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Excess deaths and SARS-CoV2 vaccinations in Scotland
- spadez 5y agoA follow up to the post.. https://drowningindatadotblog.wordpress.com/2021/05/27/linking-excess-deaths-and-sars-cov-2-vaccinations-in-scotland-26-may-2021/ https://drowningindatadotblog.wordpress.com/2021/05/27/linki... And there is also one from CDC data.. https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/
- rpz 5y agoInteresting thanks for sharing not sure why this is being downvoted but I'd consider myself a layperson on this matter. Could someone help explain why this post above is worthy of downvotes?
- eloff 5y agoIt's not worthy of downvotes. But people vote with their emotions, not based on any rational criteria. The OP also seems to be the submitter - that explains it. People are downvoting because they don't like the article ( and you can't just downvote a submission, strangely.)
- spamizbad 5y agoWell, take the second link for example: https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ 1) The chart shown mixes up lipid concentrations for protein spikes from the original cited paper and data 2) R00-R99 coded deaths will always be higher for "new" data. Over time, these are revised and coded differently. So if you look backwards from today, it will always seem like this number has gone way up the last month or so. The author notes this in his post (good), but leaves the original one in its place (also fine, but just be aware). The author's hypothesis is not supported by data, and the arguments put forth are based on misunderstanding or misinterpreting things. Also if the fear here is the mRNA vaccines are dangerous, there's always the more traditional Janssen (J&J) vaccine which does not use mRNA.
- spadez 5y agoThis page seem to be updated https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ with the information about observation of increase in R00-R99 deaths for current time. But the article does not appear to believe that it changes their reading of the data.
- manwe150 5y agoI scrolled though a bit wondering that too. Seems that buried in the post is a graph that shows it actually was a dramatic plunge in deaths correlated with the vaccination. I say ‘buried’ because it is surrounded by graphs and text concerned about a relatively much smaller increase in uncategorized deaths. It looks intellectually lazy. Similar stuff has been posted many times and this doesn’t appear to add to the discussion of COVID. The links may confirm anti-COVID biases and confuse laymen, but does not seem likely to withstand rigorous analysis.
- spamizbad 5y agoAnd that much smaller increase is because a death may initially be coded as uncategorized and later revised. So at any point in time, the most recent data you look at will show this phenomena - COVID, vaccine or not.
- spadez 5y ago>a graph that shows it actually was a dramatic plunge in deaths correlated with the vaccination. Please share the link to the page and section heading under which this graph is present. Also this page seem to be updated https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ with the information about observation of increase in R00-R99 deaths for current time. >but does not seem likely to withstand rigorous analysis. But where is this rigorous analysis?
- zibzab 5y agoCan you really simplify something this complex this much? What happens if we, say, include people who died of covid despite getting the vaccine? Would this still stand? Edit: read spadez other links. This is basically monty python witch scene plus some graphs and citations to make it look legit.
- barry27 5y agothe vaccines are causing death on the scale that covid is? is that really so.
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- jostmey 5y agoSo are vaccinations causing excess deaths? Just remember that correlations to not imply causation. To understand why, imagine repeating this analysis using a sliding window with a width of one year. In the last year, you will see an increase in excess deaths and vaccinations. It does not imply vaccinations cause excess deaths. The causation goes the other way... the excess deaths caused the vaccinations
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- quilombodigital 5y agoyep... Lets say someone says bananas help with covid, so when there is an increase in excess deaths, people start eating it, afraid of going bananas. You just cant later see the bananas graph and say "oh bananas!". :)
- jostmey 5y agoThat’s right. You can’t get at causation by passively looking at data. You need an intervention. One stage of a clinical trial looks at safety by giving some people the vaccine and other people a placebo. You then look for excess deaths in the vaccinated people. The author is ignoring crucial clinical trial interventions and instead using shoddy correlations to passively imply causations that do not exist. The people that volunteered for the clinical trials took the real risk and this article is a disservice to their altruism
- xupybd 5y agoThere are a good number of examples that show the problem with correlation being miss understood. https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.statwolf.com/does-eating-cheese-make-you-more-likely-to-die-in-your-sleep-the-risks-in-inferring-from-data%3fhs_amp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.statwolf.com/does-eating-c...
- dathinab 5y agoWhat a misleading article. 1) The weekly excess death tend to always largely fluctuate as far as I know. 2) If there really is a causation between excess death and vaccination, shouldn't the number of weekly excess death increase when the relative in crease in the amount of vaccinated people is higher (e.g. the steps between the measurement points is larger)? 3) The drop at the end is also easily explainable, it's a statistics over the first vaccination and vaccination takes some time to take effect and increasingly more people over the same time got vaccinated and once a large amount of people are vaccinated the excess death due COVID will notable fall. So not really that surprising. Did I miss something?
