Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

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.

Okay… but how much less likely are you to get “infected”?

How are you even defining “infected”, here? If virus gets in your body and then your immune system kills it before it does much damage, were you “infected”? If the answer is no, you've got pretty serious selection bias, because you're completely ignoring everyone who was completely protected by the vaccine in the “vaccinated” group, but paying attention to everyone who didn't really need a vaccine in the “unvaccinated” group: basically ignoring all the really-healthy, great-immune-systems, unlikely-to-die people in the “vaccinated” group so, proportionally, the sicker people take up more room. So you can't even say that the vaccine makes things worse for them! If it improves their chances by 100 times, as Dr. Tom said, but the selection bias is only paying attention to the 0.2% least immune people (those who got infected when exposed after vaccination), you'd expect to see a 5× higher death rate even though the actual death rate is 0.99× lower. (Made-up numbers.)

We should be as accurate as possible with when talking about vaccine but throwing around statics(or should we say "Vaccine Statistics") like:

> "the death rate among the vaccinated, if infected with COVID, can be 3 to 5.7 times higher than the death rate of the unvaccinated."

is not exactly providing the big picture context needed for a productive social discussion.

The article suggests focusing "real efficacy". Before the vaccine program started there were ~4000 deaths per day in the US, now there are ~100. Clearly it is very effective at reducing death.

Thanks for vouching for it.

It makes tons of sense that those who are vaccinated and get infected are more likely to die, simply because it would indicate a failure to develop antibodies and mount an effective immune response to the virus.

That being said I’m not sure such a rant is justified over a tweet like this. Dr. Frieden is more or less correct if you slightly re-word his sentence to: “Getting vaccinated decreases the chance of dying by approximately 100x”.

What I take home from this is that everyone is human, can make simple mistakes, and that we take things written on Twitter far too seriously. I’m sure that Dr. Frieden would not have made such a mistake if he wrote an article that was published somewhere reputable instead of a tweet that could have been sent while waiting for his coffee at Starbucks, or using the toilet.

There is a trade off in communicating science to the public in that using social media, TV, and newspapers reaches more people but almost always distorts the message. I’m not sure how exactly to balance this trade off, but I also think that some amount of responsibility lies with the reader to seek the truth instead of demanding that every sentence they read on the internet be as accurate as a peer reviewed journal.