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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

The fact that people turn to sophistry in defense of valid criticisms is evidence enough that people were mislead. Never mind whether it was intentional or out of ignorance. 95% effective at what? Preventing death? Preventing serious disease? Preventing spread? Preventing variants? The truth has come out and it was far from "95% effective" at anything.

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The first large peer-reviewed clinical trial published in NEJM in Dec 2020 had around 43,000 subjects and in that population there was about a 95% reduction in cases vs placebo. Over time, it is clearer that the effectiveness with respect to the all-cases end-point is less. But that appears to be less a function of lying and more a function of the incremental way in which biomedical science asymptotically approaches the truth through iterative study and better understanding of confounding variables etc.

It’s not sophistry to point out that someone has unrealistic expectations.

Furthermore, you can’t ask yourself a bunch of questions and then ignorantly answer them all with “no” when vaccine efficacy studies set a clear definition of “effective”.

It's not 95% effective, though.

> vaccine efficacy studies set a clear definition of “effective”.

Those definitions changed after it became clear that the original definitions -- those on the basis of which the vaccines were authorized, and people pressured into obtaining them -- were not met.

If anyone had unrealistic expectations, it was policy-makers.

>95% effective at what?

It doesn't matter. What matters is that we don't see the number 100 anywhere, so one shouldn't pretend that anyone said the vaccine is 100% effective at anything with regard to prevention. If you decide to pretend someone did say that, it's not their fault.

How about 95% lies!

This is great if you want a catchy slogan, not so great if you’re interested in really any honest discussion.

Is honest discussion what you're trying to do? Did you expect to change the original poster's mind with a line-by-line list asserting the opposite of their own assertions? I find such posting kind of rude personally and almost never read such posts.

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