Disclaimer: I'm pro vaccine, I do think Covid vaccines saved a lot of lives. I still think the risk is relatively low even after getting an onset of auto-immune disease 3 days after the shot (diagnosis confirmed 2 years after it started after mRNA booster) and sister in law getting another auto-immune months after the vaccine (also confirmed diagnosis by now).
I did read the article and while deaths from Covid were clearly lower in vaccinated group, the sample selection has signs of various problems, starting from representation (why significantly more disadvantaged groups in unvaccinated group), to results like external causes of mortality 25% lower in the vaccinated group. 32% lower deaths from transport crashes - clearly healthy/selection bias.
Such studies bring nothing to pro-science crowd and give anti-vaccine propaganda another advantage.
What?? So any first mRNA dose before May 1st and after Nov 1st 2021 was not considered an adequate exposure? Why are they only defining exposure as the initial dose being administered within a six-month period for a vaccine that was released (A) before that; and (B) still continually offered - though in much lower capacities?
I'm all pro-vax but what? Lol.
Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
This is interesting because of "supposed" cardiovascular effects of the vaccine that many folks were worried about. Even more confounding is the gender differences. You'd think skewing women would skew away from cardiovascular issues.
An alternate interpretation is that the at risk cardio unvaccinated died of COVID for some reason.
This sounds like a red flag to me if you're trying to isolate the COVID vaccine as something safe. Table 2 data showed less drownings, less car crashes, less falls, less deaths related to chromosomal abnormalities... How can there not be a confounding variable or two here?
I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
Look at this article and point out any wording that seems meant to push a certain viewpoint. Note anything important the author leaves out, downplays, or overstates, including numbers that seem cherry-picked or lack context. Clearly separate basic facts from opinions or emotional language. Explain how people with different viewpoints might read the article differently. Also call out any common persuasion tactics like loaded wording, selective quotes, or appeals to authority.
But to be honest even before the current shit show I was taking recommendations from foreign health departments when it came to COVID.
I got a booster shot after getting the J and J vaccine before it was officially recommended by the CDC because I saw other countries’ health departments publishing data about it. I can’t remember whether it was Isreal, the UK or the EU.
There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.
edit: tl;dr: covid-19 mRNA vaccine was effective and did not contribute to increased deaths.
Remember, France was one of the wonderful countries where you couldn't legally shop or work if you were deemed to be 'not at risk' && 'unvaccinated' and achieved a very high rate as a result biasing the control group. (This is a purely statistical statement)
And for reference, I do think the vax is dangerous in terms of massive populations and we don't have mass graves due to mRNA problems (although several large cancer blips). In the same way in countries with low vaccination rates we don't have mass graves at 10% population or higher. Cv19 was always going to kill and an untested treatment is likely to kill those who were at risk.
(I'm willing to bet in the case of cv19 the ones who were hit hardest would have been hit badly by either vector, virus or mRNA. But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...)
I'm sure both extremes will jump to the rallying cry of "2 more weeks..." So yes of course I'm wrong, I only worked on analysing early 'data' and pulling apart the models so what do I know.
also, this is only tangentially related, but why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them? they made billions off vaccines.
remember martin shrkeli? he claimed he raised the price of a drug for a rare disease to make it commercially viable and he was crucified for it. less than 5 years later, a virus breaks out of a town with a lab dedicated to experimenting with (i.e. weaponizing) viruses and big pharma decided to convert to altruism when we needed them most? shrkeli's company made $65M in total off that (which a court ruled all of which had to be returned)... thats not even rounding error for pfizer, who sold $35B+ worth of mrna vaccines in 2021 alone.
if the guy who invented Daraprim came out and told us shkreli was a scumbag, we'd have believed him. but the mRNA guy comes out and he gets eviscerated. i get it, it's not 1:1, but still.
i'm not saying its all a hoax or a conspiracy, but "there doesn't need to be a formal conspiracy when interests converge". in the U.S., federal funding was given to anyone "treating" COVID. had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death. and a check to the hospital from uncle sam.
earlier this year (MIT got duped)[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2GzdAGbxwinERSEt/a-widely-s...] by a second year student when no one critiqued his fraudulent AI research. its a reminder that skepticism is an important part of the feedback loop.
i don't think the vaccine killed 17M people, and i think there are definitely grifters on the skeptic side, but that doesn't discount skepticism as a whole. and i dont think this study vindicates anything completely either.
