This was originally submitted by 'slowhand09' with a slightly
editorialized title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059987.
I glanced at it, and it seemed like a reasonable article by a
reasonable person. I tried to vouch for it, but it didn't come back
alive, so I reposted it. The parts I read seemed coherent, but I
haven't actually read the whole thing yet, so it might well misleading
somewhere further down.
I'm doubly vaccinated and boosted, as is my wife, as are my parents.
Despite having somewhat adverse reactions to the shots, I'm pretty
sure my wife and I are safer this way, and even more sure my parents
are. But I think discussion is a good thing though. Maybe I'm
wrong, maybe there's evidence I haven't seen, maybe others are
unconvinced and the rebuttals here will be what convinces them.
I mention this to suggest that before flagging this as heretical,
please consider what message you are sending by doing so, and what the
impacts will be. Do you think those who are currently afraid to be
vaccinated will change their mind if only we can prevent them from
reading more things that might encourage them? Are you absolutely
certain everything you currently believe is true, and the end of the
story? Or might something useful come from discussing---and possibly
rebutting---this post?
I'm going to hop on this. I am a structural biologist, I study mainly viruses, admittedly not normally mammalian viruses. Recently, I've been involved in a collaboration for developing a new, Covid vaccine. Full disclosure - not mRNA. As part of that, I've been working directly with Covid-19. I'm not a Covid expert, but I am aware enough of the science to spot many obvious falsehoods.
I didn't write this article, nor did I rigorously fact check it. But it struck me as at least, mostly reasonable questions around which to foment a discussion. Most of the points in this article I'd be comfortable asking to a room of PhD scientists with expertise on Covid and vaccines. I'd be disappointed to see this flagged.
What was the risk and is it approved for discussion if the absolute top vaccine experts declined to recommend it and a government funded news media, BBC, reported on that?
Is this too fringe to talk about?
Is BBC anti-vaxx now?
Are these professors anti-vaxxers?
I'm surprised by the ever growing HN trend of not reading articles before commenting. This time the comments fail to guess what the article is about spectacularly.
Tell me again how the public should not get involved in the debate but this time give the right example and do it silently?
Are you American by any chance? Is CBS a government mouthpiece because they carry actual government broadcasts like presidential addresses and have some oversight from a government agency (FCC)?
phd in algae/oil production. So they'd have plenty of base knowledge about biology, but hard to say that they learned anything about human medical biology.
the vast majority of scientists are know are clueless about statistics. Biochemisty isn't a field that is strongly dependent on stats, in a way that (for example) genomics is.
"Clueless" is misleading. It seems fair to assume anyone with a PhD in a hard science is probably in the 99%+ percentile for statistical knowledge. Sure, even at this level the statistics often get applied incorrectly, but I'm not sure how well statistical intuition correlates with the number of courses taken.
Deep within the linked piece there is a small section entitled 'On “statistical significance”'. It says this:
Now, this result does not happen to be “statistically significant.”
People often use arguments like “but it’s not statistically significant” to try to discount results. I even hear people with PhDs or MDs say this, because somewhere in their schooling they were falsely taught that results need to be “statistically significant” to be “real.”
But even if a result is not statistically significant, absent better data, it still remains the best available estimate for the effect in question. This is just common sense. “Statistically insignificant” does not mean that there is no effect. More on statistical significance here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9.
As a non-PhD who has (relatively) thought a lot about statistics, and who has previously linked others to that Nature article, this is the sort of balanced statement that makes me think she is not clueless. How about you?
I've talked to nearly every PhD scientist I've worked with about multi test corrections. It's one of my favorite things. I didn't really understand it, and totally ignored it for many years until it was pointed out, and after that, I noticed that nearly everything I saw published did multiple tests without corrections (combined with very, very large numbers of tests, and fairly loose p--values). I don't think anybody mentioned multi test corrections until I voluntarily took an intro stats class in grad school.
BTW, I strongly disagree the quote you have about statistically insignificant data. It cannot be used to say there is no effect, or anything about the direction or magnitude of the effect. I'm not sure what a statement like """somewhere in their schooling they were falsely taught that results need to be “statistically significant” to be “real.”""" even means, significance is a mathematical/probabilistic formalism that has nothing to do with underlying reality, just with the event system you're working on.
Thanks for the response. I'm confused by your "BTW", though. Are you saying you strongly disagree with her sentiment that "even if a result is not statistically significant, absent better data, it still remains the best available estimate for the effect in question"? Because I feel like this is a useful insight which often gets lost among statisticians: if you have limited information and are forced to make a bet, you probably should bet that whatever actually happened will happen again. True, you should have low confidence in this bet, but you shouldn't throw away information just because 6 times out of 100 (p>.05) it might have occurred purely by chance.
yeah, I don't think that's a useful insight. I would say that if a result is not statistically significant, you shouldn't consider it to be the "best available estimate" (which is sort of a different concept anyway) unless you're willing to deal with a very high false positive rate.
BTW I set my p threshold at 1e-6 for a single test, 0.05 is just crazy. On the other hand, I've worked with systems where nobody cared about the significance, just that the weights that got pushed to production made more money than the last set of weights.
be the Chief of the Department of Bioethics approving questionable research such as sand flies eating live Beagles.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10130709/NIH-says-b...
'The NIH said that they did do leishmaniasis research on dogs in a laboratory in 2016, and in an enclosed open space in Tunisia, but not the research pictured.'
The person you're referring to, Christine Grady, does indeed have a PhD in philosophy (which seems to make perfect sense for somebody who works in bioethics). But in addition to that, she is a trained nurse with an immense amount of experience. It's not clear to me that a doctor would make a better decision than a nurse here (or in the clinic, TBH).
I think you have a different issue given your highly specific criticism of dog bioethics. THe NIH primarily concerns itself with human bioethics and permits some amount of very unpleasant research on model organisms.
Yeah, sorry, don't really put much weight into that. Fauci is a dedicated civil servant and pretty much everything he does is seen by large numbers of people. Oh, look: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-170254166936
If my goal was to cast fear, uncertainty and doubt into vaccines, I think I'd be able to weave a far more convincing web of lies that the folks worrying about a married NIH power couple.
I guess the way I look at Fauci is that he already proved his value in the HIV/AIDS crisis and it would be crazy not to trust somebody with that level of knowledge, levelheadedness, and connections.
'Dr. Anthony Fauci is rewriting history. He is doing so to disguise his shameful role in delaying promotion of an AIDS treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in the first years of the epidemic.
In my book, Body Counts, A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, I recount how slow the federal government was in publicizing the use of Bactrim and other sulfa drugs to prevent PCP (the pneumonia that was then the leading killer of people with AIDS) in addition to its long-time and well-known use to treat PCP.'
I'm sorry exactly what are you saying is wrong with AZT? It wasn't discontinued, it's still in use and was the first drug that really started to turn around HIV. I know all about this because my research into pharmaceutical chemistry during my phd contained a lot about nucleoside analogs (I worked with a similarly toxic one, gemcitabine), and because I was working near the forefront of HIV antiviral research at the time.
Bactrim addresses a symptom of AIDS (specifically, a side bacterial infecftion that many people infected with HIV are prone to getting) while AZT reduces viral infections. Two completely different things. The former is for people who are infected, the latter for people to not get infected. The fog of virus is like the fog of war: easy to criticize from the distance of time.
I think you've said enough. It's clear what your opinion about Fauci is, and it's adding absolutely nothing to this discussion.
It was the quick magic cure the public was demanding. With more testing it was shown to have significant side effects and is no longer used across the board.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-rise-an...
'The AZT will work for you for a little while, for the maximum of one year, as it did for me, and afterwards the damage became visible.'
I wonder if the current quick magic cure demanded by the public may also overlook harmful side effects. The current pressure to dose those in low risk groups may be short-sighted. Ignoring risks is the subject of the thread.
Like I said earlier, you've said enough. You've exposed yourself as somebody who believes anecdotes, not science.
There are no quick magic cures. AZT made a huge difference for a lot of people but it wasn't until later retrovirals (based on tech that didn't exist at that time) were released. It's still used in combination with other therapy.
If you're at a university, drop this article into the queue at your grad school journal club. Give folks a week to prepare counterarguments. Attend, and see what you think.
prediction: this "article" contains 18 invalidating points in the first three paragraphs.
I think its important we have the same conversations in public as we do behind closed doors in academia. Especially when we are asking people to inject medicine in their bodies.
They're participants in society but not the scientific community. They're not even part of a study. What makes their opinions on the science worth entertaining? Do you think John and Jane Q Public should be involved in network architecture because they have phones? Or civil engineering of bridges because sometimes they drive over one? I cannot find th logic in these arguments.
This is exactly what the article [that you didn't read] talks about.
The end user can usefully participate in the network architecture debate if enough of their messages are vanishing. If the expert then says: "oh, but 1 in 2680 is rare" other professionals may adjust their opinion about them personally.
If they then go on a crusade to get the exchange scrubbed from the record it would make them more credible to you?
Their doubts are worth entertaining because their health and freedom is directly on the line. They correctly suspect they are being fed only specific information and all counter discussion is getting labeled as "misinformation" by what is supposedly the Fourth Estate.
If I drive across a bridge I should have the right to question the competency and the trust being put in the engineers. If something looks like a crack, I would ask detailed questions and I hope my fellow citizens would do the same. Can you really not find the logic, in good faith?
When the public is discussing if we should mandate vaccines or not, and at what age, and in order to do what activities... including important activities like receiving an education... yes, you need to have these conversations outside of the ivory tower.
Should we let the uninformed masses make decisions based on wild speculation? Should non experts get to weigh in in the technical merits of your field? What value do people with no prior knowledge and no expertise add to scientific discussions?
If you keep the fine technical points from the general public, everyone will remain uninformed and will correctly suspect a conspiracy to suppress information. Having contempt for them (calling everyone who disagrees an "anti-vaxers") is not doing your position any good.
In a few years the other political party will be elected and make decisions on your behalf. Will you be as keen on their mission to fight misinformation from this perspective of "people are sheep"?
I'm personally delighted whenever "the general public" is interested in participating in my field of expertise. I love describing how we scientifically approach the unknown with models and attempts at falsification. And how we make engineering decisions and for what reasons. You've never talked with non-technical people about browser standards and programming language design? If you can't present good counterpoints to uninformed statements then you don't understand your own field.
In the fall and early winter of 2020, all of the news reporting I saw claimed 80-90+% effectiveness for the COVID vaccines against the initial strain of the virus (and all pointed out that that was quite good for a vaccine). And yet, today, you have people like the author of the original article and several commenters here on HN complaining about how the vaccines don't provide "perfect protection" and claiming that they are useless if they don't that, even though that is physically impossible.
I've talked to non-technical people about technical subjects, to some success. But presenting good counterpoints to people who have no intention of playing the game honestly is wasting your breath.
I agree. The vaccine was not about perfect protection. The risks were minimal for what it did provide. It was a reasonable decision. Being able to deploy a vaccine efficiently is what we want.
Both sides seem to be engaging dishonestly though. For example, there is no scientific basis for vaccinating children 12-18. They are not at risk. You don't even need to be vaccinating healthy people under 30 for that matter.
Children also do not need to be wearing masks at school or social distancing in the cafeteria. We are harming our children by robbing them of a proper education and the experiences of childhood. And yet good luck trying to convince a covid alarmist of any of this.
I think educating the public is fine. Teaching is fine. But that is a different context. Maybe you can encourage someone to learn more and eventually that ends up with them contributing something useful. That is not what is happening here.
There also comes a point when you have explained something well enough, and then people are just deliberately “asking questions” not because they are being honest, but because there is an agenda. I see that attitude on HN all the time. It’s disguising honest enquiry.
And then there are people that will just ignore what you have done and still want to put their 2bits in.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can't create a simple enough explanation for people with no frame of reference to understand what's happening. Medicine is not a good place to let groupthink decide anything.
The conversation should be one way. By all means, experts should inform the general public but for pete sake don’t listen to them! I’m not going to put my API design to a vote among people who have no idea what an API is. That doesn’t mean that I have contempt for people who don’t know what an API is, just that they don’t have any meaningful input to give.
Disproving misinformation by those who are making flawed arguments, whether out of ignorance or whatever’s takes far more effort than spouting them in the first place.
I glanced over it and it’s clear the author has no idea about statistics or rates. Oh at a time when a few hundred million vaccines were administered there was an uptick in absolute numbers of reported vaccine side effects? Wow! And that happened in the context of a large portion of the population being deathly afraid of the vaccine and anxious about it?
If one wants to present an unpopular and not viewed as credible point of view, it’s pretty important not to look completely ignore simple alternative explanations that are unquestionably causing part of the effects one is talking about
Same take for me as well. Screams of cherry picking. The stats in favor of vaccines take a sentence to explain (like “of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died”). This is a long term rambling wall of text.
Another part is how individual doctors mention individual patients who develop problems after the vaccine. Statistically, that is guaranteed to happen. There is a guarantee that someone will have their first heart attack today. The overlap between vaccine doses and heart problems is statistically guaranteed but does not imply causation.
> The stats in favor of vaccines take a sentence to explain (like “of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died”)
Are those real numbers?
At least according to table S26. Death summary in Blinded Phase (https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f...) it should be “of the 15184 people with the vaccine 16 died, vs the 15162 people with placebo, 16 died”. Unless I'm mistaken.
There were 30,000 participants, and in both test and placebo, there were 16 deaths. The test arm had 3 covid deaths, and the control arm had 1, but it was an HIV patient who was not fully vaccinated so they are arguing it’s 0 deaths for the fully vaccinated cohort. So, the numbers we’re looking at here are pretty small.
So what can we learn from this? Basically, if you remove all the covid deaths, it’s 13 deaths in test and 15 in placebo. These are statistically equivalent. In both test and control you’re equally likely to die of something other than covid in that window.
Now onto the covid deaths. There were 3 in placebo and 0 in control. These are horribly small numbers. More data would be useful.
However.. you can do the stats anyway. The placebo group suggests that the death rate is .02%, with some error. Having 0.00% death rate in the test group is unlikely, but within that error.
So this data is too weak to draw much of a conclusion.
But why would you go look at the results of a year old study with 30,000 participants when there is recent data covering many more people where protection from death among the vaccinated is blatantly obvious?
That's the trick, focus on the evidence that paints a particular picture instead of actually evaluating the available evidence.
The greatest point of failure in these studies is the quality of data. If it isn't ensured to be accurate any further analysis is useless. And this is the core point the article tries to make.
Not saying it is correct or not, but you did not respond to the criticism.
Firstly, as others pointed out, your numbers are wrong so your one sentence explanation is just misinformation. The number of deaths in the trial arms were about the same, actually a bit higher in the vaccine arm. The official explanation for this is that COVID is not deadly enough to show up in a trial population of 'only' ~60-70,000 participants especially because the trials failed to recruit many over 80 year olds, who are by far the most at risk.
Secondly, the article is broken down into sections with proper titles, and many links to evidence. It's not a "wall of text" and it's not "rambling", it's well structured.
Thirdly, the doctors and nurses in question are saying explicitly that they found the sudden prevalence of these events surprising and concerning. They are front line workers, they aren't sitting in an office reading Excel for Dummies, they're saying they noticed a qualitative change in the situation.
Finally, I only got about half way down but I actually found statements that were underplaying the extent of the problem, like this one:
"the English data, though difficult to interpret, contains some worrying signals that all-cause mortality could be higher in the vaccinated, especially in those under 60 years of age"
It doesn't contain "worrying signals" that all cause mortality "could" be higher. It shows outright that the all-cause death rate in the vaccinated has been much higher than in the unvaccinated in 2021. You can find a graph of it here:
that comment is an excellent example of why these articles get flagged rather than debated. They become an incessant Sisyphean slog through every minor detail that has between twisted or cherry picked in ways that really seems intentional on the part of the pro-death anti vax movement in order to prove their narrative at any cost.
210 million America are vaccine as of today. Are you trying to say the number I mentioned in my comment was wrong because I said “few hundred million” instead of “a couple hundred million plus change” when even if it were just “one” hundred million my point would be valid? Quibbling over whether it should be a couple or few when either of them support the point is 100th level nitpicking on the unimportant. Of course the point I made has been ignored because it was valid.
> show up in a trial population of 'only' ~60-70,000 participants
Why are you looking at the number of participants? It’s not relevant to your point there. The number that had covid is needed to answer the question you’re posing.
"Are you trying to say the number I mentioned in my comment was wrong because I said “few hundred million” instead of “a couple hundred million plus change”"
No. You claimed "of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died" which is just factually wrong. The trials didn't show anything even close to this disparity.
"Why are you looking at the number of participants? It’s not relevant to your point there. The number that had covid is needed to answer the question you’re posing."
Trial size determines ability to detect small but real effects, which is why the larger number of deaths in the vaccine vs placebo arm was ignored.
