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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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I'm not a fan of the vaccine mandates but there's a couple of things I think we should keep in mind here. These facts combined don't justify the mandates, but it does explain some of the situation.

  • Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration. This is the standard way to measure a vaccine's efficacy and it doesn't take transmission into account. It obviously doesn't take into account what happens after your experiment duration is over. So we quickly found ourselves estimating efficacy by looking at hospital admissions and vaccination base-rates once experiments were finished.

  • The vaccine seemed much more promising against the initial strains of the virus. If I recall correctly it prevented ~95% of infections for a few months. Such a strong efficacy against infection does a lot to prevent transmission.

  • There is reason to believe a milder case results in less transmission. You're spreading for shorter periods and expelling smaller viral loads. There was evidence of this. (Admittedly I don't think this is significant enough)

  • Testing for transmission reduction would have been infeasible. There is no standard objective way to measure this. Even with infinite money and without red tape it's not clear whether we should have counted covid particles in the infected's breathing air or something like that, and we couldn't have confidently turned into a "X % transmission reduction"

  • Regarding vaccinating during a pandemic, maybe Bossche is right, we'll never know. However, so far, it looks like the escaping variants we got mostly came from areas that weren't vaccinated. Perhaps it would be less risky if we didn't "meddle with nature" but we were rightly confident that the vaccines would save many vulnerable people's lives.

Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration.

More people died in the vaccinated group than in the control group in Pfizer's trial.

Edit: You can downvote me all you like but the simple fact remains that more died in the vaccinated group than the control group. That's only 1 out 3 criteria but a pretty big one. By itself probably nothing but you might want to check the overall excess mortality rate of highly vaccinated countries to see if it went up or down afterwards just to be safe...

You appear to be repeating the claim referenced here. 14 people died in the control group and 15 people died in the vaccinated group - from all causes. The linked article is obviously not unbiased, but I cannot find any fault with the facts presented. Unless you're asserting that the researchers lied or miscategorized causes of death, you haven't rebutted any criteria.

But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine - especially one meant to be given prophylactically to large numbers of healthy people, as vaccines are.

I never claimed to "rebut any criteria." I pointed out that the Pfizer trial failed 1 of the 3 criteria, arguably the most important one.

It gets worse-

9 vaccine recipients died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to 6 placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance is small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide have found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are linked to heart inflammation in young men.

But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine

Where can I find that argument?

I never claimed to "rebut any criteria." I pointed out that the Pfizer trial failed 1 of the 3 criteria, arguably the most important one.

You keep using "arguably" as a sneaky hidden appeal to authority, when what you mean is "In my opinion."

9 vaccine recipients died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to 6 placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance is small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide have found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are linked to heart inflammation in young men.

Yes, that's an interesting piece of information which is certainly worth following up on to see if it has any significance, but by itself it does not provide meaningful evidence for an anti-vacc argument.

Speaking of appeal to authority, we have a moderator with a poorly concealed grudge against me, speaking "ex cathedra," to apply an AP factcheck on my very true statement. Nothing you posted contradicted my factual statement in the least.

I would recommend that you not take discussions so personally as that tends to generate more heat than light, but you do you.

Dude, first of all, I was not speaking as a moderator. We're allowed to participate like everyone else. Consider addressing the arguments instead of reaching for ad hominems because you got pulled up on the facts.

You need to get rid of this persecution complex you have where every time a mod interacts with you, you think it's because we have a grudge against you. None of us have a grudge against you. We don't know you or care who you are. You started claiming a grudge the very first time you got modded as a new user, when it was impossible for anyone to have formed a personal bias against you. (I presume you are probably someone who came here from reddit, but I neither know nor care who you were there.)

That last line is the most obvious case of projection I have seen in quite a while

because you got pulled up on the facts

This never happened.

Again, I would caution you against taking these discussions so personally.

Good luck!

[citation needed]

The Pfizer trial is my citation. I thought that was clear.

That's not a citation, you have to be more specific, like providing a link to a paper or report and, if it's long, preferably quoting the relevant section. For example, the first citation I found while googling was this paper, which says, under "Adverse Events":

Two BNT162b2 recipients died (one from arteriosclerosis, one from cardiac arrest), as did four placebo recipients (two from unknown causes, one from hemorrhagic stroke, and one from myocardial infarction)

So I would conclude that your claim is simply wrong until you provide actual evidence.

edit: someone linked numbers above. 15 vs 14 deaths out of a population of almost 22,000 in each group is obviously noise. You cannot consider a "primary end point" which you do not have the statistical power to measure.

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