I feel like you could have the same conclusion if you had groups that were people who go to the doctor vs people who do not in the same time period
they go into this themselves:
> It seems reasonable to assume that by early November 2021, 3 months after the introduction of the mandatory health pass39 (delivered when fulfilling one of these conditions: a negative COVID-19 test result, proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or a certificate of recovery from a COVID-19 infection) to enter and exit France as well as to access restaurants, theaters, and nonurgent hospital consultations, the majority of unvaccinated individuals were reluctant to get vaccinated.
> A study aimed at characterizing patient hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccination showed that categorical refusal of vaccination was associated with prior noncompliance with vaccination recommendations, a lower educational level, and a less severe perception of COVID-19.41
in any case i've yet to see a slam dunk study showing any negative effect of vaccination.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
> The main causes of death were cancer (769 and 853 cases per million in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, respectively), external causes of mortality (493 and 597 cases per million, including, among others, unintentional injuries, such as transportation crashes, falls, and drownings, as well as suicides or self-inflicted injuries) and diseases of the circulatory system (282 and 367 cases per million) (Table 2). Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
I don't think mRNA vaccination is likely to cause an increase in all-cause mortality. But this study is clearly comparing two radically different populations, and could not show a mortality increase from mRNA vaccination even if one existed.
I have 4 kids, and 3 of them got vaccinated for the covid (1 is a baby 2 years old) for the very first time with Delta. They struggle for weeks to recover, they get tired, they seem to have heart related symptoms. Eventually, those went away after months. The baby has never had covid (no vaccine). I then have never covid vaccinated them, and they have never been sick with covid even though my wife and I caught covid after our 3rd vaccine shots. We didn't do any isolation, we share things and direct contacts with them. They might have had Covid but very mild, the quick tests never showed positive.
My wife got blood clot issue that I saw blood coming out from her skin.
I struggled many months with the vaccines with weird fatigues (I'm normally very healthy in my late 30s). My gut biome seemed to change and I became quite sensitive to some food (milk proteins mostly, not just lactose intolerance)
My mom who lived in a different country got 3 shots and she struggled with heart condition for more than a year, Drs couldn't find the reason why. It was difficult for her to do anything with strength. She finally recovered after 1+ year.
There're many real and true stories like mine, I really have no idea what these studies saying anymore.
Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
I'm not sure why. The top causes for that age group are usually non-medical, accident, suicide, or homicide. We might speculate those would anticorrelate more strongly with the prudence that leads people to get the vaccine than unavoidable medical causes, but looking at the V, W, X, and Y causes from Table 2 that doesn't seem to be true. I guess it could be true but only for the 18-29 group (and if it's not then what causes are responsible?), since they don't break that down by age.
The "problem" is that vaccine recipients are so much healthier overall than non-recipients that the vaccine would have to be spectacularly unsafe to offset that. So this analysis doesn't actually tell us much, but it's consistent with all other evidence that the vaccine is safe.
You can see that in this chart (click the 5Y range): https://ycharts.com/indicators/france_coronavirus_full_vacci...
It's the full vaccination rate; as of Dec 1 2021 it was 69.89%. A month later (i.e. those Nov folks are getting their second dose) it's 74%; latest number on the chart is 78.44%.
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.
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.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
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.
"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
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.
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.
Surely, you aren't going to also argue that the vulnerable people don't care about others? A charitable argument is that people who cannot get the vaccine for a medical reason probably also shouldn't be around a lot of other people during a pandemic.
But with the current absence of evidence we don't actually know why the social answer is different.
You are aware of the "incentives" offered by the French govt?
Such wonderful options as the ability to go the shops without being arrested that came with, "take the mandated medicine".
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.
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?
This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...
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 !"
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.
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.
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.
But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn't able to eliminate its spread so it mostly is about protecting yourself rather than protecting others.
