Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant • Hacker News Board

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#211

Post by sjwalter » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #201

sjwalter wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, statistics can make a case for anything. Life expectancy went down, but the average age of a covid death was 82 years old, meaning half were older than 82. These octogenarians and older are pulling the average life expectancy up every year they continue living. It would be a way different story to have the average life expectancy go down because a bunch of, say, 20 year olds died.

Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works. And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year. When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal. Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.

It depends on how it drops by 1.2

If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens.

To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy.

Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome.

But to you, it's 1.2 either way.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#212

Post by Auracle » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #185

Auracle wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve probably had some long COVID symptoms myself, but self reporting on something like this is next to worthless. You’ve got a mix of the placebo effect with people that had COVID attributing everything negative after to it, all backed with the media constantly reminding them of long COVID.

I think "nocebo" is the better term in this case.

Maybe, though I've never understood why there needs to be separate words for positive and negative effects.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#213

Post by hawkice » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

sjwalter wrote: post #211

bena wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works. And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year. When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal. Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.

It depends on how it drops by 1.2 If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens. To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy. Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality…

> nowhere near a tragedy

It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird.

edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#214

Post by SuoDuanDao » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #204

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have autonomy over their own medical decisions.

Ah. So I took your use of the word "want" more literally than you seem to have intended it. I "want" everyone to get the vaccine. You seem to be specifically calling out the desire to "compel" which I am much more ambivalent about. (I'd probably be in favour of "incentivising" with a careful eye on unintended blowback). But the phrase "finger waggers" is just divisive and raises the temperature. I'd strongly suggest…

Fair enough. As I mentioned elsewhere, the same people I'm referring to were trying to shame anyone who wore a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with no gain in self-awareness since. I consider that type of unreflective desire to compel dangerous to democracy and opposing it something of a civic duty, I can get a bit overzealous when speaking against it.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#215

Post by Auracle » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

agent008t wrote: post #206

Auracle wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve probably had some long COVID symptoms myself, but self reporting on something like this is next to worthless. You’ve got a mix of the placebo effect with people that had COVID attributing everything negative after to it, all backed with the media constantly reminding them of long COVID.

Even if it is placebo effect - so what? Placebo effect is still real and has real world consequences. If someone has higher levels of fatigue, or is more susceptible to depression or anxiety after COVID (both symptoms of long COVID) - is it any consolation to them that 'it is all in their head'? It is still an effect that must be considered and that must be studied and treated.

The things that would be studied would be quite different.

Real long COVID - are there still viruses or virus fragments in the body? Is it a minor autoimmune condition? Is it due to damage that the virus did? Is severity of initial disease progression linked to severity of long COVID effects?

Placebo long COVID - To what extent are people susceptible to media influence when it comes to disease effects? Are people in blue states more likely to get it than those in red states? What can be done to assure people that there's nothing wrong with them?

Also, if they acknowledge it might all be in their head then any placebo/nocebo effects might in fact go away.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#216

Post by BeetleB » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #91

vmception wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then turn off the news. You need to look for actual signals such as availability of emergency services. Hospital capacity.

Is it feasible to “turn off the news” in 2021? I’m not so sure.

What is the difficulty?

Don't browse news sites (including HN if the stuff here gets you down). Don't use social media where you have poor control of what gets in your feed. If you have contacts who keep sending you news, ask them to stop and if they won't, put them in an ignore list. If your in-person contacts with friends is always about the news, limit the time you spend with them.

Substitute that time with other things - be it other sites, hobbies or activities. Reading novels can be a lot of fun. Building things, etc.

It is in your hands.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#217

Post by kristjansson » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

datameta wrote: post #95

refurb wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very fact you’re suggesting every country locks down for 3-4 weeks” as a solution shows youre ignoring reality. All it would take is for 1 person to travel for the epidemic to continue. Maybe developed nations could do it but developing nations are still dealing with illegal border crossers even 1 year into the epidemic. So great theory but it falls flat in reality.

In my scenario travel in both directions would be disallowed for the time period. This also requires neighboring nations to do the same, as well as farther off countries to implement checks at the airport. All this was somewhat done regardless but in a haphazard manner devoid of full international cooperation. So we suffered the major drawbacks anyway all while reaping a partial reward.

And if we banned all drugs, all drug use would stop too?

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#218

Post by mmastrac » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

sjwalter wrote: post #210

mmastrac wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your attempt at reading my internal mindstate was wrong, I'm afraid. I was simply correcting your assertions that have not been backed up by real data, and the fact that you've glossed over the changes in the virus that have been observed in the wild over the last few months. But let's talk about this: having an immune system be as strong as possible is not a good thing. Weak immune systems are bad. Overly "strong" i…

> "Natural immunity" to COVID is no different ($) than vaccine immunity You can't find any studies to back this up, can you? It'll be hard without clarification at first, because it's not clear what you mean--do you mean "natural immunity" as in somebody who, when encountering the virus for the first time, has an immune system which fights off the infection without any symptoms and low/no transmission to other hosts?…

> You can't find any studies to back this up, can you?

The "($)" which you quoted indicates a reference at the bottom of my comment, where I linked a study that explicitly showed that natural immunity from COVID and vaccine immunity are similar (but fully-vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine is best).

I don't believe you're willing to have a conversation in good faith, as you are clearly anti-vaccine. Good day.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#219

Post by mindslight » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #192

mindslight wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the priority, but the latter types are ultimately still imposing the consequences of their decisions onto others - their extended families when they want to visit, their friendships where they can't help but pushing the nonsense into every conversation, public spaces if they're not actually continuing to wear a mask and social distance, institutions that are going back to business as usual (eg schools), et…

Unfortunately, when places like the world's largest video site censor debates between different medical professionals on the topic, it's hard to be confident how rare those well-reasoned viewpoints actually are.

Even without the censorship, the non well-reasoned narratives would still drown out the well-reasoned ones. The social media hypothesis that many opinions could be distilled down into useful information has been a failure.

So I'm speaking locally based on the people that I know personally who have bought into the "skepticism", and they don't seem well-reasoned at all. For example, one sent me a video saying that Covid is caused by 5G and asked my opinion (thank goodness for small things). I responded with corrections of specific technical claims in the video, only to have them fall back to relativism because "nobody can know". Ultimately the manipulation and conviction in the video won out over scientific facts. It's like the new dark ages.

Also, there are also Internet forums with a higher signal to noise ratio than effortless-publishing mass-media, and I do believe that if there were anything worthwhile it would gain momentum.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#220

Post by bena » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

sjwalter wrote: post #211

bena wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works. And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year. When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal. Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.

It depends on how it drops by 1.2 If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens. To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy. Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality…

If half are over 82, what does that make the other half?

I'll wait for you to figure that one out.

1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened.

Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible".

I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy.

Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?