Oh oops wrong level of comment. You weren’t saying that my numbers were wrong, my bad. But the other points still stand. Those numbers the person quoted do appear off.
So you agree with my points about the few hundred million getting vaccinated in a highly anxious climate with tons of misinformation about side effects is essentially guaranteed to have high levels of reported side effects simply due to psychology. That alone means nearly all of the articles points fall apart so quibbling with sub comments in an effort to salvage the article is pointless.
Also the article is a long mass of poor quality text. Having section dividers doesn’t make bad references and argumentative fallacies good logic.
For the question you posed about Covid and the excuse giving, yes the number of Covid patients matters.
I scanned through it, and one thing that jumped out is the Google Trends graph for "Myocarditis". Is it really "curious" that more people are searching for that term, given all the media coverage? How many people even heard the term "myocarditis" before 2021?
This is beyond useless as any kind of supporting evidence for the point the author is trying to make. Mixed in with Twitter anecdotes and random YouTube videos, it's just noise making it that much harder to critically evaluate the argument.
"Anaphylaxis is a well known side effect and doctors are required to report it (see FDA Fact Sheet at the top of page 10) because it is considered a “severe adverse reaction.” It occurs right after the shot. You can’t miss it. It should always be reported. A study at Mass General Brigham (MGM) that assessed anaphylaxis in a clinical setting after the administration of COVID-19 vaccines published in JAMA on March 8, 2021, found “severe reactions consistent with anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10,000 vaccinations.” This
rate is based on reactions occurring within 2 hours of vaccination, the mean time was 17 minutes after vaccination. This study used “active” surveillance and tried not to miss any cases."
251,000,000 people have received 1 or more doses of COVID vaccines (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-... taking that 0.000247 rate at face value results in about 62,000 cases of anaphylaxis-related symptoms. VAERS reports 282, meaning 220x under-reporting, much worse than Kirsch's "As noted in the letter, this implies that VAERS is under-reporting anaphylaxis by 50X to 123X."
Unfortunately, anaphylaxis is not as bad as death and should be more common than death, right? But Kirsch also claims, right at the top of the paper, "The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans so far." So that's more than two times as many instances of a result that should be less common, by his own argument.
"In this prospective cohort of health care employees, 98% did not have any symptoms of an allergic reaction after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The remaining 2% reported some allergic symptoms; however, severe reactions consistent with anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10 000 vaccinations. All individuals with anaphylaxis recovered without shock or endotracheal intubation. The incidence rate of confirmed anaphylaxis in this study is larger than that reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on passive spontaneous reporting methods (0.025-0.11 per 10 000 vaccinations).1 However, the overall risk of anaphylaxis to an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine remains extremely low and largely comparable to other common health care exposures.4 Although cases were clinically compatible with anaphylaxis, the mechanism of these reactions is unknown."
you’ve pointed out exactly why allowing misinformation posts literally kills people. It takes more effort to thoroughly debunk every single claim and lie, and yet the damage is already done. And despite the debunking the anti bad narrative crowd just posts it again.
Nicely wrapped packages of turds is super common for vaccine posts, if the box smelled like poop and has fudge like material smeared on it, it would be odd to open the box and send it to a lab for a 12 page assessment of the exact species and last meal.
So Forgive me for just pointing out this box smelled bad and has smears on the outside. Now that I pointed it out, you’re welcome to send it off to a lab yourself if you want to know whether it’s cow or horse.
-> ...currently afraid ... of jabs ... will change their mind ...
The group who are in good health, who had the Delta variant and can prove it via antigen test results and Dr. letter of recovery, may not be afraid of the jabs. Instead, maybe they think their sterilizing immunity is the logical progression for those in good health and better than non-sterilizing jabs.
I thought the best science was that those who had had covid were actually better off with the vaccination as well.
I had also heard pre print suggestion that those who had only acquired omicron without prior vaccination or delta may not have good neutralization of delta.
This wouldn't seem to bear on what you have said because you were very specific about antigen testing and a doctors letter that you had recovered from covid but people are fantastically bad at making such fine distinctions about things they poorly understand and many who are unvaccinated seemed sure they had had covid even when the illness they proposed was prior to the advent of covid in country. Their logic is in general so bad that they literally changed the date of covid impacting their nation to account for this disparity instead of concluding that their illness back in 2019 was unlikely to be covid.
By January 2022 everyone who hasn't vaccinated has "had covid" whether they have actually had it or not and any differential in public policy towards unvaccinated people who have recovered is likely to result in disadvantage for society at large.
I had COVID-19 pre-vaccines and I've received a booster. Ancedotally, I'm the only person I know at this point that hasn't gotten Omicron; though I'm not really sure that's relevant. I also live in the Bay Area, so it's not like I'm not being exposed when I go to the bar.
But, that's not what sterilising immunity means. The fact that previously infected individuals were infected again means that their natural infection did not provide sterilising immunity. Better immunity? That's debatable, but it's not, by any definition I've seen, sterilising immunity.
There is firstly a survivorship bias. People who survived covid once were on average healthier than the people that died. Next people who got vaccinated alone and managed to avoid catching covid entirely had the lowest mortality followed by those who got vaccinated before catching covid.
To say that given 2 different priors one is superior to the other and ergo one should behave such is wrong because it doesn't consider the cost of the prior. Considering the full cost you aren't better off getting covid and in most cases all of society is better off and ergo you yourself on net as well if you avoid it as long as possible so as to spread it out and get it when resources are available to treat you and because quality of treatment goes up over time as more treatments become available and as importantly more broadly available.
When the lockdowns started in USA I took some days to consider the possibilities while still out "in the field" in the work truck. Since the virus passes between humans and animals such as deer and cats where it mutates, it was apparent I would be exposed at some time. I chose a course of action to make peace with my family, my God, and to remain vigilant about diet and health. A year later I got it and recovered at home.
It is generally not going to be a choice to avoid this virus. Hopefully it continues to mutate to be highly transmissible and less harmful like the seasonal flu.
> Do you think those who are currently afraid to be vaccinated will change their mind if only we can prevent them...
Given the ppl I've spoken with, this is slightly off target assumption. It's not the jab they fear per se. It's the sources (gov + pharma) and the context (heavyhanded hyperbolic data / stats manipulation), and as of late the authoritarian efforts to force the jabs on anyone (above 5 yo) with a pulse.
If these people have a fear, it's that given the facts too few others have no fear at all.
Why did you vouch for it before actually reading it? Discussion isn't inherently virtuous. The world is literally full of people on average expressing both nonsense and malicious lies designed to manipulate you and chief among the tools for doing so is subtly but substantially wrong pseudo reasonable dialog and repetition. We are inherently inclined to see something that is believed by many sources as more apt to be true all other things being equal. Generally speaking we don't need a greater degree of discussion on the virtues of Nigerian princes we need a spam filter.
Now if you instead had read the entire thing and believe his points are substantially correct I couldn't fault you for vouching for it even if I personally don't agree. I do not suggest you can't have your own opinion. Instead i suggest you form it and THEN vouch for what is actually worth reading. Things are mostly flagged for a reason.
> Why did you vouch for it before actually reading it?
I felt I'd read enough of the piece to trust the author's intentions. I liked her "consilience" example, and liked the overview she gave of where she was going. I've finished reading it now, and continue to feel confident that it is a solid piece worthy of discussion.
> Discussion isn't inherently virtuous.
I may disagree with this, but it depends on how literally we interpret "inherently". I certainly agree that not all discussions are productive, and some can cause more harm than good. But I also believe that understanding is between parties who disagree is practically impossible without discussion. I think the inherent virtue of discussion is that when it stops things often get worse.
I'm fairly strongly on the "mistake theory" side of conflict. I think that most people share common meta-goals, but have different strategies for how to get there. I think with more information sharing, conflict can be avoided. The alternative is "conflict theory", where the goals themselves are simply incompatible. I'm hoping this is not the case in the US, as I think that leads to literal civil war.
> Things are mostly flagged for a reason.
I agree. I think "Some small subset of flagged stories are worthy of discussion" is compatible with "Most flagged stories deserve to be flagged".
I commonly flag about 5-10 new stories a day, mostly outright spam. I probably vouch for about 1-2 stories per day that I feel have been wrongly (or unnecessarily) flagged. Of these, some drop off quietly for lack of attention, some are reflagged and disappear, some turn into flamewars, and some generate interesting discussion. I'm sure this story is not "spam", and I'm doing my best to put/keep this one in the category of "interesting discussion". I think this one is (barely) in the last category, and there are some scattered small productive discussions going on.
I feel like most people think this story is making a claim that it is not. As I see it, the main claim is that adverse reactions to the vaccine are likely to be underreported. I think this is true. The author believes that as a healthy young woman, the risk of the vaccine to her is greater than the benefit. I'm not sure if she's right here, but I do believe there certainly could be a cutoff age where this could be true.
Some people think that publicly acknowledging this possibility needs to be avoided, because it lends credence to "anti-vaxxers". Possibly true, but I think they are already set in their ways. I'm more concerned that the government bodies (and "Science" as a whole) may be unnecessarily burning their credibility for future events by trying to bend the truth to better fit their desired outcome of having everyone take the vaccine. I think they are well intentioned, but don't think the "noble lie" is a good long term strategy. I'd hoped for more discussion on that level, but at least there is some.
I didn't flag this for being heretical; I flagged it for reducing confidence in public health measures. Am I certain everything I believe is true? No. Neither does the public health leadership. However, they are operating in good faith, with overall health in mind, and they aren't intentionally cloaking massive amounts of vaccine reactions with the goal of ... well, I'm not sure what. Yes, some vaccines have side effects, some of which are serious. But we've already determined almost certainly that they are overall safe enough to justify wide use.
A data scientist who is an ex-biologist who is quoting line doctors and cobbling bits of social media isn't some powerful truth-finder. They're just muddying the waters and making it harder for the public health establishment reduce mistrust.
I also don't think there is any interesting rational discussion that's going to come from posts like this since they don't rise to the level of scientific discussion.
> I didn't flag this for being heretical; I flagged it for reducing confidence in public health measures
That is literally, exactly what heretics were punished for: reducing confidence in things that were believed to be in the public interest.
So if you didn't flag this for being wrong, or at least for being written in bad faith (neither of which you have alleged), then yes you did flag it for being heretical.
I am certain there were quite a few people back then saying "the same" about Galileo Galilei. And maybe that the church only had their best interest at heart... to protect them from quacks and heretics.
I find your view dangerous. You believe the chances, that his person is "right" are vanishingly small? That's of course a good reason to flag (delete) that article. Why allow an discussion or other to read the piece and have their own opinion. I cannot believe people are saying things like that with a good conscience.
I understand exactly what you're saying. And I stand by the idea that this work does not meet the minimum bar for discussion (I'm qualified to evaluate that) and that its dissemination risks causing more harm than hurt, by convincing people of something which isn't really true through selective information and reasoning.
Note that there is an entire scientific literature where experts in this field argue these things and that is where the "heretics" need to go make their arguments. This work is propaganda designed to make people doubt the public health establishment, not a good-faith argument.
> This work is propaganda designed to make people doubt the public health establishment, not a good-faith argument.
Let's assume you are correct.
Your claim seems to presuppose that the author believes the opposite of what the piece suggests ("not a good faith argument"). Why did the author go to such lengths to design this propaganda? Why do they want to make people doubt the public health establishment? How do they profit from that?
I could see claiming that they are wrong (though I'm not qualified to evaluate that), I just don't at all understand the claim of bad faith.
This is usually how I feel about claims of bad faith in general (and the internet is lousy with them of late). Maybe I am just naive. I tend to think it's more likely that people believe what they say and are potentially incorrect than that they are incorrect and know it, yet still make the claims anyway.
Am I misunderstanding what bad faith means? Merriam Webster: lack of honesty in dealing with other people.
It sounds like you're saying they are incompetent, not dishonest.
I ask because I see this all over the place, and almost every time I see "bad faith" or "disingenuous" (which I think are synonymous) I wonder if the person writing it just saw someone else use it incorrectly and never learned what it actually means, or if I just don't understand what it means myself.
For the sheer quantity of usages like yours, I should probably assume I'm wrong, but I'm having trouble reconciling that with the definition.
Nope, I'm saying they are dishonest. Cherry picking data and using rhetorical tricks (or other tricks commonly used in social media) is dishonesty and acftually is a sign of a competent person- somebody who knows they can fool most people with a slick argument instead of a correct one.
You say upthread that they believe the thing they are trying to convince us of. You also say that they are competently using tricks to fool us into believing the thing that they believe is true. Why would they be fooling us into believing something that they believe to be true? And if they were, would that even be deceptive?
This doesn't seem coherent to me. What am I missing?
I dunno about you, but all my training in writing and rhetoric was based on the idea that the author is right, and should, above all, have the goal of convincing the reader, that not all readers can be convinced without the use of cherrypicked data or illogical reasoning, and that it's acceptable to do so (this is the "all effective writing is propaganda" school of thought).
I can't say that I've had any formal training in rhetoric, so I can't speak to that.
> ... the author is right, and should, above all, have the goal of convincing the reader ...
It still seems logically inconsistent to me to call that bad faith.
Let me try from a different angle. In my mental model, bad faith requires that the author try to convince you of something that they know is untrue (or at least may likely be untrue). Is my model wrong? If so, how?
the author intentionally crafted a lengthy piece of misinformation, in bad faith, with the intention of having it be misleading, using cherry-picking and rhetorical/social media tricks, intentionally trying to fool most people with a slick arguments instead of correct ones... but she somehow believes her own line of bullshit 100% genuinely, even though she was the one who spun it to begin with?
you can't just call everyone who disagrees with your worldview L. Ron Hubbard and be done with it.
It's quite common to do this. Most op-eds I read fall into the category of "author believes, uses rhetoric to cover up weak argument, to convince normies".
>it seemed like a reasonable article by a reasonable person
No, they're full of shit. They use small to moderate descripencies to argue that everything is wrong. The two that I saw before closing it:
(1). The vaccine is less effective than advertised but that doesn't mean it's ineffective. Two doses still provides good protection while two doses plus boosters provides excellent.
(2). It's still primarily an epidemic of the unvaccinated. The ~15% of unvaccinated turn into 70-80% of hospitalizations. If the hold outs got vaccinated (and everyone got boosted) we could cut hospitalizations 75-95%
The article is hardcore antivax misinformation, carefully and intentionally crafted to be so, and "coherent" is a very low bar. No matter how good your motives were in posting it, it should be flagged. You've now put the onus on people to either let this superficially convincing thing go unchallenged and have people believe it, or waste their time trying to refute the ever changing arguments made by these bad actors. Please reconsider the second order effects.
Like, if you see a creationist proof against evolution that follows the scientific form superficially, do you post it to HN because it deserves to be discussed? I sure as hell hope not.
What happened with the AZ vaccine in the Nordic countries is pretty good at showing how tiny effects would be detected by the public health authorities once the vaccines were rolled out to prod, and how the authorities would react to it (hint: not by covering it up to boost foreign big pharma profits, or whatever the conspiracy theory of this week is). The safety of these vaccines, as well as the relative benefits, has been intensly studied by the people who have to make the actual calls. Those are the people we should be listening to, not engaging in a dialogue with malicious crackpots.
As if the unvaccinated are going to stop the spread of COVID. Misinformation is falling back on your original argument that the vax prevents the spread of COVID.
My sister was visiting from
Korea and mentioned that Moderna is not approved for men under 40 (something like that, don’t quote me on specifics). Then this blog mentions that many European countries have done the same. Ignore anecdotes if you want, but it’s concerning that the US is so stubborn to allow Moderna even for teens and kids now.
The OP did not seem "reasonable" to me. It's mixing very different arguments in a way that's incredibly confusing, moreover the author seems to have a bias towards underplaying the benefits of mRNA vaccines whilst emphasizing rare adverse reactions and side effects, which in practice are nowhere near the severity of similar reactions following SARS-CoV2 infection.
There's nothing wrong with seeking to make "heretical" arguments, but these should call for more caution and striving for accuracy, not less. This article does not usefully contribute to the debate.
This is not science, this is heresy, anecdotes, confirmation bias, self-referencing, and regurgitation of political theatre happening across the wold.
This article even includes using Facebook responses of people claiming to be part of the "consilience" of vaccine data being incorrect as one of the most egregious examples of proof of "consilience".
Some people are saying: "this person is a biologist we should trust them". Please check out their Linkedin, Linkedin posts/resposts, and Twitter and understand this persons background and where this information is coming from.
Those that flag it as heretical cannot ever be good custodians of information and I think their negative influence on the willingness to vaccinate is far more extensive than those that might peddle unsubstantiated rumors.
I see à lot more scare mongering, irrelevant paranoia (the definition of vaccine was updated on a website? Oh my clearly a conspiracy) and statistically insignificant anecdotes than valid citations.
