A common pattern you'd find in reliable research papers is that authors tend to understate their findings, which in practice strengthens the impact of their conclusions.

Do you have a PhD or an MD?

I give you this pill that makes you suffer for a year, but you will not die in 4 years. If it's safe to you, then alcohol and smoking are safe too.

Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc

Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).

The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.

This is a general problem in many technical fields.

People in a technical field, learn to "chunk" complex phrases. Their natural communication style becomes complex. Which makes them hard to understand to those outside of the field. If they want to be understood, the solution isn't to try to educate the world. It is to educate themselves. To learn how to write simply and directly.

Depending on the readability test used, the section up to "Introduction" - which is supposed to be readable - is somewhere between advanced high school and university. See https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_... or other free tools to test it. That's bad. The percentage of Americans who can read this text is below the percentage who could read, say, a plain language version written in Spanish. We should expect people to misunderstand. We should not expect this paper to convince.

Eh, it's an important point. "It made COVID things much better, and it didn't make other unrelated things worse."

Yeah, but there's a plausible explanation for this: Likely, people who get vaccinated also are more likely to do other things to improve their health.

If you don't get the covid vaccine you probably do other risky things. Not get other vaccines, don't see the doctor about various issues...

Could it mean that lots of Covid deaths are being attributed to other things?

> "no increased risk of all-cause mortality"

My take is not quite as charitable as most of the comments, although my objection only barely applies to this particular paper. Biomedical research has long tradition of a very specific type of analysis: hypothesis testing. Roughly speaking, you make a hypothesis and test your data for compatibility with the hypothesis. In this paper, the authors are comparing two hypotheses: (a) there is an increased risk of all-cause mortality or (b) the increase in risk is zero or negative [0]. And the statement you’re quoting from the conclusion section sure sounds like it’s saying that the authors found that the data was consistent with (b) but not with (a).

Researchers love this. There are lots of papers with fancy-named tests with which one can do this analysis. Regulators often demand it.

And it produces papers that are correct in a fairly literal sense but miss the point entirely. For example, “we found no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of autism”. I, too, can look under my bed or study four people and find no evidence of anything at all about vaccines and autism, and I would be more or less justified in making that claim.

And because of this, you need to read papers very carefully to see what you can actually conclude. “No evidence” means a lot more in a large (“high powered”) study than in a small, weak study.

The right way to do this is something like “we looked at such-and-such data and found, with 95% confidence, that the increase in risk of X is <= 0.2%” or even that “the change in risk is <= -25%” (check out that minus sign!). If I look under my bed, I will find evidence that the increased absolute of autism caused by vaccines is <= 100%, and I didn’t need to study anything to confirm that :)

Fortunately, this particular paper has the silly throwaway starting you’re complaining about in a few places but is otherwise mostly on the right track. Quoting from the Results section:

> Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76]), with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause.

IMO that should have been the headline. The latter sentence there is giving some indication that the result is robust and that the researchers didn’t flub it or get unlucky in quality of their data.

P.S. The fact that the vaccines seemed to reduce the risk is death from causes other than severe covid is interesting. I wonder how much is reducing death from complications of COVID other than “severe covid”, how much is behavioral changes (vaccinated whole socializing more and leaving their houses more), and how much is bizarre off-target effects of the mRNA vaccines. Here’s an example of a surprising off-target benefit that no one understands well:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-and-...

[0] I think. I didn’t reread it enough times to rule out the other common test: is the data consistent with the hypothesis that the risk didn’t change at all, which is also sadly common. But I’m moderately sure I’m right in the context of this paper.

you never get a second chance to make a first impression

Ultimately, natural selection might do it.

It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.

I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.

"bUT wE StILl DoN't KnoW tHe LOnG TeRM EffECts oF ThE VacCInES."

I swear these folks will be on their death beds 50 years in the future claiming this. There will be no amount of evidence or time that matters to them.

Someone can prove me wrong, and tell me exactly what evidence would convince them that the vaccines are safer than the alternative.

And this bit:

"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"

> First, individuals who choose vaccination may differ from those who do not, potentially introducing confounding bias.

It's very hard to interpret this data given the massive confounder of "antivaxxers are suspicious of healthcare and take more risks".

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Your cite reads to me like a statement on the available data, which is interesting in its own ways but can be corrected for when it's irrelevant to the hypothesis.

