Vaccine doesn't prevent you from catching covid: Sowmya Swamination, WHO

Nor from being an asymptomatic carrier, but yes, it won't give you a serious infection

This is what the British Medical Journal said a long time ago: the Phase-3 trials DO NOT test whether you are protected against mild infection, ONLY against serious infection or hospitalization. So don’t put the mask and hand sanitizer away, and continue to maintain social distancing as much as possible.

You could get a mild symptomatic infection, or you could be an asymptomatic carrier EVEN AFTER getting vaccinated.

Disclaimer: I am not anti-vaccine, I just want them to be thoroughly tested for outcomes and for side-effects.

Here are India’s vaccine plans: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OsF2YQMIdJX4lmtjPnvFJFgNGN_cnq8K/view?usp=sharing

I am happy that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not in the list, because their cold-chain requirements cannot be supported easily in India. They need to be maintained at -70 deg C and -20 deg C respectively. The Bharat Biotech covaxin may be our best bet, but it’s only in Phase-3 trials now.

The most likely candidate for vaccination in India is the AstraZeneca/Oxford/Serum Institute of India vaccine, of which Serum Institute has already manufactured 40 million doses.

I have followed it carefully. There is a full paper on it from the Lancet dated 8 December 2020, but be forewarned that it’s terribly written. The trial design (eg participants are not diverse, being mostly white, female, and health workers, the Indian trial is totally missing, the only thing measured is serious illness/hospitalizations) is a little dicey. The outcome (eg. better result with 1/2 dose + full does than with full dose + full dose, lack of clarity on adverse side-effects, some of statistical p-values are missing) is also a little dicey.

Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext

Here’s a screenshot from the Guardian, from the following article. They are hedging and backpedaling furiously, none more so than WHO’s Sowmya Swaminathan: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/29/who-warns-covid-19-pandemic-is-not-necessarily-the-big-oneeguardian.com/world/2020/dec/29/who-warns-covid-19-pandemic-is-not-necessarily-the-big-one

This is a reason I have been feeling rather queasy about the hastily-approved vaccines, as in several previous substacks. I quoted the BMJ comment earlier in one of these substacks.

I feel that the vaccines may do some good, but they are nowhere near as efficacious as the lay public think they are, nor are they worth the billions of dollars being spent on them. It gives the public a sense of comfort, just as the ‘security checks’ in airports are a kind of theater.

Of course that sense of confidence is worth a lot, especially when the entire opposition as well as all the western mainstream media are baying for the Govt of India to do something.

But let’s be clear. This is not life as we knew it, “back to normal”. If you want to take a risk with the vaccine, take the shot, but continue to keep away from crowds and wear masks, especially if you are older or have co-morbidities.

Thanks for letting the cat out of the bag, Sowmya.

She, the WHO Chief Scientist, was the one who said, memorably, about the Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine hoax in May: “We should have asked for the data, but because it was published in The Lancet, we didn’t”.

Yes, trust but verify. Get the results reproduced by somebody before accepting them. Glad this time you’re telling us what the trials didn’t actually test for: mild or asymptomatic infections.

PS. In passing, Harsh Vardhan, India’s health minister, has now been added to the board of GAVI, the global vaccine cheerleaders, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative. Isn’t there a conflict of interest there somewhere?