Yeah, the dictionary one is baffling. Miriam-Webster dictionary update their definition of vaccine, after seeing probably millions of hits to that page. The author is implying Miriam Webster is a deep state actor now?
The very first citation refutes the article. The table was deliberately cropped and blurred to make the details unclear, but if you look at the original it's obvious the table doesn't say what the author says it does (that Covid deaths were the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups). This is not just an oversight or innocent misinterpretation, this is a deliberate attempt to deceive. Flagged.
Where does the article say that Covid deaths were the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups? What relevant data is missing from the table?
As far as I can tell, the point is to show the tiny difference in this particular study between the vaccinated and placebo for both total deaths and Covid deaths. It does that, and looking at the original tables doesn't change anything of note, as far as I can see.
That's a quote by Dr. Peter Doshi, not the article. While it's not strictly true if he was referring the that study, the difference is tiny enough that it doesn't matter in my opinion. It wouldn't make any difference if you switched the groups.
Regardless, what relevant data is missing from the table? As far as I can tell, you can see all relevant data to determine both total deaths and Covid deaths from the table in the screenshot.
> That's a quote by Dr. Peter Doshi, not the article.
Huh? It's a quote presented by the article as support for their assertion that vaccinated people die at similar rates as unvaccinated people. An assertion that's flat-out false, and that their own source refutes if you look at the original data from it, rather than relying on the misleadingly-cropped and blurred version presented in the article.
When you copy-paste a massive quote from someone else, prefacing it with "...I encourage you listen to this clip from Dr. Peter Doshi, a senior editor at The British Medical Journal, a highly prestigious medical journal:", I'm going to say it's part of the article.
Sure, if you examine the chart closely, like I did, you see that it's not really saying what the author is telling you it's saying. Then if you look up the actual research study (which you'll have to type the url because the referenced links are also screenshots) you see that it definitely doesn't say what the author says it does. But how many people are going to do that? As the author is well aware, not many.
I'm just going to ask this here because I'm not active elsewhere on social media, I'm curious and it seems germane:
I've started experiencing some balance issues recently and am otherwise healthy as far as I know. I am mid-thirties, double vaccinated and boosted, and may have had COVID but don't have a positive test to confirm it even though I had some mild symptoms consistent with the Delta strain.
Has anyone else who has either received the vaccine (I got Pfizer) or had COVID experienced a new feeling of instability when walking? Not necessarily a room-spinning vertigo but more akin to feeling like a toddler learning to walk or a little drunk. It seems especially noticeable when I'm walking and turn my head to look to around.
I've always felt sure footed and this slightly off kilter sensation began about 2-3 weeks after my booster.
Way before COVID, I got vertigo for a weekend, caused by a cold. Apparently viruses can cause the fluid in the ear to change in viscosity.
For me that induced vertigo (really bad "spins" for two days), for you it could be less severe but longer lasting. As I understood it, it can be caused by any virus (unclear about COVID's relationship with it) and will likely go away.
While it was happening, I drank extra water and any time the spins got out of control, I'd sit down and take some deep breaths. It's easy to cope when it is just for a weekend. Best of luck to you.
Yeah I felt that way after I had covid, along with some occasional tinnitus, and I figured they are both the fault of the inner ear. A month later it’s mostly gone.
Yes, but prior to any vaccines or any known covid I have a suspected COVID infection but I really don't know. I experienced this same thing in winter of 2020. Symptoms lasted for 6-8 weeks from October to December. I finally went to see an Ear Nose and throat specialist in December 2020 as my symptoms were beginning to wane, everything was clear on my ears.
I had pretty much the exact same symptoms you are describing. I am also in my mid-thirties. It was extremely uncomfortable. It was disorienting enough that whenever I experienced it (which was daily) I would start to spiral out and have a near panic attack, i.e. it was extremely anxiety inducing. It was so uncomfortable, sometimes when I stand up (1 year later) I still brace myself for it.
ranks pretty high in the realm of psychosomatic symptoms. I had an anxiety disorder that primarily manifested itself that way in my mid-20s. went away when I recognized it as such and took on a meditation practice for handling my panic attacks.
You should probably see a doctor. What you are doing here is exactly why this article is so bad: it relies on random anecdotes and confirmation bias to make its case. Any answer you get here will not help you. See a doctor, and get a proper exam and diagnosis.
My fiancee had previous issues with vertigo, and few weeks after getting COVID this got as bad as it was ever before. Took her a few months to recover fully, thankfully. A neighbor lady also reported she started having balance issues, though after a vaccine (not sure which one, but I guess it should have been Astra Zeneca). Most of my friends that have contracted the virus around me are reporting that whatever they had issues with before, worsened.
For me on the other hand there were no particular issues after the virus, though I certainly don't have the same strength I had before. Haven't yet vaccinated, as I've been instructed by my GP not to yet (still have ~600 bau), my next test is in 10 days. Still researching which vaccine is safest.
In the end a lot of the specifics don't matter much to me. I'm very liberty minded. I'm simply not in favor of excess restrictive mandates from the government. And I have absolutely every reason to distrust large pharmaceutical companies that aren't even liable for damages.
Everyone else in my household is vaccinated. I've been advised to not get the vaccine for medical risks. A few weeks ago my fiance and I both got COVID. She had it worse than I did despite being vaccinated. 19yp daughter no apparent symptoms at all.
My own suggestion was to wear face cover of any kind in groups and close event centers and bars. If we would have done that alone from the beginning it would have been better.
But no, at first any mention of covid was racist fear mongering. Then anyone who didn't lock themselves inside was killing grandma.
Even now people are comparing being unvaccinated to drink driving despite the vaccinated being every bit as risky to others.
It's all political bullshit and I'm ready to be done with it.
Yes, that healthcare has been politicized to the degree that it has is beyond disgusting. That so many doctors are afraid or ignorant about treatments for COVID other than the vaccine or hospitalization is beyond frustrating.
It's gotten so bad that you have pharmacists now playing the role of doctor - even lecturing a physician about his care directives for his patients - when it comes to the much maligned "horse dewormer", leading to this lawsuit against Walrmart (where the pharmacy in question was) and another local pharmacy that did the same: https://www.scribd.com/document/553842620/Saliers-v-Walmart-...
This isn't about "fact checking" so called misinformation - this crap has spilled over and almost forced these people into the hospital where just about everyone agrees it's far better to NOT be forced into the hospital in the first place.
Funny; they fail to mention in August that the much maligned horse dewormer was authorized as a COVID treatment - and a few weeks later infection rates dropped dramatically and stayed extremely low until the time of that article.
How many people ended up in the hospital that didn't have to all because the horse dewormer and HCQ patents expired and there were cheap, generic forms readily available? Isn't it interesting that now that Pfizer has a new pill that all of the sudden the vaccine isn't the sole path to salvation for the planet? Funny that, eh?
Where was ivermectin authorized for use as a COVID treatment? It certainly wasn't approved in the US and it also wasn't (and isn't) authorized in Japan, before or after the date of your WaPo article.
> Even now people are comparing being unvaccinated to drink driving despite the vaccinated being every bit as risky to others.
No, they are not. Any basic statistical analysis shows this. They are still far less likely to catch a disease, and when they do they fight it off better and catch it less severely. This means fewer virus replications, fewer mutations, and fewer chances to spread.
If the data is correct. That is the point the article tries to make. I am astonished how many don't seem to be able to grasp the criticism. That is step one and the next step is to prove the correctness of the data.
one of my hopes after things calm down a bit is that people will be more reluctant to use the "racist fear mongering" and "killing grandma" arguments.
This bothered me back when we had to hear about "death panels" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel and nearly everybody ignored that fact that since we have finite funds, we have to make difficult medical decisions that lead to patient deaths.
This is the worst kind of misinformation, the one that reads "reasonable" instead of foaming at the mouth, and as such can create doubt in peer-validated articles and reports that quote from them.
I am immediately skeptical of anything that has to use an analogy like friends stealing stuff from a party just to explain a point, especially when that point is "ignore that none of these pieces of evidence are particularly convincing on their own."
But even so I didn't really think of anything in here as "misinformation." What specifically is wrong?
Edit because apparently HN's knee-jerk downvoting applies to this instance as well: I'm triple-vaxxed and think everyone's default should be to get the vaccine unless their PCP or a specialist tells them specifically not to get it, I'm just curious what the incorrect info is other than "well it's cropped obv"
I mean, literally the first chart is so misleadingly cropped that it makes the opposite point in this article than it does in the original study.
Edit for the above comment's edit: look, if a deceptively cropped chart doesn't qualify as "misinformation" for your purposes, I guess I'll leave you to do your own research.
Really? Have anything of substance to complain about rather than a blanket ad-hominem assertion?
mRNA technology has been under development since the late 80's. If it is so safe and effective why were all the big pharma players just sitting on it and not going through the trial process to bring it to market before they got emergency authorization that absolved them of all liability? Many if not all of the companies have had trials in the past - just curious as to why they didn't complete them since these vaccines are so safe and effective?
If they are so safe that NO ONE should be questioning them, then why the blanket - and SUSTAINED - need for immunity for the makers? I can see at the start when they unexpectedly had to ramp up production in a time of crises - but they have been distributing vaccinations for over a year now. Manufacturing these should be beyond stable and old hat at this time, yet they still need blanket immunity?
For that matter, why isn't the FDA approved vaccine widely available (or even available at all)? Why aren't the emergency use authorization terminated now that there is an approved vaccine - as required by law?
Why is it Moderna happened to turn a profit for the first time in their entire existence last year? I'm sure that's just another crazy coincidence.
Yup - nothing to see here. Anyone who has any questions is just a trash conspiracy theorist, right?
"(1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings."
This is not new. This is not specific to mRNA vaccines. The simple math is that if you prepare a treatment and give it to 300 million people, 300 people with adverse reactions may make the entire endeavor unwise financially.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was established to partially resolve this [2]. They state:
"[The VICP] was created in the 1980s, after lawsuits against vaccine companies and health care providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce U.S. vaccination rates, which could have caused a resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases."
If you're interested in looking into the reasons why things are done a certain way, I suggest reading the law and understanding how historical events have led us to the (imperfect) system we have today.
>The simple math is that if you prepare a treatment and give it to 300 million people, 300 people with adverse reactions may make the entire endeavor unwise financially.
Yet other medicines taken by the majority manage fine without liability immunity, like aspirin and paracetamol. Why do vaccine manufacturers deserve a license to kill without liability?
I believe that point is directly addressed by my quote from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, namely that we do not have a national incentive to ensure that aspirin usage is at herd immunity levels.
"deserve a license to kill" is a crappy framing. Vaccines are different for a number of reasons; see the history of antivax (predating modern antivax).
all medicines come with risks, vaccines probably have a higher risk than aspirin, but still represent a massively overall good thing, and the public is very sensitive to hearing about extremely small numbers of adverse events.
As you may see elsewhere in the comments, people pointed out a number of things the author did to juice their case.
however, I'd say that the smart people who can read an article like this aren't under some sort of moral requirement to create a data-driven response. Some things are beneath us, like debating a flat-earther.
Further, you undermine your comment by going full conspiracy theory when all the questions you ask have far more banal answers than you think.
mRNA technology has been in development since the 80s because there were and are a lot of challenges with deploying it on a wide scale. This Nature article [1] goes into it, but a lot of the foundational elements of the vaccines were only developed in the last several years.
The need for immunity for the makers is because these vaccines were developed very quickly and administered through EUAs, since the low chance of long term side effects was deemed less harmful than the time constraints that would have been required for normal approval. This need was codified into law back in 2005's PREP act, invoked by the Trump administration in February of 2020, and the legal immunity only lasts until 2024 [2]. If everyone who got an mRNA shot develops myocarditis in 15 years, Moderna et al won't be immunized from those lawsuits.
Pfizer/BioNTech is currently the only fully approved vaccine, but they aren't going to pull EUAs for other vaccines when supply constraints are still an issue. Pfizer is widely available, but it isn't universally available and keeping other options (themselves going through the process for full approval) available is not unreasonable.
Moderna was founded with the idea of commercializing mRNA technology. This is the first significant commercial use of mRNA technology. It doesn't really seem like a big mystery to me.
The very first reference is deliberately misleading. If you actually look at the original table (https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f... p68), in a form not cropped and blurred to obscure the details, you will see that that particular group had 4 deaths from Covid, three of which occurred among the placebo group. The other deaths were from other causes, including one suicide (in the placebo group).
This deliberate misinformation post getting 50+ votes on Hacker News is not surprising. Too many libertarian techbros are only a meme away from pushing pseudoscience.
I don't really look at it that way. I think it's useful to know about the existence of things like this, and what kind of things they say to try to support their assertions. It was pretty obvious to me after reading barely 10% of it that the conclusions are poorly-supported, but I can easily see why someone might believe an article like that. And I think that's worthy of discussion here.
It really isn't. We are reaching a year into vaccine availability, and you'd think by now that the vaccinated would be dropping like flies at this point. In reality most people pushing vaccine hesitancy, if not being contrarian in order to appear wise, are doing so to make money from the people who have been made anxious by vaccine misinfo (it's not a coincidence that this blog is hosted on substack).
It's no longer about applying reasoning, but being part of an in-group; like QAnon - almost every retort is met with deflection or claims it's out of context. And while they almost every "theory" anti-vaxxers can come with are built on anecodota or cherry picked statistics, they will require that you have several cited sources and if you trip up once; well that proves it, vaccines are unsafe.
Also I get it, some may not like vaccine mandates, and being told to lockdown and told where they can and cannot go, but that does not imply the vaccines are unsafe.
It's really worth as much discussion as the theory the JFK will rise from the dead and invalidate the 2020 election.
Like I said maybe a year ago, I do think it's genuinely surprising that HN, given its general right-libertarian stance, has gone more or less full anti-vaxxer with COVID-19. It's just not a rational position, and there are no personal political biases which should logically lead there.
Questioning vaccine mandates and the alleged efficacy of rushed out vaccines does not in any way equate to being an anti-vaxxer. What would be more irrational would be the blind questioning of authorities without a particularly convincing track record.
It's an interesting phenomenon that I've been watching over the past few years. I have my own opinions about what's going on, but I would say that I think generally, the "what positions do people in a political clique take" has changed tremendously over the past few years.
In the old days, the NY Times would have simply published an oped by William Buckley that would sum up the position of pro-freedom argument of the mainstream republican elite. and then the world would move on. Except that buckley wouldn't have done that, he would have been for mandates. Context: during the HIV/AIDS crises, Buckley proposed tattooing a big red A on the ass of every gay person with AIDS: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/s...
Aside: why does every substack article on HN seem to from this particular subculture? As far as I can tell substack is just a paid newsletter platform but I feel like I'm seeing a pattern here.
Four incidents does seem like a really small number to be finding much significance. I know the overall N is large, but don't you need sample size large enough for the incident count to be large(ish) as well?
Obviously, at this point we're seeing very clear divergence in both hospitalizations and deaths wherever we track vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated people (e.g., NYC and more recently the CDC), but I'm surprised how small the relevant case numbers are in that study.
No, I'm not. Clinically, severe disease is (and was known to be at the time of the study) a pre-requisite for death. We don't see people with mild covid dropping dead. The study saw only 2 severe cases among the vaccinated and 106 in the unvaccinated. Coupled with the rarity of negative reactions to the vaccine, the researchers were justified in saying that the study proved that the vaccine would prevent death. Experience has proven them correct, as death rates among the unvaccinated are much higher than the vaccinated.
Ah, that's a good point. The limited death data itself was (I assume) not significant, but we don't need it to be given the size of the effect earlier in the "conversion funnel".
It's a bad argument, it implicitly assumes you know only severe COVID-19 can lead to death. You cannot say this study proved lower incidence of all cause death. You would have to extrapolate via some model of disease transmission. Once you get to that point you ought to get more imaginative than vaccine vaccine vaccine. It's a slick argument though, very "these aren't the droids you are looking for"
Indeed, the numbers in that table are small. I think a more pertinent objection to the OP is cherry picking a table with small numbers in the first place, instead of, say, Table S27 on the very next page that has Severe Covid-19 Starting 14 Days After Second Injection 118 (placebo) vs. 3 (vaccine).
But this is the reason we have randomized trials. Because the human body is complicated and you can't say with certainty that those "other" deaths were not related to the vaccine in most cases.
I'm happily vaccinated, but after seeing these results (thank you for the link), it's not clear to me why the vaccine is recommended for anyone under 65 if they're healthy given the limited benefit and large increase in adverse reactions.
The default conclusion if someone died of other causes isn't to assign the cause of death to the vaccine else we would conclude any broad preventative action including brushing your teeth was unsafe. The benefit isn't limited its both a very very substantial decrease in mortality and hospitalization and a decreased burden on an already overloaded medical system that if it collapses will vastly increase mortality.
