The Pfizer CEO gets COVID-19 after four shots

by philg

Here’s a puzzler:

Why does the Pfizer CEO want to tell people that four shots of a purported “vaccine” from his/her/zir/their own company are so ineffective that he/she/ze/they needs to take an emergency use authorized medicine designed to prevent obese elderly unvaccinated people from being killed by COVID-19? He/she/ze/they got four shots and nonetheless faced an “emergency” situation requiring an experimental drug?

The big questions…. First, why wasn’t Dr. Bourla (a veterinarian so he/she/ze/they knows a lot about ivermectin!) smart enough to never take a COVID-19 test that could call into question his/her/zir/their company’s product? Second, assuming that such a test was somehow unavoidable, why disclose the reason for taking a week off? Why not simply say “I prefer not to work for the next five days?” Or “I have read so much about opioid addiction that I need to stay home and consume Pfizer’s own opioid for a week”?

28 thoughts on “The Pfizer CEO gets COVID-19 after four shots”

  2. The horrid horridness of all the horridity is horrifyingly horrid. Someone needs to do a new version of “The Scream” – with a mask!

  3. I’m hesitant to call it a certainty, but it looks every day to me like Judith Persichilli was correct! And it’s not because I have any particular fealty or other interest in Persichilli, it’s just that she struck me as one of the very few people who was being honest from (almost) the beginning, and that’s worth something.

    She began her career as an intensive care nurse and has a good sense, I think, about how airborne respiratory viral diseases with a diameter of approximately 0.3 microns go.

    It’s really a crime that more people just didn’t listen to her from the beginning and save everyone a lot of time and money. But that’s not how ‘Muricans do things.

    “I’m Definitely Going to Get It, We All Are.” – March 21, 2020

    https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/03/im-going-to-get-it-we-all-are-njs-top-health-official-says-as-she-leads-the-states-coronavirus-war.html

    What I want to know is: “When are we going to start putting people who misled hundreds of millions and even billions of people in jail?” I think we should start doing that. Lacerate a couple of them really good and send them a message.

    • When I say that, I should also note that at the very beginning of COVID-19, it was very well known to the Virus People Community who Kept Their Fucking Mouths Shut that the world had *never* developed a vaccine that was successful at preventing a coronavirus infection over the long term. And we still have not!

      So why didn’t we just say that at the beginning instead of offering all the false hopes about “eradicating the virus” and “stopping the pandemic” and all the other attendant horses**t everyone has said since then?

      So much courage! So much Truth! So much #Science! So much money! Everyone stand up and take a bow for Pfizer, Moderna, et. al.

  4. Philip, do you genuinely think these vaccines are useless, or are you just being sassy?

    If being boosted reduces your chance of death by 90%+, and greatly reduces severe outcomes, but doesn’t prevent you from 18 hours of fever, would you consider that ineffective?

    If we discovered that giving police bullet-proof vests reduced death by some large fraction, but still left them open to bruising and broken ribs from impact, would we consider that a waste?

    Is there anything else in life where we say “If it saves lives, but doesn’t save 100% of the lives, it’s useless”?

    • Sensible people compare the risk (autoimmune, reproductive, myocarditis, etc.) versus the benefit (extremely SHORT TERM reduction of risk from “very small” to “even smaller”).

      If you were asked to deliver a lecture on an apolitical topic (accounting?) at a respected university in a veru low-crime college town, would you wear a bulletproof vest to the occasion? Would you do so if the vest were produced by Takata and Pfizer and worked against obsolete forms of firearms (musket balls not modern bullets) and came with a nontrivial risk of exploding or giving you clotting disorders, myocarditis / pericarditis, autoimmune disorders, immune disorders, or just impotence?

      In short, the burden of proof is on the vaccine makers, especially on completely novel mRNA technology that uses the human body to produce harmful poisons. Almost every week more studies come out about the short-term uselessness (and often counterproductive effects) and long-term harmfulness of these injections.

