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Background

A search on Twitter for Pfizer currently shows many people talking about a supposed recent release of documentation (tens of thousands of pages) from Pfizer. A simple Internet search shows many personal blogs discussing the release, sites claiming to have the documents in question (I was unable to access them, and at any rate am not inclined to go through such a large document myself), and news articles debunking a claim about adverse effects.

In the Twitter discussion, I have noticed a few common themes: along with the usual anecdotes (that I see every time there is a swell in Twitter discussion of COVID vaccines) about individuals supposedly harmed by the vaccine and protest of Pfizer's profit margins, there are four distinct claims I have noticed:

  • A claim that the leak of the Roe v Wade decision was timed to distract from the contents of the Pfizer documents (this is, of course, an unprovable and irrelevant conspiracy theory, so I have not selected it as the topic here)

  • A claim that the documentation indicates over a thousand deaths caused by vaccines during the trials (the news coverage I can find all seems to focus on this claim, making the simple argument that these deaths cannot necessarily be attributed to the vaccine; that's good enough for me as it stands, so this is also not the claim I want to highlight. I suppose this is similar to the classic misuse of VAERS seen in many other covid-19 related questions.)

  • A claim that the vaccine was not recommended during pregnancy or lactation, as the studies did not determine whether the vaccine would be excreted in human milk. It was established later that the vaccine is passed on this way, but this has been deemed safe and beneficial, so this is also not the claim I find interesting for skeptics.SE purposes.

Claim

The preceding is largely meant to establish that the documents in question indeed exist and that they have been looked over, but that I don't know where to look for a thorough treatment of the topic. There is one claim outstanding in the discussion which I have not seen addressed. I will cite example Tweets here:

https://twitter.com/amerix/status/1521838512663941121

While the system kept you busy with abortion in USA & War in Ukraine,

Pfizer data came out after a court order.

The vaccine was 12% effective & dropped to less than 1%.

No trials were done on pregnant women before giving them!

Pfizer vax had a 0.83% chance to save you.

Scam!

https://twitter.com/stevienut/status/1521553172665413635

Pfizer data just out! We no why they fought to seal data for 75 years! Vaccine was 12% effective. Never trialled in pregnant women, tested on 7 Rats before it was given to them! Actual Pfizer vaccine had a 0.83% chance to save ur life from Covid. SHOCKED

https://twitter.com/CarloGrims/status/1521663669939187714

Now that the "#Science" is out that the #Pfizer vax is actually 12% effective the first 7 days, and then below 1% after that time lapse... How do we fight the mandates legally? Even the kangaroo courts we have in #Canada won't be able to come up with enough bs to cover for that.

The numbers cited are consistent: it is claimed that Pfizer has now admitted their vaccine to be only "12% effective".

My question is: Where does this number come from, and does it have any salience or validity? How are the anti-vax crowd interpreting the document to infer such a result, and how could this happen with the same data that was used to produce headlines of over 90% efficacy at the time the vaccines were released? It seems as though outright fraud is being alleged.