All-cause deaths is more important metric than Covid deaths. I'm not sure why it should be ok to trade deaths of one form for another and pretend like we've done something obviously positive.
Upvoted, since although I disagree with the flag, I appreciate the specific criticism.
I don't think I agree that it's deliberately misleading. The graphic is used to argue against the statement that "Clinical trials have shown that the vaccines are highly effective ... against death". If these are indeed the trials that are being referred to, I don't think that data shows this. 3 Covid deaths versus 1 out of groups of 16,000 is compatible with being highly effective, but probably isn't statistically significant. Would you argue that this is sufficient evidence to claim that a vaccine is "highly effective"? Personally, I think they are highly effective, but I'd agree with the author that this particular study is not very good evidence of this.
I'm doubtful the graphic was intentionally blurred. I'd guess it's a screenshot of a screenshot type problem. The important numbers are visible if you look closely, and (atypically) links to the underlying data are helpfully provided at the bottom. Also, although it might not be immediately apparent, the graphic shows the results of two different trials. The top is Moderna, the bottom (which coincidentally also had about 16 deaths per group) is Pfizer (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345). In that study, there are 2 Covid deaths for the placebo, and 1 for the vaccine.
Also, just for a sense of proportion, there were actually 2 suicide deaths in the Moderna study period, one in each group. In the Pfizer study, there don't appear to have been any suicides, but the 29 total deaths include some unhelpful causes of death including "Missing", "Unevaluable Event", and "Death"!
I have to disagree about the intent to deceive here. The author circled the total deaths and indicated that the study showed no advantage of vaccination. No matter how you slice it, that is clearly wrong, and certainly a former biologist would know that. It's also worth noting that the study had 30,000+ participants, and among them, there were only 2 instances of severe Covid in the vaccinated and 106 in the placebo group. Yet the author of the article chose to take a chart from one of the supplemental appendices out of context and deliberately misrepresent even that. This was not accidental, or just sloppy.
I'm not sure which person you are referring to as "the author", but for clarity, the slide is a screenshot taken from a slide used in a presentation by Peter Doshi: https://rumble.com/vqc2ww-dr.-peter-doshi-of-the-british-med... (at 1:41). It's used as it was presented there, and was not altered by the author of the Substack post, Joomi Kim. When I claim that it wasn't intended to deceive, I'm referring to Dr. Kim's use of it. I don't know enough about Dr. Doshi to speak to his intent.
I don't think it was Kim's intent to claim that there is "no advantage of vaccination", nor do I think she made this (erroneous) claim. Instead, I think she was using the slide to make the specific legitimate claim that Fauci and Walensky overstepped the conclusions of the study when they claimed that "clinical trials have shown that the vaccines ... are highly effective ... against death". I think this is useful evidence the official sources are willing to tell "noble lies" for what they think is a good cause.
Whether that evidence matters in the face of a Covid pandemic seems to be a point of dispute.
Your reading of the author's intent is generous, but since neither of us can read minds, we'll just have to disagree about intent here. It's clear from the rest of the linked study, however, that Fauci and Walensky did not overstep---the disparity in severe disease between the vaccinated and unvaccinated was large (2 vs 106). Coupled with clinical knowledge about the link between severe disease and death (a very high correlation, people with mild covid were not simply dropping dead), and the lack of any link between the vaccine and death, they were on solid ground to say the vaccine protected against death. No one expected the vaccine to cure cancer or prevent suicide, they expected it to prevent death by Covid. And it has.
Unfortunately in this case the original post is mostly correct. It claims that this vaccine study did not establish that the vaccines were protective against death.
This is both true at a glance (the number of deaths are clearly too small to establish statistical significance, i.e. the trial was underpowered to detect efficacy against death), and corroborated by the study you link to which (on page 68) lists the 95% CI of efficacy against death as NE-100%. NE = non-estimable).
Now, we do know that vaccines are protective against death from covid-19, but this study did not establish that fact.
Why do I bother writing this? I believe the only way to defeat "misinformation" is to rebut it accurately. An inaccurate rebuttal is likely to be interpreted as "my opponents don't even understand the data, therefore I believe my original position even more strongly".
I think a better rebuttal to this argument is "yes, the original trials did not prove efficacy against death - because they were underpowered, not because the effect did not exist. Subsequent observations of death rates among vaccinated and non-vaccinated populations are basically impossible to explain unless the vaccines protect against death, even though those observations weren't taken during an RCT."
Your point is well taken, but I doubt the casual reader would make the distinction that you do. And in regard to Covid deaths in the study, the people who ran it were well aware that the small number of deaths were not, by themselves, enough to establish efficacy. But in combination with the numbers for severe illness (2 in the vaccinated vs 106 for the placebo group) and everything we understood about how the disease kills, I would argue that the study does in fact overwhelmingly support the conclusion that the vaccine prevents death, just as we have since confirmed.
I 100% agree that if you have proof of efficacy against severe disease, its reasonable to assume efficacy against death. In fact I think it would be absurd not to. But, the usual rules of the game (and certainly the rules the FDA plays by as I understand it) are that you either reject the null hypothesis with a sufficient degree of statistical significance or you don't, and if you don't, you haven't "proved" anything. So if someone claims that studies proved something according to those rules, its fair to call them out if there was in fact no proof.
To your first point: Yes, 99% of the population does not understand statistics, null-hypothesis testing, what "under-powered" means, etc. But, I think we under-estimate the ability of the public to understand good explanations of these topics. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I believe the median reader of a page like the linked article can grasp explanations of these topics even if they are initially somewhat ignorant of them. And, while I can't prove it, I believe that the most epistemically rigorous rebuttals of what we feel are false claims are ultimately going to be the most durable.
> Now, we do know that vaccines are protective against death from covid-19, but this study did not establish that fact.
Can you point to a source not associated with Pfizer that proves that claim? The only thing I've noticed among those I've seen with covid is that the outcome depends on age, overall health before infection, and how quickly treatment was administered, not with vaccination status.
Flagging is doing more harm than good. I wanted to see the discussion and counterpoint when I finished reading the article. Except the thread vanished and I had to count on Google to find it. Thankfully it was easy this time, but if it hadn't been, what am I supposed to assume, especially when the narrative is framed around censorship?
The dismissive attitude of many of the commenters (present company excluded) is sickening. I'm weary of the "I don't have to refute this, I declare that it doesn't rise to the level of scientific discussion" argument. Thanks for actually saying something to address one of the claims here.
I got the original two shots, but I have not and will not get the booster.
One factor in this decision is the fact that people who have legitimate questions are answered with "You're dumb and anti-science! If you don't take it, you'll lose your job, and never be able to get on an airplane ever again!"
How should a reasonable person respond when honest, good-faith questions are answered by suppressing the questioner with name-calling and government-sanctioned force?
I personally choose to: Ignore the names. Resist the force. Assume the people encouraging the name-calling and mandates have bad motives. If they had good motives, they'd lay all the cards on the table, give me honest, good-faith answers (which might be "We don't know" or "Yes, there are some safety issues"), and then let me freely choose whether I accept a medical treatment into my own body.
Insisting people who already have had the virus (and thus have better immunity than that given by the vaccine) should be second class citizens until they comply and get the vaccine, despite not needing it, proves more than anything else that many of the pro-vaccine arguments are NOT being made in good faith.
I believe there were countries that did acknowledge previous infection as contributing to immunity; this is just America doing what America does best--large portion sizes.
In Spain public health system don't do PCRs anymore (only private, which very few would). Without a PCR you don't have a valid proof of being infected.
This is my personal case and the case of many many Spanish people, as Omicron is sweeping the country.
It is the same in Quebec. It's not because they don't want to recognize infections, it's just that they don't have the capacity to do so, which is perfectly understandable, while not recognizing infection as a vaccine does isn't.
Glancing over it, it seems pretty hard to draw any useful conclusions from it.
I would expect that those most at risk from covid are the most likely to get vaccinated for it. I would expect the effect to get smaller once you start controlling for age (which they did not).
Granted, I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation. But I wouldn't state it as being supported by that paper.
I did. And it in no way disagrees with my above comment. _Persons_ who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.
This _does not mean_ that prior infection confers better protection.
The vaccine vs infection was not distributed randomly - inherent risk is a confounding factor. So an equally likely explanation for the conclusion (as opposed to your interpretation of causation) is that the people who are naturally better at fighting off covid (e.g. younger, fewer high-risk factors), are less likely to get the vaccine.
Germophobes have finally been granted their paradise where everyone lives in a controlled bubble. They aren't going to give up that power easily. These people are going to be masking up for the rest of their lives and expect everyone to follow their virtuous example.
The perpetual boosters and social pressure is a play right into the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies who want annual flu vaccine 2.0.
It's not a few assholes. It's literally all media, public and private (at least where I live, in Germany). You do get the feeling that something is terribly off here.
if your goal is to truly good-faith ask questions without getting the response you cite, it's entirely possible. The secret is to play dumb and make the person you're asking explicitly support each and every statement they are making in a way that would convince a normal person. Just keep asking reasonable questions and playing dumb. Then, at the very end, say slowly: "huh. well, ok, I guess you've explained your perspective, but there are these things that don't quite follow, and seem like they are just guesses or suppositions:" and list all the remaining problems. This is also an effective denial of service attack on the scientific infrastructure.
I don't think public health officials really want to be in the position of explaining their lack of certainty (combined with a set of previously established good practices that are likely to lead to good outcomes) about nearly anything, since we have a long history of noncompliance in patients and lack of certainly just leads to additional noncompliance.
I don't want to sound completely unsympathetic, as I've lived through multiple paradigm changes and I know well that scientists get defensive when you challenge their territory. but remember, we have to deal with the jenny mccarthy effect.
Have you talked to a doctor about it, and not just people on the Internet? If you ask a doctor, they would probably tell you the benefits without belittling you.
Speaking about holding two opposed viewpoints in your head at the same time. Which is a skill btw.
1. I believe that Covid media coverage was horribly biased and more than occasionally untruthful, and (extra doses of) vaccine are very likely counter-productive for large segments of the population, possibly all the healthy young.
2. This article grates my reasoning skills like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Unfortunately, the opposite of stupid is not Wise. Coverage can be bad or biased on both sides, and we can't really take its quality as a sign on which side is more right. We just have to do it the hard way and keep weighting evidence.
But anyways, as far as I'm concerned after this pandemic the emperor is naked for all to see: the authorities and the mainstream media lied, bullied and outright censored things which later turned out to be fact. And "neglected" to do due diligence to a degree that in the proper context could be called criminal.
> But anyways, as far as I'm concerned after this pandemic the emperor is naked for all to see: the authorities and the mainstream media lied, bullied and outright censored things which later turned out to be fact. And "neglected" to do due diligence to a degree that in the proper context could be called criminal.
Same. While they may have been lucky that the vaccine isn't dangerous, the loss of credibility is strong. We all have to lose when regular people start distrusting science.
I tremble to imagine what would have happened if the lies/censoring had been made worse by the vaccine being genuinely dangerous.
There's still time. In a country full of "Did you take x drug? You may be entitled to compensation," commercials, if there turn out to be unexpected long-term effects to something many people were strong-armed into taking with no legal recourse, there are going to be lots of angry people who think dangerous kooks were right all along.
> if there turn out to be unexpected long-term effects to something many people were strong-armed into taking with no legal recourse, there are going to be lots of angry people who think dangerous kooks were right all along.
Wouldn't that mean the dangerous kooks were the ones unscientifically asserting there were no long-term side effects in spite of it being completely and utterly fucking impossible to know that without conducting longer-term trials?
Eh, I think the vaccine was a bit over-tested. We had it from month 1, but had to wait almost a year to use it. It's more of a general disconnect between reality and discourse that's the problem. And a very very stupid black and white worldview - what's allowed is automatically mandatory.
We should have allowed the vaccines much earlier for populations at risk, and we should hesitate a lot more before we make anything mandatory. But yeah, this would take balls and willingness to assume responsibility. And speaking of, literal millions[1] of dead later we still haven't done any challenge trials, because exposing 25 year olds to Omicron to find out things about it faster _would be immoral_.
I think the vaccine should have been distributed earlier to at risk groups as well. I’m probably classified as either anti-vaxx in the current discourse. I think if you are placing healthy people under house arrest to protect other people then you have to strongly consider if risk/benefits of an experimental vaccine justifies its distribution without waiting for normal testing.
"red pilled" + "Glenn Greenwald" == bozo bit already. Add "Robert Malone" and we have the guy with a clever brainfart unwilling to do the gruntwork to ship that brainfart as a useful product so no, not changing my mind one bit.
Downvotes welcomed and expected snowflakes, I am truly aiming for zero karma here as an experiment and a commentary on Sam Altmann's hell site, so you're doing me a favor with your downvotes, have at me.
while I hate being part of a flash mob science experiment myself, and while I will not be surprised if there are long-term negative consequences to repeatedly vaccinating, I will be even more surprised if they are worse than the consequences of repeatedly catching variants of this horrible thing because we politicized masks and containment efforts. So I picked the least crappy option according to my doctorate in biochemistry. You do you. I'll do me.
You know, if you regard HN as a "hell site", you could just... not come here.
[Edit to add: Your last paragraph reflects my frustrations with the current situation. We have to guess at the risks and make a choice. The "least crappy option" is the best we can do. I hate it.]
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Yawn. The lack of hard evidence demonstrating injuries from vaccines has led to a lot of this "lower order proof" conversation: "well here's something suspicious and here's something suspicious...".
Taken together it feels like someone heavily implying something while waggling their eyebrows and nudging you in the ribs to get you to come to the same conclusion.
It also very quickly engages in what I call "conspiracy theory epistemology," which is when the fact that someone disagrees with you, especially if that someone is ostensibly an expert or in a position of authority is presented as evidence that you're correct (because clearly they're part of the cover-up!), and the more such people who disagree with you the more obvious that makes it that you're correct (because everyone is in on it!).
This isn't to say that there aren't real conspiracies or that any claims that a conspiracy exists is "conspiracy theory epistemology." The problem is this particular mode of epistemology where a claim is presented and then significant time is spent focusing on how the mere fact that experts disagree is somehow evidence of the coverup. The reason it's bad epistemology is that it can be used indiscriminately in defense of literally any claims of conspiracy.
Have you looked at the US or European vaccine adverse effects databases (VAERS and VigiAccess)? There are literally over an order of magnitude more adverse effects and deaths reported since the rollout of the covid vaccines than for all vaccines in the 20+ years before that (including the flu vaccine that roughly half of Americans take every year). And none of the "vax-is-safe" people have provided any convincing explanation for this other than asserting without evidence that the rate of adverse effect reporting has increased.
That's pretty obvious, of course. The more media attention on side effects there is, the more likely it is that people will report side effects, including incidental side effects.
VAERS is self-reported (and you can report for others) and not verified. We live in an age where a small segment of the population is highly motivated to cast doubt on vaccines.
Also, there has never in history been as quick and wide a rollout of a vaccine as COVID-19. If a database were tracking every negative outcome for a person after taking a vaccine - even if the vaccine didn't cause it - we would see a spike. You'd see a worrying spike in negative outcomes if we spun up a database that recorded adverse reactions after eating a banana, for example; doesn't mean bananas are killing people.
> There are literally over an order of magnitude more adverse effects and deaths reported since the rollout of the covid vaccines than for all vaccines in the 20+ years before that (including the flu vaccine that roughly half of Americans take every year)
Putting aside the obvious difference in societal impact and media coverage, which the modern flu has never received, it seems like the drastic differences in vaccine uptake absolutely contributes to this.
Flu vaccine uptake in 18+ was estimated at 45.3% in 2018-2019, 37.1% in 2017–18, and 43.3% in 2016-2017 [1]. It's sitting at 76% for COVID right now [2].
Short term damage as in death vs unknown long term impacts on people life expectancy and health. That last part is unknown but might be an issue that has cardiologists worried.
There is a reason vaccines take a long time to develop. Let’s not pretend that this straight to market approach does not come at a potential bigger negative down the road.
I would like to have a long term phase 4 follow up. And yes I got two doses of Pfizer and I had COVID as well.
Why should the evidence be overwhelming? Look at how long it took for the evidence for things like smoking, lead in gasoline, DDT to show up.
If the harm is acute then sure evidence should be overwhelming but we should continually look for evidence of injury as it could be subtle.
We should also keep in mind that even if we do find a rate of injury higher than originally thought, the overall benefit of the vaccine may still be positive as Covid itself has a higher rate of injury.
…and attacks on Big Pharma being evil, which, while obviously true in some cases (see Aducanumab for a glaringly recent example), does not mean they were evil here.
…also “consilience” in this context sure sounds like a fancy word for “cherry-picking evidence to confirm whatever priors I have.”
EDIT (The below quote is form the science based medicine blog post linked above).
