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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Just for transparency, I am a staunch antivaxxer. My wife pressured me to get the jab in summer of 2020. I asked for more time. The argument of social responsibility did carry weight with me at the time. But in July of 2020 the Israeli data showed that the jabs did not prevent infection.

All else aside for a moment, I really object to this being what we're now calling "antivax". As some here know, I was an immunologist by training and research, I spent about ten years of my life working on vaccine and vaccine-adjacent research, and I used to spend a decent bit of time on social media arguing in favor of childhood vaccines and trying to convince people to get them. It would never have occurred to me to call someone antivax on the basis of them saying, "I don't know about this specific new vaccine, I'd really like to see what the dose course and long-run efficacy is before I take it".

There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose. If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

The bookkeeping was sketchy and dishonest due to creating different start points for the experiment, but the underlying principle would be basically fine as long as you adjusted time courses appropriately. Obviously, we do want to know what happens immediately after vaccination (in case there are adverse outcomes that include increased risk of infection), but if we're thinking about long-run quality of a vaccine, it does make sense to start your ticker a couple weeks after a boost, because there is little or no expected benefit in the short-run. With appropriate statistics, this would be fine.

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