I’d love to get some thoughtful responses to this analysis.
Before anyone looks at this, who is Toby Rogers, and why should we care?
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@Christy Someone I care about very much sent me this link, and several of the author’s points seem logical. I’d like to know how to answer because I want to stand against misinformation. I hope to send them a link to this thread with thoughtful and fair responses.
So I personally don’t care who Toby Rogers is. I care whether or not his analysis is valid, or if he has misinterpreted.
If it’s misinformation, let’s get it documented.
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I feel for your predicament, but I wish at some point we could not waste our time entertaining the “logical” claims of known liars with no credibility. People (not you, your friends) need to learn how to use google and vet sources.
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I just had a look at his homepage. The post right at the very top is one insisting that vaccines cause autism.
Basically, he’s an antivaxxer.
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I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
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Fine, so I went and looked at the Pfizer report myself (https://www.fda.gov/media/153447/download)
I think the most telling detail is Table 14 on page 34, which shows that under the scenarios considered, not having the vaccine will result in 1 death per million. That’s the risk. If those million are vaccinated, there will be 106 myocarditis cases with zero myocarditis deaths.
So Toby whoever is right about a few items:
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There is no emergency on which to base an EUA. (one in a million deaths in this cohort?)
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This report fails to engage with other side effects of the vaccine.
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It irresponsibly underestimates the dangers posed by myocarditis (zero deaths? Unlikely).
Note: I’ve had my jabs and I encourage most people to do the same. I’m looking here for somebody to show me where I have erred in this analysis of the report.
My conclusions: From this data one cannot conclude with any confidence that this cohort is better off with the vax. They are probably better off with broad spectrum natural immunity from the disease vs the narrow spectrum spike protein immunity from the vaccine.
If I’m wrong, please show me where. Show me the data. Give me numbers from the report that indicate there is significant benefit to outweigh the risk. Or if there are other studies of that vaccine which provide more compelling data, please point me to it. Thanks!
Understanding the source is a key step in making sure what our well-meaning friends and family and fellow-parishioners is legitimate. Because our well-meaning friends and family and fellow-parisioners certainly aren’t doing it with the stuff they send out. Finding out who is doing the (mis)quoting and getting back to the source of the (mis)quote is the responsible thing to do.
I am tired of doing other people’s homework for them, because they were too excited or lazy to do it themselves, before they pressed send.
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Thanks for getting to the source you really are asking about. It’s the exhausting, boring work we all have to keep doing for other people, or just send the message back to your loved one, and ask THEM to do the work, before they send off someone’s interpretation.
But looking at the report, which will probably take a good hour or more for us lay-people to examine and only partially understand, the people passing it along will say, “Well, that’s too much work! How am I supposed to know if it’s true or not? I can’t understand it?” Which means they can’t evaluate the interpretation they are sharing around, either.
So off we go to study.
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Fine. It’s 9:08 PM for me. Let’s begin.
Suffice it to say I’ve thought a lot about risk-benefit analysis and I’m better equipped than most to read one of these documents.
He’s an expert, trust him? Let’s see how well he does.
His red flags:
- No kids died in either group. 90% efficacy at preventing cases is meaningless because they just mean mild cases in children.
- Pfizer’s clinical trial was intentionally undersized to hide harms
- Pfizer only enrolled participants without evidence of prior infection
- Did Pfizer lose contact with 4.9% of trial participants?
- The follow-up period was too short
- The risk-benefit model only looks at one known harm-myocarditis
- Pfizer intentionally wipes out the control group for ethical reasons by vaccinating them
- Pfizer inferred vaccine efficacy by immunobridging
- The FDA only assesses benefits in a six month period after two doses
- The FDA/Pfizer play “fast and loose” with their estimates of myocarditis
Okay, that took about 12 minutes. Do you want to look at any one of these 10 in particular? In general, Toby cites many other anti-vaccine writers that are well, let’s just say extremely mistaken like Geert Vanden Bossche (and his absurd idea vaccines create more variants when its literally the opposite), RFK Jr. (no comment), Alex Berenson (a grifter who is making hundreds of thousands of dollars writing nonsense about the pandemic), and Steve Kirsch (tech entrepreneur turn expert epidemiologist overnight).