> Dr. Mandrola is right that this trial was not large enough to fully “inform the safety of a vaccine that will be given to many millions”. It was too small to detect rare events, such as myocarditis from the vaccine or serious complications from the virus. However, only the largest trials can detect rare events, and the rarer the event, the larger the trial must be to detect it. The adult vaccine trials, which were about twenty-times larger than the adolescent trials, also did not detect rare events, such as blood clotting with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The inability to detect rare events is a fundamental limitation of clinical trials, not a flaw of this particular trial.
Rare events can usually be detected once a vaccine or medication is taken by large numbers of people. This is why post-marketing surveillance, called a phase IV trial, is so crucial. It’s a fact that no serious safety signal emerged during the trial. The authors were not only justified to report this finding, the data from their study required it. They didn’t claim that rare side effects would not emerge once millions of children received the vaccine.
All of this makes me wonder. Other than a trial that enrolled hundreds of thousands of adolescents, which would be required to meaningfully detect a rare event such as myocarditis, is there anything a trial could do so Dr. Mandrola wouldn’t feel he had to put “positive” in quotes? Did he make his objections known when the plans for the adolescent vaccine trial were announced or only after it was completed? Has he been similarly critical of other randomized-controlled trials, or is this the only trial he has singled out this way? As he does not feel someone getting COVID-19 is a “clinical outcome”, what would he call it? Why didn’t he inform his readers that the vaccine prevented COVID-19 in adolescents? Would he have been similarly silent had the vaccine been significantly less effective at preventing COVID-19? We can only guess.
...
So basically, yeah these clinical trials aren't big enough to catch these side effects, but the motivations of any doctor pointing that out must be suspect!
> which is discussed in multiple sources, but we’ll go with the Science Based Medicine blog
I read the entire linked article. This is not a neutral summary, and one should not "just go with it". The author is a psychiatrist, and he has a pretty clear bias: most of the words in the article are spent equivocating on severity, despite the author saying that he doesn't have the necessary background to judge:
> As a neurologist and psychiatrist, I view the heart as a pump to deliver blood to the brain, so I am a bit out of my territory when discussing whether or not myocarditis can be “mild”.
This is the medical version of "IANAL" (which is always followed by legal advice...)
For a balanced view on this issue, I like Walid Gelad, who is a professor of medicine at Pitt, an expert in drug regulatory process, and has been vocal on the topic of regulatory approval of booster doses for children:
attacks on Big Pharma being evil, which, while obviously true in some cases
Big Pharma may be evil, but they sure like cash, and they get a lot more cash from developing a safe vaccine than an unsafe one. Look at the J&J vaccine that the CDC is specifically saying to not get if you have Pfizer/Moderna available due to the risk of blood clots.
>but they sure like cash, and they get a lot more cash from developing a safe vaccine than an unsafe one.
If everybody is mandated to take one and they're immune to liability, they can make it as dangerous as they want as long as it's less dangerous than the other vaccines.
Without addressing your points, your points and parent's points can both be true, and free market proponents, for example, will say that parent's points are sufficient for Big Pharma to act in the public's interests.
> conjecture that the vaccines don’t prevent death or hospitalization, which is so wrong I don’t even know where to start.
The provided data is just raw numbers, not proper statistics. What is being compared is the mortality in those who chose to be vaccinated vs those who didn't. There is no control for confounding factors like if the first group are generally more health conscious, or if there are disproportionately more young healthy people in the vaccinated group, or even if hospitals are admitting more unvaccinated people under the impression they're more at risk.
This is none of the above. Language like the above is used to defend and employ censorship.
Use your big boy brain; this is a persons opinion piece - regardless of whether any of it is evil, good, correct, incorrect you need to employ context.
This is not the bible, this is one person publishing their thoughts to the internet. Keep that in mind always when you read someone's dogshit opinion. "intentional misinformation" is laughable.
It's reasonable to assume that the numbers for anything that can be interpreted as anti-vax are underreported, but the chance of dying by vaccine is still relatively low.
The chance of dying of covid is also pretty low, which is why I would have preferred not to be forced to do 3 shots or be prevented to access a supermarket (and no, testing every day is not viable), but I think vaccinating is overall relatively safe. If the study mentioned says 1/2680 that's 0.03%.
It's probably more dangerous to drive everyday somewhere than either getting covid or getting the vaccine.
The disproportionate spike in reports in the VAERS database would suggest that we might want to have a more rational discussion about risk than continuing to take assurances from folks who CONTINUE to have blanket immunity from any side effects. That used to be called a sever conflict of interest instead of settled science.
I dunno - I got COVID and while it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't any worse than the worst flu I have had in the past. There is growing evidence that there are multiple side effects from these vaccines, including heart problems for males - particularly 18 and under or over 50. I'm in the latter so I have zero desire to roll the dice with the vaccines, especially as I've already had and recovered and now have as good if not better immunity than what is provided by the vaccine.
When you consider the ridiculous political and social pressure put on ANYONE who dares to question the vaccines, I'm frankly amazed the numbers in VAERS are as high as they are. If anything I would expect them to be underreported. Why not - the CDC director recently admitted that at least 40% of COVID hospitalizations were not because of COVID, but from people who went to the hospital for something else and happened to also test positive for COVID - despite being pitched as "COVID Infections" requiring emergency responses.
If that can be over reported for almost 2 years before we finally start to get clarification of what many suspected (or saw with their own eyes) why can't VAERS be underreported?
That's the real problem - at this point we still don't know, because very few are asking any questions. And those that do get quickly pounced on as being crackpot trash conspiracy theorists.
I'm amazed that so many people still seem to be puzzled that not everyone is unquestioning about if there are risks with the vaccines or not. Especially when there is still a blind push/rush to get everyone vaccinated, whether it is needed or not, whether it's medically advisable or not (quite a few people have pre-existing medical conditions where the vaccines are far more of a risk than mitigating COVID other ways). If such people aren't willing to have an inarguably rational discussion about real risk, then why should they expect to be taken seriously? Much of the uncertainty around the vaccines are self-inflicted wounds - and instead of altering their approach the usual suspects double down and just shout louder/more shrilly.
If they are so safe as to be unquestionable then why are they STILL operating under emergency use? Over a year later is it really still an an emergency? Isn't it beyond ridiculous to have an emergency for this amount of time - especially when the vast majority of the population has either been vaccinated or had COVID already at this point? Yes, infections are up with the latest variants - how could you miss it with the constant flogging of the infection numbers by the media and some politicians. But notice what has disappeared? The death counters that were oh so prominent, especially before a certain election. More than a little curious, eh?
> There is growing evidence that there are multiple side effects from these vaccines, including heart problems for males
Right, except that myocarditis is also a possible side effect of COVID, and the incidence as a COVID side effect is an order of magnitude larger than as a vaccine side effect.
> I dunno - I got COVID and while it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't any worse than the worst flu I have had in the past.
This is why articles like this are so useless: they rely on anecdotes cherry-picked to support their conclusion, not on actual data that tracks both positive and negative effects. You got lucky; many many people do not.
> Right, except that myocarditis is also a possible side effect of COVID, and the incidence as a COVID side effect is an order of magnitude larger than as a vaccine side effect.
Unless you're a male under 40 years old, then that particular risk is higher in the vaccines than covid. And way higher with Moderna.
> Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals.
So the Pfizer is approved, not just in an emergency fashion. Full approval is for the 2 doses for ages 16+, while emergency approval is for the 3rd dose or ages 12-16.
I agree we shouldn't mandate vaccines or have governments buy them with my taxes or restrict people who are not vaccinated.
But as the resident anarcho-capitalist nobody ever listen to me. I hope the authoritarianism displayed by governments
Keep an eye on this:
> A judge forced Pfizer to publish safety data in 8 months (instead of the 75 years they asked), so hopefully that will shed some light.
> A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to produce, at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, the documents it relied on to license the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
> The rate of 55,000 pages a month would mean the FDA has just over eight months to fully produce all of Pfizer’s pre-licensure safety data. That is much faster than the 500 pages-per-month rate the FDA proposed in December 2021. That rate would have effectively given the agency roughly 75 years to fully produce the data, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on the case, previously observed.
This article has very poor reasoning. For example, the author states
> Everybody knows that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. But if hospitalizations and deaths were almost exclusively occurring in the unvaccinated, why would booster shots be necessary?
There is a simple example of how both these “seemingly contradictory” statements can be true.
1. Suppose that being unvaccinated increases chance of death by a factor 10. Then, it would reasonable to call the pandemic a pandemic of unvaccinated
2. Suppose that the booster decreases the chance of death by another factor of 10. Then, many vaccinated individuals may still want the booster.
The authors argument is a example of reductio ad absurdum. The author attempts to argue against the vaccine by trying to show that getting the booster leads to a logical contraction by using a poorly reasoned absurd example.
I am disappointed to see such a poorly reasoned articles on HN.
Interesting. I've always just assumed that the messaging around prevention like vaccination/masking has always been adjusted to the Western motive - Do THIS thing and it will keep you safe! Whereas I think we all know by now the only way to defeat the virus is to prevent the spread - not to prevent a specific individual from being infected. Vaccination, boosting, masks, social distancing - the goal is all to get that R0 below 1.0, but to convince people to actually practice them we must tell them it will keep them safe.
> This article has very poor reasoning. For example, the author states
I feel you may have misread the article. The author doesn't "state" the lines you quoted, she quotes someone else (Dr Peter Doshi) who used this line in a presentation as an example of something that deserves further investigation. The part of the quote the author highlighted (a couple lines after) was "There’s something to be curious about. There’s something not adding up." She uses this quote to provoke thought, not to claim that (the unspoken) answer is obvious.
> The author attempts to argue against the vaccine
I don't think this is the argument she's making. The main thrust of her argument is that adverse side-effects of the vaccine are systematically underreported. While this could be used as part of an argument against the vaccine, she doesn't actually try to make that argument. The closest she comes is in the conclusion, where she says "I believe that for someone of my age and health, I was taking on more risk than reward, especially considering the fact that its efficacy wanes relatively quickly." Whether or not she is right, I'd wager this means she believes that many people (older than her or in poorer health) definitely benefit from the vaccine.
The first comic ending with "So why did I do this?" "No idea. I am just following orders" destroys all possible credibility. Did not proceed.
Anyone seriously writing about covid vacciness should be able to state the claims, wether the author believes them or not.
I had the same reaction. Panel 3 is especially stupid: my understanding is that manufacturers are not liable (in the US at least) for most vaccination-related issues on all vaccines, not just for COVID. The US federal government handles compensating people who are harmed by vaccines.
But yeah, it leaves out the obvious benefit: sure, I may still get COVID (though the likelihood is much lower), and I still have to wear a mask, but it's nearly guaranteed that my illness will be relatively minor and I won't need hospitalization or die.
Don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Germany doctors get paid per vaccine ... which, like any monetary incentive, is a stronger signal than the "good faith" and should be taken into account when thinking about this.
Needlessly politicizing a refusal to engage with science that doesn’t meet a pre-determined narrative of YOLOing freely to oblivion! How rude of me! Of course healthcare is political!
Yes, hundreds of countries, some of which hate the others, across the world have - in an unprecedented bout of cooperation - conspired together to hide the truth, but a few youtubers are valiantly fighting it.
Which one are we talking about again - the moon landing, JFK, 9/11 or covid?
Hey, JFK and 9/11 at least have somewhat limited numbers of actors (the US government). COVID is at flat earth and global warming denial levels of bonkers. You have to believe that all the major governments and health organizations in the world has decided to go in on a conspiracy to vaccinate people for... reasons... terrible reasons. Political reasons... Because... reasons...
The biggest issue I have with these sorts of conspiracies is whenever you try and scratch at the "why" you'll get a bunch of conflicting answers that are completely unsatisfactory. They are trying to kill off half the population. They are trying to install mind control agents. They are trying to persecute more libertarian minded people by targeting those that refuse to vax. They are trying to make money for the vaccine producing companies.
None of these reasons make any sense for ALL the major health organizations and governments to go along with.
They also fall apart really quickly. One of the conspiracies is that "fauci is making a bunch of money in stocks from his investments in Pfizer and the like". yet, you look at Fauci's financial statements and you see he's invested pretty much entirely into mutual funds and ETFs (poorly I might add). [1] His finances are public record.
News agencies worldwide suppressed the 'lab leak' theory. Facebook actively censored it. Fact checkers 'disproved it'. Leading scientists called it a conspiracy theory.
It is not the first time that this has happened. We were told that Irak had weapons of mass destruction. It was announced at the United Nations. All mainstream news agencies reported it.
For many, many years, the US was 'winning the war' in Vietnam. All news agencies agreed. The US was not winning.
The mere fact that many, even most, people agree with something does not make it true.
Yes, we've vaccinated five billion people, but all we have is a bunch of peer-reviewed studies and statistics! What about all the valuable retracted studies and social-media hearsay? /s
Or, one could look at the data suggesting that vaccinating someone, even after they have been infected, can dramatically decrease the risk of long covid.
I hate to say it, but I am reluctant to read any 'testimony' from nurses or patients about vaccine harm or issues without knowing their political affiliation. If a bunch of Cheeto loving nurses are claiming it, I will weigh that information differently than reports coming from unbiased sources. I honestly think the vaccines are not nearly as good as they should be - but this article is a hot mess of unsubstantiated garbage.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadI'm doubly vaccinated and boosted, as is my wife, as are my parents. Despite having somewhat adverse reactions to the shots, I'm pretty sure my wife and I are safer this way, and even more sure my parents are. But I think discussion is a good thing though. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's evidence I haven't seen, maybe others are unconvinced and the rebuttals here will be what convinces them.
I mention this to suggest that before flagging this as heretical, please consider what message you are sending by doing so, and what the impacts will be. Do you think those who are currently afraid to be vaccinated will change their mind if only we can prevent them from reading more things that might encourage them? Are you absolutely certain everything you currently believe is true, and the end of the story? Or might something useful come from discussing---and possibly rebutting---this post?
I didn't write this article, nor did I rigorously fact check it. But it struck me as at least, mostly reasonable questions around which to foment a discussion. Most of the points in this article I'd be comfortable asking to a room of PhD scientists with expertise on Covid and vaccines. I'd be disappointed to see this flagged.
I have no idea if her concerns have merit, but I don't believe it should be shot down without consideration either.
UK’s vaccine top advisory body (that refused to recommend the vaccine for 12-15 age bracket) membership:
Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford)
Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals)
Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)
Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England)
Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England)
Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust)
Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick)
Alison Lawrence (lay member) Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital)
Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)
Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol)
Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands)
Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen)
Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London)
Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol)
Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals)
Approved government media: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669
What was the risk and is it approved for discussion if the absolute top vaccine experts declined to recommend it and a government funded news media, BBC, reported on that?
Is this too fringe to talk about?
Is BBC anti-vaxx now? Are these professors anti-vaxxers?
Tell me again how the public should not get involved in the debate but this time give the right example and do it silently?
That's not what the BBC is
How much more government approval do you need? The Queen to notarize personally every utterance, noise and word they say/write?
It's literally as close to that as one can get, has a Royal Charter too.
Next would be the queen herself broadcasting live 24/7/365, might be hard to get that much juice out of a 90 year old. Maybe one day.
This is the youtube outlet for it
https://www.youtube.com/user/number10gov
Are you American by any chance? Is CBS a government mouthpiece because they carry actual government broadcasts like presidential addresses and have some oversight from a government agency (FCC)?
BBC is 100% government owned.
You are basically saying there is no difference between the Empire State Building and the White House.
Deep within the linked piece there is a small section entitled 'On “statistical significance”'. It says this:
Now, this result does not happen to be “statistically significant.”
People often use arguments like “but it’s not statistically significant” to try to discount results. I even hear people with PhDs or MDs say this, because somewhere in their schooling they were falsely taught that results need to be “statistically significant” to be “real.”
But even if a result is not statistically significant, absent better data, it still remains the best available estimate for the effect in question. This is just common sense. “Statistically insignificant” does not mean that there is no effect. More on statistical significance here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9.
As a non-PhD who has (relatively) thought a lot about statistics, and who has previously linked others to that Nature article, this is the sort of balanced statement that makes me think she is not clueless. How about you?
BTW, I strongly disagree the quote you have about statistically insignificant data. It cannot be used to say there is no effect, or anything about the direction or magnitude of the effect. I'm not sure what a statement like """somewhere in their schooling they were falsely taught that results need to be “statistically significant” to be “real.”""" even means, significance is a mathematical/probabilistic formalism that has nothing to do with underlying reality, just with the event system you're working on.
BTW I set my p threshold at 1e-6 for a single test, 0.05 is just crazy. On the other hand, I've worked with systems where nobody cared about the significance, just that the weights that got pushed to production made more money than the last set of weights.
be the Chief of the Department of Bioethics approving questionable research such as sand flies eating live Beagles. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10130709/NIH-says-b... 'The NIH said that they did do leishmaniasis research on dogs in a laboratory in 2016, and in an enclosed open space in Tunisia, but not the research pictured.'