Karl Knechtel
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  • You need to include links to the Tweets so that you're giving attribution to the authors. – Laurel May 04 '22 at 17:09
  • I didn't want to name and shame Internet randos, but okay. – Karl Knechtel May 04 '22 at 17:17
  • From what I gathered, the 12% come from studies on children aged 5-11 years for Omicron: they received a smaller dosage, for a strain that was not the one circulating at that time. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/28/pfizer-covid-vaccine-was-just-12percent-effective-against-omicron-in-kids-5-to-11-study-finds.html – user89073 May 04 '22 at 17:53
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    `A claim that the vaccine was not recommended during pregnancy or lactation, as the studies did not determine whether the vaccine would be excreted in human milk. It was established later that the vaccine is passed on this way` - No. Absolutely this is not true. The antibodies your body produces as a result of having been vaccinated are passed on. The vaccine is not, and is rapidly cleared by your immune system. (Vaccines in general are ***highly*** recommended for pregnant women, and it is now standard of care to give Tdap early in the third trimester to maximize protection to the infant) – CJR May 04 '22 at 18:38
  • Pardon; I evidently misspoke. I'm not clear on exactly how to edit it because I'm honestly not that good with my immunobiology. Feel free to fix it. – Karl Knechtel May 04 '22 at 18:48
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    No, thank you. Honestly, this question is a few twitter randos, a link to a duckduckgo search that changes for everyone who clicks on it, and your thoughts. If I was going to start editing, I would delete it. – CJR May 04 '22 at 19:09
  • I saw a common claim, that should be provable in principle and which relates to a document that evidently exists, being made identically by many people. How is that not on topic? The rest is background explaining how I became aware of the claim, explaining why I chose this claim to focus on (out of others being made in the same context), and evidencing the existence of the document. I legitimately don't understand how I am doing anything wrong in asking the question. – Karl Knechtel May 04 '22 at 19:11
  • There's no answer I could write to this question which wouldn't be met with 'well actually the vague amorphous claim here is something else and so your answer is irrelevant'. If you can find a specific claim (e.g. the pfizer vaccine is 12% efficient because on page 300 of this document there's a graph...), that is something that can be skeptically analyzed. The rest of your writing is just unnecessary noise. – CJR May 04 '22 at 19:25
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    Is the tweet that talked about the war in Ukraine trying to claim that the war was started in order to hide this data? – Joe W May 04 '22 at 19:26
  • Is there a notable source for this or is it just some random people on twitter? – Joe W May 04 '22 at 19:27
  • It is *many* people on twitter claiming *the exact same thing*. How does that not establish notability? Twitter is far and away the easiest way nowadays to be exposed to politically charged claims of fact. If the claim is being repeated verbatim, clearly it is notable - in that many people demonstrably believe, and or seek to cause others to believe, that one specific thing. – Karl Knechtel May 04 '22 at 19:30
  • "There's no answer I could write to this question which wouldn't be met with 'well actually the vague amorphous claim here is something else and so your answer is irrelevant'." The entire reason I am asking is because I *want to know the basis* for the claim. It is not vague or amorphous; it is stated in terms of a *specific number*, where *everyone involved* is giving the *same number*. It's not plausible that this is coincidental; thus, they must have some reasoning (whether or not flawed) behind it. – Karl Knechtel May 04 '22 at 19:36
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    The complaint isn't that this is a non-notable topic, but that you need to find a notable single source that's written down exactly what the claim is so that people can write specific responses. Do you really think that *many* people on twitter are all on the same page when it comes to what they're claiming? It's an internet telephone game, they're just repeating vaguely similar-sounding things until it loses meaning. If you want to know the basis for the claim, I suggest a search engine - this is a site to skeptically analyze if specific claims are correct, not go and find them for you. – CJR May 04 '22 at 19:37
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    I suspect the 12% are from reports about the efficacy of the vaccine against infection in children, and the 1% is the ARR (Absolute Risk Reduction) for the vaccine which will always be a much smaller number than the relative values. But in the end a question with this kind of vague claims will boil down to a generic "do the vaccines work" answer, which we already have. So I'm not entirely sure what to do with this question. – Mad Scientist May 05 '22 at 05:57
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    The [Daily Mail](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10561455/The-Pfizer-COVID-19-vaccine-12-effective-against-infection-children-aged-five-11.html) article states more pertinently that the '12%' figure _only_ relates to children between 5 and 11 and relates _only_ to Omicron Covid-19. – Nigel J May 05 '22 at 11:59
  • Tangential: the people who say this don't actually want this to be true, because if it is true then we should have mandatory masks again. – user253751 May 05 '22 at 14:49
  • @NigelJ: and that seems to be based on study actually published, not on the discovery ordered by that Texas judge, which indeed forced the FDA to release tens of thousands of pages relating to Pfizer's application(s), but I'm not aware of any amazing info contained therein. It's worth noting that the Twitter account cited by the OP published some reproductions of the pages from that disclosure, but they don't include the 12% figure or anything that would seem to allow such a calculation. – Fizz May 05 '22 at 16:11
  • @user253751 I doubt that. The people who believe this to be true presumably, generally, consider that contracting covid is not a big deal. The principal complaint is about violation of rights (perceived or actual) and freedoms - i.e., freedom from compulsion to do *anything* about the virus or its spread. – Karl Knechtel May 05 '22 at 17:10
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    Another potential source for the 12% claim is this blog post: https://soniaelijah.substack.com/p/was-pfizers-95-vaccine-efficacy-fraudulent?s=r – Mad Scientist May 06 '22 at 17:18
  • @MadScientist: yeah, that's probably what the tweets actually allude to. – Fizz May 06 '22 at 21:50
  • @MadScientist: there's an [article](https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2022/05/06/efficacite-de-12-de-1-deconseille-aux-femmes-enceintes-les-trois-nouvelles-infox-sur-le-vaccin-de-pfizer_6125036_4355770.html) in French (Le Monde) connecting the claims in the first tweet with Sonia Elijah's writing(s). – Fizz May 06 '22 at 23:58