It's obviously almost all confounders, since COVID mortality is low now and choosing to obtain the vaccine correlates strongly with other medical and non-medical factors affecting all-cause mortality. The point is that no adverse effect from the vaccine offsets that confounding beneficial effect. More covariates would shrink the confounding effect, but they did the best they could with their dataset.

That confounding effect turned out to be massive, which is bad news for anyone hoping to tightly bound the vaccine risk. It's good personal news for anyone in the vaccinated group, just more as to their general life choices than as to COVID.

>As unvaccinated individuals were alive between their random index date and November 1, 2021, corresponding to a maximum duration of 6 months, starting follow-up from the index date would have introduced immortal time bias. Therefore, we initiated the study of long-term mortality 6 months after the index date, while mortality within 6 months after vaccination was analyzed separately using SCCS models. While the SCCS models are well-suited for short-term vaccine safety studies, they are less appropriate for long-term mortality, particularly due to limited control periods among vaccinated individuals, and age differences within the same individual across risk or control periods, as age is by far a major risk factor for death. For both analyses, we introduced the calendar period as an adjusting factor to account for the infection dynamics, baseline mortality trends, and the varying propension to get vaccinated.

Note that LLMs can easily deduce what your biases are based on your prompt and give you only information that confirms your biases.

Thank you!

I think it's pretty safe to assume given the conclusion that the US gov't had nothing to do with it. It wouldn't be a headline if they did.

The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.

Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.

This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.

Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.

Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.

It's interesting that they leave things at 18-59. Do they later stratify into 18-28, 29-38, 39-48, 48-58?

Because this whole paper is bullshit and is a bias confirmation report

It assesses persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"

That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"

Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?

Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.

Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.

Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness.

This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...

I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584

Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people. Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine.

Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything.

- "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?"

- "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"

This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.

While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.

Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.

> These are the important bits for the non medical folks

Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."

They define unvaccinated as anyone who wasn't vaccinated by Nov 2021. What if they got vaccinated afterwards?

The increase in myocarditis from the vaccine is well-documented. (And very small.)

COVID causes myocarditis too (even for young people unlikely to die from COVID itself), at much higher rates. So you only need a 20% chance of contracting COVID for the vaccine to be net positive in the least obviously positive age group.

Not being an idiot who takes dumb risks like being unvaccinated certainly does seem confounding.

> But if people died right away due to the vaccine (hypothetically), wouldn’t this design exclude those deaths?

Yes. That's what we have plenty of other studies for, including the clinical trials that led to the vaccines being approved in the first place.

It goes the other way too. It's hard to imagine a {EU,German,whatever} institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.

Who would win, the combined efforts of the best scientists in the field, or innuendo from a fancy markov model?

You could at least paste the points here.

> But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...

How convenient for you...

If this were true, we would expect to see higher mortality among unvaccinated individuals in high-vaccination rate areas.

On the other hand, what would an intellectually honest comment look like?

> so anyone who didn't get vaccinated before Nov. 2021 is considered unvaccinated?

The answer is in the first paragraph of the "Design, Study Populations, and Outcomes" section:

Exposure to COVID-19 vaccination was defined as the administration of a first dose of an mRNA vaccine between May 1 and October 31, 2021 (inclusion period), which was the mass vaccination period for adults in France, who primarily received mRNA vaccines. Multiple vaccinations in exposed individuals were not considered. The unvaccinated group was defined as individuals who remained unvaccinated as of November 1, 2021. Individuals vaccinated before May 1, 2021 (12.0%), or who received a first dose of another (ie, non-mRNA–based) COVID-19 vaccine during the inclusion period (1.4%) were excluded.

> why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them?

Are we? Says who? Certainly there are bad actors who profit off of the misfortune of others. There are also brilliant people who work hard to bring about access to lifesaving treatments. There have certainly been examples of fraud in the past, and there have also been examples of truly amazing public health benefits.

Do I personally think the US health system could be better structured to disincentivize the former and promote the latter? Definitely! Is that evidence of a global conspiracy? Nope.

> had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death

There's a good analysis of that here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million...

TLDR is that all-cause death increased in line with the reported covid deaths which strongly refutes the "had covid got hit with a bus" theory.