Like, the major takeaway is that the vaccine is safe, I think that we've already established that it works to reduce Covid hospitalisations.
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.)
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
That’s a nonsense comparison because the thing they are studying is the vaccine, not COVID itself. The vaccine was available at minimum, what, end of 2020? Exposure being defined as first dose May-October 2021 does not seem unreasonable at all (and probably not arbitrarily chosen right - it’s probably something to do with the availability of data)
The "secret" part is that before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe.
This is discussed too few times.
2/3 of the unvaccinated COVID patients who were admitted to hospital regretted their decision, declared they would promote the vaccine post-discharge, and declared they would get it post-discharge.
From that study:
> Conclusions
> The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging
Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
did they control for that?
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.
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.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
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...
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.
Why then do you ascribe the difference in mortality to the vaccine?
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.
You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.
I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.
The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.
Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.
Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
You see this all the time where people will pick up niche jargon and misapply it.
Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate
https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-die...
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%.
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.
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.
Why would you ascribe any difference to the vaccine rather to any other difference between the groups?
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 guess I will say that I have thought for a long time that serializing research into linear documents seems archaic at this point.
The technical writeup is necessary. It's what spells out what they specifically claim to have done, and the specific results. "Specific" being highly technical and fundamental in the scientific community understanding the paper correctly. In particular, the in-depth statistics of many such papers is simply too complex for most of the population to understand, and that's fine. The technical write-up uses terms of art which do not mean what civilians read in them. (And while it's hard to do studies larger than this one, this is all the more essential in smaller studies.)
The interpretation would be useful because it's just plain dangerous to let your PR department write that. Even if they consult you. And it is interesting to focus on what the scientists themselves think they achieved. Both what they deliberately went for, and any ancillary result they think they notice. In this case in particular, they are very focused on this safety aspect, and they seem to not want to give too much attention to the efficacy aspect (which they probably did not plan for and is then suspect.)
If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.
For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st...
This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"
If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.
What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
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.
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.
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.
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
This is a straight up lie - because “adverse reaction” does not mean “I felt achy for a couple days and maybe had a little fever,” it’s actually a VERY specific term.
But you are trying to peddle falsehoods.
Most people know nobody who “had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots”
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
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.
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.
Until, of course, you start to have all of the exact things you’re sharing right now.
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.
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.
Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.
The study does not control for the differences. No causality can be inferred.
If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.
Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.
Why do people still frame this as either/or? How many people out there didn't get covid after they got some number of shots?
The only real scenario is covid with n shots, where n >= 0. In other words, when you got covid, how many shots had you gotten.
(Not anti vax myself, though generally avoid whatever drugs I reasonably can)
mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.
The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.
And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164643
>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
I read that many times. It was a totally unrealistic promise, because not even all the other vaccines do that, even after years of research and improvements. (In particular, here is a big trade off in the inyectable vs oral vaccine for polio.)
Who is the highest ranking person that said it? I guess it was not one of the researchers. Perhaps it was a politician that is probably a lawyer and not a medical doctor, or perhaps a tv show host, or perhaps a random internet commenter. Who hallucinated that?
>> “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
Actually that was what the trials show before the vaccines were approved. I think they had like 50k persons each. The number of deaths was too small to have a statistical significative result in the death toll. It was enough to have a statistical significative reduction of hospitalizations, like a 60% reduction in old style inactivated virus vaccines to 95% in the new style mRNA vaccines. And remember that hospitalization+ventilator is really bad.
> You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-...
Perhaps any statement in that context should be assumed to be oversimplified; but I don't think I can fault someone for taking words to mean what they literally say. The COVID vaccines look great so far on balance, but they absolutely were oversold to the public. We'll pay the price in public confidence for at least a generation.
I also had covid this year, zero boosters, had a mild fever and sniffle for two days. not sure what you are demonstrating with this anecdote. or what goalposts you think I moved. the "milder symptom" stuff all came long after it was obvious that the covid shots were not doing what had been promised. that is what I would call moving the goalposts
In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
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?
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.
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.
The money arguments are a double edged sword.
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 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.
> 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.