1 Answers1

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I'm not entirely sure when the documents were released, but Le Monde connects the twin claims (12% and 1%) of the first tweet in the question to the writings of Sonia Elijah, some of which you can read here, as found by Mad Scientist. Le Monde comments that

Pour arriver à ce « 12 % », Mme Elijah s’appuie sur un document, rendu public depuis au moins le 8 décembre 2020 : la notice d’information envoyée par Pfizer aux FDA, dans laquelle l’entreprise se targue des fameux 95 % d’efficacité du vaccin qui allait être autorisé. Une phrase y interpelle l’ancienne journaliste de la BBC : « Parmi les 3 410 cas totaux de Covid-19 suspectés mais non confirmés dans la population globale de l’étude, 1 594 sont survenus dans le groupe vacciné contre 1 816 dans le groupe placebo », écrit Pfizer.

Un calcul réalisé à partir d’individus… négatifs « Si vous calculez l’efficacité vaccinale à partir de ces chiffres, elle est incroyablement basse, 12 % », s’emporte Sonia Elijah. Sauf que contrairement à ce qu’elle présuppose, rien ne permet d’affirmer avec certitude que ces 3 410 personnes symptomatiques ont bien été malades du Covid-19. Certes, il n’est pas possible d’écarter une part de faux négatifs (des personnes contaminées, mais non détectées en raison d’un problème de réglage du test PCR, ou d’une charge virale trop basse, par exemple).

So, the Pfizer documents are from their Dec 2020 FDA submission, and Elijah derived the 12% efficacy figure by including all the participants who had some symptoms related to Covid-19, although they were not confirmed (e.g. PCR) as being infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Fizz
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  • I've seen related claims elsewhere. The anti-vaxxers are counting the people who had symptoms that the PCR test didn't confirm. Hey, that means it wasn't Covid--so no surprise it's about the same in the vaccine and control arms. Never mind that the real-world performance of the vaccine is similar to the counts of the PCR-confirmed cases in the trials, this data has been overtaken by reality and means nothing. – Loren Pechtel May 12 '22 at 03:00
  • @LorenPechtel, could you elaborate on the reality claim? From my govt (Israel) released daily data I see, that new confirmed cases in the last two months per 100 thousands are higher for vaccinated vs unvaccinated(I suppose these people are get called by names by you). – dEmigOd Jul 08 '22 at 07:04
  • @dEmigOd What I said was overtaken by reality is that the real-world performance of the vaccine matched what we would expect if the "cases" not confirmed by PCR weren't relevant. As for what we are seeing now: the case numbers have ceased to mean much as home tests predominate. Confirmed cases are now strongly biased towards those who are seriously ill--being at high risk would make people more likely to get vaccinated and also more likely to get seriously ill. – Loren Pechtel Jul 08 '22 at 21:35
  • @LorenPechtel, while your claim could have some basis, the data is split by age cohorts and pretty consistent. So are you claiming that in each age cohort more vulnerable got vaccinated, while less did not? I may buy this in the 90+ group, but this is highly unplausible in the 12-18, 18-29 and other "younger" groups. It just can not be that there are so many vulnerable people in such young people groups. – dEmigOd Jul 09 '22 at 04:45
  • @dEmigOd This is one of the ploys of the anti-vax crowd--pretending the number of people with pre-existing conditions is low. – Loren Pechtel Jul 09 '22 at 15:24
  • @LorenPechtel, so you have numbers? – dEmigOd Jul 09 '22 at 19:31