# Pfizer documents released under court order



## Amity Island




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## travellor

As opposed to the overall number of deaths from covid............
I know where I'd rather be.
But good some anti vaxxers are still telling us we shouldn't be pro vaccination.
Anyone that survived the pandemic is a bonus, no matter how they did it.


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## travellor

Amity Island said:


> According to the dictionary the word "safe" means:
> 
> 1. secure from liability to harm, injury, danger, or risk: a safe place.
> 2. free from hurt, injury, danger, or risk: to arrive safe and sound.
> 3. involving little or no risk of mishap, error, etc.: a safe estimate.



"involving little or no risk of mishap, error, etc.: a safe estimate"

Well we agree then.
Out of 11 billion or so vaccines administered, those numbers are certainly "little".
It looks like the vaccine program got us through safe and sound as you say.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> Then yes, provided people _are_ made aware of this _before_ using the product then this may be acceptable to them.


Given the situation, I don't think anything has been misrepresented. Yes, with Ox/AZ there was a risk of a serious kind of clotting, and that was made public as soon as it was found, and policy was changed. And for the mRNA vaccines there are various complications, the main one being heart inflammation, but again that's not being hidden, and in a few countries that's been part of the reason for changing policy (giving doses 8 weeks or so apart rather than 3).

In both those cases, the trials were just too small to have picked up the signal, and if you demand a trial 10 or 100 times larger you're just never going to get a new vaccine.

I'm afraid Dr John Campbell has just gone full anti-vaxx (even though he's been vaccinated and I'm sure would argue that at least some people should get vaccinated), presumably because that's where his subscribers seem to be. (Along with being pro Ivermectin, pro Vitamin-D, etc.) And yes, he's just reporting the information he finds, but really he's just JAQing off.


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## Windy

Nothing is 100% safe, from going out in the car for a drive, to having vaccinations. It's all a balance of risks, the risk of side effects from treatment, compared to the risk of diseases that the treatment is there to address. 
For instance, I take metformin, and it can mess up your digestive system so you have to stay within sprinting distance of the loo, but also it helps with my BG levels, so I accept the risk of that side effect by taking it.
I read as much as I could before I was vaccinated for covid - 2 x Astra Zenica and a Pfizer, and was willing to accept the reported risks, compared to the risk covid offered me as I am an obese, middle aged woman (and diabetic, though I didn't know it at the time), so I assessed the risk from covid was higher, and went for it.
Plus covid killed my uncle's partner, and put poet/writer Michael Rosen in a coma for months. 

I respect other people's wish not to be vaccinated, but I don't really understand it.


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## Bruce Stephens

Windy said:


> I respect other people's wish not to be vaccinated, but I don't really understand it.


That's how I feel. Sure, last January the vaccines were new (and the mRNA ones seemed very new (though based on decades of work)) and the disease was also new (so maybe it'll disappear in the summer, for example).

And if I lived in New Zealand I wouldn't have been in a hurry to get vaccinated, I think: seems sensible to let the rest of the world try it first.

But now it just feels crazy. The vaccines now being used here (the mRNA ones) have side effects, sure, and they're not quite as effective with the Omicron variant. And the Omicron variant is less severe (and so presumably less likely to give long term effects, though that's unknown as far as I know). But they're still very good and very safe, and they're the best thing we've got now that we're way too late to try and eliminate the virus.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> The reason you don't think anything has been misrepresented, is because it wasn't presented to begin with. It took some persistant doctors and a court judge for that to happen.


I'm all for transparency, but is this actually providing any meaningful new evidence? Hundreds of millions of people have had this vaccine, and we can just look at what happened to them (through the yellow card and similar systems for short term effects, and a number of countries have, I'm sure, been tracking too).


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## Bruce Stephens

Bruce Stephens said:


> I'm all for transparency, but is this actually providing any meaningful new evidence?


