England's (and Australia's) horse in the vaccine race was recently trumpeted as a big success following the release of stage-3 trial results which claimed "90% protection against Covid".

As mentioned earlier, 90% protection is not the same as prevention - it just means that 90% of recipients in the trial didn't develop severe symptoms. (Aside: Not sure how this compares with reports that 80% of people who contract Covid (without any vaccine) will only have mild symptoms - is it the degree of the symptoms?)

The Australian Government called it great news that would result in a "fully-safe Australia". Science magazine reported it as “convincing evidence that [the vaccine] works. ” (Yet another example of a leading science journal lending credibility to dodgy science - i gotta wonder what the fuck is going on with those magazines?) The stock market duly rose by near record levels.

Now the drug company is being called out on it's data. Dr Geoff Porges, a vaccine 'expert' (aside: we're always being yelled at to 'listen to the experts' - but what happens when the experts disagree?), has accused Oxford AstraZeneca of having "embellished the data".

That's a serious accusation. A drug company producing a vaccine to 'save us all' from the scourge of Covid (which, in turn, will make it billions of dollars), is knowingly fudging the data?!!!

It has now come to light that the company made a mistake in administering the doses during the trial. The trial involved participants receiving two doses. In a significant number of participants, they were accidentally given a half-dose in the first instance (due to a manufacturing error) then a full-dose the second time around. Importantly, this group of recipients (from a trial in Brazil) were allunder the age of 55. Bear in mind that Covid is virtually harmless to under 55's anyway.

Those participants that received two full-doses only returned a 62% efficacy rate. The 90% figure came from the accidental mis-dosage.

This raises a lot of questions. Firstly, how did they make such a basic fuck-up? Secondly, what other things have they fucked-up/fudged but are not telling the public? At best, this is "shaky science". At worst, it's willful lying for mega-financial gain.

As Porges notes:

"Confidence comes from transparency of communication and clarity of communication. You need to be completely honest about what you're sharing and really clear about the information. I think AstraZeneca, at the very least, violated those two tenets."