This is a critique of Mark Skidmore’s Will I Take the COVID Injection?, which appeared in the Lighthouse Economics blog on March 27, 2021. It appears that there are many valid arguments relative to economics on his site, but the science on this page doesn’t seem to be quite right.
In the second paragraph Skimore writes that the “Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson” Covid-19 vaccines are “gene therapy” and “inappropriately labeled a ‘vaccine’”. This is an argument I have read about many times elsewhere. Indeed, the mechanisms of the vaccines are quite different than the traditional inactivated virus vaccines, but that does not keep it from being a vaccine. The purpose and function of these vaccines, like any other, is to present antigens that elicit an immune response that creates antibodies, and to that end they appear to have succeeded quite well. Thus the argument presented is only a moot point involving semantics, which does not make the vaccine any safer or more dangerous.
That “the PCR test generates 94% false positives“, written in the third pararaph, is most definitely false. This was improperly conveyed from arguments that the PCR test can have UP TO 94% false positives, which may in theory be true, although very misleading, as it seems to stem from extreme situations where the prevalence of the virus is low. A good argument is given about this on healthfeedback.org. It is inconceivable to me that in practice they could have been on average anywhere near as ineffective.
If the situation can be portrayed as simply as in paragraph four, why is it that no country in the world seems to have been able to protect the vulnerable successfully during this pandemic without society being disrupted in some major way?
In the seventh paragraph a reference is made to the Covid-19 Vaccine Side Effects World Map page where basically throughout it is assumed that if someone had a side effect or died after receiving a vaccine, then it was the vaccine that caused the side effect or death. During the pandemic, people are not only vulnerable to Covid-19, which could infect an individual just before or just after receiving a vaccine, but people could also be dying from unrelated causes. It is perhaps not easy for many of us who are not statisticians to know that correlation does not mean causation and to interpret data when a population of such huge numbers (those receiving vaccines) is concerned. The referred site lists, for example, that for “1/15/2021” in the “USA”, “VAERS/CDC is now reporting 6,758 cases with side effects, 66 deaths”. It is wrong to use “side effects” in this sentence, as correlation does not signify causation. It likely is true that at least 66 deaths occurred during this time period after an individual received a vaccine, but that in no way means that the vaccine caused that many deaths. The VAERS is a an example of a “spontaneous report“, where all reported conditions and death are compiled for a period of time after the vaccine is administered. Just because someone (anyone) calls in such data does not mean that the vaccine was the cause. Indeed, it appears to me that researchers, governments and manufacturers are acting responsibly in attempting to prove or disprove causation, in a manner that appears quite analogous to improving aviation safety after accidents and incidents, although it is typically far easier in practice to know if someone has died due to an aviation accident than from a vaccine.
It is true that on page three the Moderna “White Paper” states, “once inside the nucleus, DNA vaccines have a risk of permanently changing a person’s DNA“. This seems to be an effective scare tactic, while disregarding the fact that the Moderna mRNA vaccine does not contain DNA, but rather RNA. The very next paragraph states: “Unlike DNA vaccines, mRNA vaccines do not need to enter the nucleus, nor do they risk being integrated into our DNA”.
If it is true that “the mRNA gene therapy being used for COVID is truly experimental” after decades of relevant research, then it would be an even riskier experiment to see how homo sapiens will fare if vaccines are not used against this virus. I’ll take my chances with one of the available vaccines.