Here's another YouTube video on the documents, recorded a few days before Campbell's but apparently covering the same sorts of misunderstandings. False Claims about Pfizer document


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## Chris Hobson

It is highly disingenuous to compare those that had reservations about the various Covid "vaccines" and anti-vax fruitcakes in general. Traditional vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective over a very long period of time and over millions of applications. The diseases that they are used against have been effectively eradicated. The injections used against Covid did not have such long term data and so it was always a judgement call to balance the risks of having the jab against the risk of the disease itself, especially as the Covid jab has proven not to be particularly effective. For the record, I have had the injections because, as a 63yo diabetic I considered that I was at relatively high risk from Covid.


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## Bruce Stephens

Chris Hobson said:


> The injections used against Covid did not have such long term data and so it was always a judgement call to balance the risks of having the jab against the risk of the disease itself, especially as the Covid jab has proven not to be particularly effective.


But looking at the data now, doesn't it look clear that the vaccines are effective enough relative to their (small) risks? 

Sure, maybe you might be unconvinced that it's worth trying to get it approved for children under 5, and maybe you even think it's not appropriate for older children, but there are surely enough reports of healthy adults dying from COVID-19 or surviving but obviously seriously harmed, and not a whole lot of reports of people being harmed significantly from the Pfizer vaccine?


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## Bruce Stephens

Bruce Stephens said:


> but there are surely enough reports of healthy adults


I don't mean to imply that "unhealthy" adults don't matter. (Obviously, since I am one.) I'm just assuming that "healthy" adults are less likely to suffer much from infection. (And now there's a reasonable understanding of what comorbidities are relevant, though less so for long COVID.)


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## travellor

@Amity Island 
Putting you in ignore now, far too many identical crazy posts simply repeating YouTube anti vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
I'm still alive, if you can't move on from the pandemic, that won't drag me down now it's passed, and I've survived it, and the vaccination played it's part for me.
Now, if you want to contribute anything towards diabetes........


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> The question Campbell also raised in his video is the lack of transparency and the effect this has on people being able to make informed decisions. He's clearly upset that this information wasn't given to him (or others).


Did you have a look at the (much shorter) video I linked to? She says this document has been available since November 17, 2021. So presumably long after he had his vaccinations, but still a while ago. She notes it's not for 46,000 participants (rather, it includes everyone who'd been given the vaccination), that there aren't 9 pages of adverse events (rather, those are the possible events they were particularly looking for), and that it wasn't sealed until 2097 (the FOI resulted in hundreds of thousands of pages and the FDA was able to release only 500 pages a month (they needed to redact for trade secret and patient confidentiality reasons), and offered to prioritise according to the requestors wishes; a court order required them to speed that up, so the FDA is apparently hiring more people to do the checking and redacting)).


Amity Island said:


> What are the figures for injuries, hospitalisation, disabilities and deaths to date?


Here (again) is the UK information: https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...irus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting


Amity Island said:


> For the first 3 months in the UK that data could be relevant to only 1 jab, what about the other 2,3,4 etc since, what is the cumalitive affects?


I'm not aware of particular concerns. For Ox/AZ it seemed to be that if you don't get the clotting reaction from the first dose the second dose would be safe, but I'm not sure there were enough cases to be confident before we pretty much stopped using it. For the two mRNA vaccines I think several countries are separating the doses by more than 4 weeks because it's felt that reduces the chance or severity of myocarditis (which is usually described as mild and short lived).

I've not heard of anyone reporting worries about cumulative effects. A 3 (or more) dose vaccine isn't that unusual among vaccines so I don't think there's any generic worries about it. The effectiveness after 3 doses obviously has been studied.


Amity Island said:


> What are the mixing effects between combining different manufacturers?


That was studied for the UK's booster doses in the COV-BOOST study, published here https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02717-3/fulltext

I don't know whether using mixtures for the first two doses was studied. I don't think that was done in the UK that much. I doubt there's any reason to think it would be a problem.


Amity Island said:


> What are the effects of not following the manufacturers guidance on timings between doses?