These are fair questions. I guess I'd first say that there were studies on reactogenic/immunogenic effects coincident w/ the original rollout. But perhaps more importantly, this study conditions on the time frame, meaning that it applies to all participants, and should thus not affect the risk ratio. I think knowing the current hazard risk ratio is more scientifically/medically valuable than the previous one (even if I'm skeptical that it has changed significantly for reasons other than noise)

As others have mentioned that data is captured in other studies and isn't the point of this paper

Not getting measles, polio, etc… seems like a pretty big benefit to the individual.

For vaccines like the measles vaccine where it can entirely stop the spread in a vaccinated population this can be true until enough people think this way that measles starts spreading in your vicinity.

But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn't able to eliminate its spread so it mostly is about protecting yourself rather than protecting others.

Is the personal expense not dying or getting less sick or something?

If you really missed the personal "benefit" of mortality or morbidity there are many ways you could make up for that.

How? Not dying from preventable diseases seems like a pretty good deal for the individual.

I think that's mostly fair, but given that we can't randomly assign vaccine administration this sort of study is the best we're gonna get.

Like, the major takeaway is that the vaccine is safe, I think that we've already established that it works to reduce Covid hospitalisations.

> but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious

That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,

“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”

It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.

(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)

There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.

So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.

Not getting the vaccine is statisically correlated with distrust in traditional medicine, and suceptibility to giving undue attention and credit to unfounded and unsound practices.

I do not see any 'radical difference' in the numbers. Individuals who choose not to get vaccinated are likely to be less informed and more reckless in other aspects of managing their health and their lives in general, so the relatively small difference between the populations is perfectly understandable.

This study demonstrates that it benefits the individual (and therefore the population).

Vaccines benefit both! Not dying or even really getting sick from preventable but horrific diseases is a huge benefit to the individual!

I'm having a hard time following your second paragraph, but I don't see where you're questioning the cause of these issues to be covid itself instead of the vaccines?

That's my biggest problem with the "I now have X problem after the vaccine" crowd; quick to blame the vaccine, but they never question whether it was the virus itself that caused it.

My dad is one of these people and it infuriates me to no end that he defaults to "vaccine bad" and not his irresponsible behavior during the height of the pandemic which caused him to get very sick from the virus itself. Nor the fact that he had a very visible lyme disease rash 20 years ago and refused to get treatment because "MDs bad". He's quick to blame his neurological disease on the covid vaccine though, so frustrating.

> I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer.

But you write anti-vax comments filled with the usual anti-vax post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.

The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.

Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.

People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.

Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.

Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.

I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.

I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.

https://www.gavinpublishers.com/article/view/detection-of-pf...

The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.

A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.

It's a term of art. The audience for this paper would understand, rather like many denizens of HN know what TDD is.

Papers like this are designed to fit into the conventions that allow knowledge to compound. Not that the conventions are perfect at doing this.

I would suggest that rather than changing this convention in a big way, there needs to be good pathways for communicating the most important takeaways to the general public. Unfortunately, there's kind of a chasm between academia and popular science.

Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.

You're basically saying that the study compares two distinct populations that differ in many other aspects rather than just by vaccine.

Why then do you ascribe the difference in mortality to the vaccine?

Explain how? there is a right answer but you'll probably not get it by relying exclusively on the reported data.

As a young person with a healthy immune system, there was 0 benefit of injecting something that was given immunity from liability.

> Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.

I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.

Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.

What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.

No it doesn’t. I’m not trying to make a point about vaccines, just that the study is a population study and so shows benefits on average to a population.

If the vaccine killed 1/100 people (again I don’t believe this but it’s the internet) but made the other 99 immune to dying over the 4 years, it would look really good on average even if it was directly responsible for the deaths of 1%.

We all started getting weird symptoms after the vaccines, not after having covid, you got it backward.

I am not quick to blame the vaccine. If you take the vaccine and immediately after you start develop symptoms, then the chances that the vaccine are doing something strange to the body are very likely, not the virus infection.

And these don't get diagnosed with Covid or having Covid symptoms before, it must be something related to the vaccine. That's evidence, not just observation.

I went to UCI, SoCal Kaiser hospitals and cardiologists 6-7 times, a bunch of tests, no doctors could explain why.

I took the vaccines myself, I am no anti-vaxxer, and when it comes to this situation, I don't see there's conclusive studies about the vaccines.