Table 14 is one particular scenario of out six in the report you listed that aims to model a particularly low prevalence of COVID-19. You can’t actually say if that’s going to be the scenario that happens because we don’t know what the prevalence of COVID-19 is going to be over the next six months.
Unless it’s your kid. But even then, kids being hospitalized or spreading the virus to their caregivers are worth considering seriously. More than 140,000 children lost a primary or secondary caregiver in the pandemic so far. What about preventing long-COVID symptoms that can last for longer periods of time?
Because there aren’t other main side effects from the vaccine for these age groups.
Hmm, I’m not sure if this is the correct conclusion. Should we rely on the Silicon Valley turned epidemiologist, Steve Kirsch, who analyzed the data? Or maybe these organizations know what they’re doing because they have lots of expertise analyzing rare incidents in vaccines or other pharmaceutical interventions.
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This seems appropriate here (thanks, @Laura 
), if the moderators will be a little lenient:
The figure on the right is @pevaquark.
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A beloved family member is bombarding an even more beloved one with their alt. reality. Recently it was microwaves being the Devil’s dishwasher hence being banned in Japan, South Korea, China last year. Fact.
I researched its provenance for the best beloved; it is a Russian satire. I will not be able to tell the best beloved’s beloved this. I could try, but that would be easily rebuffed as me being factist - an old Soviet response at the time of the first Russian riff on this from '76.
The Russians are the grand masters of maskirovka, deception, chaos, disinformation. Like Penn and Teller they even tell the truth of it and we disbelieve that in favour of the fiction, as they know we will. Fear is the key.
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I feel like the rebuttals are the same as always. You can’t just focus on the individual because we are dealing with an uncontrolled pandemic. Vaccination rates in a population dramatically affect community spread. Children are spreading the virus to more vulnerable people, even if they aren’t dying themselves in large numbers. Also, death is clearly not the only health risk to people who contract COVID, and anytime someone summarizes the COVID situation purely in terms of deaths, they are invariably ignoring huge swaths of data and pushing an agenda.
Plus multiple standard vaccinations for children are not for deadly diseases. The bar for “necessary” for the anti-vax crowd is ridiculously high because they believe all kinds of nonsense. You shouldn’t have to prove a disease poses a deadly threat to advocate vaccination, you should just have to show people are better off not getting the diseases than getting it. COVID is far more dangerous to public health than chicken pox, measles, or meningitis. The fact that people who have never before batted an eye over getting their children recommended shots are freaking out over this one demonstrates that the “issues” are disinformation and general ignorance, not these grave problems with this particular vaccine or governmental vaccine regulation.
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Of course you are correct but they will just point to all the “Vaers deaths” and all the “hidden deaths” due to the vaccine (there are social media hashtags now outlining all the alleged cases) and point out the actual covid deaths are overblown and that the vaccine is too new and untested/unproven. It’s all one big tangled package of misinformation that in a way is self-sustaining or self-affirming. I mean, how do you convince someone the earth is not flat if all your evidence is dismissed as “lies and coverups?” I find this happens so frequently in NT studies and apologetics as well. You can’t reason with someone who is unreasonable or has a block not allowing them to see the obvious. Our society (in the states at least) just isn’t intelligent enough to peer through the misinformation. Some can but many cannot and it’s mainly self-inflicted.
Vinnie
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I think it’s mostly willful ignorance.
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Klax, that actually made sense to me. Maybe I should get checked. (But I’ve been told stripes are more complimentary)
Seriously, I was in conversation with a a conspiracy minded friend, and asked him how he interpreted evidence that clearly made his assertions in error, and he just went further down the rabbit hole, as your comment predicts.
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Damrite! ‘Experts’ got us here!
And we liberaller than they folk need to check our immense privilege and our standing lest we fall under their wrath for our condescension and judgement.
We’ve GOT to love our enemies, no? It’s not an option.
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Yeah, but why do they have to make it so &#%!@? difficult to do so?
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… 
Even if I showed him Japanese 2021 microwave oven sales. Stripes definitely. They were banned in 2020 so the sales figures are lies. Microwaves. Not stripes. CIA-Jewish-Microsoft lies.
[So I’ll be buying him vegan FEB, Friday and agreeing where I can.]
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