MC, Your life must be very tense. If you take some time and check the source material available at the CDC website that is re-interpreted and incorrectly reported by ZeroHedge, you might be less angry at CDC and the "establishment" and more grateful for the vaccines. I and others cannot do it for you, because it is exhausting work, like playing whack-a-mole. If you have a specific question, I would be happy to answer it to the best of my knowledge and vast experience as an MD and a molecular virologist. But you are buried in a blizzard of lies and half-truths. To take on only this last report from ZeroHedge, the CDC has developed a new reporting system as of May, specifically targeted at detecting vaccine breakthrough cases, because they recognize that monitoring the rate of such an event is critical for predicting the emergence of resistant virus variants, if that should occur. Surely there are partially resistant strains extant even now, as you know. That is not a sinister or evil act on the part of CDC. Also, while it appears to be true that some sources count a positive RT-PCR in an asymptomatic person as a "case" (and I myself have been railing against that practice), that is not the formal definition of a case from either the FDA or the CDC point of view. See the CDC case definition from August, 2020. In the phase 3 clinical trials to determine vaccine efficacy, there were (and are for any ongoing studies) strict CLINICAL criteria which in addition to a positive RT-PCR were part of the case definition. Applying those criteria, the efficacy of the two mRNA vaccines was determined to be ~95% for the study groups. That is not 100%. That means one can still get COVID even after vaccination, but with a hugely diminished risk that that will happen. There is some good reason to criticize CDC for its behavior during the
first 2 months or so of 2020 as regards the RT-PCR tests used in the US,
because there were perfectly good test kits available from China and
Germany, yet the CDC insisted on relying upon US-based kit developers,
and yes some of those kits were crap. Did the CDC decision to refuse test kits from China or Germany have something to do with politics, ya think? It's not about what Ct value is taken as positive; it's about the formal process of validating any test kit. The validation process, which is arduous, determines what Ct value for that particular kit can be used as a cut-off for positivity. And yes, a Ct value of 40 or higher can almost never be taken seriously. There were a lot of governmental blunders in the early months, for sure. But in the end, you and those like you need to make up your mind what you believe. Is the virus a fraud? Is the virus real and an evil Chinese plot? Is the idea it caused a pandemic a fraud? Are the vaccines a corporate plot to make money and kill people willy nilly, or are they merely a fraud because after all there was no pandemic? And so on and so forth. It's very tiring.