I think you have a different issue given your highly specific criticism of dog bioethics. THe NIH primarily concerns itself with human bioethics and permits some amount of very unpleasant research on model organisms.
If my goal was to cast fear, uncertainty and doubt into vaccines, I think I'd be able to weave a far more convincing web of lies that the folks worrying about a married NIH power couple.
I guess the way I look at Fauci is that he already proved his value in the HIV/AIDS crisis and it would be crazy not to trust somebody with that level of knowledge, levelheadedness, and connections.
During AIDS outbreak, Fauci pushed for FDA to approve the toxic and expensive drug known as AZT which was eventually discontinued. https://www.spin.com/2015/10/aids-and-the-azt-scandal-spin-1...
Bactrim was cheap and not approved. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whitewashing-aids-history_b_4...
'Dr. Anthony Fauci is rewriting history. He is doing so to disguise his shameful role in delaying promotion of an AIDS treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in the first years of the epidemic.
In my book, Body Counts, A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, I recount how slow the federal government was in publicizing the use of Bactrim and other sulfa drugs to prevent PCP (the pneumonia that was then the leading killer of people with AIDS) in addition to its long-time and well-known use to treat PCP.'
Bactrim addresses a symptom of AIDS (specifically, a side bacterial infecftion that many people infected with HIV are prone to getting) while AZT reduces viral infections. Two completely different things. The former is for people who are infected, the latter for people to not get infected. The fog of virus is like the fog of war: easy to criticize from the distance of time.
I think you've said enough. It's clear what your opinion about Fauci is, and it's adding absolutely nothing to this discussion.
I wonder if the current quick magic cure demanded by the public may also overlook harmful side effects. The current pressure to dose those in low risk groups may be short-sighted. Ignoring risks is the subject of the thread.
There are no quick magic cures. AZT made a huge difference for a lot of people but it wasn't until later retrovirals (based on tech that didn't exist at that time) were released. It's still used in combination with other therapy.
prediction: this "article" contains 18 invalidating points in the first three paragraphs.
How about discussing those points with a roomful of non-PhD, non-scientists, with no particular knowledge of medicine in general?
The end user can usefully participate in the network architecture debate if enough of their messages are vanishing. If the expert then says: "oh, but 1 in 2680 is rare" other professionals may adjust their opinion about them personally.
If they then go on a crusade to get the exchange scrubbed from the record it would make them more credible to you?
If I drive across a bridge I should have the right to question the competency and the trust being put in the engineers. If something looks like a crack, I would ask detailed questions and I hope my fellow citizens would do the same. Can you really not find the logic, in good faith?
What’s yours?
In a few years the other political party will be elected and make decisions on your behalf. Will you be as keen on their mission to fight misinformation from this perspective of "people are sheep"?
I'm personally delighted whenever "the general public" is interested in participating in my field of expertise. I love describing how we scientifically approach the unknown with models and attempts at falsification. And how we make engineering decisions and for what reasons. You've never talked with non-technical people about browser standards and programming language design? If you can't present good counterpoints to uninformed statements then you don't understand your own field.
I've talked to non-technical people about technical subjects, to some success. But presenting good counterpoints to people who have no intention of playing the game honestly is wasting your breath.
Children also do not need to be wearing masks at school or social distancing in the cafeteria. We are harming our children by robbing them of a proper education and the experiences of childhood. And yet good luck trying to convince a covid alarmist of any of this.
They took the vaccine, so must everyone else, science be damned, seems to be their logic.
Some even post their vaccination cards, as if it’s some kind of scientific evidence. Absolutely crazy.
There also comes a point when you have explained something well enough, and then people are just deliberately “asking questions” not because they are being honest, but because there is an agenda. I see that attitude on HN all the time. It’s disguising honest enquiry.
And then there are people that will just ignore what you have done and still want to put their 2bits in.
Their membership:
----
Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford)
Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals)
Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)
Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England)
Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England)
Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust)
Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick)
Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital)Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)
Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol)
Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands)
Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen)
Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London)
Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol)
Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals)
----
Can you spot the unwashed, uninformed, idiots-by-definition, masses here? The result might surprise you.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/joint-committee-on-vacc...
I glanced over it and it’s clear the author has no idea about statistics or rates. Oh at a time when a few hundred million vaccines were administered there was an uptick in absolute numbers of reported vaccine side effects? Wow! And that happened in the context of a large portion of the population being deathly afraid of the vaccine and anxious about it?
If one wants to present an unpopular and not viewed as credible point of view, it’s pretty important not to look completely ignore simple alternative explanations that are unquestionably causing part of the effects one is talking about
Another part is how individual doctors mention individual patients who develop problems after the vaccine. Statistically, that is guaranteed to happen. There is a guarantee that someone will have their first heart attack today. The overlap between vaccine doses and heart problems is statistically guaranteed but does not imply causation.
Are those real numbers?
At least according to table S26. Death summary in Blinded Phase (https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f...) it should be “of the 15184 people with the vaccine 16 died, vs the 15162 people with placebo, 16 died”. Unless I'm mistaken.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f...
Group A and Group B had the same amount of deaths.
Group B also had more adverse reactions, some serious and some minor.
Given these details in isolation, I would want to be in Group A. But then you look at what that Group A is, and it's actually the control group.
There were 30,000 participants, and in both test and placebo, there were 16 deaths. The test arm had 3 covid deaths, and the control arm had 1, but it was an HIV patient who was not fully vaccinated so they are arguing it’s 0 deaths for the fully vaccinated cohort. So, the numbers we’re looking at here are pretty small.
So what can we learn from this? Basically, if you remove all the covid deaths, it’s 13 deaths in test and 15 in placebo. These are statistically equivalent. In both test and control you’re equally likely to die of something other than covid in that window.
Now onto the covid deaths. There were 3 in placebo and 0 in control. These are horribly small numbers. More data would be useful.
However.. you can do the stats anyway. The placebo group suggests that the death rate is .02%, with some error. Having 0.00% death rate in the test group is unlikely, but within that error.
So this data is too weak to draw much of a conclusion.
That's the trick, focus on the evidence that paints a particular picture instead of actually evaluating the available evidence.
Not saying it is correct or not, but you did not respond to the criticism.
Secondly, the article is broken down into sections with proper titles, and many links to evidence. It's not a "wall of text" and it's not "rambling", it's well structured.
Thirdly, the doctors and nurses in question are saying explicitly that they found the sudden prevalence of these events surprising and concerning. They are front line workers, they aren't sitting in an office reading Excel for Dummies, they're saying they noticed a qualitative change in the situation.
Finally, I only got about half way down but I actually found statements that were underplaying the extent of the problem, like this one:
"the English data, though difficult to interpret, contains some worrying signals that all-cause mortality could be higher in the vaccinated, especially in those under 60 years of age"
It doesn't contain "worrying signals" that all cause mortality "could" be higher. It shows outright that the all-cause death rate in the vaccinated has been much higher than in the unvaccinated in 2021. You can find a graph of it here:
https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov...
And that article links to the original ONS report, if you want to read that.
210 million America are vaccine as of today. Are you trying to say the number I mentioned in my comment was wrong because I said “few hundred million” instead of “a couple hundred million plus change” when even if it were just “one” hundred million my point would be valid? Quibbling over whether it should be a couple or few when either of them support the point is 100th level nitpicking on the unimportant. Of course the point I made has been ignored because it was valid.
> show up in a trial population of 'only' ~60-70,000 participants
Why are you looking at the number of participants? It’s not relevant to your point there. The number that had covid is needed to answer the question you’re posing.
No. You claimed "of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died" which is just factually wrong. The trials didn't show anything even close to this disparity.
"Why are you looking at the number of participants? It’s not relevant to your point there. The number that had covid is needed to answer the question you’re posing."
Trial size determines ability to detect small but real effects, which is why the larger number of deaths in the vaccine vs placebo arm was ignored.
So you agree with my points about the few hundred million getting vaccinated in a highly anxious climate with tons of misinformation about side effects is essentially guaranteed to have high levels of reported side effects simply due to psychology. That alone means nearly all of the articles points fall apart so quibbling with sub comments in an effort to salvage the article is pointless.
Also the article is a long mass of poor quality text. Having section dividers doesn’t make bad references and argumentative fallacies good logic.
For the question you posed about Covid and the excuse giving, yes the number of Covid patients matters.
This is beyond useless as any kind of supporting evidence for the point the author is trying to make. Mixed in with Twitter anecdotes and random YouTube videos, it's just noise making it that much harder to critically evaluate the argument.
The term "Gish gallop" comes to mind.
"Anaphylaxis is a well known side effect and doctors are required to report it (see FDA Fact Sheet at the top of page 10) because it is considered a “severe adverse reaction.” It occurs right after the shot. You can’t miss it. It should always be reported. A study at Mass General Brigham (MGM) that assessed anaphylaxis in a clinical setting after the administration of COVID-19 vaccines published in JAMA on March 8, 2021, found “severe reactions consistent with anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10,000 vaccinations.” This rate is based on reactions occurring within 2 hours of vaccination, the mean time was 17 minutes after vaccination. This study used “active” surveillance and tried not to miss any cases."
251,000,000 people have received 1 or more doses of COVID vaccines (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-... taking that 0.000247 rate at face value results in about 62,000 cases of anaphylaxis-related symptoms. VAERS reports 282, meaning 220x under-reporting, much worse than Kirsch's "As noted in the letter, this implies that VAERS is under-reporting anaphylaxis by 50X to 123X."
Unfortunately, anaphylaxis is not as bad as death and should be more common than death, right? But Kirsch also claims, right at the top of the paper, "The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans so far." So that's more than two times as many instances of a result that should be less common, by his own argument.
Somebody here isn't understanding statistics.
Oh, and about that 2.45/10,000 vaccinations? That paper is https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777417.
"In this prospective cohort of health care employees, 98% did not have any symptoms of an allergic reaction after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The remaining 2% reported some allergic symptoms; however, severe reactions consistent with anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10 000 vaccinations. All individuals with anaphylaxis recovered without shock or endotracheal intubation. The incidence rate of confirmed anaphylaxis in this study is larger than that reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on passive spontaneous reporting methods (0.025-0.11 per 10 000 vaccinations).1 However, the overall risk of anaphylaxis to an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine remains extremely low and largely comparable to other common health care exposures.4 Although cases were clinically compatible with anaphylaxis, the mechanism of these reactions is unknown."
Nicely wrapped packages of turds is super common for vaccine posts, if the box smelled like poop and has fudge like material smeared on it, it would be odd to open the box and send it to a lab for a 12 page assessment of the exact species and last meal.
So Forgive me for just pointing out this box smelled bad and has smears on the outside. Now that I pointed it out, you’re welcome to send it off to a lab yourself if you want to know whether it’s cow or horse.
The group who are in good health, who had the Delta variant and can prove it via antigen test results and Dr. letter of recovery, may not be afraid of the jabs. Instead, maybe they think their sterilizing immunity is the logical progression for those in good health and better than non-sterilizing jabs.
I had also heard pre print suggestion that those who had only acquired omicron without prior vaccination or delta may not have good neutralization of delta.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.13.22269243v...
This wouldn't seem to bear on what you have said because you were very specific about antigen testing and a doctors letter that you had recovered from covid but people are fantastically bad at making such fine distinctions about things they poorly understand and many who are unvaccinated seemed sure they had had covid even when the illness they proposed was prior to the advent of covid in country. Their logic is in general so bad that they literally changed the date of covid impacting their nation to account for this disparity instead of concluding that their illness back in 2019 was unlikely to be covid.
By January 2022 everyone who hasn't vaccinated has "had covid" whether they have actually had it or not and any differential in public policy towards unvaccinated people who have recovered is likely to result in disadvantage for society at large.
'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
Yes - 'you were very specific about antigen testing and a doctors letter that you had recovered from covid'.
To say that given 2 different priors one is superior to the other and ergo one should behave such is wrong because it doesn't consider the cost of the prior. Considering the full cost you aren't better off getting covid and in most cases all of society is better off and ergo you yourself on net as well if you avoid it as long as possible so as to spread it out and get it when resources are available to treat you and because quality of treatment goes up over time as more treatments become available and as importantly more broadly available.
When the lockdowns started in USA I took some days to consider the possibilities while still out "in the field" in the work truck. Since the virus passes between humans and animals such as deer and cats where it mutates, it was apparent I would be exposed at some time. I chose a course of action to make peace with my family, my God, and to remain vigilant about diet and health. A year later I got it and recovered at home.
It is generally not going to be a choice to avoid this virus. Hopefully it continues to mutate to be highly transmissible and less harmful like the seasonal flu.
Given the ppl I've spoken with, this is slightly off target assumption. It's not the jab they fear per se. It's the sources (gov + pharma) and the context (heavyhanded hyperbolic data / stats manipulation), and as of late the authoritarian efforts to force the jabs on anyone (above 5 yo) with a pulse.
If these people have a fear, it's that given the facts too few others have no fear at all.
Now if you instead had read the entire thing and believe his points are substantially correct I couldn't fault you for vouching for it even if I personally don't agree. I do not suggest you can't have your own opinion. Instead i suggest you form it and THEN vouch for what is actually worth reading. Things are mostly flagged for a reason.
I felt I'd read enough of the piece to trust the author's intentions. I liked her "consilience" example, and liked the overview she gave of where she was going. I've finished reading it now, and continue to feel confident that it is a solid piece worthy of discussion.
> Discussion isn't inherently virtuous.
I may disagree with this, but it depends on how literally we interpret "inherently". I certainly agree that not all discussions are productive, and some can cause more harm than good. But I also believe that understanding is between parties who disagree is practically impossible without discussion. I think the inherent virtue of discussion is that when it stops things often get worse.
I'm fairly strongly on the "mistake theory" side of conflict. I think that most people share common meta-goals, but have different strategies for how to get there. I think with more information sharing, conflict can be avoided. The alternative is "conflict theory", where the goals themselves are simply incompatible. I'm hoping this is not the case in the US, as I think that leads to literal civil war.
> Things are mostly flagged for a reason.
I agree. I think "Some small subset of flagged stories are worthy of discussion" is compatible with "Most flagged stories deserve to be flagged".
I commonly flag about 5-10 new stories a day, mostly outright spam. I probably vouch for about 1-2 stories per day that I feel have been wrongly (or unnecessarily) flagged. Of these, some drop off quietly for lack of attention, some are reflagged and disappear, some turn into flamewars, and some generate interesting discussion. I'm sure this story is not "spam", and I'm doing my best to put/keep this one in the category of "interesting discussion". I think this one is (barely) in the last category, and there are some scattered small productive discussions going on.
I feel like most people think this story is making a claim that it is not. As I see it, the main claim is that adverse reactions to the vaccine are likely to be underreported. I think this is true. The author believes that as a healthy young woman, the risk of the vaccine to her is greater than the benefit. I'm not sure if she's right here, but I do believe there certainly could be a cutoff age where this could be true.
Some people think that publicly acknowledging this possibility needs to be avoided, because it lends credence to "anti-vaxxers". Possibly true, but I think they are already set in their ways. I'm more concerned that the government bodies (and "Science" as a whole) may be unnecessarily burning their credibility for future events by trying to bend the truth to better fit their desired outcome of having everyone take the vaccine. I think they are well intentioned, but don't think the "noble lie" is a good long term strategy. I'd hoped for more discussion on that level, but at least there is some.
A data scientist who is an ex-biologist who is quoting line doctors and cobbling bits of social media isn't some powerful truth-finder. They're just muddying the waters and making it harder for the public health establishment reduce mistrust.
I also don't think there is any interesting rational discussion that's going to come from posts like this since they don't rise to the level of scientific discussion.
That is literally, exactly what heretics were punished for: reducing confidence in things that were believed to be in the public interest.
So if you didn't flag this for being wrong, or at least for being written in bad faith (neither of which you have alleged), then yes you did flag it for being heretical.
I find your view dangerous. You believe the chances, that his person is "right" are vanishingly small? That's of course a good reason to flag (delete) that article. Why allow an discussion or other to read the piece and have their own opinion. I cannot believe people are saying things like that with a good conscience.
Note that there is an entire scientific literature where experts in this field argue these things and that is where the "heretics" need to go make their arguments. This work is propaganda designed to make people doubt the public health establishment, not a good-faith argument.
Let's assume you are correct.
Your claim seems to presuppose that the author believes the opposite of what the piece suggests ("not a good faith argument"). Why did the author go to such lengths to design this propaganda? Why do they want to make people doubt the public health establishment? How do they profit from that?
I could see claiming that they are wrong (though I'm not qualified to evaluate that), I just don't at all understand the claim of bad faith.
This is usually how I feel about claims of bad faith in general (and the internet is lousy with them of late). Maybe I am just naive. I tend to think it's more likely that people believe what they say and are potentially incorrect than that they are incorrect and know it, yet still make the claims anyway.
