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ANTIVACCINE NONSENSE MEDICINE POLITICS

Transmission
gambit: An old
antivax trope is
resurrected
Recently, antivaxxers were all over
social media after Tucker Carlson
touted a “revelation” that the phase 3
clinical trial used to support licensure of
the Pfizer COVID19 vaccine didn’t
examine its ability to block transmission
as meaning that its inability to block
transmission had been “covered up”. It
wasn’t, and antivaxxers are ignoring
everything we’ve learned over the last
two years to make the claim that
vaccines “don’t prevent transmission”.

By Orac October 24, 2022

178 Comments

Earlier this month, there appeared to have

been large increase in antivaccine activity on
social media, in particular Twitter. I know
this mainly because others whom I follow
mentioned it, and a certain talking point kept
bubbling up to the surface about the Pfizer
clinical trial not having tested for the ability
of its COVID-19 vaccine to prevent
transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which was
somehow some sort of horrific oversight that
invalidates everything about the vaccine. The
whole thing appears to have bubbled up a
couple of weeks ago, when Rob Roos, a
member of the European Parliament, started
agitating about vaccine mandates based on
this:

Rob Roos MEP

@Rob_Roos · Follow

BREAKING:

In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits:

#vaccine was never tested on preventing
transmission.

"Get vaccinated for others" was always a lie.

The only purpose of the #COVID passport:

forcing people to get vaccinated.

The world needs to know. Share this video!

Watch on Twitter

5:04 AM · Oct 11, 2022

248.2K See latest COVID-19 info

Read 12.1K replies

It didn’t take long the usual amplifiers of

antivaccine misinformation in the media to
run with this, including Tucker Carlson:

Leander · Oct 11
@LeanderWoltinge · Follow
#HalTurnerRadioShow
10-11-2022

Stunning Testimony: Pfizer Never Tested

Cov¡d "Vax" to "Stop Transmission" of
V¡rus! We were all lied to

Testimony of a Pfizer Director,

appearing before a committee of the
European Parliament

halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/n…

Watch on Twitter

Leander
@LeanderWoltinge · Follow

Dutch MP of the European Parlement, Rob Roos,

at the Tucker Carlson Show:

"Pfizer admits the Cov¡d vaccine's ability to

prevent transmission was never tested"

Watch on Twitter

Rob Roos MEP @Rob_Roos

Tonight I will join @TuckerCarlson to
discuss one of the biggest scandals of our
time.

#Pfizer now admits there was no evidence

the #vaccine would stop the spread of the
virus.

Yet the introduction of #COVID mandates

was based on this very lie.

I demand accountability.

4:27 AM · Oct 12, 2022

2 See latest COVID-19 info

Read more on Twitter

Antivaxxers were off to the races after this,

trumpeting the “revelation” that Pfizer never
tested its vaccine to determine if it prevented
transmission in its phase 3 clinical trials used
by the FDA to issue an emergency use
authorization (EUA) for the vaccine in
December 2020 and how that failure means
that vaccine mandates were always
illegitimate right for the beginning.

Antivaxxers and a
tsunami of messaging
over the last week
Before I explain why this particular line of
antivax disinformation is, well,
disinformation, I thought I’d include some
examples of how it was being spun other than
the Tweets above. I’ll start with the antivax
and COVID-19 conspiracy site The Epoch
Times by way of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

A Pfizer executive said Monday that

neither she nor other Pfizer officials knew
whether its COVID-19 vaccine would stop
transmission before entering the market
last year. Member of the European
Parliament, Rob Roos, asked during a
session:

Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested

on stopping the transmission of the
virus before it entered the market? Did
we know about stopping immunization
before it entered the market?

Pfizer’s Janine Small, president of

international developed markets, said in
response:

No … You know, we had to … really

move at the speed of science to know
what is taking place in the market.

Roos, of the Netherlands, argued in a

Twitter video Monday that following
Small’s comments to him, millions of
people around the world were duped by
pharmaceutical companies and
governments. “Millions of people
worldwide felt forced to get vaccinated
because of the myth that ‘you do it for
others,'” Roos said. “Now, this turned out
to be a cheap lie” and “should be exposed,”
he added.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects were posting

apocalyptic Substacks, for instance Paul
Alexander (who, as an advisor to Health and
Human Services assistant secretary for public
affairs Michael Caputo, noted in a summer
2020 email advocating a Great Barrington
Declaration-like “natural herd immunity”
approach to the pandemic, “we want them
infected“) wrote a post titled “Dr. Geert
Vanden Bossche and Dr. Paul Elias Alexander
discuss Pfizer’s failure to test COVID
vaccines for transmission, the need for
population chemoprophylaxis, and
recommendations for the vaccinated“. (I like
how Alexander uses his full name, including
middle name. Who does routinely that? I
usually don’t even use my middle initial!)
Regular readers will remember that Geert
Vanden Bossche is a veterinarian who made a
name for himself fear mongering about mass
vaccination during a pandemic in March 2021
because—or so he claimed—imperfect
vaccines would drive the emergence of
“escape mutants” that could evade prior
immunity due to vaccination, ignoring
observations that it is the number of people
being infected, far more than vaccination,
that leads to the emergence of variants that
could evade prior immunity, and that these
variants could evade prior immunity due to
vaccines or previous infection, not just
vaccines.

