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I have realized that the Fenton & Neil trick logically can't explain VE against death if we use, say, a 6 months or 1 year window to calculate it. The Fenton &
by csee 5y ago
I have realized that the Fenton & Neil trick logically can't explain VE against death if we use, say, a 6 months or 1 year window to calculate it. The Fenton & Neil trick only has a non-trivial impact when looking at the instantaneous percentage. If you expand the sliding window to 1 year, the trick's impact asymptotes to zero and simply can not explain a high VE.
Moreover, the way he's set up the example exaggerates the effect. He's assuming that 78% of the population gets vaccinated between weeks 6 and 11! Not even Israel is that quick. This is a moot point, anyway, given the above.
Given Fenton & Neil can't explain it, what other explanation is there for a high VE against death, when that VE is calculated using 6-12 months of data?
> Exactly. The RCT shows neither that the intervention is effective or safe.
So you have moved me a bit on this. I now believe:
- The RCT shows that the vaccine is highly effective at preventing infection itself in a previous strain.
- The RCT can't possibly show that the vaccine is effective at preventing Covid mortality (due to lack of Covid circulation over study window).
- The RCT can't possibly show that the vaccine is safe within the bounds of a 20-50% death rate increase.
- The RCT shows that the vaccine isn't so dangerous as to be massively increasing the death rate (within the limitations of N=44,000 power).
> Israel's 20-29 mortality
Yes, it's interesting for sure.
It could still be noise. You dismiss the 2017-2018 dip because it was "repaid". However there's no mechanism for repayment. The 2017-2018 data is i.i.d. barring some understanding of what's driving it (e.g. knowledge of a war or something). The existence of the repayment is really further evidence that the bump in 2021 could be noise. That dip & repayment both show that this level of random variance is to be expected in this data - we've seen it twice.
BUT! Given that these are largely cardiac deaths, and we see it in 3 different age bands at the same time, and we know the mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis, I think you could be right about the interpretation.
I just want to see it in other countries. If it's really driving mortality in this way, we should be able to find it elsewhere.
- beagle3 5y agoI think we are in agreement about most things. Did you check the cdc link? Do you have a theory for the rising curve? Re:the “repayment” - every single person can be modeled I.I.d, but the event of death of each person is an increasing failure rate function. Someone who is in bad condition will (a) die at a significant challenge, be it flu, Covid, or other reasons; and (b) will only die once. In that sense there’s repayment - a weak flu season gives some people 6-12 until the next bad season, but usually not much more if a bad flu year would have killed them. This is known as “dry tinder” hypothesis in epidemiology. It’s not a law of nature, or a certainty, but has been observed in the past in some cases. Thank you very much for an enriching, respectful conversation. Really uncommon on this subject these days.
- csee 5y agoI can think of 3 reasons: - vaccines are killing people - undiagnosed covid / long covid is killing people - something innocuous like the reporting methodology has changed and this category is acting like a residual What makes me think it probably isn't vaccines is that the "Diseases of Heart" category didn't spike. The working hypothesis is that the mRNA vaccines are killing people primarily via myocarditis and heart attacks. I would've thought that this category would therefore have spiked if that was the case? I'd like to see how many of these are young men, I think that that would be revealing.