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I took the bait, I'm ashamed. I try to keep an open mind, so I read some of it. The thrust of the article is that vaccines work well at preventing infection, b

by alecst 5y ago

I took the bait, I'm ashamed. I try to keep an open mind, so I read some of it. The thrust of the article is that vaccines work well at preventing infection, but that if you do get infected, it is _possible_ that you might die at a higher rate. _Possible_ comes from a big spread in the standard deviation of P(death|infected & vaccinated). I didn't check his calculations, I took his numbers at face value and just looked at the charts. The author uses big standard errors to make claims about what could or could not be true, because the standard errors straddle both favorable and unfavorable statistics for the vaccine. However when the standard errors are too small for this dubious reasoning, they come out in favor of the vaccine. The author appears to me to be using motivating reasoning to push an agenda. Edit: sorry I am not completely right, because I wrote this comment before thoroughly reading the whole article. Sometimes his standard errors come out against the vaccine, and for all I know his math could be right. But I don't want to check the math because I have limited time and I don't care if my death rate goes up given conditions {x, y, z.} I care if getting the vaccine makes me less likely to get sick and die, which it does, because if you look at all the tables and charts that's exactly what it shows.

ndkwj 5y ago
>The author appears to me to be using motivating reasoning to push an agenda. Just like the pro-vaccination arguments.
pcrh 5y ago
Yes. If I read the article correctly, the data in fact say you cannot determine whether the death rate in vaccinated people who become infected is different than in unvaccinated people. However, 1) it isn't clear if Frieden is working from the same dataset as the author, and 2) a very slight re-wording of the initial statement would make it correct, i.e. "If you are _exposed_ to covid and you've been vaccinated you're about 100 times less likely to die."
roenxi 5y ago
> I care if getting the vaccine makes me less likely to get sick and die, which it does, because if you look at all the tables and charts that's exactly what it shows. The author is actually in the range of an interesting point, even if the article is mostly foolish. If I had a hypothetical vaccine that was in fact composed of neurotoxin and killed the injectee instantly ... it would show 100% effectiveness in the cited tables, because the corpses would be unable to contract COVID. So you can't actually tell if the vaccine reduces your odds of getting sick and dying - we know the current crop are a bit rough and kill people in rare cases. Covid deaths are so low in the 16-44 category that may be comparable to the vaccine. Although I think the hospitalisation numbers are still quite persuasive in favour of the vaccine.
azakai 5y ago
It's even worse than that. Aside from deviations, this is a main point in the article: > The death rate if infected was always going to be higher in the vaccinated groups if most of the vaccinated were those likely to die in the first place. IOW: Those most likely to die were most likely to get vaccinated. Obviously true, but not interesting - a correlation we need to account for. When you do control for prior risk, the results are as expected, i.e., vaccines make you much safer. The quoted tweet ("100x") was inaccurate and exaggerated. That's worth briefly correcting. But the lengthy article's points are only minor and pedantic, and do not change what we know, which is that our vaccines are very effective.
- asdfkljgisjg9 5y ago
  Everybody is misrepresenting this article badly. Here is what it says that is important: > The person who incorrectly assumes that “with the vaccine, even if I get infected I am less likely to die than I would be without the vaccine,” will be more likely to engage in behavior that risks infection. They may become the “it’s just a flu bro” of the vaccinated. > If the lack of observed layered protection were made more explicit then people may choose to still wear masks and social distance, to further reduce their exposure in addition to vaccination. They may choose to go to fewer social events. This in turn would reduce the infection rate, and reduce the probability a mutation that evades vaccination finds a host to practice on. (While writing this article, the White House changed its masking recommendation for the vaccinated)
m12k 5y ago
There's several reason why even with highly effective vaccines, we might see worse infections when we do see them among the vaccinated. For example, if the vaccines work well, then there should be a bias where we see the most breakthrough infections among those for whom the vaccine doesn't do anything, i.e. people with compromised immune systems. So the people with normal immune systems will make up a much larger percentage of infections among the unvaccinated group, allowing them to drag down the average severity of infections - in the vaccinated group, they've been "removed" since most of them won't get infected, or have mild enough infections that they don't even notice, leaving the immunocompromised as a larger part of the infections that get counted in the statistics, and these infections are thus on average more severe.

by alecst 5y ago

ndkwj 5y ago

>The author appears to me to be using motivating reasoning to push an agenda. Just like the pro-vaccination arguments.

pcrh 5y ago

Yes. If I read the article correctly, the data in fact say you cannot determine whether the death rate in vaccinated people who become infected is different than in unvaccinated people. However, 1) it isn't clear if Frieden is working from the same dataset as the author, and 2) a very slight re-wording of the initial statement would make it correct, i.e. "If you are _exposed_ to covid and you've been vaccinated you're about 100 times less likely to die."

roenxi 5y ago

> I care if getting the vaccine makes me less likely to get sick and die, which it does, because if you look at all the tables and charts that's exactly what it shows. The author is actually in the range of an interesting point, even if the article is mostly foolish. If I had a hypothetical vaccine that was in fact composed of neurotoxin and killed the injectee instantly ... it would show 100% effectiveness in the cited tables, because the corpses would be unable to contract COVID. So you can't actually tell if the vaccine reduces your odds of getting sick and dying - we know the current crop are a bit rough and kill people in rare cases. Covid deaths are so low in the 16-44 category that may be comparable to the vaccine. Although I think the hospitalisation numbers are still quite persuasive in favour of the vaccine.

azakai 5y ago

It's even worse than that. Aside from deviations, this is a main point in the article: > The death rate if infected was always going to be higher in the vaccinated groups if most of the vaccinated were those likely to die in the first place. IOW: Those most likely to die were most likely to get vaccinated. Obviously true, but not interesting - a correlation we need to account for. When you do control for prior risk, the results are as expected, i.e., vaccines make you much safer. The quoted tweet ("100x") was inaccurate and exaggerated. That's worth briefly correcting. But the lengthy article's points are only minor and pedantic, and do not change what we know, which is that our vaccines are very effective.

asdfkljgisjg9 5y ago
Everybody is misrepresenting this article badly. Here is what it says that is important: > The person who incorrectly assumes that “with the vaccine, even if I get infected I am less likely to die than I would be without the vaccine,” will be more likely to engage in behavior that risks infection. They may become the “it’s just a flu bro” of the vaccinated. > If the lack of observed layered protection were made more explicit then people may choose to still wear masks and social distance, to further reduce their exposure in addition to vaccination. They may choose to go to fewer social events. This in turn would reduce the infection rate, and reduce the probability a mutation that evades vaccination finds a host to practice on. (While writing this article, the White House changed its masking recommendation for the vaccinated)

m12k 5y ago

There's several reason why even with highly effective vaccines, we might see worse infections when we do see them among the vaccinated. For example, if the vaccines work well, then there should be a bias where we see the most breakthrough infections among those for whom the vaccine doesn't do anything, i.e. people with compromised immune systems. So the people with normal immune systems will make up a much larger percentage of infections among the unvaccinated group, allowing them to drag down the average severity of infections - in the vaccinated group, they've been "removed" since most of them won't get infected, or have mild enough infections that they don't even notice, leaving the immunocompromised as a larger part of the infections that get counted in the statistics, and these infections are thus on average more severe.