Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

Wikipedia defines "vaccine" as "a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease", which in my view would fit the Pfizer/Moderna shots. Which definition of "vaccine" do you subscribe to that these "treatments" don't fit into?

Also, mRNA is not the only type of vaccine for COVID.

Finally, two more questions: would you clarify which definition of "experimental" you subscribe to? And do you have a source for "testing standards were reduced"?

Why do you trust this company?

https://corporatewatch.org/pfizer-six-scandals-to-remember/

1986: Pfizer had to withdraw an artificial heart valve from the market after defects led to it being implicated in over 300 deaths. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew its approval for the product in 1986 and Pfizer agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation after multiple lawsuits were brought against it.

2003: Pfizer has long been condemned for profiteering from AIDS drugs. In 2003 for example, it walked away from a licencing deal for its Rescriptor drug that would have made it cheaper for poorer countries.

2011: Pfizer was forced to pay compensation to families of children killed in the controversial Trovan drug trial. During the worst meningitis epidemic seen in Africa, in 1996, Pfizer ran a trial in Nigeria their new drug Trovan. Five of the 100 children who took Trovan died and it caused liver damage, while it caused lifelong disabilities in those who survived. But another group of 100 children were given the conventional “gold standard” meningitis antibiotic as a “control” group for comparison. Six of them also tragically died because, the families said, Pfizer had given them less than the recommended level of the conventional antibiotic in order to make Trovan look more effective.

2012: Pfizer had to pay around $1billion to settle lawsuits claiming its Prempro drug caused breast cancer. Prempro was used in hormone replacement therapy, usually for women going through the menopause. The settlements came after six years of trials and hardship for the women affected.

2013: Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle over 2,000 cases in the US that accused its smoking treatment drug Chantix of provoking suicidal and homicidal thoughts, self harm and severe psychological disorders. Pfizer was also accused of improperly excluding patients with a history of depression or other mental disturbances from trials for the drug. Later, in 2017, a coroner in Australia ruled that the drug had contributed to a man’s suicide. The man’s mother campaigned to change the label on the drug.

2020: Pfizer reached an agreement with thousands of customers of its depo-testosterone drug in 2018 after they sued it for increasing the likelihood of numerous issues, including heart attacks.

It's not a non-statement, such effects are a serious concern for nucleoside analogs. But I can't say it's an actual issue or that it's definitely not because we just don't have sufficient data.

You're correct that almost anything with a pharmacological effect has such concerns, which diminish with time. That's why prevention is superior to treatment.

Also I wasn't talking about Paxlovid, but molnupiravir, which you'd also be taking.

> You are not forced to take any vaccine

Can we please just stop? “Take this or lose your job and pension” is not a choice.

> There's no bad propaganda when it comes to persuading people to get vaccinated

This is a very dangerous road to go down. I strongly disagree that the government and media should have license to lie to people if it's a useful lie in the moment. All that does is erode trust in those institutions, the longer term results of which are the root cause of most of the anti-vaccine sentiment today.

> PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus, HIV.

You're absolutely right. The experts are just guessing the odds of this stuff, and you and I are really only able to do the same, with even less certainty.

> It makes more logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate even if there are no pressures to mutate

With all due respect, when dealing with probabilities like this, non-experts estimating what makes "logical sense" is completely useless.

> if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.

Israel and New Zealand have negligible populations on a world scale. The efficacy of social distancing in the east Asian countries you mentioned is clear, but completely unrelated to the question at hand. The delta variant came from India, a country of 1.4B people, before any of them had access to the vaccines. That tells us nothing about whether the vaccines net encourage or net discourage harmful virus evolution.

It's okay to say we don't know, and in fact far better to do so than to make up a politically convenient answer.