It sounds like you're saying they are incompetent, not dishonest.
I ask because I see this all over the place, and almost every time I see "bad faith" or "disingenuous" (which I think are synonymous) I wonder if the person writing it just saw someone else use it incorrectly and never learned what it actually means, or if I just don't understand what it means myself.
For the sheer quantity of usages like yours, I should probably assume I'm wrong, but I'm having trouble reconciling that with the definition.
You say upthread that they believe the thing they are trying to convince us of. You also say that they are competently using tricks to fool us into believing the thing that they believe is true. Why would they be fooling us into believing something that they believe to be true? And if they were, would that even be deceptive?
This doesn't seem coherent to me. What am I missing?
We were also taught how to identify this and counteract it. In high school we spent a lot of time analyzing William F Buckley's article https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/s... which uses rhetoric to make a utilitarian argument.
> ... the author is right, and should, above all, have the goal of convincing the reader ...
It still seems logically inconsistent to me to call that bad faith.
Let me try from a different angle. In my mental model, bad faith requires that the author try to convince you of something that they know is untrue (or at least may likely be untrue). Is my model wrong? If so, how?
you can't just call everyone who disagrees with your worldview L. Ron Hubbard and be done with it.
You will simply continue chanting how right you were ad-infinitum regardless of actual evidence for or indeed against it.
No, they're full of shit. They use small to moderate descripencies to argue that everything is wrong. The two that I saw before closing it:
(1). The vaccine is less effective than advertised but that doesn't mean it's ineffective. Two doses still provides good protection while two doses plus boosters provides excellent.
(2). It's still primarily an epidemic of the unvaccinated. The ~15% of unvaccinated turn into 70-80% of hospitalizations. If the hold outs got vaccinated (and everyone got boosted) we could cut hospitalizations 75-95%
Like, if you see a creationist proof against evolution that follows the scientific form superficially, do you post it to HN because it deserves to be discussed? I sure as hell hope not.
What happened with the AZ vaccine in the Nordic countries is pretty good at showing how tiny effects would be detected by the public health authorities once the vaccines were rolled out to prod, and how the authorities would react to it (hint: not by covering it up to boost foreign big pharma profits, or whatever the conspiracy theory of this week is). The safety of these vaccines, as well as the relative benefits, has been intensly studied by the people who have to make the actual calls. Those are the people we should be listening to, not engaging in a dialogue with malicious crackpots.
There's nothing wrong with seeking to make "heretical" arguments, but these should call for more caution and striving for accuracy, not less. This article does not usefully contribute to the debate.
This article even includes using Facebook responses of people claiming to be part of the "consilience" of vaccine data being incorrect as one of the most egregious examples of proof of "consilience".
Some people are saying: "this person is a biologist we should trust them". Please check out their Linkedin, Linkedin posts/resposts, and Twitter and understand this persons background and where this information is coming from.
As far as I can tell, the point is to show the tiny difference in this particular study between the vaccinated and placebo for both total deaths and Covid deaths. It does that, and looking at the original tables doesn't change anything of note, as far as I can see.
"Today we have more data, and you can see that there were similar number of deaths in the vaccine and placebo groups.
The trials did not show a reduction in death, even for Covid deaths, as opposed to other causes…"
(Emphasis mine.)
Regardless, what relevant data is missing from the table? As far as I can tell, you can see all relevant data to determine both total deaths and Covid deaths from the table in the screenshot.
Huh? It's a quote presented by the article as support for their assertion that vaccinated people die at similar rates as unvaccinated people. An assertion that's flat-out false, and that their own source refutes if you look at the original data from it, rather than relying on the misleadingly-cropped and blurred version presented in the article.
Sure, if you examine the chart closely, like I did, you see that it's not really saying what the author is telling you it's saying. Then if you look up the actual research study (which you'll have to type the url because the referenced links are also screenshots) you see that it definitely doesn't say what the author says it does. But how many people are going to do that? As the author is well aware, not many.
I've started experiencing some balance issues recently and am otherwise healthy as far as I know. I am mid-thirties, double vaccinated and boosted, and may have had COVID but don't have a positive test to confirm it even though I had some mild symptoms consistent with the Delta strain.
Has anyone else who has either received the vaccine (I got Pfizer) or had COVID experienced a new feeling of instability when walking? Not necessarily a room-spinning vertigo but more akin to feeling like a toddler learning to walk or a little drunk. It seems especially noticeable when I'm walking and turn my head to look to around.
I've always felt sure footed and this slightly off kilter sensation began about 2-3 weeks after my booster.
Way before COVID, I got vertigo for a weekend, caused by a cold. Apparently viruses can cause the fluid in the ear to change in viscosity.
For me that induced vertigo (really bad "spins" for two days), for you it could be less severe but longer lasting. As I understood it, it can be caused by any virus (unclear about COVID's relationship with it) and will likely go away.
While it was happening, I drank extra water and any time the spins got out of control, I'd sit down and take some deep breaths. It's easy to cope when it is just for a weekend. Best of luck to you.
P.S. Always best to check with a real doctor.
It’s a strange illness.
I had pretty much the exact same symptoms you are describing. I am also in my mid-thirties. It was extremely uncomfortable. It was disorienting enough that whenever I experienced it (which was daily) I would start to spiral out and have a near panic attack, i.e. it was extremely anxiety inducing. It was so uncomfortable, sometimes when I stand up (1 year later) I still brace myself for it.
I wish you a quick recovery.
For me on the other hand there were no particular issues after the virus, though I certainly don't have the same strength I had before. Haven't yet vaccinated, as I've been instructed by my GP not to yet (still have ~600 bau), my next test is in 10 days. Still researching which vaccine is safest.
Everyone else in my household is vaccinated. I've been advised to not get the vaccine for medical risks. A few weeks ago my fiance and I both got COVID. She had it worse than I did despite being vaccinated. 19yp daughter no apparent symptoms at all.
My own suggestion was to wear face cover of any kind in groups and close event centers and bars. If we would have done that alone from the beginning it would have been better.
But no, at first any mention of covid was racist fear mongering. Then anyone who didn't lock themselves inside was killing grandma.
Even now people are comparing being unvaccinated to drink driving despite the vaccinated being every bit as risky to others.
It's all political bullshit and I'm ready to be done with it.
It's gotten so bad that you have pharmacists now playing the role of doctor - even lecturing a physician about his care directives for his patients - when it comes to the much maligned "horse dewormer", leading to this lawsuit against Walrmart (where the pharmacy in question was) and another local pharmacy that did the same: https://www.scribd.com/document/553842620/Saliers-v-Walmart-...
This isn't about "fact checking" so called misinformation - this crap has spilled over and almost forced these people into the hospital where just about everyone agrees it's far better to NOT be forced into the hospital in the first place.
The Washington Post is puzzled about a drop in COVID cases that doesn't match the rest of the world: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/japan-covid-...
Funny; they fail to mention in August that the much maligned horse dewormer was authorized as a COVID treatment - and a few weeks later infection rates dropped dramatically and stayed extremely low until the time of that article.
How many people ended up in the hospital that didn't have to all because the horse dewormer and HCQ patents expired and there were cheap, generic forms readily available? Isn't it interesting that now that Pfizer has a new pill that all of the sudden the vaccine isn't the sole path to salvation for the planet? Funny that, eh?
No, they are not. Any basic statistical analysis shows this. They are still far less likely to catch a disease, and when they do they fight it off better and catch it less severely. This means fewer virus replications, fewer mutations, and fewer chances to spread.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34176397/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Would love to read more if there is better data.
This bothered me back when we had to hear about "death panels" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel and nearly everybody ignored that fact that since we have finite funds, we have to make difficult medical decisions that lead to patient deaths.
This is the worst kind of misinformation, the one that reads "reasonable" instead of foaming at the mouth, and as such can create doubt in peer-validated articles and reports that quote from them.
"I was deceived" indeed.
But even so I didn't really think of anything in here as "misinformation." What specifically is wrong?
Edit because apparently HN's knee-jerk downvoting applies to this instance as well: I'm triple-vaxxed and think everyone's default should be to get the vaccine unless their PCP or a specialist tells them specifically not to get it, I'm just curious what the incorrect info is other than "well it's cropped obv"
Edit for the above comment's edit: look, if a deceptively cropped chart doesn't qualify as "misinformation" for your purposes, I guess I'll leave you to do your own research.
mRNA technology has been under development since the late 80's. If it is so safe and effective why were all the big pharma players just sitting on it and not going through the trial process to bring it to market before they got emergency authorization that absolved them of all liability? Many if not all of the companies have had trials in the past - just curious as to why they didn't complete them since these vaccines are so safe and effective?
If they are so safe that NO ONE should be questioning them, then why the blanket - and SUSTAINED - need for immunity for the makers? I can see at the start when they unexpectedly had to ramp up production in a time of crises - but they have been distributing vaccinations for over a year now. Manufacturing these should be beyond stable and old hat at this time, yet they still need blanket immunity?
For that matter, why isn't the FDA approved vaccine widely available (or even available at all)? Why aren't the emergency use authorization terminated now that there is an approved vaccine - as required by law?
Why is it Moderna happened to turn a profit for the first time in their entire existence last year? I'm sure that's just another crazy coincidence.
Yup - nothing to see here. Anyone who has any questions is just a trash conspiracy theorist, right?
"(1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings."
This is not new. This is not specific to mRNA vaccines. The simple math is that if you prepare a treatment and give it to 300 million people, 300 people with adverse reactions may make the entire endeavor unwise financially.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was established to partially resolve this [2]. They state:
"[The VICP] was created in the 1980s, after lawsuits against vaccine companies and health care providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce U.S. vaccination rates, which could have caused a resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases."
If you're interested in looking into the reasons why things are done a certain way, I suggest reading the law and understanding how historical events have led us to the (imperfect) system we have today.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/300aa-22
[2] https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html
Yet other medicines taken by the majority manage fine without liability immunity, like aspirin and paracetamol. Why do vaccine manufacturers deserve a license to kill without liability?
all medicines come with risks, vaccines probably have a higher risk than aspirin, but still represent a massively overall good thing, and the public is very sensitive to hearing about extremely small numbers of adverse events.
however, I'd say that the smart people who can read an article like this aren't under some sort of moral requirement to create a data-driven response. Some things are beneath us, like debating a flat-earther.
Further, you undermine your comment by going full conspiracy theory when all the questions you ask have far more banal answers than you think.
mRNA technology has been in development since the 80s because there were and are a lot of challenges with deploying it on a wide scale. This Nature article [1] goes into it, but a lot of the foundational elements of the vaccines were only developed in the last several years.
The need for immunity for the makers is because these vaccines were developed very quickly and administered through EUAs, since the low chance of long term side effects was deemed less harmful than the time constraints that would have been required for normal approval. This need was codified into law back in 2005's PREP act, invoked by the Trump administration in February of 2020, and the legal immunity only lasts until 2024 [2]. If everyone who got an mRNA shot develops myocarditis in 15 years, Moderna et al won't be immunized from those lawsuits.
Pfizer/BioNTech is currently the only fully approved vaccine, but they aren't going to pull EUAs for other vaccines when supply constraints are still an issue. Pfizer is widely available, but it isn't universally available and keeping other options (themselves going through the process for full approval) available is not unreasonable.
Moderna was founded with the idea of commercializing mRNA technology. This is the first significant commercial use of mRNA technology. It doesn't really seem like a big mystery to me.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
Flagged.
It's no longer about applying reasoning, but being part of an in-group; like QAnon - almost every retort is met with deflection or claims it's out of context. And while they almost every "theory" anti-vaxxers can come with are built on anecodota or cherry picked statistics, they will require that you have several cited sources and if you trip up once; well that proves it, vaccines are unsafe.
Also I get it, some may not like vaccine mandates, and being told to lockdown and told where they can and cannot go, but that does not imply the vaccines are unsafe.
It's really worth as much discussion as the theory the JFK will rise from the dead and invalidate the 2020 election.
In the old days, the NY Times would have simply published an oped by William Buckley that would sum up the position of pro-freedom argument of the mainstream republican elite. and then the world would move on. Except that buckley wouldn't have done that, he would have been for mandates. Context: during the HIV/AIDS crises, Buckley proposed tattooing a big red A on the ass of every gay person with AIDS: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/s...
https://www.wired.com/story/substack-future-chris-best/
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/anti-vaxxers-qa...
Obviously, at this point we're seeing very clear divergence in both hospitalizations and deaths wherever we track vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated people (e.g., NYC and more recently the CDC), but I'm surprised how small the relevant case numbers are in that study.
"The efficacy in preventing severe disease was 98.2% (95% CI, 92.8 to 99.6), with 2 cases in the mRNA-1273 group and 106 in the placebo group..."
This was in a study that included over 30,000 participants.
I'm happily vaccinated, but after seeing these results (thank you for the link), it's not clear to me why the vaccine is recommended for anyone under 65 if they're healthy given the limited benefit and large increase in adverse reactions.
I don't think I agree that it's deliberately misleading. The graphic is used to argue against the statement that "Clinical trials have shown that the vaccines are highly effective ... against death". If these are indeed the trials that are being referred to, I don't think that data shows this. 3 Covid deaths versus 1 out of groups of 16,000 is compatible with being highly effective, but probably isn't statistically significant. Would you argue that this is sufficient evidence to claim that a vaccine is "highly effective"? Personally, I think they are highly effective, but I'd agree with the author that this particular study is not very good evidence of this.
I'm doubtful the graphic was intentionally blurred. I'd guess it's a screenshot of a screenshot type problem. The important numbers are visible if you look closely, and (atypically) links to the underlying data are helpfully provided at the bottom. Also, although it might not be immediately apparent, the graphic shows the results of two different trials. The top is Moderna, the bottom (which coincidentally also had about 16 deaths per group) is Pfizer (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345). In that study, there are 2 Covid deaths for the placebo, and 1 for the vaccine.
Also, just for a sense of proportion, there were actually 2 suicide deaths in the Moderna study period, one in each group. In the Pfizer study, there don't appear to have been any suicides, but the 29 total deaths include some unhelpful causes of death including "Missing", "Unevaluable Event", and "Death"!
I don't think it was Kim's intent to claim that there is "no advantage of vaccination", nor do I think she made this (erroneous) claim. Instead, I think she was using the slide to make the specific legitimate claim that Fauci and Walensky overstepped the conclusions of the study when they claimed that "clinical trials have shown that the vaccines ... are highly effective ... against death". I think this is useful evidence the official sources are willing to tell "noble lies" for what they think is a good cause.
Whether that evidence matters in the face of a Covid pandemic seems to be a point of dispute.
This is both true at a glance (the number of deaths are clearly too small to establish statistical significance, i.e. the trial was underpowered to detect efficacy against death), and corroborated by the study you link to which (on page 68) lists the 95% CI of efficacy against death as NE-100%. NE = non-estimable).
Now, we do know that vaccines are protective against death from covid-19, but this study did not establish that fact.
Why do I bother writing this? I believe the only way to defeat "misinformation" is to rebut it accurately. An inaccurate rebuttal is likely to be interpreted as "my opponents don't even understand the data, therefore I believe my original position even more strongly".
I think a better rebuttal to this argument is "yes, the original trials did not prove efficacy against death - because they were underpowered, not because the effect did not exist. Subsequent observations of death rates among vaccinated and non-vaccinated populations are basically impossible to explain unless the vaccines protect against death, even though those observations weren't taken during an RCT."
To your first point: Yes, 99% of the population does not understand statistics, null-hypothesis testing, what "under-powered" means, etc. But, I think we under-estimate the ability of the public to understand good explanations of these topics. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I believe the median reader of a page like the linked article can grasp explanations of these topics even if they are initially somewhat ignorant of them. And, while I can't prove it, I believe that the most epistemically rigorous rebuttals of what we feel are false claims are ultimately going to be the most durable.
Can you point to a source not associated with Pfizer that proves that claim? The only thing I've noticed among those I've seen with covid is that the outcome depends on age, overall health before infection, and how quickly treatment was administered, not with vaccination status.
The dismissive attitude of many of the commenters (present company excluded) is sickening. I'm weary of the "I don't have to refute this, I declare that it doesn't rise to the level of scientific discussion" argument. Thanks for actually saying something to address one of the claims here.
One factor in this decision is the fact that people who have legitimate questions are answered with "You're dumb and anti-science! If you don't take it, you'll lose your job, and never be able to get on an airplane ever again!"
How should a reasonable person respond when honest, good-faith questions are answered by suppressing the questioner with name-calling and government-sanctioned force?
I personally choose to: Ignore the names. Resist the force. Assume the people encouraging the name-calling and mandates have bad motives. If they had good motives, they'd lay all the cards on the table, give me honest, good-faith answers (which might be "We don't know" or "Yes, there are some safety issues"), and then let me freely choose whether I accept a medical treatment into my own body.