Unsurprisingly, Alexander went on to use that

“failure” to start “just asking questions” (a.k.a.
JAQing off) about the vaccine, writing “Pfizer
(and Moderna) & FDA, the UNHOLIST of
alliances, corrupted to the very core, did not
test if the COVID gene injection stopped
transmission? What else did they not test for?
Dr. Koops weighs in“:

Pfizer and Moderna also: -did not test

whether there were any serious drug
interactions with other commonly used
medicines/vaccines. -did not test whether
there were genetic mutations in the host -
did not test whether the “vaccine” became
systemic or stayed restricted to the
injection site -did not test whether
“boosters” were actually beneficial (they
simply stated that as the initial protocol as
a two dose protocol without any data to
support it) -did not test whether the “non-
active” ingredients caused any problems
(these were not normal excipients-some of
the placebo arm data suggests that these
were also causing problems) -did not test
whether the “vaccine” was transmissible
from the recipient -did not test as to
metabolic elimination of the vaccine from
the host, i.e. how long does it remain
active in the host -proposed a product
specification that would essentially allow
for almost anything to pass -did not
account (i.e. screen) for a rather
pronounced natural immunity already in
the population -conducted most of their
studies outside of the US in countries that
have been known for questionable clinical
studies (Brazil in particular) -had virtually
no stability data

One notes that we’ve addressed a number of

these claims before; so I will not address
them again, except to note a couple of
common tropes. As for “natural immunity
already in the population”, remember that the
Pfizer vaccine was tested in the summer and
fall of 2020, before a huge percentage of the
population had become infected. Similarly,
the mRNA-based vaccines produced by
Pfizer and Moderna do not “permanently
alter your DNA,” contrary to Alexander’s
other claim.

Elsewhere, “health freedom groups”

trumpeted “We tried to warn you“, while
James Lyons-Weiler proclaimed, “Knowledge
About Lack of Protection Against
Transmission is Old, Not New“. Indeed it’s
not, as we will show (and as even The Epoch
Times article acknowledged), nor is it
shocking. Lyons-Weiler tries to spin this as:

The admission by a Pfizer exec has set

social media ablaze with shock. That’s
what you get when you suppress
inconvenient truths. Now the flawed
policies must be reversed or rescinded.

That’s right! Antivaxxers are treating this

“revelation” as some sort of shocking “new”
news when its not, and Lyons-Weiler tries to
say that the reason they’re doing this is
because there was a conspiracy to cover up
this “inconvenient truth”. But was there? (I
think you know the answer to that.)

Before I get to that question, I’ll note that

this isn’t all the antivax content, not by a long
shot, seemingly coordinated to amplify the
message that the approval of the Pfizer
vaccine was illegitimate because it never
tested for the ability of the vaccine to prevent
transmission. There were, of course, many
videos, because there are always antivax
videos, from the usual suspects. For example,
over at Rumble, Alexander interviewed
Vanden Bossche about the same thing, with
largely the same claims. COVID vaccine
transmission. Meanwhile, John Campbell
(whom we’ve met before spreading
misinformation about COVID-19 and
monkeypox and someone whose
misinformation I should really have discussed
more often) treats this “revelation” as
something new that had been hidden for
nearly two years, introducing his story with
the exchange between Robert Roos and
Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of
international developed markets before
describing the revelation as a “breaking
international scandal”—and, near the end of
his video, a “complete and utter scandal”—
that Pfizer did not know whether its vaccine
stopped transmission before rollout:

Viral transmission not test…

COVID-19 vaccine • Get the

latest information from Healt…
Canada.

Around 1:27 he goes on about how:

…at the time I remember representatives

of the UK government who’ve now been
made into Dames and Knights and all sorts
of things emphatically telling us that
everything that was normally done in any
clinical trial was done during these trials.
They gave us their word about this, and
let’s hope that this doesn’t turn out to be
less than accurate.

Susan Oliver did a nice job of deconstructing

Campbell’s disinformation, as usual, but I’ll
discuss some of it with my spin as well, as my
purpose in writing this post is not so much to
point out why this whole “shocked” line of
hysteria is nothing new and based on
intentionally deceptive spin and outright lies,
but to look at the history as well, which
makes me perfectly happy to point you to
sources in addition to my scintillating words
to deal with this particular antivax
propaganda:

Is Dr John Campbell’s P7z…

COVID-19 vaccine • Get the

latest information from Healt…
Canada.

Even better, Dr. Richards points out that in early

2021 Dr. Campbell was mocking the idea that the
vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission.

Let’s dig in. First, I think it’s important to

address a seemingly simple but poorly
understood question: What is the purpose of
a vaccine?