>"post hoc ergo propter hoc"

Appealing to an informal fallacy, and not even using it right. The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy hinges on the fact that one's argument assumes that just because one event happened chronologically first, it must have caused the one(s) that chronologically came after.

GP did more than that and didn't simply say "X happened first, so I think it's responsible for Y." He gave correlative observations and suspected a possibility of causation OUTSIDE of chronological timeline. Regardless of whether I agree with him, it's easy to see this comment having more than fallacy.

Another factor that may play a role: the people who chose not to take the vaccine may be prone to taking bad decisions more broadly, leading to a higher mortality rate.

I am speaking about what the paper shows.

There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.

Where do you get decades? That study says 200 days.

If the vaccine was randomly administered among the study population, I'd buy this as the simple explanation.

Not sure it follows so cleanly with the actual study setup

1 out of 100 when billions are getting it is gonna be a large number. Mortality rate has gone down substantially since the vaccines.

What specific impact do you think that would have on this study? Do you think vaccines prior to Nov-2021 were safe and they were unsafe after? Do you think short term results, captured after Nov-2021 are more relevant than inclusive results prior?

So what you're saying is that they are comparing two distinct self-selected populations that differ in many other aspects than just taking the vaccine.

Why would you ascribe any difference to the vaccine rather to any other difference between the groups?

This is specific to the Trump administration. Previous administrations actually took critique and updated policies and advice based on the critique.

Nonsensical whataboutism.

That's entirely irrelevant to "what date do we pick as the cutoff for this research?"

From the chart, they picked a very reasonable spot to draw said line.

I assume their point is that, ah, the opinion of someone who thinks AIDS is _caused by poppers_ on anything medical, or, indeed, probably on _anything_, may be safely discounted, on the basis that they are clearly insane.

The vaccine was not tested on people that were already dead.

Obviously there are confounding variables besides vaccination status, but I find it pretty compelling that the decrease in COVID mortality among the vaccinated group was significantly larger than the decrease in all-cause mortality of that group. This suggests whatever the difference was between the two groups, besides vaccination, either had a much larger impact on COVID than other causes of death or that the vaccine had some positive impact.

One example of the former explanation I could imagine is that people who got vaccinated against COVID were probably also more likely to take other preventative measures, like wearing a mask or avoiding larger crowds of people. Those precautions would be more likely to be effective against a contagious disease like COVID but less likely to protect them against some other causes of death like heart disease.

I'm not sure how likely I find that as an explanation compared to the alternative that the vaccines provide at least some level of protection. My observation was that widespread measures specifically meant to defend against COVID, like masking and social distancing, largely went away well before the end of the time period covered by this study, at least in the US.

Amusingly, I suspect the anti-vax contingent would likely be bothered by data suggesting anything the COVID vaccinated group was doing differently protected against COVID, since their position seems to largely be that not only is the COVID vaccine useless, but so are any other measures meant to reduce the spread.

I understand that. I'm wondering why you'd find such a shitty source even the slightest bit compelling.

non-scientific but every young person I know has had covid at least twice.

For me, it’s a way to break down and analyze articles more critically, not to pick a side.

My memory is failing me right now. When did they start vaccinating en masse?

I am not a physician, but I expect that decades hence we will see the health effects of repeated Covid infections. I'm guessing specifically around cardio health and dementia risk.

and how many young persons do you know that have had COVID-induced myocarditis?

I got it December 2020

Well, if say the vaccine gave 1/100 fatal lung cancer then a population study would show a decrease in covid deaths and an increase in lung cancer deaths though.

It's only the case if the vaccine gave everybody slightly higher chances of dying from everything that it could hide in the weeds.

So in this specific example we can see from Table 2 that deaths/1 million are just lower for everything in the vaccinated so it's not the case that it lowered one kind of death drastically at the expense of another.

This comment helps me understand how folks see "your taxes will go up $10k but you won't pay $20k in health insurance premiums" as a hit to the pocketbook.

Don't those 99 enjoy being alive despite all of the things that would have killed some of them had they not taken the vaccine? If "some" is at least 1%, that sounds like an individual benefit to me.

If you take the vaccine, you have a lower chance of dying over those 4 years. You also have an infinitely higher chance (specifically 1% vs 0%) of dying from the vaccine, but that doesn't change the previous sentence.

But this ignores the other counterfactual (what would happen to the 1/100 people had they not received the vaccine).