    • David: It is not I who has recently made any comment on the effectiveness of the Pfizer COVID-19 shots, but rather the CEO him/her/zir/theirself. The CEO is an apparently healthy slender 60-year-old who already had a miniscule chance of death even if unvaccinated. Let’s assume as true your 90 percent risk reduction figure. If each of the 4 shots reduced his/her/zir/their chance of death by 90 percent, the CEO’s risk of death and/or a severe outcome should have been just 1/10,000th of the 2020 unvaccinated risk (this assumes SARS-CoV-2 is just as deadly today as it was in 2020). With 1/10,000th of what was already a pretty small risk the CEO rushes to gulp down some Paxlovid, an experimental drug to be taken only in the event of a personal health crisis. This would appear to show a lack of confidence in the purported massive risk reduction from the purported “vaccine” that Pfizer offers (I prefer the term “COVID shot” for this medicine).

      Separately, from my own knowledge and experience I don’t have any evidence that the COVID-19 shots reduced anyone’s risk of severe outcomes. The people I know who got COVID-19 in 2020 reported flu-/cold-style symptoms. Some of the vaccinated folks who got COVID-19 in 2021 or 2022 reported worse symptoms than the 2020 cases. The unvaccinated deplorables (non-laptop-class) that I know who have been getting COVID-19 in 2022 barely register it as an illness. Nor does my personal experience give me any evidence that the COVID-19 shots are harmful to young healthy people. Nobody that I know has experienced cardiac troubles after being stuck. My father died, age 90, shortly after getting Pfizer shot #2, so it is possible that his death confirms what was found in Norway and some other countries regarding the vaccine being lethal to the old/frail. If we exclude my father from my personal sample, as far as I can tell the vaccine shots cannot be distinguished from saline injections.

    • Philip – By taking the vaccine and Paxlovid, he’s making the statement that the benefit of these are greater than the risk, that’s all.

      It means that he knows that 1M people have been killed by covid, and that the side-effects of these vaccines are very small and rare, so the risk-benefit to a well-informed 60-year old is a no-brainer.

      I agree that his absolute risk is low, but risk is low in many places in life.

      If you stopped wearing your seatbelt, what are that odds that would kill you in the next year? Likely very low, but you likely buckle up every day.

      I also agree that many people drastically over-estimate their risk from covid.

    • David: the seat belt analogy is great until you consider side effects. 100 percent of the side effects of wearing a seat belt are known and, as it happens, they are minimal. My friends who are medical school professors say that the side effects of the vaccines on human immune systems won’t be known until many years in the future. We know about the cardiac side effects already, but it is quite possible, for example, that the vaccine could degrade the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2. Paxlovid is not an FDA-approved drug, so its side effects are only beginning to be explored. Unless you need to take pharma, it is usually a bad idea to take pharma. And that’s for FDA-approved pharma!

    • Philip – The vaccine has been given out for 18 months and more than 1B people world-wide.

      Are you expecting a serious side-effect to turn up that is so subtle that it has gone undetected so far?

      And why would you assume that the long-term risks of the vaccine are worse that the long-term effects of a bad infection?

      “Long covid” is a thing, right?

    • David: Maybe Long COVID is the serious side effect. You seem to be assuming that a “bad infection” (one in which the host body was not sanctified with 4 Pfizer shots) is the precursor to Long COVID. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-long-covid says “Even people who did not have any symptoms can experience long COVID”

      (So far, the evidence is that “vaccination” is similar to a saline injection with respect to Long COVID. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0 (maybe a 15% difference in Long COVID between vaccinated righteous and unvaccinated deplorables).)

      Back in March 2020, my med school professor friends said that the virus and humans would have to co-evolve and that any intervention, be it lockdown, mask orders, or vaccines, could interfere with that co-evolution process in a net negative way. They advised humility and caution in making predictions and said that it would be 10 years before we figured out whether what we did helped or harmed (they never anticipated 1.5 years of school closure in our biggest cities (except in Florida, of course)).

      Just give SARS-CoV-2 another few years to evolve. It may be that those who were never vaccinated will be better equipped to fight off the Double Super Omicron variant or whatever it is called. Anyone who says that he/she/ze/they knows is not speaking scientifically.

