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Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

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Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#21

Post by sb057 »

mc32 wrote: post #3

The case for the vaccine sells itself. Why do professionals get in the business of exaggeration when it serves no useful purpose than to provide excuses and doubt to the hesitant. Also. Often when officials state things with exaggerated and unwarranted certainty, take it with a grain of salt. PS why isn’t Twitter marking such as misinformation? My guess, it fits their narrative, so it gets a pass.

There's a natural predilection for some people that, when presented with bullshit (in this case "5g mIcROchIPS"), go in the complete opposite direction and start spewing bullshit themselves, but based on the opposite underlying truth.

This same phenomenon is easily witnessed in other contexts, including politics (Q-Anon vs. zany Kremlin theories), and science (climate change deniers vs. climate doomsday seers).

I'm unsure what the cause or solution to this is, but I think sage advice would be to approach always assume the worst for your side of the story. Don't try and stretch data to fit your worldview. If your position doesn't hold up under the harshest scrutiny that you can give it, it's not a position worth holding.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#22

Post by roenxi »

This article does actually make an interesting point, but its graphs are all bunk.

The vaccine works by priming the immune system to work quickly against a disease. It is quite likely that if someone develops symptoms despite their body being at peak alert for coronavirus then they are in trouble. The graphs bear that out, and do not alarm me. If we only select for cases where the person is physically susceptible enough for the virus to break through the vaccine protections to cause an infection it makes sense that the cases will be on average worse.

But there is an interesting point here that if the vaccine were killing people (eg, heart inflammation problems have been detected in some cases) then the "COVID-19-related-death" stats, etc, would be highly misleading. It would be more interesting to see all-cause mortality and the cited tables don't do that.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#23

Post by yadaeno »

hereforphone wrote: post #14
aikinai wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only a religious debate in the US where Trump tied it directly to a certain identity people desperately want to maintain or distance themselves from.

I've never heard it referred to as a religious debate in the US. When I hear about anti-vaxxers complaining, it's from a perceived freedom (not religion) standpoint. Maybe there are exceptions for some religious minorities, but I have yet to hear them.

The religion in this case is US partisanship, which somehow the vaccine seems to be getting sucked into.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#24

Post by mortehu »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #13

> The real world data has shown that the death rate among the vaccinated, if infected with COVID, can be 3 to 5.7 times higher1 than the death rate of the unvaccinated. 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 pre…

The author uses "evidence of infection" as the definition of infection, and labels all other definitions as misinformation, and writes at length about it as if it was not just a difference in definitions.

Obviously most of the people the author is criticizing are using "exposure that would cause detectable disease in non-immune individuals" as their definition, and I don't know if we have a better word for that.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#25

Post by riedel »

hsnewman wrote: post #2

I don't believe everything that is posted on the internet.

One really has to ask why some one cares to write such a long blog post instead of simply publish the analysis to Lancet if it is so new and overlooked. Does the author expect to get careful reviews? I would care if I am publishing something that easily can also be misguide policy makers. If the author is correct from my understanding one should see more deaths and more hospitalised relative to the incidence in countries with high vaccination rates. We do see the opposite afaik. Did I get something wrong? But isn't that the claim: now mostly thoseppl just do not get infected which never would have died anyways?? Can someone please enlighten me, but there seems to be a major flaw in that analysis.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#26

Post by frumiousirc »

There is a slippery joint conditional probability here. The article talks mostly of:

Pd1 = Prob(death GIVEN infected AND vaccinated)

vs

Pd2 = Prob(death GIVEN infected AND NOT vaccinated)

Which makes it easy to lose site of:

Pi1 = Prob(infected GIVEN vaccinated)

which is very very small compared to its opposite:

Pi2 = Prob(infected GIVEN NOT vaccinated)

Because Pi1 is so much smaller than Pi2 there are several consequences for Pd1 and Pd2:

- The small counts for "numerator" of Pd1 (zero in some cases) means large uncertainty in the ratio and that the centroid of the distribution is not particularly meaningful. Statistical fluctuations (just one more or one less death) will change Pd1 substantially.

- Statistically significant deviations between Pd1 and Pd2 do not point to a cause.

For example, it could be that those contributing to Pd1 all got a much higher viral load in order for the virus to break through the vaccine's defenses and high viral loads are known to correlate with death so once vax protection is defeated it is game over. The distribution of viral load exposure may even be the same in the Pd2 case, but for the unvaccinated a lesser load can be fatal. This explanation is consistent with P1d possibly being greater than P2d AND consistent with the given anecdotes of vaccinated tweeters saying covid is just the flu, bro.

The main take away is still: you do NOT want to get this shit and vaccine AND masking will help achieve that goal. And, unless you are a sociopath, you do NOT want to give this shit and vaccine AND masking will help achieve that goal.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#27

Post by jtbayly »

alecst wrote: post #18
jtbayly wrote: post #9

This post was flagged. I just vouched for it. I read the whole thing. As far as I can tell, it is accurate. There is not a single comment pointing out any error or misinformation or lie or damned lie. Unless somebody can show that the data and/or interpretation are wrong, it should not be flagged.

The post has been up for an hour. The people who will write those comments pointing out errors are probably taking their time to read it and write those comments.

So, to be clear, you're simply assuming that this article is false because... reasons?

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#28

Post by joophro »

yadaeno wrote: post #15

This article fails to mention the BY FAR most significant benefit of the vaccine which is: achieving herd immunity 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…

Herd immunity can be achieved with natural immunity + inoculation + therapeutic/chemo prophylaxis. The only time in history where natural immunity has been considered insufficient for the goal of herd immunity is 2020+. WHO went as far as changing their definition of herd immunity last year to exclude natural immunity (check the way back machine).

Leaky vaccines can also cause mutation pressure on viruses, but the only acceptable public position is that the unvaccinated are causing the more virulent strains.

Propaganda from the top down to sell more (in patent) pharmaceutical products, with force and public shame. Think about this for a moment: someone at WHO identified their herd immunity definition on their website and willingly modified it to exclude natural immunity. Ask yourself how that is in any way scientific or appropriate. It is scientific gaslighting and the only explanation is a desire to sell more vaccines.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#30

Post by iten »

The author makes a critical mistake when analyzing the BNT/Pfizer clinical trial. Over and over when discussing the results they mention calculating efficacy against "infections" using this data. But this specific clinical trial provided no data about infections. The metric measured was symptomatic COVID-19 disease.

This kind of mistake is understandable, but doesn't really inspire much confidence in a screed about the mistakes others are making in analyzing COVID-19 data.

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