I mean, it's plausibly something around trust in medical authorities which correlates with both vaccine and other treatment refusal.

OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?

That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.

There is plenty of evidence beside this study.

That only works if:

1. You assume that your LLM of choice is perfect and impartial on every given topic, ever.

2. You assume that your prompt doesn't interfere with said impartiality. What you have written may seem neutral at first glance, but from my perspective, a wording like yours would probably prime the model to try to pick apart absolutely anything, finding flaws that aren't really there (or make massive stretches) because you already presuppose that whatever you give it was written with intent to lie and misrepresent. The wording heavily implies that what you gave it already definitely uses "persuasion tactics", "emotional language" or that it downplays/overstates something - you just need it to find all that. So it will try to return anything that supports that implication.

I think this reads to me as a way for you to couch your ignorance as criticism while learning nothing from reading a study like this. Why not do this for your own biases?

What metrics do you focus on while reading an article that result in you confirming your own preconceived ideas?

If you have to come at an article like this in a hostile way, then you're not learning anythign about it, you're just confirming your own biases. I think I would recommend that you focus all of these criticisms inward at your own biases in terms of what you react to and need to explain and see if it's explained in the paper above. Then see if you find yourself convinced by the scientific method that they undertook?

Otherwise you're prepping yourself to continue living in an echo chamber.

1% mortality would be setting off sirens during this kind of trial

Are you aware that to this day, 30% of all Covid cases are asymptomatic, aka you CANNOT tell that you have had it?

Until, of course, you start to have all of the exact things you’re sharing right now.

> Appealing to an informal fallacy

I didn't appeal to one, I pointed one out. And there's something wrong now with pointing out fallacies just because they are informal? Apparently you don't understand what "informal" means in logic. (Or there's bad faith--a good case can be made here.)

> it's easy to see this comment having more than fallacy.

And yet you failed to point out a single one. You say that I used post hoc ergo propter hoc incorrectly, which I disagree with, but even if I did, that isn't a fallacy, it would simply be an error of fact. But remarkably you find multiple unnamed fallacies (formal, or informal?) in my one sentence.

I won't respond further.

I wouldn't bother critiquing methodology without current, masters-level experience in the domain. I make incorrect assumptions when I'm even narrowly outside my own lane, and end up asking questions that clearly demonstrate e.g. my inability to parse fig. 4a.

I interpret this as the comment saying "we won't know how this affected things until decades from now." Which can likely be attributed to existing vaccine skepticism and is unlikely to result in them changing their opinion in the next ever.

What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID. They feel like they're being asked something risky in a vacuum, when in fact, they're being asked for something with (as best as we can tell) limited risk against a backdrop of a dangerous virus that killed millions and caused a global pandemic.

Even if they could demonstrably prove the vaccine created a higher risk of outcomes for people who took it, the risk compared to getting COVID is de minimus, and the likelihood of getting COVID is high. I would be surprised if there was a significant population of people who had avoided it at this point.

You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.

I like to ask people who talk about a 1% mortality rate if they'd go to a football game in a stadium with 100k seats if 1k of those seats randomly had a small bomb attached.

The paper doesn't even use it consistently. At first it uses "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID", and then in the results section it uses the same phrase to mean "all causes including COVID". The whole purpose of terms of art is to increase the specificity of language, but they're not doing that here. Their usage of the term is confusing.

Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.

If true, that means the groups are different in many other aspects other than the vaccine.

The study does not control for the differences. No causality can be inferred.

you're reading to much into it. i make no assumptions.

i'm not even talking about the article. are you a bot?

It doesn't matter if you make assumptions or not - your prompt does. I think the point of failure isn't even necessarily the LLM, but your writing - because you leave the model no leeway or a way to report back on something truly neutral or impartial. Instead, you're asking it to dig up any proof of wrongdoing no matter what, basically saying that lies surely exist in whatever you post, and you just need help uncovering all the deception. When told to do this, it would read absolutely anything you give it in the most hostile way possible, stringing together any coherent-sounding arguments that would reinforce the viewpoint that your prompt implies.

“It brings up some interesting points for this article...”

Why are you acting like a LLM that had its own earlier statements run off the end of the context window and can’t remember you yourself said them?