"Follow the Science!" indeed :p
This is my personal case and the case of many many Spanish people, as Omicron is sweeping the country.
source?
I would expect that those most at risk from covid are the most likely to get vaccinated for it. I would expect the effect to get smaller once you start controlling for age (which they did not).
Granted, I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation. But I wouldn't state it as being supported by that paper.
'persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
This _does not mean_ that prior infection confers better protection. The vaccine vs infection was not distributed randomly - inherent risk is a confounding factor. So an equally likely explanation for the conclusion (as opposed to your interpretation of causation) is that the people who are naturally better at fighting off covid (e.g. younger, fewer high-risk factors), are less likely to get the vaccine.
The perpetual boosters and social pressure is a play right into the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies who want annual flu vaccine 2.0.
I don't think public health officials really want to be in the position of explaining their lack of certainty (combined with a set of previously established good practices that are likely to lead to good outcomes) about nearly anything, since we have a long history of noncompliance in patients and lack of certainly just leads to additional noncompliance.
I don't want to sound completely unsympathetic, as I've lived through multiple paradigm changes and I know well that scientists get defensive when you challenge their territory. but remember, we have to deal with the jenny mccarthy effect.
(Yes, it's death rate and may not apply to you. it's a similar effect for infections)
1. I believe that Covid media coverage was horribly biased and more than occasionally untruthful, and (extra doses of) vaccine are very likely counter-productive for large segments of the population, possibly all the healthy young.
2. This article grates my reasoning skills like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Unfortunately, the opposite of stupid is not Wise. Coverage can be bad or biased on both sides, and we can't really take its quality as a sign on which side is more right. We just have to do it the hard way and keep weighting evidence.
But anyways, as far as I'm concerned after this pandemic the emperor is naked for all to see: the authorities and the mainstream media lied, bullied and outright censored things which later turned out to be fact. And "neglected" to do due diligence to a degree that in the proper context could be called criminal.
Same. While they may have been lucky that the vaccine isn't dangerous, the loss of credibility is strong. We all have to lose when regular people start distrusting science.
I tremble to imagine what would have happened if the lies/censoring had been made worse by the vaccine being genuinely dangerous.
Wouldn't that mean the dangerous kooks were the ones unscientifically asserting there were no long-term side effects in spite of it being completely and utterly fucking impossible to know that without conducting longer-term trials?
We should have allowed the vaccines much earlier for populations at risk, and we should hesitate a lot more before we make anything mandatory. But yeah, this would take balls and willingness to assume responsibility. And speaking of, literal millions[1] of dead later we still haven't done any challenge trials, because exposing 25 year olds to Omicron to find out things about it faster _would be immoral_.
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Downvotes welcomed and expected snowflakes, I am truly aiming for zero karma here as an experiment and a commentary on Sam Altmann's hell site, so you're doing me a favor with your downvotes, have at me.
while I hate being part of a flash mob science experiment myself, and while I will not be surprised if there are long-term negative consequences to repeatedly vaccinating, I will be even more surprised if they are worse than the consequences of repeatedly catching variants of this horrible thing because we politicized masks and containment efforts. So I picked the least crappy option according to my doctorate in biochemistry. You do you. I'll do me.
[Edit to add: Your last paragraph reflects my frustrations with the current situation. We have to guess at the risks and make a choice. The "least crappy option" is the best we can do. I hate it.]
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Taken together it feels like someone heavily implying something while waggling their eyebrows and nudging you in the ribs to get you to come to the same conclusion.
If the vaccines are injuring people, the evidence should be overwhelming. Despite rigorous review (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/covid-19-vacci...) there is no evidence of this.
This isn't to say that there aren't real conspiracies or that any claims that a conspiracy exists is "conspiracy theory epistemology." The problem is this particular mode of epistemology where a claim is presented and then significant time is spent focusing on how the mere fact that experts disagree is somehow evidence of the coverup. The reason it's bad epistemology is that it can be used indiscriminately in defense of literally any claims of conspiracy.
Also, there has never in history been as quick and wide a rollout of a vaccine as COVID-19. If a database were tracking every negative outcome for a person after taking a vaccine - even if the vaccine didn't cause it - we would see a spike. You'd see a worrying spike in negative outcomes if we spun up a database that recorded adverse reactions after eating a banana, for example; doesn't mean bananas are killing people.
Putting aside the obvious difference in societal impact and media coverage, which the modern flu has never received, it seems like the drastic differences in vaccine uptake absolutely contributes to this.
Flu vaccine uptake in 18+ was estimated at 45.3% in 2018-2019, 37.1% in 2017–18, and 43.3% in 2016-2017 [1]. It's sitting at 76% for COVID right now [2].
1: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1819estimates.ht... 2: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/up-to-76-of-covid-va...
There is a reason vaccines take a long time to develop. Let’s not pretend that this straight to market approach does not come at a potential bigger negative down the road.
I would like to have a long term phase 4 follow up. And yes I got two doses of Pfizer and I had COVID as well.
What is the reason?
https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and...
If the harm is acute then sure evidence should be overwhelming but we should continually look for evidence of injury as it could be subtle.
We should also keep in mind that even if we do find a rate of injury higher than originally thought, the overall benefit of the vaccine may still be positive as Covid itself has a higher rate of injury.
…anecdotes. Testimonies have an obvious selection bias.
…conjecture about myocarditis. Which is discussed in multiple sources, but we’ll go with the Science Based Medicine blog. (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/myocarditis-and-covid-19-a-...)
…conjecture that the vaccines don’t prevent death or hospitalization, which is so wrong I don’t even know where to start. (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination and https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...)
…and attacks on Big Pharma being evil, which, while obviously true in some cases (see Aducanumab for a glaringly recent example), does not mean they were evil here.
…also “consilience” in this context sure sounds like a fancy word for “cherry-picking evidence to confirm whatever priors I have.”
EDIT: …oh, right the VAERS debacle. (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/as-2021-shambles-to-a-close...)
> Dr. Mandrola is right that this trial was not large enough to fully “inform the safety of a vaccine that will be given to many millions”. It was too small to detect rare events, such as myocarditis from the vaccine or serious complications from the virus. However, only the largest trials can detect rare events, and the rarer the event, the larger the trial must be to detect it. The adult vaccine trials, which were about twenty-times larger than the adolescent trials, also did not detect rare events, such as blood clotting with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The inability to detect rare events is a fundamental limitation of clinical trials, not a flaw of this particular trial.
Rare events can usually be detected once a vaccine or medication is taken by large numbers of people. This is why post-marketing surveillance, called a phase IV trial, is so crucial. It’s a fact that no serious safety signal emerged during the trial. The authors were not only justified to report this finding, the data from their study required it. They didn’t claim that rare side effects would not emerge once millions of children received the vaccine.
All of this makes me wonder. Other than a trial that enrolled hundreds of thousands of adolescents, which would be required to meaningfully detect a rare event such as myocarditis, is there anything a trial could do so Dr. Mandrola wouldn’t feel he had to put “positive” in quotes? Did he make his objections known when the plans for the adolescent vaccine trial were announced or only after it was completed? Has he been similarly critical of other randomized-controlled trials, or is this the only trial he has singled out this way? As he does not feel someone getting COVID-19 is a “clinical outcome”, what would he call it? Why didn’t he inform his readers that the vaccine prevented COVID-19 in adolescents? Would he have been similarly silent had the vaccine been significantly less effective at preventing COVID-19? We can only guess.
...
So basically, yeah these clinical trials aren't big enough to catch these side effects, but the motivations of any doctor pointing that out must be suspect!
I read the entire linked article. This is not a neutral summary, and one should not "just go with it". The author is a psychiatrist, and he has a pretty clear bias: most of the words in the article are spent equivocating on severity, despite the author saying that he doesn't have the necessary background to judge:
> As a neurologist and psychiatrist, I view the heart as a pump to deliver blood to the brain, so I am a bit out of my territory when discussing whether or not myocarditis can be “mild”.
This is the medical version of "IANAL" (which is always followed by legal advice...)
For a balanced view on this issue, I like Walid Gelad, who is a professor of medicine at Pitt, an expert in drug regulatory process, and has been vocal on the topic of regulatory approval of booster doses for children:
https://twitter.com/walidgellad
Big Pharma may be evil, but they sure like cash, and they get a lot more cash from developing a safe vaccine than an unsafe one. Look at the J&J vaccine that the CDC is specifically saying to not get if you have Pfizer/Moderna available due to the risk of blood clots.
Dangerous vaccines don't sell.
If everybody is mandated to take one and they're immune to liability, they can make it as dangerous as they want as long as it's less dangerous than the other vaccines.
The data regarding their vaccine safety is all readily available and not kept secret? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/critics-outraged-by-fda-re...
The companies behind making these are legally accountable for damages if they do harm you, yes? https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
And these are reputable companies that we can trust? https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-ille...
I just picked Pfizer fro these examples, but please let me know if you want one for Johnson and Johnson (and I'll be happy to provide).
The provided data is just raw numbers, not proper statistics. What is being compared is the mortality in those who chose to be vaccinated vs those who didn't. There is no control for confounding factors like if the first group are generally more health conscious, or if there are disproportionately more young healthy people in the vaccinated group, or even if hospitals are admitting more unvaccinated people under the impression they're more at risk.
Use your big boy brain; this is a persons opinion piece - regardless of whether any of it is evil, good, correct, incorrect you need to employ context.
This is not the bible, this is one person publishing their thoughts to the internet. Keep that in mind always when you read someone's dogshit opinion. "intentional misinformation" is laughable.
The chance of dying of covid is also pretty low, which is why I would have preferred not to be forced to do 3 shots or be prevented to access a supermarket (and no, testing every day is not viable), but I think vaccinating is overall relatively safe. If the study mentioned says 1/2680 that's 0.03%.
It's probably more dangerous to drive everyday somewhere than either getting covid or getting the vaccine.
I dunno - I got COVID and while it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't any worse than the worst flu I have had in the past. There is growing evidence that there are multiple side effects from these vaccines, including heart problems for males - particularly 18 and under or over 50. I'm in the latter so I have zero desire to roll the dice with the vaccines, especially as I've already had and recovered and now have as good if not better immunity than what is provided by the vaccine.
When you consider the ridiculous political and social pressure put on ANYONE who dares to question the vaccines, I'm frankly amazed the numbers in VAERS are as high as they are. If anything I would expect them to be underreported. Why not - the CDC director recently admitted that at least 40% of COVID hospitalizations were not because of COVID, but from people who went to the hospital for something else and happened to also test positive for COVID - despite being pitched as "COVID Infections" requiring emergency responses.
If that can be over reported for almost 2 years before we finally start to get clarification of what many suspected (or saw with their own eyes) why can't VAERS be underreported?
That's the real problem - at this point we still don't know, because very few are asking any questions. And those that do get quickly pounced on as being crackpot trash conspiracy theorists.
I'm amazed that so many people still seem to be puzzled that not everyone is unquestioning about if there are risks with the vaccines or not. Especially when there is still a blind push/rush to get everyone vaccinated, whether it is needed or not, whether it's medically advisable or not (quite a few people have pre-existing medical conditions where the vaccines are far more of a risk than mitigating COVID other ways). If such people aren't willing to have an inarguably rational discussion about real risk, then why should they expect to be taken seriously? Much of the uncertainty around the vaccines are self-inflicted wounds - and instead of altering their approach the usual suspects double down and just shout louder/more shrilly.
If they are so safe as to be unquestionable then why are they STILL operating under emergency use? Over a year later is it really still an an emergency? Isn't it beyond ridiculous to have an emergency for this amount of time - especially when the vast majority of the population has either been vaccinated or had COVID already at this point? Yes, infections are up with the latest variants - how could you miss it with the constant flogging of the infection numbers by the media and some politicians. But notice what has disappeared? The death counters that were oh so prominent, especially before a certain election. More than a little curious, eh?
Right, except that myocarditis is also a possible side effect of COVID, and the incidence as a COVID side effect is an order of magnitude larger than as a vaccine side effect.
> I dunno - I got COVID and while it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't any worse than the worst flu I have had in the past.
This is why articles like this are so useless: they rely on anecdotes cherry-picked to support their conclusion, not on actual data that tracks both positive and negative effects. You got lucky; many many people do not.
Unless you're a male under 40 years old, then that particular risk is higher in the vaccines than covid. And way higher with Moderna.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
> Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals.
So the Pfizer is approved, not just in an emergency fashion. Full approval is for the 2 doses for ages 16+, while emergency approval is for the 3rd dose or ages 12-16.
But as the resident anarcho-capitalist nobody ever listen to me. I hope the authoritarianism displayed by governments
Keep an eye on this:
> A judge forced Pfizer to publish safety data in 8 months (instead of the 75 years they asked), so hopefully that will shed some light.
> A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to produce, at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, the documents it relied on to license the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
> The rate of 55,000 pages a month would mean the FDA has just over eight months to fully produce all of Pfizer’s pre-licensure safety data. That is much faster than the 500 pages-per-month rate the FDA proposed in December 2021. That rate would have effectively given the agency roughly 75 years to fully produce the data, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on the case, previously observed.
> Everybody knows that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. But if hospitalizations and deaths were almost exclusively occurring in the unvaccinated, why would booster shots be necessary?
There is a simple example of how both these “seemingly contradictory” statements can be true.
1. Suppose that being unvaccinated increases chance of death by a factor 10. Then, it would reasonable to call the pandemic a pandemic of unvaccinated
2. Suppose that the booster decreases the chance of death by another factor of 10. Then, many vaccinated individuals may still want the booster.
The authors argument is a example of reductio ad absurdum. The author attempts to argue against the vaccine by trying to show that getting the booster leads to a logical contraction by using a poorly reasoned absurd example.
I am disappointed to see such a poorly reasoned articles on HN.
I feel you may have misread the article. The author doesn't "state" the lines you quoted, she quotes someone else (Dr Peter Doshi) who used this line in a presentation as an example of something that deserves further investigation. The part of the quote the author highlighted (a couple lines after) was "There’s something to be curious about. There’s something not adding up." She uses this quote to provoke thought, not to claim that (the unspoken) answer is obvious.
> The author attempts to argue against the vaccine
I don't think this is the argument she's making. The main thrust of her argument is that adverse side-effects of the vaccine are systematically underreported. While this could be used as part of an argument against the vaccine, she doesn't actually try to make that argument. The closest she comes is in the conclusion, where she says "I believe that for someone of my age and health, I was taking on more risk than reward, especially considering the fact that its efficacy wanes relatively quickly." Whether or not she is right, I'd wager this means she believes that many people (older than her or in poorer health) definitely benefit from the vaccine.
Because there's a high vaccine uptake. If 100% of the population were vaccinated every single death from covid would be in the vaccinated.
"No. You can still be killed while wearing a seatbelt."
"Will I have to keep driving carefully in hazardous conditions?"
"Yes."
"If by some freak accident the seatbelt decapitates me instead of saving me, can I sue Toyota?"
"No."
"So then why am I wearing a seatbelt?"
"I don't know. Also, I couldn't answer anyway because I have the intelligence of a 9 year old."
But yeah, it leaves out the obvious benefit: sure, I may still get COVID (though the likelihood is much lower), and I still have to wear a mask, but it's nearly guaranteed that my illness will be relatively minor and I won't need hospitalization or die.
Which one are we talking about again - the moon landing, JFK, 9/11 or covid?
The biggest issue I have with these sorts of conspiracies is whenever you try and scratch at the "why" you'll get a bunch of conflicting answers that are completely unsatisfactory. They are trying to kill off half the population. They are trying to install mind control agents. They are trying to persecute more libertarian minded people by targeting those that refuse to vax. They are trying to make money for the vaccine producing companies.
None of these reasons make any sense for ALL the major health organizations and governments to go along with.
They also fall apart really quickly. One of the conspiracies is that "fauci is making a bunch of money in stocks from his investments in Pfizer and the like". yet, you look at Fauci's financial statements and you see he's invested pretty much entirely into mutual funds and ETFs (poorly I might add). [1] His finances are public record.
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7014520-Fauci-Disclo...
Yet it appears to be a perfectly valid theory. https://www.amazon.com/Viral-Search-COVID-19-Matt-Ridley/dp/...
It is not the first time that this has happened. We were told that Irak had weapons of mass destruction. It was announced at the United Nations. All mainstream news agencies reported it.
For many, many years, the US was 'winning the war' in Vietnam. All news agencies agreed. The US was not winning.
The mere fact that many, even most, people agree with something does not make it true.
*Natural immunity with or without vaccine provided robust protection against hospitalization in the age of delta.*
and therefore, if one was infected previously, they don't need to be vaccinated to boost their immune protection against the virus.
[0] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm#contribA...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Do-vaccinations-p...
Vaccine Mandates imposed by the corrupted government are not reasonable, one could argue.