As far as I know it's regarded as positive. The suggestion is that the 3 (or 4) week separation was to get trial results as soon as possible (and is to maximise the protection available short term) rather than because it was ideal. I've heard people suggesting that if we weren't in a pandemic then maybe just two doses 6 months apart might do as well as 2 doses 3 weeks apart followed by another one 6 months later. But we still have really high prevalence, so getting people good protection as fast as possible is still important.

I'm sure the UK regulators have published what information they have about this somewhere, if you really want to know.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> Chris, that would make for a good definition of "vaccine".


It would mean never having new vaccines for anything. Who could afford to test a vaccine on millions of people over many years?


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> I wasn't suggesting this would be how trials are done, just that if something eradicates the thing you are fighting against and it is proven over time, this gives one confidence in them and certainly meets the (original) definition of vaccine.


If you mean you want a vaccine that provides perfect immunity against something, then there's never going to be a vaccine. No vaccines provide complete immunity.

I think it's useful to call the influenza vaccines vaccines, even though nobody thinks they do anything more than provide limited protection (mostly against disease, though some protection against infection).

I think that's always what vaccines have been: a way to train the adaptive immune system against some pathogen, providing some immunity. It seems quite likely that's been tied to their construction, usually using inactivated forms of the pathogen, or less harmful ones (like cowpox for smallpox), so the DNA and mRNA vaccines might need some modification for part of some definitions.

Obviously you want the vaccine to be really effective, but even one that's not all that good (like the new one against the malaria parasite) might be important (and deserves to be called a vaccine).


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> The other thing I noticed in the trials was they were carried out only on the middle age groups on only healthy people.


Not true. Where are you getting this nonsense? There were exclusions (women who were or were intending to become pregnant is an obvious one), but there were certainly old participants and people with various coexisting conditions. The Pfizer trial was published here and gives the participant ages as 16-91, with median 52.0. Yes, that includes lots of people who aren't the people we most care about vaccinating, but that doesn't seem a bad choice.


Amity Island said:


> As we know, the vaccines were not tested on animals before they were tested on humans.


Because there was good reason to think they would be safe in humans (as they in fact were), so the animal trials happened alongside the human ones. fullfact


Amity Island said:


> As I said before, the absolute benefit of a vaccine for covid is around 1% and many people already had a 99% chance of survival with either their innate immunity or cross transferred prior immunity from other viruses.


Paralytic poliomyelitis only affected 0.1-0.5% (1-5% nonparalytic aseptic meningitis). Hardly seems worrying about, does it? The arguments you (and your sources) are using are ones that have always been used against vaccines.


Amity Island said:


> So to put this into context of the released papers and the number of subsequent health problems, you need to evaluate the benefit to risk based on things we know.


It would certainly be good to know the longterm risks from infection. Unfortunately we just don't know for this novel virus though it looks like some people who get significantly sick can have serious longterm disability, and some who have an apparently mild infection can still be suffering long after it.









						Please beware: facts are correct but the interpretation/message is NOT.
					






					www.bmj.com


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## mikeyB

I'm thinking of giving up Insulin, because I've discovered that everyone who uses it can get neuropathies, and eye problems, to say nothing about the renal problems. What's more, everyone who uses it dies.

Beware, all you T1s, that insulin is killing you.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> New paper from editor of the British Medical Journal on trials.
> 
> The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively).
> 
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> Serious Adverse Events of Special Interest Following mRNA Vaccination in Randomized Trials
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> Introduction: In 2020, prior to COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Brighton Collaboration created a priority list
> 
> 
> 
> papers.ssrn.com


This is a preprint (so hasn't been peer reviewed yet), and it doesn't seem that I can read the actual paper (though that might be a browser issue).

It looks like they looked at adverse events during the trials and (unsurprisingly) found more in the vaccinated than placebo arms. And then compared that against the hospitalizations _during those trials_. If that's what they did then it should be obvious why sensible people are going to ignore the paper.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> No, they only looked at serious adverse events.


Yes, I can see the paper now (different browser at home). I still doubt the value of comparing these SAEs against how well the vaccines reduce hospitalisations over the course of the trial. The vaccines are for years (if not decades) not just for a few months, which makes it (to me) an unhelpful comparison.

