What’s the Rush?

The Pfizer vaccine is on a fast track for FDA approval, hearings possible today according to the NYTimes.

I suspect the political pressures are enormous. Still, how can approval be possible when the safety record of this vaccine is far worse than any vaccine in the past, including many that were pulled from the market?

Efficacy

Part of the answer is that CDC is not reporting the statistic most relevant to measuring efficacy. That is: Vaccination status of COVID patients. How many of the new infections and new deaths are in vaccinated individuals, and how many in unvaccinated?

Of course, this information is known in CDC databases; it is scandalous that the numbers are not being made public. I do not know if they are being provided to FDA. Israel is more honest, and numbers from there are not encouraging.

Likewise, data about transmissibility, comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, are not being reported, and were not part of the clinical trials last fall.

Safety

There are several systems for reporting vaccine reactions, including deaths, but the only one available to the public is VAERS. It is incomplete, because it relies on voluntary reporting, there is no incentive to report to VAERS, and it is a cumbersome process. We may compare reports of the COVID vaccines to past years, when there were also hundreds of millions of vaccinations, including annual flu shots and childhood vaccine schedules. The comparison is dramatic.