    • David: See https://www.statnews.com/2015/11/11/flu-shots-reduce-effectiveness/ shows what became clear after 70 years of administering flu shots to global populations.

      “Dr. Edward Belongia is among the scientists who have seen the picture coming into focus. He and some colleagues at Wisconsin’s Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation reported recently that children who had been vaccinated annually over a number of years were more likely to contract the flu than kids who were only vaccinated in the season in which they were studied. … the fact that repeated vaccination against flu might diminish rather than enhance the vaccine’s protection is perplexing.”

    • Philip — I’d like to know more about these med school professor friends.

      Did they get vaccinated?

      Did they get their parents vaccinated?

      If they had an 80-year-old parent in a nursing home who had the option of getting a vaccine, did they respond with “Sorry Mom, we need to see how this vaccine will co-evolve with us, or else bad things might happen.”

    • David: Where did the professors come down on the guesswork of applying the experimental vaccines? Depending on the prof, the age threshold where they thought it would be worth recommending the first two injections was somewhere between 50 and 60. Then they said it wouldn’t make any sense to give a vaccine to a healthy person under 30. For those between 30 and 50/60, they didn’t have a strong opinion on the risk/benefit. This was back when the vaccine was believed to prevent infection and transmission. They had a weaker level of enthusiasm for Shot #3 and no enthusiasm for Shot #4 (but that could change if a Shot #4 targeted to today’s strains is offered).

      Circling back to your question about the 80-year-old, they wouldn’t have had any problem giving the vaccine to the 80-year-old while letting the virus rage among the young and middle-aged (essentially the Swedish plan; protect the old and don’t try to fight viral spread among the non-old).

      Remember that vaccinating the young could easily have resulted in higher mortality among the old. If the young hadn’t been vaccinated, SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t have been forced to evolve around the vaccines. In that case, old people with vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan sequence would have been protected for many more months or years.

    • Philip — Those age ranges seem very defensible, especially given the lack of information at the time.

      Re: Sweden. According to Google:

      – COVID deaths in Sweden: 19,528 (of 10.35M)
      – Share of population: 0.1945%

      Compared to their next-door neighbor, Norway:

      – COVID deaths: 3,834 (out of 5.379M)
      – Share of population: 0.0712%

      If the US performed as well as Sweden, we would have had 642k deaths

      If the US performed as well as Norway, we would have had 235k deaths

      So the “Swedish plan” would have cost the US an extra 407k deaths.

      It’s common for me to hear right-wing people say “Sweden didn’t lock down, and they did just fine”. But did they?

      (Of course, we lost 1M, so we performed worse than both, but I think you get the point).

    • As noted in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/04/04/coronascientists-are-the-modern-aristotles/ , the comparison set for Sweden picked by Science before all data were received was Ireland, Britain, and France. Picking Norway after it is seen to be an outlier, but happens to be a geographical neighbor, makes as much as sense as comparing Vermont and New York State. See the “population-weighted density” chart in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/05/18/analysis-of-sweden-versus-uk-covid-19-outcomes/ for why it might make sense to compare Sweden and Ireland, but not Sweden and Norway.

      Separately, you’re counting deaths, not life-years. An obese 85-year-old with 4 comorbidities who dies a week earlier than he/she/ze/they would have otherwise, but with a positive COVID test, is someone “we lost”. By that standard, the U.S. will suffer at least 100 million deaths from a combination of COVID-19 and coronapanic measures. People with less education live shorter lives and schools in the biggest American cities (except in Florida) were shut for 1.5 years. People with lower income and wealth live shorter lives and the U.S. squandered $10 trillion that will, in theory, have to be paid back. Plus there were all of the economic losses from shutdowns that were ordered. If you say that a person who died a week prematurely is a COVID-19 death you also need to acknowledge that someone whose life has been statistically shortened by 6 months due to a year of missed education is a Coronapanic death. Because the Swedes indulged in only a minimal amount of coronapanic, in the long run their lives lost will be at a rate less than 1/20th that of the U.S. (and also than Norway’s, if we’re willing to add that to our experiment now that we have all of the data, since Norwegian kids received less education than Swedish kids).