I'm all for examining these SAEs: we need to know the risks of the vaccines (perhaps others will be safer but similarly effective).


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## mikeyB

I don’t care of how many booster jabs it takes to be disease free, for the simple reason is that I don’t want Covid infection, and I’ve had no adverse effects from previous jabs.

You have to remember that we are are dealing with a coronavirus. There are around 20% of viruses that give us colds that are coronaviruses. Nobody has bothered with developing vaccines against viruses that give us colds, and we develop immunity to those in our geographical locality. That only lasts for two or three years. So it would be a miracle if a vaccine could induce the same level of immunity against a coronavirus.


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## nonethewiser

Amity Island said:


> I'd normally agree with that, but.....what booster number are we onto now?


 
Will be getting 5th soon & hopefully more if virus stays around.


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## trophywench

Neither of us is sufficiently aged to get our 4th.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> New paper from editor of the British Medical Journal on trials.
> 
> The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Serious Adverse Events of Special Interest Following mRNA Vaccination in Randomized Trials
> 
> 
> Introduction: In 2020, prior to COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Brighton Collaboration created a priority list
> 
> 
> 
> papers.ssrn.com


There've been a couple of what seem to me to be careful criticisms of this preprint: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2022/06/29/peter-doshi-vs-covid-19-vaccines-the-latest-round/








						Studies show that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh their risks; preprint claiming to show otherwise is flawed
					

Multiple peer-reviewed published studies have shown that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh its risks. While some COVID-19 vaccines are associated with a risk of heart inflammation while others are associated with a risk of blood clots, the same risks are much higher following...




					healthfeedback.org


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## Dave_Z1a

Its all about the money.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> I'd normally agree with that, but.....what booster number are we onto now?


As I understand it the consensus is that these are really safe vaccines, and there's no significant risk in having extra doses. Also, it seems generally accepted that it's sensible to regard three doses as the normal series (so our first "booster" probably should just be regarded as the third dose).

UKHSA shows a consensus of vaccine effectiveness in https://assets.publishing.service.g...83443/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-24.pdf (Table 3, page 13, in particular the Pfizer section).

From that it looks to me like 2 or 3 doses are about as good as each other in preventing hospitalisations once you're after 6 months. (So there's a reasonable argument that actually 2 doses is fine, really.)

But before 6 months you get somewhat better protection against symptomatic infection so an extra dose is likely to do something to help. And if you're higher risk, it's probably worth having one. I find it hard to understand why the government is still pretending it's not going to offer another dose more widely: sickness is obviously causing some of the workforce issues and another dose would help (if only for half a year), and maybe it would help a bit with stress on hospitals (though for the moment C19 isn't that big a part of the problem).


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> The paper in the BMJ said this


It's not "in the BMJ". It's a preprint, and one author is an editor at the BMJ.


Amity Island said:


> I'd assume any doctor would assess the risk/reward of precribing any medicine based on the presenting illness.


Absolutely, but (as the criticisms say, and as I commented) this was during the trial when prevalence wasn't all that high. 

If you want to know about the vaccines now, look at the evidence now that they've been given to billions of people.


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## Bruce Stephens

Dave_Z1a said:


> Its all about the money.


For India I suspect money is a big part of it, yes. Not just the money they'd need to pay to Pfizer, but the money they'd need to spend on the infrastructure to deliver the vaccine. Probably doable in cities, but would be more challenging outside.

The idea that Pfizer was turning down 1.3 billion customers seems a bit silly: these vaccines are hard to produce and there were regular delays even in supplying US and Europe. I presume India wanted to know how to make it themselves (since they make much of the world's vaccines) and that discussion was a part of the conflict too since Pfizer (and Moderna) haven't been very proactive about sharing that expertise even under license.

My guess is this demand for evidence on safety is as much a distraction as anything.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> The paper (by the BMJ chap) (and this thread) is about the trials, which is the basis for the emergency use authorisation.


