Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, having somehow survived impeachment, is getting back to pursuing The People’s Urgent Business with a stupid performative lawsuit against Pfizer, accusing the drug company of lying about the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine and failing to make the pandemic just go away — poof! — like magic.
In a 54-page complaint shot through with anti-vaxxer rhetoric and deliberately bad math, Paxton claims that “The COVID-19 vaccines are the miracle that wasn’t,” and that by saying that clinical trials of its vaccine showed it to be “95% effective” in preventing death or serious illness, Pfizer had “deceived the public” into expecting the pandemic would be over real quicklike — never mind that Pfizer never made any claims at all that its vaccine would end the pandemic, let alone that it would do so within any specific timeline.
Why no, the lawsuit makes no mention at all of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s constant attempts to prohibit local authorities from taking actions that would limit spread of the virus, like school and public mask mandates.
The lawsuit will probably get tossed fairly quickly, because it relies on bullshit claims that are popular with MAGA loons, but it will also generate plenty of headlines about what a brave soul Paxton is for taking on the tyranny of public health and Big Pharma. And when it’s thrown out of court for making stupid claims, that too will reinforce the message that the courts are rigged against patriots like Paxton and Abbott.
From the very first paragraph, the complaint is tailored to carry weight not with a court, but with antivaxxers and rightwing media. Just look at this bullshit here:
Placing their trust in Pfizer, hundreds of millions of Americans lined up to receive the vaccine. Contrary to Pfizer’s public statements, however, the pandemic did not end; it got worse. More Americans died in 2021, with Pfizer’s vaccine available, than in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. This, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Americans received a COVID-19 vaccine, with most taking Pfizer’s.
As the Texas Tribune points out, yes, sure, more people died from COVID in 2021 than in 2020. In fact it was twice as many. But that has little to do with the vaccine’s efficacy, because Paxton’s playing fast and loose with time here: 2021 marked a full calendar year of nationwide infections, including the rise of the nastier Delta variant, even as more and more Americans insisted they would not get the vaccine for political reasons while also insisting on going out and becoming disease vectors themselves.
By comparison, during the nine months the virus spread in 2020, it took some time to get traction before it spread wildly; in most states, the Tribune notes, the early weeks of the pandemic saw death rates in the double digits. Comparing the calendar years is just plain dishonest and misleading.
Of the 1.2 million Americans who have died from COVID since the first death was recorded in March 2020, more than half of them died within the first 12 months. By then, only a third of Americans had gotten the shot.
Further, Paxton offers this common but completely dishonest bit of statistical malfeasance:
in at least some places a greater percentage of the vaccinated were dying from COVID-19 than the unvaccinated. Pfizer’s vaccine plainly was not “95% effective.”
Dear readers, we know you understood there would be no math, but we have to unpack that statement: Paxton wants you to think this means that the vaccine was doing more harm than good, or that it was safer in some cases to be unvaccinated. That ignores some basic statistical reality, as KFF explained pretty clearly last year:
[If] 100% of people in the U.S. were vaccinated, vaccinated people would represent 100% of COVID-19 deaths. Similarly, as the share of the population with a booster rose somewhat during 2022, the share of deaths among boosted people also rose. COVID-19 vaccines are very effective at preventing severe illness and death, but they are not perfect, so deaths among vaccinated people will still occur. […]
And with COVID, the group with the highest vaccine uptake remains the elderly and people with other risk factors. So yes, there will be more deaths among that high-risk population, even though they’re vaccinated, but that doesn’t mean the vaccines aren’t effective — it just means they were at greater risk to start with. As the KFF ‘splainer notes, “That’s why, when CDC adjusts for some of these factors (age and population size), we still see that unvaccinated people are at much greater risk of death and other severe outcomes than people the same age who have stayed up-to-date on boosters.”
And as the Texas Tribune points out, that’s exactly the case in Texas:
The state’s own Department of State Health Services COVID-19 death tracker shows that as of April, the COVID death rate for fully vaccinated Texans is 12 times lower than that of unvaccinated Texans.
In short, Paxton’s lawsuit is completely without merit, but people who are easily bamboozled by misleading statistics and handwaving will find it very persuasive. And since explaining why the lawsuit is bullshit requires people to think about math class, that probably won’t change. Maybe the case will even get somewhere, if it’s assigned to a judge who hated math.
[Texas Tribune / Texas v. Pfizer complaint / Ars Technica / MSNBC]
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