Just visited
this link (again) to see how many people have died while infected with the novel corona virus or COVID19. There have been several virus mutations since the COVID pandemic started and two types of "vaccines" were developed. One, based on messenger RNA (mRNA), and another based on a weakened form of the virus. AFAIK, no-one knows how effective getting "jabs" from either version really is. It was said that there simply was not enough time to select a cohort and to do a double-blind field test, where half the cohort would get a "jab" containing the prospective vaccine; the other half of the cohort would also get a "jab" but it would contain only a sterile saline solution placebo. The people getting the "jab" don't know which group they are in, and the people administering the "jab" don't know which syringes contain the trial and which ones contain the placebo. Thus the "double-blind" name of the study.
The USA Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA) has certain criteria for certifying a new drug or medical procedure. Among those criteria are it must be both safe and effective. It takes a long time to demonstrate safety and "safety" can NEVER be proven or guaranteed. It only takes ONE counter-example of non-safe use to demonstrate that a new drug or procedure in NOT safe under the circumstances for which it is taken. Look at what happened with
thalidomide, and
look here for a deep dive into why thalidomide made a big come-back a few years ago.
Within a large cohort, some will become sick after receiving their "jab" and after exposure to the virus. We would expect the sick people in the group getting the placebo to be statistically larger than the sick people getting the prospective vaccine. If a larger, or equal, number of sick people occurs in the placebo group, compared to the number of sick people in the group getting the prospective vaccine, we can be pretty confident that whatever the prospective vaccine is, it is NOT effective against the virus. On the other hand, if a significant number receiving the prospective vaccine DO NOT get sick, then the prospective vaccine MAY be responsible for that.
There are problems administering a double-blind
medical trial. If infection by the virus is highly fatal, is it even moral to have a "control group" that receives only the placebo? If it is morally acceptable, how large must the "control group" be to obtain statistical confidence in the data? Is it morally ethical to deliberately expose anyone, the whole cohort, to the virus "for the greater good" or whatever rationale you can think of, knowing that some will get sick and die? These are tough decisions to make, and because it was a "crisis" the Government decided that citizens would have no right to sue Big Pharma if something went wrong, such as an allergic reaction, or if the virus nevertheless infected those who received the "jab" with the prospective vaccine. So Big Pharma was protected, whether anyone receiving the vaccine benefited or not.
The question I have is: Was it worth it? I looking at the COVID death rates, it does appear that both types of vaccine have slowed down or reduced the rate of COVID deaths. But at what cost? How many people die every year from ordinary yearly flu infections? How about other causes of death? Did Big Pharma do us any favors by picking the "low-hanging fruit" and rushing it to the public? Medical research and drug development are expensive, so it may have made sense to proceed "full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes" to get something... anything, really... to a government-subsidized market. That is what Big Government is usually good at: spending money to get things done quickly.
Has it been worth it? I got my two "jabs" this year and AFAIK have avoid getting COVID. But now I have an itchy rash on both arms and will go on a high vitamin C, no-sugar, diet for a few weeks to see if that will clear it up. Wife says for me to delay getting the third "booster jab" or whatever THAT is. Will it be effective against the latest mutation? Are people at work in secret laboratories trying to figure out how to make COVID more fatal, more, contagious, and targeted to specific genomes? Do I have too much (or too little) melanin under my skin and would melanin be an effective genetic discriminant? Hows about blue eyes (mine are brown) and blonde hair (my hair is also brown, tending toward gray now)? We are already using viruses to deliver drugs to targeted human cells because the virus has the biological "key" to slip into the cell. Looking ahead to what may be possible, it scares the bejesus out of me.
Since we mapped out the human genome in the previous century, there is tremendous opportunity to do both a lot of good as well as a lot of evil. Well, maybe it's a moot point now if we melt all the ice on the planet with global climate change. There might not be any of "us" left to populate the next century. Oh, well. It has been an interesting time so far... that's an old Chinese curse, by the way.
Hop