In that case it's much too late. Even if we believe it makes sense (and I don't, for the reasons given) that's long ago. We have much better experience of how the vaccines work now.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> It seems it was also about giving indemnity to the manufacturers, which India didn't want to do.


Could be, or maybe that was at least partly leverage: if you manufacture it in India (or teach us how to) maybe we can do a deal.

Given that India is a massive manufacturer of vaccines, and especially once they'd seen that vaccines were effective I'm sure they wanted to manufacture their own rather than having to buy them from foreign firms. (Same for Russia and China.)

(This idea that there's some horrible secret, that the Pfizer vaccines are killing more people than they save and it's all being hushed up, is just a silly conspiracy.)


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> We also know how well our innate/acquired immune system works too. If one has had covid, this changes the context too of the risk vs reward.


Sure, but there's no need to rely on it: recovery from infection can give you good protection (though it may not, and there's some signs that recovery from Omicron doesn't give such good protection), but recovery from infection followed (a few months later) by vaccination is vastly better. So people should get vaccinated.

Infection is risky: you can die, and (for the survivors) you may be harmed in the long term by the infection (or from your immune system's response to the infection). Vaccination is a safer way to gain that adaptive immune response. And vaccination followed by recovery from infection also seems to provide a very good immune response (better than either alone and (according to one small study) perhaps better than recovery followed by vaccination). So people should get vaccinated.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> These vaccines, from what I understand, do not prevent infection, hence why UK hospitals are now bringing back masks and social distancing.


They do not. (I'm not aware of any vaccines that do.)

They do reduce the risks once one has been infected. They reduce the time that someone is infected.


Amity Island said:


> Thus, getting vaccinated when previously having had covid would be an unnecessary risk?


No! Vaccination after recovery produces _better _protection. And the risks of vaccination are really low.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> "The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively)."
> 
> What would be the basis for recommending a vaccine for those who had already had covid given the above statement?



I don't think the statement is true. See the criticisms of the preprint. Do we really think it'll pass peer review and be published? (Would an "editor of the BMJ" write in such a vaccine-critical way if there weren't really solid data? He's done it before, repeatedly.)
We don't need to rely on what happened during the trials. Lots more people have been infected since then, and lots more people have received doses of these (and other) vaccines.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> So Tim Spectors statement on This Morning with Dermot O'Leary last year can't of been true?
> 
> "Vaccines are very effective at both stopping you getting the virus and also reducing the amount of virus that you get so that it's much harder to transmit it in those "few" people that do get it once they've been vaccinated".
> 
> As opposed to the guest prior to Tim (Bev Turner) who said "it does not stop you catching or passing on the virus".


Yes, I'd say the first part of his statement isn't true except short term (for 3-6 months after the last dose). However, given that the vaccines do reduce the severity of infection (and the length) I think it's true that they reduce transmission. I think there are some studies looking at how much they reduce transmission but I don't remember the results.

As I understand it the theory (supported by evidence from this virus and previous ones) is that you can get high levels of antibodies for 3-6 months after a vaccine dose (or infection) and the antibodies can provide some protection against infection. And apparently (according to the SIREN study) that was effective (for that limited period) at least for earlier variants (I think the study hasn't reported on Omicron yet).

Bev Turner's comment is true but deliberately deceptive. The vaccines do not "prevent" those things, but they do reduce them somewhat. She's pretending (as other anti-vaccination advocates do) that these things are either perfect or useless.


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## Bruce Stephens

Amity Island said:


> This paper now appears to have been peer reviewed and published?


So it appears. Still looks useless to me for all the reasons the preprint does.


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## Dave_Z1a

Its not a vaccine, it does not fit the scientific definition of one. There is big trouble ahead with this.


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## Bruce Stephens

Dave_Z1a said:


> Its not a vaccine, it does not fit the scientific definition of one. There is big trouble ahead with this.


Alternatively, the mRNA vaccines are vaccines. We just had too specific definitions (now extended to cover them). And (most likely in my opinion) they're as safe as they seem and the technology will be used for other vaccines including for some which seemed not practical before.


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