Where do you see them using "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID" in the beginning? I skimmed over all uses of the term before the "Results" chapter, none of them seem to exclude COVID deaths?

respectfully it is not a lie, and more than a half a dozen people I know personally lost function of their hands, legs, were hospitalized with myocarditis, had local paralysis/palsy. I personally lost the use of my hand for two months and it took two more years to recover.

and when people like me say things like this, inevitably someone like you comes along to tell them they are dangerous for saying it out loud. In fact, the government was actively censoring people from being able to express this on social media.

We know that the vaccines lower your risk of bad outcomes if you get covid.

Many people have never had Covid.

> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,

By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.

Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".

Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.

No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.

Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.

I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.

I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?

> I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.

So you want magic. Got it.

In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.

Even more, perfect understanding of how good our information is at any given point in time is not always going to be available.

There were definitely some failures to communicate well with the public during that time, but demanding that only definite information be communicated, and then never be contradicted, is asking the impossible.

It also really doesn't help that there are so many people who were (and are) just so scared of everything during that time that any information coming out that wasn't 100% unquestionably positive about any new measure to try to improve things would cause them to shun it forever as too dangerous to try.

Could you give the whole paragraph, and not just the last sentence in it?

Ah, heck, I'll do the work of pasting it in.

> But again, one last thing. I — we don’t talk enough to you about this, I don’t think. One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. -Biden

I'm not sure why out of all that Trump-lite-contradictory rambling (and the massive amounts of other words and ink spilled by both the 2020[1] and the 2021 administrations on this subject), that sentence is the singular, unqualified, pinky-swear blood-pact promise that you think the medical community made to the public regarding the vaccine.

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As for Walensky:

> Three days later, on April 1, a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments, telling The New York Times “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview” adding that “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”

If you're only going to listen to the first thing that's said on a subject, and ignore everything that follows, I don't think that sort of approach will serve you very well. For one thing, it'll probably mean that you'll think that people who correct themselves are idiots.

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[1] Which, if I may remind you, developed, recommended, and rolled out the vaccine and had nothing to do with Biden.

Yes, but imagine how much money hospitals can make if they can convince idiots to skip affordable preventable medicine and instead pay tens of thousands for hospital stays.

The money arguments are a double edged sword.

I think instead of „magic“ what we should have more of is honesty about uncertainty. The public discourse would be much less toxic if people honestly said that they’re not sure about something and that the policy they advocate might fail to deliver. However such rhetoric is immediately exploited weakness and strongly selected against.

Comparing accurate communication with magic is nonsense.

Both in Europe and the US, the government screwed up badly both mask strategic stockpiles and procurement. Therefore, the official message was that “masks don’t work”. After they were finally able to procure masks, they magically started working. That is the real magic, not demanding competence for people whose jobs were literally not fucking this up.

Meanwhile China and South Korea were producing and using masks as was normal.

The second magical part is the gaslighting about the performance of institutions tasked with pandemic preparation and about the exaggerated and incompetent government measures like fining people for going outside, forbidding people from going to work without being vaccinated or mandatorily tested each day, etc.

Vaccine safety issues were consistently downplayed by the media and in internet forums like this one. In the end, the EU-CDC published clear information on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and it was much worse than for mRNA vaccines. One mRNA vaccine was worse than the other.

I'm not sure what the rest of the paragraph adds here? Nothing in that qualifies or contradicts the absolute that I quoted. Are you just saying that the statement was so generally inarticulate that any reasonable person should have ignored it completely? That was true here, but that's not great for public confidence either.

I'm aware that the scientific literature told a more nuanced and accurate story, but only a tiny fraction of the population have the skills and time to study that. I don't think you can fault people for trusting their elected leaders; and if you do, then who are you expecting them to trust next time?

> a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments

So after widespread criticism by actual scientists, she didn't even correct herself in her own voice, instead sending an unnamed spokesperson to smooth it over without explicitly acknowledging error. I can't believe you don't see how the damage is done.

>>>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”

> In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.

Even five years ago, everyone that has a minimal knowledge about vaccines understood it was an unrealistic claim, because many of the vaccines don't provide that level of immunity. If you have some free time to go down the rabit hole, you can try to count them in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_of_the_Unit...

So the questions are:

Is that quote real?

Who said that?

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I was going to hit the "reply" button, but I decided to look in Goggle and found https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/21/politics/walensky-comment... Like 10 worse than what I expected.