Near universal RT-PCR testing at the end of the Moderna trial showed no significant difference between groups

Near universal RT-PCR testing at the end of the blinded phase of the Moderna trial showed positives 157 placebo vs. 153 vaccine. At best, after ~2-3 months, any "protection" was gone.

Executive summary

The Moderna COVE trial paper published in 2021 in NEJM claimed 93.2% efficacy in preventing illness with only 55 cases in the vaccine group and 744 in the placebo group.

But if you look beyond the abstract, you’ll find something very significant that they “forgot” to mention in the abstract.

At the end of the blinded phase of the trial, the participants were given an opportunity to become unblinded. This was known as the “participant-decision visit” aka PDV.

92.3% of the participants (27,109 out of 29,362 who got the second shot) accepted the offer to visit their physician, get an RT-PCR swab, and be told which group they were in.

This was arguably the single most objective measure of vaccine efficacy in the entire Moderna trial.

The result: 157 positive placebo vs. 153 positives in the vaccine group.

In short, in the most objective test of the entire trial, the numbers showed it didn’t work to reduce infections.

They don’t give the numbers of each group to attend the PDV, but in fact, a lot of people didn’t need a PDV because they could tell by their injection reactions they got the vaccine so the PDV was likely under-attended by vaccinated participants making the numbers even worse for the vaccine. This might be why they hid the numbers.

The RT-PCR numbers were cited in the paper and in Table 28 of the supplement.

And as far as I was able to determine from searches and AI, nobody noticed this in the five years the paper has been out.

AI analyses by Grok and AlterAI confirm the above.

The details from the paper (and the supplement)

You know when they start using Fine and Gray that the raw numbers aren’t working out for them ;)

Summary

They claimed 93.2% efficacy against infection, but their own RT-PCR objective measurements at the end of the trial (which was really the single most important objective test) showed the vaccine made virtually no difference in preventing infections.

The chance that the vaccine worked as claimed and the PDV result happened as a statistical fluke? 1e-95.

Is it possible that the vaccine worked for a short period of time? Yes, it’s possible of course. But it’s more likely the COVID vaccine is just like the flu vaccine which after careful testing by the NIH (Simonsen 2005) was shown not to work at all. In general, it seems like all vaccines that they have to “keep on giving” on a regular basis don’t work.

People were allowed to return to work on a belief, not because the vaccine worked.

And they actually detected almost 3X as many cases at the PDV appointment in the vaccinated than they detected in the vaccinated over the entire trial (153 vs. 55)!

So they clearly missed a lot of cases in the vaccinated for some reason during the trial.

Bottom line: The equal numbers in the RT-PCR tests are really the most objective evidence we have about the efficacy of the COVID vaccine from the randomized trials. They show the shots didn’t work. Pfizer avoided doing the same tests so we don’t have their data to compare. So this is the best data we have.

I’m sure health officials worldwide will act on this data.