"They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness" Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions: 1. Ar

"They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness" Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions: 1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now. 2. Were they so in the past? To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection. The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available. For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths. https://bartram.substack.com/p/update-on-the-failure-of-the-vaccines?s=r https://bartram.substack.com/p/update-on-the-failure-of-the-... "It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death." That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave: https://bartram.substack.com/p/increased-deaths-in-england-for-the?s=r https://bartram.substack.com/p/increased-deaths-in-england-f... All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.