We’ve assumed, for the past century or so, that science and technology would solve many of the age-old challenges faced by humankind, eventually. The victory over smallpox, for example — which was officially declared as ‘globally eradicated’ by the World Health Organization in 1980, after killing perhaps 300 million people earlier in the 20th century — has given many people hope that other diseases would likewise be vanquished within our lifetimes, possibly through the use of vaccines.
Many other medical miracles seemingly await us.
Vaccine doses aimed at lessening the symptoms of COVID-19 have been arriving in the various American cities and towns — more slowly, perhaps, and in a less organized fashion that we may have expected. Colorado Governor Polis had hinted at future problems back in early December when he mentioned, in a video, that Colorado was expecting to receive 46,800 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in its first shipment.
“Of course, we’ve learned to believe it when we see it,” the Governor said with a smile. “We’ve had different numbers of tests and masks [promised in the past] and the numbers that were delivered were a little different than the numbers we thought…”
Will the vaccines be safe? Will they be effective?
A Daily Post reader sent me a link, earlier this week, to a lengthy article written by Swedish physician Sebastian Rushworth. Back in early August, I’d written a three-part editorial featuring Dr. Rushworth, when the good doctor had posted a prediction, on his website, that Sweden had essentially vanquished COVID by leaving their economy and society wide open and allowing the virus to spread at will. The doctor’s hopeful prediction was shared widely on American alt-right websites as evidence that government-ordered lock-downs were unnecessary and ultimately harmful.
From Dr. Rushworth’s August 4, 2020 posting:
COVID hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was COVID. Practically everyone who was tested had COVID, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had COVID. They came in with stomach pain and they had COVID.
Then, after a few months, all the COVID patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single COVID patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of COVID in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no one is getting infected any more…
…If only 6000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no one is the least bit frightened of, and which we don’t shut down our societies for…
Dr. Rushworth optimistic prediction turned out to be inaccurate, however. Sweden experienced a second wave of infections with an additional 4,300 COVID deaths since August (according to data provided by Statista.com) and, as of last week, one of the highest per capita rates of COVID deaths in the world. The national legislature passed a new law last week authorizing the public health department to order lock-downs of businesses and organizations. The country’s distribution of the new COVID vaccine seems to be lagging behind neighboring countries.
Dr. Rushworth’s new blog posting on January 10 takes a detailed look at the recently published results from three vaccine clinical trials: the Astra Zeneca vaccine being used in the UK, and the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines being administered in the US.
“Are the covid vaccines safe and effective?” asks the doctor.
I found Dr. Rushworth’s 5,400 word post to be thoughtful and accurate, based upon my own research into the vaccines since last November. (I am NOT a doctor.) To quickly summarize his lengthy essay, concerning the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines:
All three vaccine trials focused primarily on subjects under the age of 70, so we have relatively poor trial data for adults over that age. But considering that people over 70 have accounted for 78% of the COVID-19 fatalities in Colorado, and considering that the general trend in the Pfizer and Moderna trials show reduced symptoms in adults, Dr. Rushworth suggests that the implied protection — for older adults — is probably worth the risk.
None of the vaccine trials included subjects under the age of 16. We have no data, yet, to confirm whether the vaccines are effective, or safe, for children. Parents should think twice about vaccinating children until trial data is available for that age group.
For some reason, the published Pfizer data did not include details about ‘serious adverse events’.
Writes Dr. Rushworth, (who is himself young and healthy), “Would I personally be willing to take the Pfizer vaccine? No, not until Pfizer publishes a detailed breakdown of what the adverse events were, so I can tell if there’s something in there that I should be worried about or not…”
“If you are over 70 years old or otherwise belong to a risk group, it’s likely worth taking the vaccine, even without having the adverse event information, just due to the fact that the vaccine is clearly highly effective against COVID, and so the benefit/risk calculation becomes quite different…”
The good doctor wrote most favorably about the published data from the Moderna vaccine trial.
“Overall, the Moderna vaccine does appear to be both effective and safe. Would I be willing to take it? Yes, I would, actually. There is a strong signal of benefit, and zero signal of harm…”