What’s the deal with the “vaccination lie”? 5 statements in the fact check

An executive at the pharmaceutical company Pfizer has explained that the first clinical approval study has not tested whether the vaccines protect against a vaccinated person who transmits the virus. Federal Councilor Alain Berset also made scientifically incorrect statements during the pandemic. Do we now have the really big vaccination scandal? We answer five questions about it.

no That wasn’t the goal either. That is why the manager of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer could innocently say during a hearing in the EU parliament that she had not done this. The main goal in the original approval studies against the Wuhan variant of Sars-CoV-2 was to prevent symptomatic corona infection and the associated protection against serious diseases. This has been the principle behind vaccination since it was discovered in 1796.

The vaccine trains the body’s immune system in such a way that if the virus enters, the body can immediately respond with countermeasures and prevent serious illness. The studies of the developers of the Covid vaccines then found that vaccinated people had more than 90 percent higher protection against symptomatic infections than unvaccinated study participants.

The pivotal studies did not investigate asymptomatic infections in vaccinated individuals, nor the potential transmission of viruses in asymptomatic infected individuals. The question of whether the vaccines had an effect on infectiousness, i.e. whether vaccinated people passed on the virus, was not examined in the approval studies. However, this was not claimed by the pharmaceutical companies or the approval authorities, as Swissmedic emphasizes.

Following the approval of Pfizer/Biontech’s mRNA vaccine, BAG Director Anna Lévy said on December 19, 2020: “Even vaccinated people will still have to adhere to the protective measures because the vaccination protects people from disease, but we know until not today whether it also protects against transmissions, so we don’t know if vaccinated people can also transmit the virus. We will know more about that in the coming weeks and months.”

Preventing infection was not the aim of vaccination. That wasn’t even possible then. To determine the infectiousness of the vaccinated person, there must be vaccinated people who have already received a vaccine for several months. Studies on this were only done later, first from Israel. There they were vaccinated very early.

These epidemiological studies after the start of vaccinations subsequently showed that the viral load decreases faster in vaccinated people than in non-vaccinated people. Of the variants that predominated at the time, vaccinated people apparently reproduced fewer Sars-CoV-2 viruses than unvaccinated people if they contracted the virus despite being vaccinated.

This finding applies mainly to the original variant of Sars-CoV-2. The effect of the vaccines has also changed with the new variants. “With the experience of millions of vaccinated people, but also depending on the circulating virus variants, new findings are constantly being made,” said Lukas Jaggi of Swissmedic.

Omikron shows that the vaccinations protect less well against mild infections, but still very well against a severe course of the disease and therefore against hospitalization and death. In the case of the now dominant omicron variant and its subvariants, the EKIF and FOPH vaccination committee assume that a booster vaccination no longer offers relevant indirect protection against virus transmission. However, all booster vaccinations continue to increase protection against serious courses, which, as I mentioned, is the main goal of the Covid-19 vaccination strategy.

The claim was that the transmission of viruses could not be assessed, so this was not an issue in the approval of the vaccines. So there were no false promises. No vaccine offers 100 percent protection and neither Swissmedic nor the pharmaceutical companies have commented on the outstanding issue of infectiousness.

The BAG communicated as follows: “The vaccines provide effective protection against symptomatic infections, especially against severe disease progression, and reduce the risk of transmission. However, this does not exclude the possibility that fully vaccinated people (with or without a booster shot) can become infected, as no vaccine offers 100% protection. »

You can’t say that, but the statements at the many media conferences were certainly not always 100 percent correct from a medical point of view. When federal councilor Alain Berset said in October 2021 that the certificate could show “you are not contagious”, it was wrong. Even vaccinated people can be contagious. But they emit fewer viruses than unvaccinated people, which also reduces the spread of the virus in general through vaccination and from Covid disease.

In September 2021, the BAG was a little more precise in justifying the certificate: “Because only people who are not contagious or who have a low risk of being contagious come together, the chance of transmission is greatly reduced.” The background to this statement is a report from the scientific Covid-19 task force at the end of September.

After two doses of an mRNA vaccine, people under 75 had “50 percent protection against mild disease for 16 months and 80 percent protection against severe disease for three years.” In older people, the protective effect is shorter.

So there is talk of a mild and a serious illness, not of preventing the transmission of the virus. It was therefore clear to the experts from the start that vaccination can never offer 100 percent protection, especially against infection.

(aargauerzeitung.ch)