“During December 2020–July 2021, COVID-19 vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site.”
But not adjusted for overall health. This seems to be the same thing we see with flu vaccines where the vaccination rate is higher in healthy people. Otherwise what's the mechanism of action that would cause covid vaccines to decrease non-covid mortality?
Maybe those eligible for vaccinations at the time, and chose to get vaccinated, were more cautious overall about their health than anti-vaxxers who were also eligible but didn’t take up the vaccine?
My hunch is that if you compare education levels and health/mortality causes you'll also get a correlation, and there's also one between education and voting preferences. Sadly a lot of pro/anti-vaccination is political-tribalism.
In my view if you're skeptical of government (a problem not unique to USA), you're more likely to distrust the vaccination push, grasping at any conspiracy theory about why there's more to it than the government acting in your interest. So cause and effect are really flipped, for most people - they think cause: govt pushing the evil vaccine, effect: they distrust the govt, but in (my perceived) reality, cause: they distrust govt, effect: they think the vaccine push is evil and has ulterior motives.
And sure if you're vax-skeptical you can cite all the bad side effects and deaths, but I think the numbers speak for themselves, hundreds of millions vaccinated and there hasn't been tens of thousands of deaths; the vaccines are safe!
Of course those who distrust governments can claim the numbers are being fudged...
You're selecting for people who care less about health at all costs.
Different group, but I'd expect anti-lockdown/restriction people to have higher non-covid mortality as well. I'll probably die on some old arse biplane in the Siberian outback. Or maybe a brand new STI. Beats plugging myself into Meta.
I am poorly qualified to evaluate the claims of the paper, so as a proxy I looked into the qualifications of the authors. Dr Pantazatos is an assistant professor in the Psychiatry department at Columbia, with what appears to be a long record of papers in the field of brain imaging, with a shift this year (inferring from his twitter) to a focus on vaccine opposition preprints and petitions opposing vaccine mandates. Hervé Seligmann appears to be a currently unaffiliated geneticist, though he did (apparently falsely) claim to be affiliated with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in a letter advocating hydroxychloroquine?
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread“During December 2020–July 2021, COVID-19 vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site.”
In my view if you're skeptical of government (a problem not unique to USA), you're more likely to distrust the vaccination push, grasping at any conspiracy theory about why there's more to it than the government acting in your interest. So cause and effect are really flipped, for most people - they think cause: govt pushing the evil vaccine, effect: they distrust the govt, but in (my perceived) reality, cause: they distrust govt, effect: they think the vaccine push is evil and has ulterior motives.
And sure if you're vax-skeptical you can cite all the bad side effects and deaths, but I think the numbers speak for themselves, hundreds of millions vaccinated and there hasn't been tens of thousands of deaths; the vaccines are safe!
Of course those who distrust governments can claim the numbers are being fudged...
You're selecting for people who care less about health at all costs.
Different group, but I'd expect anti-lockdown/restriction people to have higher non-covid mortality as well. I'll probably die on some old arse biplane in the Siberian outback. Or maybe a brand new STI. Beats plugging myself into Meta.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8671645/
As always, I'll defer to real expert evaluation of the work, but my hunch is that the paper will be poorly received when that happens.