6 ms·

I would appreciate some links. All I could find from brief googling looks more like a sales pitch than an unbiased study. Looking at absolute hospitalization pr

I would appreciate some links. All I could find from brief googling looks more like a sales pitch than an unbiased study. Looking at absolute hospitalization prevention numbers without controls, making no distinction between incidental COVID vs. hospitalized for respiratory symptoms, and other tricks that belong to a used car salesman's arsenal, rather than a scientific context. And the disclaimers how "no, no, no, I'm not against the vaccines" remind me of the mandatory praises to Allah you would find in the papers originating from certain Middle Eastern countries.

csee 5y ago
Shouldn't introducing controls make vaccines look even better, because the old are more likely to be vaccinated? Suppose 100% of old people and 0% of young people are vaccinated. Even if the vaccines are moderately effective, most of the deaths would be in old people, giving the false impression that they don't work. > I would appreciate some links. UK Surveillance Report. Most of the bigger countries have published data.
- beagle3 5y ago
  The only ever double blind RCT of the Pfizer vaccine (that done by Pfizer themselves) found 24% increase in all cause mortality (21 in vaccine arm vs 17 in placebo arm, each group 22,000 of reasonably health mostly 20-50 year olds)
  - csee 5y ago
    How many of them had COVID when they died? Probably not many or none, right?
    - peteradio 5y ago
      Death by Covid is somehow more important than other causes of death?
      - csee 5y ago
        Death with Covid is the baseline requirement (although, ideally, we look at death by Covid, even though that's methodologically difficult) for the above data to have any meaning for the question of whether vaccines work. Suppose there's 0 Covid cases over the study period. Then this is exactly the result we expect to see. Approximately half the deaths being among the vaccinated, and half the deaths being among the unvaccinated. Because there's going to be heart attacks and so on in the two cohorts over the study window.
        peteradio 5y ago
        Sorry, I think I'm confused, it sounds like all-cause mortality is not the important number to be looking at in your opinion? The person you responded to reports more deaths in the vaccinated group. But you were querying about Covid deaths. Why would you ignore the larger all cause death and concern yourself only with Covid deaths? Suppose someone offered you a pill. They say with certainty that you can trust that it will prevent you from dying of Covid but increase your likelihood of dying of something else by so much that your overall likelihood of dying actually increases. Is that some pill you'd want to take? edit: I just finally got your point about a period with zero covid cases. Kind of makes sense, but how could you ever use that to make a claim about a vaccines effectiveness if there is known zero challenge?
        csee 5y ago
        If the difference was statistically significant, sure. But it isn't, is it? ~50% of the time, the vaccinated group will have more deaths by chance, even if the vaccine is safe - assuming either little to no community spread during the study, or a small study of young people. All this result shows is that the vaccine isn't effective at preventing car crashes, which is something we already knew.
        beagle3 5y ago
        I urge you to actually read the report - https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download on page 23 has the latest counts (21:17) and no exact list of causes, but an earlier version https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.supplementary-material https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v... which only lists 15:14 deaths, page 12 does list causes: There are 4 deaths from cardiac arrest in the vaccine arm, vs. 1 in the placebo; and 1 death from covid vs. 2 in the placebo. Taken altogether, especially with what we now know about myocarditis/pericarditis risk from the vaccine, non trivial input. And I don't know if you're aware, but the original (dec 2020) approval basically rested on 4:1 placebo:vaccine severe cases. It was approved based on statistically insignificant data, but somehow the same counts of death is not even interesting. Depending on your model, 21:17 may or may not be statistically significant. I didn't see any "official" modeling of that, especially given that "no deaths were attributed to the vaccine" - if your model says something can't happen, it obviously can't statistically happen ..... There is one "death" (which might as well be a car crash) out of the 29=(15+14) causes listed. All others are medical.

csee 5y ago

Shouldn't introducing controls make vaccines look even better, because the old are more likely to be vaccinated? Suppose 100% of old people and 0% of young people are vaccinated. Even if the vaccines are moderately effective, most of the deaths would be in old people, giving the false impression that they don't work. > I would appreciate some links. UK Surveillance Report. Most of the bigger countries have published data.

beagle3 5y ago
The only ever double blind RCT of the Pfizer vaccine (that done by Pfizer themselves) found 24% increase in all cause mortality (21 in vaccine arm vs 17 in placebo arm, each group 22,000 of reasonably health mostly 20-50 year olds)
- csee 5y ago
  How many of them had COVID when they died? Probably not many or none, right?
  - peteradio 5y ago
    Death by Covid is somehow more important than other causes of death?
    - csee 5y ago
      Death with Covid is the baseline requirement (although, ideally, we look at death by Covid, even though that's methodologically difficult) for the above data to have any meaning for the question of whether vaccines work. Suppose there's 0 Covid cases over the study period. Then this is exactly the result we expect to see. Approximately half the deaths being among the vaccinated, and half the deaths being among the unvaccinated. Because there's going to be heart attacks and so on in the two cohorts over the study window.
      - peteradio 5y ago
        Sorry, I think I'm confused, it sounds like all-cause mortality is not the important number to be looking at in your opinion? The person you responded to reports more deaths in the vaccinated group. But you were querying about Covid deaths. Why would you ignore the larger all cause death and concern yourself only with Covid deaths? Suppose someone offered you a pill. They say with certainty that you can trust that it will prevent you from dying of Covid but increase your likelihood of dying of something else by so much that your overall likelihood of dying actually increases. Is that some pill you'd want to take? edit: I just finally got your point about a period with zero covid cases. Kind of makes sense, but how could you ever use that to make a claim about a vaccines effectiveness if there is known zero challenge?
        csee 5y ago
        If the difference was statistically significant, sure. But it isn't, is it? ~50% of the time, the vaccinated group will have more deaths by chance, even if the vaccine is safe - assuming either little to no community spread during the study, or a small study of young people. All this result shows is that the vaccine isn't effective at preventing car crashes, which is something we already knew.
        beagle3 5y ago
        I urge you to actually read the report - https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download on page 23 has the latest counts (21:17) and no exact list of causes, but an earlier version https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.supplementary-material https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v... which only lists 15:14 deaths, page 12 does list causes: There are 4 deaths from cardiac arrest in the vaccine arm, vs. 1 in the placebo; and 1 death from covid vs. 2 in the placebo. Taken altogether, especially with what we now know about myocarditis/pericarditis risk from the vaccine, non trivial input. And I don't know if you're aware, but the original (dec 2020) approval basically rested on 4:1 placebo:vaccine severe cases. It was approved based on statistically insignificant data, but somehow the same counts of death is not even interesting. Depending on your model, 21:17 may or may not be statistically significant. I didn't see any "official" modeling of that, especially given that "no deaths were attributed to the vaccine" - if your model says something can't happen, it obviously can't statistically happen ..... There is one "death" (which might as well be a car crash) out of the 29=(15+14) causes listed. All others are medical.