Fact Checkers on Viral Transmission: They Get It Wrong Yet Again

 Fact-checks

• One of the more bizarre "fact-checks" I've seen so far is this one from a particularly sloppy censorship outlet called Lead Stories. It seems to be concocted in response to trending news of a Pfizer executive stating that their Covid-19 vaccine was never tested for efficacy against transmission.
• Clinical trials are intended to check the safety and efficacy of new drugs and vaccines before they are approved for widespread use.
• In the real world, efficacy is exactly about infection; whether the vaccine prevents infection or not. And this is precisely what was tested during the Pfizer trials.
• Testing for the prevention of disease transmission is not typically part of initial trials, according to vaccine experts. To start with, the Pfizer representative did say the vaccine was not tested against transmission. Second, neither the Pfizer executive nor the parliamentarian ever said that the company "Erred" by not testing if their vaccine limited transmission. "In short, the trials that tested the safety and efficacy of the vaccine were not designed to test transmission in part because the trial size and duration would have needed to be larger and longer and the goal was to prevent deaths. Her final conclusion is that vaccine trials do not test for transmission at all. Stated in her headline and repeated several times in the article, that the clinical trial was "NOT intended to test transmission prevention" and that "That's Not How Clinical Trials Work" is simply wrong. First, the author of the fact-check article wrongly claims that clinical trials of vaccines are not intended to test transmission prevention.

https://brownstone.org/articles/fact-checkers-on-viral-transmission-they-get-it-wrong-yet-again/