The purpose(s) of a
vaccine
So what are the purposes of a vaccine,
anyway? I say “purposes” because vaccines
don’t have just one purpose. First and
foremost, the main purpose of a vaccine is to
prevent people from becoming seriously ill
due to disease caused by a pathogenic
microorganism such as a virus or bacterium,
period. If a vaccine doesn’t do that, it’s a
pretty useless vaccine, particularly in the
middle of a pandemic that by late 2020 had
killed over a quarter of a million people in the
US alone. Ideally, the second purpose of a
vaccine is to prevent infection and
transmission; i.e., to prevent the pathogenic
organism from getting established in a
vaccinated host human in the first place and
to render that person unable to spread the
pathogen to others. This phenomenon is
called “sterilizing immunity” and means that
the immunity produced by a vaccine is so
effective that the virus cannot replicate in the
vaccinated individual sufficiently to gain a
foothold and cause infection, much less be
transmissible by that person to others.

Most vaccines that prevent severe disease also

prevent transmission to at least some extent,
even if far from being able to produce
sterilizing immunity, and vaccines that aren’t
very good at preventing infection and
transmission, even if they are good at
preventing severe illness, are referred to as
“leaky”. I discussed this concept in a fair
amount of detail when I discussed Geert
Vanden Bossche’s claim that, because
COVID-19 vaccines are “leaky”, they select
for nasty variants in the presence of mild or
asymptomatic disease in the vaccinated. I also
mentioned how this particular claim is not
new among antivaxxers, citing the example of
long-time antivaccine activist and scientific
fraudster Andrew Wakefield, who made
exactly the same claim for the measles
vaccine, fear mongering about a sixth “mass
extinction” because of the MMR vaccine.

Ironically, I also cited an article published in

Scientific American in January 2021 titled
“Vaccines Need Not Completely Stop
COVID Transmission to Curb the
Pandemic“, when the Pfizer and Moderna
COVID-19 vaccines were starting to roll out
to populations other than healthcare workers
and very high risk individuals, that explained
that quite a few vaccines that we commonly
recommend are not perfect at preventing
transmission. It was an excellent article that’s
worth revisiting one more time before I
discuss the Pfizer clinical trial.

Here’s the key point:

Although many vaccines widely used today

(against measles, for example) produce
very effective sterilizing immunity, others,
such as the hepatitis B vaccine, do not.
With these vaccines, an individual’s
immune system is trained to prevent
illness, yet the pathogen can persist in that
person’s body, potentially allowing them to
infect others. A lack of sterilizing
immunity means that the pathogen can
continue to circulate in a population,
where it may cause illness in unvaccinated
and vulnerable people or evolve to evade
our immune responses, Bowdish explains.

And another example:

The case of rotavirus—which causes severe

vomiting and watery diarrhea and is
especially dangerous to infants and young
children—is fairly straightforward.
Vaccination limits, but does not stop, the
pathogen from replicating. As such, it does
not protect against mild disease. By
reducing an infected person’s viral load,
however, it decreases transmission,
providing substantial indirect protection.
According to the Centers for Disease
Control, four to 10 years after the 2006
introduction of a rotavirus vaccine in the
U.S., the number of positive tests for the
disease fell by as much as 74 to 90 percent.

Another favorite example frequently cited by

antivaxxers before the pandemic is pertussis,
because the vaccine doesn’t produce
sterilizing immunity:

For example, vaccines against Bordete!a

pertussis, the primary bacterium that causes
whooping cough, or pertussis, do a great
job of preventing illness but do not
entirely clear the pathogen. Rather, as B.
pertussis replicates in the upper respiratory
tract, vaccine-induced antibodies apply
pressure via natural selection to weed out
bacteria whose disease-causing genes are
turned on. Because these same genes are
responsible for the parts of the
microorganisms that are targeted by
antibodies, bacteria that keep them turned
off evade the immune response and hang
out undetected in the upper respiratory
tract, Bowdish explains. This becomes a
problem when someone with a naive
immune system, such as an infant,
contracts the pathogen. In the absence of
antibodies, B. pertussis‘s disease-causing
genes become activated again, causing
illness. Nevertheless, the introduction of
pertussis vaccines in the 1940s cut annual
U.S. cases from more than 100,000 to
fewer than 10,000 by 1965. In the 1980s
cases began slowly climbing again as
parents increasingly refused to vaccinate
their children. Today there is renewed
focus on reducing the chance of exposure
and getting antibodies to infants by
immunizing pregnant women and new
mothers.

I’ve noted many times that antivaccine

“thinking” about vaccines tends to be very
black and white. Either the vaccine is 100%
effective, or it’s useless crap; the vaccine is
either 100% safe, or it’s deadly enough to
cause a “vaccine holocaust“; either the vaccine
prevents transmission 100% or it “doesn’t
stop transmission” at all! Again, in medicine,
as in life, nothing is 100% certain except that