- tialaramex 5y ago1) If you have a large enough population sample, excess deaths fluctuate less because of the law of large numbers The US year-on-year excess death charts are much smoother than those for a small country like Belgium for example for this reason. So yes, Scotland has too few people for you to see much in this data due to all the noise, humans easily see patterns where there aren't any. 2) This sort of nonsense generally posits some vague association between vaccination and negative outcomes and isn't too interested in trying to imagine an actual mechanism that would inevitably be debunked. 3) It's also noteworthy that over this same period the case rates subsided in the UK considerably. Whether I'm vaccinated against the disease or not, if nobody I meet has the infectious disease I'm not going to catch it from them. IMNSHO a much more significant effect, which I measured over the whole UK since that's the data I had, was that the ratio between those dying aged 90+ and those dying at my age fell dramatically a few weeks after they were vaccinated - exactly as you'd expect if vaccinations work. Before the uptick due to the Delta variant, the best overall week for UK COVID deaths seemed to be at the end of May, but if you were a young adult, say age 25, death rates were actually still higher than last summer - the overall rate was low because rates were now far better for the elderly. Because of course they'd been vaccinated. Next week vaccination will be offered to all English adults who have not previously qualified (e.g. because they were too young and had no other vulnerability) so by August the proof will be in whether that arrests further transmission or not. Countries that pursued elimination (e.g. New Zealand) are still doing better, because, vaccine or no vaccine, if nobody has the virus then nobody can die from it.
- stephc_int13 5y agoWhat we should expect, here, is a decrease of excess death. If we were seeing that it would seem logical to attribute this effect to the vaccination.
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- wobblyasp 5y agoI may just be exceptionally stupid, but is this a gag article? I mean that in all seriousness. Graph of daily vs weekly deaths look completely differently, numbers are present in absence of any context (how are vaccine rates measured? Does it only count it after the two week build up period?), and the article cited for proof of spike protein levels doesn't actually cite spike protein levels, but lipid levels.
- btilly 5y agoIt gets worse. Anyone who tracked COVID at all knows that there is a several week gap between getting COVID and when people die from it. So vaccinations today are expected to have zero impact on the death rate over the next month. The result is that the decline in the death rate starts at about where you'd expect it to start if the vaccine did what it is supposed to do. And the people dying when the vaccine rollout started are people who caught it before the vaccine was available and only then reached the point where the disease killed them. In a world filled with garbage analyses, this one is exceptionally bad. I flagged it because this isn't the kind of weird garbage that I come to HN to see.
- didibus 5y agoAs far as I know, this also doesn't show a correlation. This is just right now showing a coincidence no? Wouldn't you need to compute the correlation coefficient or at least plot a scatter graph?
- raphlinus 5y agoI often flag and downvote stories like these, because I do not believe they are consistent with HN's mission to feed intellectual curiosity. It is clear we have a very vocal contingent of vaccine deniers, and I do think it is useful to hear their arguments, but I believe that's best done in the context of source stories that actually convey some new understanding. From my observations, the best lens for understanding vaccine denial (or other related forms of Covid denial) is religious belief. Articles like these are medium-quality grains of opinion supporting that belief. Outside Covid, such things are obviously not in scope for HN, but the virus has captured our attention. If I were the mod, I'd have an explicit policy that Covid stories need to come from high quality sources. Dissenting or unusual perspectives are fine, but these "just asking questions" pieces with confusing (at best) statistics aren't. And I'd honestly consider most mainstream press pieces not to clear the bar either. There are some excellent science journalists and bloggers out there (Derek Lowe is one of my favorites of the latter). We should be listening to them, I think.
- whb07 5y agoIt’s not vaccine “deniers”, it’s extreme views like yours that paint them as such. One of my co-workers got covid, recovered just fine and then continued to wear non-N95 masks religiously. He honestly lived in an irrational fear, especially seeing the fear porn on TV. I asked him why he was still wearing a mask, and why was he scared if he’s already done with it. “Oh because I’m waiting for the vaccine.” … Putting aside all the hysteria and orange-man-bad, when did the relationship between vaccine/natural-response go away? He was seriously confused about my line of questioning pointing out that he’s already got the natural form of a vaccine. When did we all forget that chicken pox can be a serious thing to older people, but it’s relatively harmless to children? Once you get it, you’re generally inoculated for life. So when you have the majority of people behaving irrationally, leading scientists lying and playing politics, how is it anything but natural to say: “You know what? Let’s slow down for a second, and find out what’s what, because for the past year everyone’s been lying”
- LostJourneyman 5y agoI'll assume your line of reasoning is in good faith and answer it as such. To OP's point, leading research actually has answers to the questions you're asking and backs up your friend's behavior. The fundamental difference is that this isn't in the same families of viruses as your typical one and done vaccines of childhood. This is a coronavirus, which are known to have a high mutation and variation rate and tend to be vaccine resistant. This is why you have a flu vaccine every year, but chicken pox once. It's somewhat rare, but it would have been possible for your friend to have gotten a different variant, or act as a carrier for a different variant. He chose to follow expert advise to keep himself and others safe. I would like to point out also that wearing a face covering is a small price to pay for public safety even if it wasn't needed for every individual. As an example, even fully vaccinated and having had the virus, I wear my own mask constantly. It would be unkind of me to force people to choose if they trust my judgement and my word just to feel safe around me. If we discuss it and they feel safe, often I'll remove the mask for ease of conversation. But the point here is: we should care about other people, we should strive to make the world we all live in as safe and comfortable as possible for everyone around us, and we need to weigh the risk of slight personal discomfort against the benefits of interpersonal relationships, public safety, and the well-being of those around you. To conflate “You know what? Let’s slow down for a second, and find out what’s what, because for the past year everyone’s been lying” With “Oh because I’m waiting for the vaccine.” As equally reasonable positions is disingenuous at best, but it's worth checking your motivations. Edits:grammar
- rob_c 5y agoWell it is a WordPress.com article...
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