      If you don’t accept the fancy economics behind people with less education and/or lower income living shorter lives, you can also just look at the more obvious situation of fatter people living shorter lives. While Swedes went to work, the gym, etc., Americans stayed home on the couch and gained 2 pounds per month (see https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/health/virus-weight-gain.html ). Since you’re counting deaths and not life-years, that weight gain will result in at least 100 million deaths.

    • I think this page from the CDC is a wonderful example of how little we know about the effects of this new class of vaccines:

      https://covid19.nih.gov/news-and-stories/covid-19-vaccines-and-menstrual-cycle

      The story begins at the start of the mass vaccination program around January 2021. Shots were already mandatory for health care workers, many of whom are women of reproductive age.

      Cut forward 10 months to October, and the CDC says they’re giving out $1.67M in grants to determine if COVID vaccination effects menstrual cycles. Specifically, they say,

      “As more people are vaccinated for COVID-19, it is possible to gain better understanding of short- and long-term effects of the vaccines. Scientific evidence could also help unvaccinated people understand what, if any, menstruation-related side effects to expect from a COVID-19 vaccine.”

      In other words, we are going to use a mandatory mass vaccination program to understand the long- and short-term side effects because we don’t know what, if any, they are.

      Can you imagine if the CDC had said that when they were mandating vaccination? “We don’t know what the side effects are, but by forcing you to get vaccinated we’ll be able to find out.”

      Cut forward to January 2022, a full year after mandatory vaccination began, and we see that “Researchers found that the length of the menstrual cycle — the time between periods — temporarily increased by an average of less than one day in people who received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared with unvaccinated people.”

      It took a full year to identify a side effect that happens within a month of vaccination. We clearly have no understanding of long-term side effects. What else might be hiding in the wings? The CDC gives some suggestions on the page: “Future research will assess whether the COVID-19 vaccine affects other aspects of the menstrual cycle, such as […] mood changes.” Awesome.

  5. “If being boosted reduces your chance of death by 90%+, and greatly reduces severe outcomes, but doesn’t prevent you from 18 hours of fever, would you consider that ineffective?” If it actually did that then maybe so! If you think this is the case then you are a Dumb Dumb!

  6. I don’t know if your questions are genuine or rhetorical, but I think the answers are quite obvious. First of all, he has no guarantee that his falling sick would not leak to the public, so he just cannot afford to hide his infection with the coronavirus. The risk of being exposed to headlines such as “Quadruply vaccinated Pfizer CEO hides his infection from the public” would be too big. Second, it is a quite well known strategy to preempt your opponents by coming forward with exactly what they’d reproach, but twisting it. He cannot hide that he had four shots and he cannot hide that he still got sick. So it’s him who discloses it first, preempting the others. He knows he cannot claim immunization though his company’s product, so again he makes the most of it, marketing-wise. He plays candid, he says “look how honest we are, we do not claim it avoids infection, but, as I got four shots, I have only mild symptoms.”

    They play this tune because it is impossible to know what course the disease would have taken in a person had his vaccination status be different. So the claim that it protects against severe courses is non-falsifiable in a Karl Popper sense, so non-scientific. Yes, they can show, statistically, that the proportion of non-vaccinated people in ICUs is higher than in the general population (but I don’t know if all the other parameters, such as age, body mass index, other diseases, are identical between the two groups), but we still don’t know how severe the course of the disease would have been in that non-vaccinated person in ICU had he taken the shot.

    As a side, “mild” is not scientific either, but subjective. Bed-sticken? For how long? Fever? How high? I had it exactly two weeks ago. I’ve never taken a covid shot, I’m in my mid 40s, I am not fat and have no chronic diseases. I had a high fever for two days and two nights, I was quite KO during this period. Then the fever disappeared completely and I was like before, only tired. All in all I would say I was sick four days, two with just an unpleasant scratch in the throat of which I didn’t think much, two with headache, high fever and my entire throat on fire, from its base to my ears. Was it mild?

