Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked

> Here’s a question: would you have preferred to live through a total travel ban and total lockdowns, like Australia’s, to save yourself 10-to-15 days of life?

> Is stopping that worth it to you?

> My personal answer is: No. It would not be worth it to me. I’d take that loss in expected lifespan, in order to travel and live freely for a couple years.

Virtually everyone's answer to that question is "no" because it's the wrong question. Phrasing this as THE question seems intellectually dishonest. There are a few better questions one might ask:

- If new diseases sweep through every so often, and each of them has a 20% chance of leading to long-term disability affecting a significant portion of the population, should we have a lock-down?

- If new diseases sweep through every so often, and a real world-wide lock-down means they don't become endemic for your children's children, is that worth it to you?

- If a disease sweeps through, and reduces the IQ of the general population by 5 points, is getting that under control worth it to you?

... and so on. I was never worried about COVID killing me. However, I was 100% in support of tight lockdowns, of the type which would have prevented COVID from becoming endemic, for reasons unrelated to my own risk of death.

I live in Australia and I absolutely hated our policy of mandatory vaccination, but I’m glad our lockdowns saved lives. Don’t reply telling me they weren’t mandatory either. For most people quitting work or study is not an option, so bugger off.

Just as we have to consider the price of people dying across the whole population, we also have to consider the price of lost liberty across the same population. If the average person in the population shares his preferences, that they would prefer liberty even at the risk of death, then the sum across that population of those values results in the same conclusion. The population as a whole will suffer more from loss of liberty than from excess deaths. And therefore the greatest good would follow from doing as they prefer rather than as you think that they should.

But that isn't what it actually looks like. What we actually have is about half the country who prefers liberty, and half who prefers life to be as long as possible. And this division corresponds fairly well to the existing political divide between Republicans and Democrats. Who are really good at not hearing each other already and so misrepresent each other's points. As you just did.

Now of course his argument is missing other harms that people have suffered. Such as the impact of long COVID. There are plenty volunteering to make that argument. I'm pointing out that the reverse is true as well. The cost of lockdowns includes widespread mental health problems, lost education, weight gain, increased alcohol consumption and so on. See https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/one-year-pan... for an idea of how common and how extreme these impacts are.

When you add up everything on both sides, it isn't obvious which side is better. I know my preference. Which is, of course, biased by my extreme experience. But in 20 years we will still be suffering from long COVID. We will also suffer from poor mental health, alcoholism, excess diabetes, and so on. It isn't clear which set of harms will be worse. But if you refuse to look at the harms that don't support your chosen position, then you literally are unable to even think about this.

It only takes one person in an apartment building to infect the whole building if the ventilation is poor.

Actually there is.

It is called VAERS, and the statistics on Absolute Risk Reduction.

> "The concept of risk, and our ability to assess risk, has also made the headlines in the context of the COVID-19 vaccine trials. Using data from a Nov 26 opinion piece in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), we can see that vaccine efficacy in terms of the relative reduction of the risk of getting ill is around 95%. For example, in the Pfizer trial, assuming an equal split of the 44,000 participants into the vaccine and placebo groups, 0.74% of the placebo group fell ill but only 0.04% of the vaccinated participants did. The relative risk reduction is calculated as the difference between these two incidences (0.7%) divided by the placebo value (0.74%), arriving at the conclusion that 95% of COVID-19 could be avoided if people got immunized. However, there is another way of looking that the same data: The risk reduction in absolute terms is only 0.7%, from an already very low risk of 0.74% to a minimal risk of 0.04%. Thus, risk reduction is 95%, but it also is just 0.7%." [1]

> "A critical appraisal of phase III clinical trial data for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna vaccine mRNA-1273 shows that absolute risk reduction measures are very much lower than the reported relative risk reduction measures. Yet, the manufacturers failed to report absolute risk reduction measures in publicly released documents. As well, the U.S FDA Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) did not follow FDA published guidelines for communicating risks and benefits to the public, and the committee failed to report absolute risk reduction measures in authorizing the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines for emergency use. Such examples of outcome reporting bias mislead and distort the public’s interpretation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine efficacy and violate the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent."

Now, you may want to argue this for higher risk groups with comorbidities. What about Absolute Risk for teenage males where the risk of covid 19 is a fatality of 1 in hundreds of thousands to millions, but an MRNA vaccine carries a significantly higher chance of pericarditis/myocarditis, not to mention other AEs? What about athletes where the risk of a vaccine increases the chance the injection will not be intramusculuar, but instead, intravenous?

Some of the of the MRNA vaccines effect on the heart was not known at launch [2]

Anecdotally, I know two people that had severe adverse events to the vaccine, one almost died. The chances of that happening with a safe vaccine are miniscule. One of the aforementioned was likewise a healthy athlete with no comorbidities, in excellent health, of young age.

[1] https://www.oyetimes.com/views/op-eds/341030-covid-19-vaccin...

[2] https://drjessesantiano.com/study-shows-spike-proteins-affec...