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Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

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Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#41

Post by exo-pla-net »

frumiousirc wrote: post #26

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 conseq…

To clarify what you're concluding:

It's a given that you do not want to contract COVID-19. Vaccination and wearing a mask will help.

You also do not want to give COVID-19 to others. Again, vaccination and wearing a mask will help.

So this article is just pedantry over a statistical quirk.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#42

Post by roenxi »

alecst wrote: post #11

I took the bait, I'm ashamed. I try to keep an open mind, so I read some of it. 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 look…

> 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.

The author is actually in the range of an interesting point, even if the article is mostly foolish. If I had a hypothetical vaccine that was in fact composed of neurotoxin and killed the injectee instantly ... it would show 100% effectiveness in the cited tables, because the corpses would be unable to contract COVID. So you can't actually tell if the vaccine reduces your odds of getting sick and dying - we know the current crop are a bit rough and kill people in rare cases.

Covid deaths are so low in the 16-44 category that may be comparable to the vaccine. Although I think the hospitalisation numbers are still quite persuasive in favour of the vaccine.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#43

Post by azakai »

alecst wrote: post #11

I took the bait, I'm ashamed. I try to keep an open mind, so I read some of it. 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 look…

It's even worse than that. Aside from deviations, this is a main point in the article:

> The death rate if infected was always going to be higher in the vaccinated groups if most of the vaccinated were those likely to die in the first place.

IOW: Those most likely to die were most likely to get vaccinated. Obviously true, but not interesting - a correlation we need to account for. When you do control for prior risk, the results are as expected, i.e., vaccines make you much safer.

The quoted tweet ("100x") was inaccurate and exaggerated. That's worth briefly correcting. But the lengthy article's points are only minor and pedantic, and do not change what we know, which is that our vaccines are very effective.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#45

Post by devwastaken »

jtbayly wrote: post #34
devwastaken wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has to prove it's wrong. Analysis of studies is months of work in very specific domain knowledge. You're not going to find good rebuttals to medical data reviews in a comments section unless there's glaring issues and you happen to attract the attention of someone that knows better. Those people are generally not in comment sections, but working 80 hours a week.

So, you are rejecting the medical studies done by the UK and Israel on the effectiveness of the vaccines because... why exactly?

You should do research into "logical fallacy" and "intellectual dishonesty" before commenting on the internet. I never said I rejected those medical studies, I am saying the review of those studies, is, in itself, difficult to refute without a lot of time and domain knowledge. That's true of any complex topic.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#46

Post by joophro »

yadaeno wrote: post #39
joophro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

If we took your suggestion and let everyone get natural immunity, in the US alone this would cause 2.5 million deaths (not considering new mutations). This is unacceptable to any sane person, and does not require a massive global conspiracy propaganda campaign to convince people of. https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/verify...

You realize you are posting an article from September 2020 that claims that COVID has a death rate north of 3%, which we now know to be wildly untrue, right?

Christ almighty, the vaccines-are-the-only-solution crowd is statistically illiterate and lazy. Just embarrassing.

Not only are you numbers unsound, but your position is only true if you accept the false dichotomy of “vaccines or nothing”. Prophylaxis options are available, but they’re out of patent, so they’re ignored and torpedoed by your holy CDC and WHO high priests who live in the pockets of big pharma.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#47

Post by rantwasp »

lefrenchy wrote: post #36

In the “ What the numbers really showed” you use the lack of vaccinated sample size to justify something for the unvaccinated, but then immediately use that small number to your advantage to say “if 24 people had died then the vaccinated would have a higher death rate”. It’s disingenuous and doesn’t show anything. Also if the vaccine prevents contraction then it should be counted as preventing death/hospitalization,…

yes. the “if” maneuver for the mental gymnastics gold! cannot believe i wasted my time reading this pedantry

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#48

Post by asdfkljgisjg9 »

azakai wrote: post #43
alecst wrote: post #11

I took the bait, I'm ashamed. I try to keep an open mind, so I read some of it. 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 look…

It's even worse than that. Aside from deviations, this is a main point in the article: > The death rate if infected was always going to be higher in the vaccinated groups if most of the vaccinated were those likely to die in the first place. IOW: Those most likely to die were most likely to get vaccinated. Obviously true, but not interesting - a correlation we need to account for. When you do control for prior risk,…

Everybody is misrepresenting this article badly. Here is what it says that is important:

> The person who incorrectly assumes that “with the vaccine, even if I get infected I am less likely to die than I would be without the vaccine,” will be more likely to engage in behavior that risks infection. They may become the “it’s just a flu bro” of the vaccinated.

> If the lack of observed layered protection were made more explicit then people may choose to still wear masks and social distance, to further reduce their exposure in addition to vaccination. They may choose to go to fewer social events. This in turn would reduce the infection rate, and reduce the probability a mutation that evades vaccination finds a host to practice on. (While writing this article, the White House changed its masking recommendation for the vaccinated)

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#49

Post by pkilgore »

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.

I flagged it because of the inflammatory title in no way bears the weight of the rather simplistic claim this article writes conspiratorially at length to make:

The evidence that vaccination reduces the severity or decreases mortality of COVID-19 infection is not as strong as the evidence that vaccination prevents COVID-19 infection entirely.

Where are the "damn lies"? We're talking about splitting hairs in the interpretation of twitter posts that evidence does support. It's interesting, but exactly this kind of inflammatory language is what I will always flag on HN, whether it be about COVID or VIM vs. EMACs.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#50

Post by forcry »

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…

>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.

Changing the way you categorise death can do wonders..

> Q Can you talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported by coronavirus because of either testing or standards for how they’re characterized?

> DR. BIRX: So, I think, in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem — some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now, we’re still recording it, and we’ll — I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection — the intent is, right now, that those — if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

Now, imagine if, after vaccine rollout, we counts those deaths as cause by a heart condition. Boom. Drop in covid deaths! Vaccines worked! Hail pharma!

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