    • Anon: this is a great analysis. Thank you! I think you could spin your symptoms as mild, since you are not dead. The fact that you didn’t accept the Sacrament of Fauci is a problem that can be fixed: “I got COVID-19 and my symptoms were mild because most of my neighbors received the life-saving Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.”

    • > Yes, they can show, statistically, that the
      > proportion of non-vaccinated people in ICUs
      > is higher than in the general population

      Most likely they do so by careful choice of which stats to use (i.e. by fraud). See e.g. here or here.

    • @Anonymous, If he trust in the product his company is making, why does he see the need to take Paxlovid? Why not just ride the “mild” symptoms? Furthermore, why isn’t he saying “If I only had the 5th, 6th, etc. booster shot, the COVID symptom would have been far less and I would not have needed to take Paxlovid”. Wouldn’t that put his company in a much better selling position for “sacrament”?

    • @George A.: Well, I don’t know the answers to your questions. They definitely point to some logical flaws in his actions. What I can assume though is that, on one hand, he saw the way of thinking that you expound and, on the other hand, he could use the opportunity to say “hey, look, we have a comprehensive solution package: a prophylactic one — the vaccine — and a medication — the pill to take when you do get infected”. I suppose he weighed the risks of exposing himself to the your kind of critique and the opportunity to promote his products and he thought that the second option brings more benefits.

      Personally I don’t believe he took Paxlovid. He’s like in a sort of educational/promotional video: “I am isolating and have started a course of Paxlovid”. “This is the correct course of action”, is the educational message, “you should take Paxlovid too”. And when it comes to one’s own health, #abundanceofcaution makes that we skip logic and pile medicine on ourselves.

      And let’s be honest: many medical procedures are applied without logic, often just to for having the ass covered. For example I’ve just got a message from a mountaineering friend. He almost died at 14500 feet altitudine in a Central Asian country. His lungs stopped working, his blood oxygen saturation fell to 37%, he couldn’t breathe. He was immediatly administered a corticoid and was flown to a hospital. There they diagnosed, based on imaging, pneumonia in both lungs. (He had a medical check-up 12h before and was deemed in best shape.) Just that he has no fever whatsoever, so it’s a sort of infectionless “idiopathic” pneumonia. Nevertheless they are pumping him with antibiotics.

    • Anon: Your friend’s experience is horrifying, but consistent with what I have heard. Altitude sickness is unpredictable and often strikes those who have previously tolerate similar altitudes (flip side is decompression illness from SCUBA diving on compressed air rather than Nitrox; a person can get bent on the 100th dive that has the same profile as 99 previous ones). I hope that your friend survives the sickness and the treatment!

  7. A natural experiment has been done in the US, namely NY and MA, where a large fraction of the deaths happen before vaccine compared with other states. It is probably hard to deduce exact numbers but some inference can be made.
    MA has 21.2k covid deaths in total, 12k in 2020. For this back of envelope calculation, 12k happened before vaccine, and 9.2k after vaccine.
    FL has 78k deaths in total, 23k in 2020. It is clear that there is a significant difference in the ratio between the two states.
    Now, most deaths happen in the 65+ age range so let’s compare the 65+ population in the two states. I calculated from census, and if I am not mistaken, there are 1.215m 65+ people in MA and 4.596m people in FL. If vaccine has no effect at all, from MA number, we expect that there are 21.2*4.596/1.215 = 80.2k deaths in FL.
    My personal conclusion on this is that there might be an effect, though the effect is most likely very far from 90% reduction or anything dramatic like that.

    • AA: Your approach is interesting. Any time that we are looking at Year 1 vs. Year 2 data we should also keep in mind that a virus, even without mutation or a vaccine or a treatment, becomes less deadly over time. The hosts that are most susceptible to being killed are likely to be killed in the first wave of that virus. Because people can’t be killed twice, the virus appears to be getting less deadly even though, in reality, it is just that the people who were easy for the virus to kill are already dead.

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