Covid 19 -

[russellw]

Originally Posted by T3rminator

Benjamin Netanyahu's interview on how he allowed Pfizer to use his people for "testing" is interesting. The deal was that they got first access in return. Israel's citizens have all their health records digitised on a central database. It allowed authoritise to quickly identify and group people who had reactions. That is why we kept hearing of "studies out of Israel showed xyz" during the vaccine roll out. Having heard that, its apparent it was still being tested during the initial roll outs.

I've no doubt that is correct. The reality is that the vaccines were fast tracked by at least a couple of years compared to normal processes and that to some extent all the early uptake was experimental.

Is this ideal? Absolutely not and while I doubt that the side effects (including the fatal ones) were ever going to be completely avoidable it has set a potentially dangerous precedent for the next pandemic that comes along where we may not be so lucky in how safe these vaccines have proven to be.

What is certainly beyond any reasonable doubt is that the vaccines saved lives. It would have been devastating globally if the case mortality rates had stayed where they were in 2020 but even if we look at our own country it's startling:

If the 2020 pre-vaccination CMR of 3.049% had continued unchecked then Australia would have recorded 347,633 deaths to date and not the 19,373 we've had.

Globally the vaccines are claimed to have saved circa 20M lives although my data is a bit more conservative and says that if the global 2.315% CMR of 2020 had continued then 15.37M people would have died instead of the 6.7M to date. Either way, it's a lot.