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Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

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Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#51

Post by User23 »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #41
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.

The key insight of the article was that errors are reliably ignored or excused when they fit the desired narrative.

It's not hard to see how that would be effective anti-persuasion for persons inclined to have doubts about receiving an emergency authorized intervention. Rigorous honesty[1] would assuredly persuade at least some of those people and thus would raise the population vaccination rate, which I'm sure we all agree is a desirable outcome.

[1] For example, rather than chanting the mantra "safe and effective!" being honest about the tradeoffs and showing that proven risk management strategy indicates vaccination is the mathematically optimal choice.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#52

Post by breathe_dah »

Here's what I'm failing to understand.

According to most major studies coming out (including this one: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/227713/coronavirus-infection...), with the advent of delta variant, the vaccinated have about a 50% less chance of getting infected than unvaccinated people.

If we assume the vaccine offers no additional protection against hospitalization/death given that one is already infected (which is what the author seems to be arguing), then what we should be seeing is 67% of hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated, yet we're seeing the rate closer to 97%. So there's obviously something going on here, and the most likely culprit would be that the vaccine does offer protection against hospitalization/death, contrary to the author's argument.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#53

Post by ihunter2839 »

Not directly related to the article, but - I am extremely disappointed that this article was flagged. It certainly displays the general inability for people to openly analyze ideas and narratives that (at first glance) appear to go against their beliefs. I feel like this type of censorship across platforms is only adding ammunition to the persecution complex of those who are already skeptical of the vaccine.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#54

Post by atc »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #41
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.

> 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.

How does that explain delta spread being biggest in highly vaccinated countries?

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#55

Post by dennis_jeeves »

chewz wrote: post #6

My theory - pandemic is mostly a religious event. Mind that much of world religions is mostly anti-epidemic advice presented as God's commands (with some world creation myth and some moral advice on top). So people are prone to react with religious fervor in response to each epidemics. And since the main purpose of religion is dividing people on Us vs Them (Us - clean and moral, Them - stained and evil) this is exact…

Fully agree, it's actually good old religion, if one can identify the underpinning tones, even if there is a modicum of truth in all of it.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#56

Post by ihunter2839 »

pkilgore wrote: post #49
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 inter…

I am not 100% on HN policies regarding flagging / renaming threads, but I do see articles get renamed on a fairly regular basis without getting flagged into dead status first? Is there not a mechanism to suggest a different title without getting it pulled entirely?

I think the click bait title is a good knee-jerk reaction test, and I would suspect a fair number of folks flagged the thread without reading the full article. In the spirit of open discussion and intellectual honesty, this seems like a failure.

A more descriptive title would probably be for the best, though.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#57

Post by jtbayly »

pkilgore wrote: post #49
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 inter…

No, the point is not what you claim. The point is that facts matter and we shouldn’t lie about them, for a variety of reasons.

From the article:

> 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

#58

Post by exo-pla-net »

belter wrote: post #29

@dang and other moderators: Please unflag this.

Please don't. The article is pedantic silliness that can be, will be, and has been interpreted to mean "vaccination increases your risk of dying from COVID". Far from decreasing vaccine stupidity, it's increasing it. The article has negative value.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#59

Post by forcry »

joophro wrote: post #46
yadaeno wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

>your holy CDC and WHO high priests who live in the pockets of big pharma.

Even you are wrong. Because they are not in the pockets, but they are the big pharma. They are the marketing arms of big pharma that are just a much more convincing version of the person in a lab coat in a toothpaste commercial. They just appear to do enough good stuff to not blow their cover, just like an undercover cop might go along with the baddies just enough to not blow their cover.

So if you think CDC/WHO can be "fixed" by changing the funding, you would be very wrong.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies, and Vaccine Statistics

#60

Post by m12k »

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…

There's several reason why even with highly effective vaccines, we might see worse infections when we do see them among the vaccinated. For example, if the vaccines work well, then there should be a bias where we see the most breakthrough infections among those for whom the vaccine doesn't do anything, i.e. people with compromised immune systems. So the people with normal immune systems will make up a much larger percentage of infections among the unvaccinated group, allowing them to drag down the average severity of infections - in the vaccinated group, they've been "removed" since most of them won't get infected, or have mild enough infections that they don't even notice, leaving the immunocompromised as a larger part of the infections that get counted in the statistics, and these infections are thus on average more severe.
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