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Extreme example: Person A with perfect health gets vaccinated. Person B undergoes palliative care and chooses not to get vaccinated. Person B's routine SARS-CoV

Extreme example: Person A with perfect health gets vaccinated. Person B undergoes palliative care and chooses not to get vaccinated. Person B's routine SARS-CoV-2 PCR test is positive and they're therefore classified as a hospitalized/severe case. It's a miracle that Israel even offers age-stratified hospitalizations data. But it's still not enough.

mthoms 5y ago
Do you really think scenarios like this could account for skewing the data by a multiple of 9? Come on. >Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions. Oh please. This data overwhelmingly shows that vaccinated people (>60) have better outcomes than non-vaccinated people(>60). The only debate is by how much.
- charbonneau 5y ago
  No, it was an extreme example to better express the issue: We do not know why they're not vaccinated. We do not know their medical history. This isn't a randomized controlled trial. More realistic example: According to this study [1], 4.0% of US citizens (>80) are immunocompromised. We know that ~5.8% of Israelis (>80) are not vaccinated. Is it possible that the unvaccinated in this age cohort have more serious pre-existing conditions and therefore had a way higher chance of being hospitalized? We don't know. Is it wrong to ask for better data? We're capable of extracting the smallest detail from a person randomly scrolling through a news feed but we can't get proper stats on hospitalized people? Come on. [1] https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779 https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779
  - mthoms 5y ago
    None of the reasons you cited come anywhere near to reasonably accounting for a nine-fold difference. You're really reaching. If you can't take something away from a 9x difference (vaxed vs. non-vaxed) I don't what to tell you. Better data would be great, but based on your anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-science, comment history I'm not convinced that would be enough for you. I'm not interested in debating people with an obvious idealogical agenda, so good day to you.
    - charbonneau 5y ago
      Since I'm an anti-science woman on a quest to spread my anti-vax agenda, I've taken a look at the raw data. We're talking about 137 unvaccinated & 268 vaccinated patients >60 with severe disease (What kind of disease? Who cares, am I right?) So, based on this enormous (!) sample size with one (!) confounding factor (#FuckMedicalHistory), we conclude that of course there is an undeniable nine-fold difference. Why are we even doing randomized controlled trials? Just observe 137 & 268 patients retrospectively and frame critics as ideologues. A final word from an anti-vax activist: > Conversely, there was concern that observational data obtained from nonrandomized studies after vaccine deployment could yield unreliable answers. Observational studies are subject to substantial biases and are much less amenable to unambiguous interpretation. Their limitations are of particular concern during this public health emergency, because vaccinated and unvaccinated people will differ in their risk of exposure to infection and of serious disease, partly because of fluctuating attack rates and because during early phases of vaccine deployment, vaccinees may well be at particular risk of infection. In these circumstances, even carefully analyzed observational studies can yield misleading answers about safety and efficacy. In addition, unrelated events that occur by chance after vaccination may be incorrectly attributed to the vaccine, and such anecdotes may be deliberately promulgated by groups opposed to vaccination. [1] [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538

mthoms 5y ago

Do you really think scenarios like this could account for skewing the data by a multiple of 9? Come on. >Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions. Oh please. This data overwhelmingly shows that vaccinated people (>60) have better outcomes than non-vaccinated people(>60). The only debate is by how much.

charbonneau 5y ago
No, it was an extreme example to better express the issue: We do not know why they're not vaccinated. We do not know their medical history. This isn't a randomized controlled trial. More realistic example: According to this study [1], 4.0% of US citizens (>80) are immunocompromised. We know that ~5.8% of Israelis (>80) are not vaccinated. Is it possible that the unvaccinated in this age cohort have more serious pre-existing conditions and therefore had a way higher chance of being hospitalized? We don't know. Is it wrong to ask for better data? We're capable of extracting the smallest detail from a person randomly scrolling through a news feed but we can't get proper stats on hospitalized people? Come on. [1] https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779 https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779
- mthoms 5y ago
  None of the reasons you cited come anywhere near to reasonably accounting for a nine-fold difference. You're really reaching. If you can't take something away from a 9x difference (vaxed vs. non-vaxed) I don't what to tell you. Better data would be great, but based on your anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-science, comment history I'm not convinced that would be enough for you. I'm not interested in debating people with an obvious idealogical agenda, so good day to you.
  - charbonneau 5y ago
    Since I'm an anti-science woman on a quest to spread my anti-vax agenda, I've taken a look at the raw data. We're talking about 137 unvaccinated & 268 vaccinated patients >60 with severe disease (What kind of disease? Who cares, am I right?) So, based on this enormous (!) sample size with one (!) confounding factor (#FuckMedicalHistory), we conclude that of course there is an undeniable nine-fold difference. Why are we even doing randomized controlled trials? Just observe 137 & 268 patients retrospectively and frame critics as ideologues. A final word from an anti-vax activist: > Conversely, there was concern that observational data obtained from nonrandomized studies after vaccine deployment could yield unreliable answers. Observational studies are subject to substantial biases and are much less amenable to unambiguous interpretation. Their limitations are of particular concern during this public health emergency, because vaccinated and unvaccinated people will differ in their risk of exposure to infection and of serious disease, partly because of fluctuating attack rates and because during early phases of vaccine deployment, vaccinees may well be at particular risk of infection. In these circumstances, even carefully analyzed observational studies can yield misleading answers about safety and efficacy. In addition, unrelated events that occur by chance after vaccination may be incorrectly attributed to the vaccine, and such anecdotes may be deliberately promulgated by groups opposed to vaccination. [1] [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538