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Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

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Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#321

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

cogman10 wrote: post #276
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if only the second type exists, but they always claim to be the first?

The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.

> The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism.

My opinion is that on the specific topic at hand of COVID-19 vaccine "scepticism", we are far past the point of rational scepticism being sustainable.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#322

Post by creer »

btilly wrote: post #263
acjohnson55 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Papers like this are designed to fit into the conventions that allow knowledge to compound. Not that the conventions are perfect at doing this. I would suggest that rather than changing this convention in a big way, there needs to be good pathways for communicating the most important takeaways to the general public. Unfortunately, there's kind of a chasm between academia and popular science.

With all due respect, I disagree. You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job. I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediatel…

It would be nice if academics would move to BOTH publishing the technical write up, AND a more understandable write up of their interpretation of the result (in more detail than the one liner which is in all abstracts.)

The technical writeup is necessary. It's what spells out what they specifically claim to have done, and the specific results. "Specific" being highly technical and fundamental in the scientific community understanding the paper correctly. In particular, the in-depth statistics of many such papers is simply too complex for most of the population to understand, and that's fine. The technical write-up uses terms of art which do not mean what civilians read in them. (And while it's hard to do studies larger than this one, this is all the more essential in smaller studies.)

The interpretation would be useful because it's just plain dangerous to let your PR department write that. Even if they consult you. And it is interesting to focus on what the scientists themselves think they achieved. Both what they deliberately went for, and any ancillary result they think they notice. In this case in particular, they are very focused on this safety aspect, and they seem to not want to give too much attention to the efficacy aspect (which they probably did not plan for and is then suspect.)

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#323

Post by armada651 »

binary132 wrote: post #275
CrossVR wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.

perfectly understandable and you’ve described a reasonable decision-making process any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the alternative hypothesis was not an equally accepted decision many people chose severe penalties rather than participate in a sudden worldwide field trial of mRNA vaccination by indemnified pharmaceutical companies, and in some parts of the world were not even given that choice.

We were also subjected to a sudden worldwide field trial of a novel coronavirus, so it makes sense that it requires a similar response to combat it. I think in any other decade this would've been celebrated as a major scientific achievement.

If the moon landing happened today people would just be cynical about it just being an arms race with the Soviet Union to develop better ICBMs. This is of course true, but it doesn't make the achievement any less impressive.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#324

Post by rsynnott »

misiti3780 wrote: post #264
ceejayoz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy who says HIV is caused by poppers?

i was referring to this https://youtu.be/P3nXJB5PoBM?t=39

I assume their point is that, ah, the opinion of someone who thinks AIDS is _caused by poppers_ on anything medical, or, indeed, probably on _anything_, may be safely discounted, on the basis that they are clearly insane.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#325

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

zosima wrote: post #61
eddieroger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).

The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths. Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination. This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups. Therefore this paper is mod…

I think that's mostly fair, but given that we can't randomly assign vaccine administration this sort of study is the best we're gonna get.

Like, the major takeaway is that the vaccine is safe, I think that we've already established that it works to reduce Covid hospitalisations.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#326

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

pygy_ wrote: post #300
pygy_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors. Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection. People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.

Another factor that may play a role: the people who chose not to take the vaccine may be prone to taking bad decisions more broadly, leading to a higher mortality rate.

I mean, it's plausibly something around trust in medical authorities which correlates with both vaccine and other treatment refusal.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#327

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

a_cardboard_box wrote: post #68
eddieroger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).

Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.

It's a term of art. The audience for this paper would understand, rather like many denizens of HN know what TDD is.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#328

Post by cogman10 »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #321
cogman10 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.

> The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. My opinion is that on the specific topic at hand of COVID-19 vaccine "scepticism", we are far past the point of rational scepticism being sustainable.

I agree.

5 years of vaccination of a large portion of the population with no negative signs in sight is long enough.

The only vapor keeping this alive is anecdotes from confused people or liars about "vaccine injury".

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#329

Post by oldgradstudent »

deepspace wrote: post #228
emtel wrote: post #198

From the paper: > The main causes of death were cancer (769 and 853 cases per million in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, respectively), external causes of mortality (493 and 597 cases per million, including, among others, unintentional injuries, such as transportation crashes, falls, and drownings, as well as suicides or self-inflicted injuries) and diseases of the circulatory system (282 and 367 cases per m…

I do not see any 'radical difference' in the numbers. Individuals who choose not to get vaccinated are likely to be less informed and more reckless in other aspects of managing their health and their lives in general, so the relatively small difference between the populations is perfectly understandable.

You're basically saying that the study compares two distinct populations that differ in many other aspects rather than just by vaccine.

Why then do you ascribe the difference in mortality to the vaccine?

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#330

Post by [deleted] »

oxag3n wrote: post #277

I'm a bit uneasy about so many people being pro-science and still falling into all the fallacies scientific method tried to address. Disclaimer: I'm pro vaccine, I do think Covid vaccines saved a lot of lives. I still think the risk is relatively low even after getting an onset of auto-immune disease 3 days after the shot (diagnosis confirmed 2 years after it started after mRNA booster) and sister in law getting anot…

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