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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32961 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I would bet there is no reliable data in unvaccinated countries. Every country developed enough for a vaccine campaign (except for China) has used the Western mrna vaccines. Also, if there was good data it wouldn't be comparable. Africa's mortality is not comparable to countries where half the country is over 50 (or whatever it is). Especially when you factor in all the excess mortality in Africa from other things (AIDS, untreated diseases that wouldn't matter in the developed world, etc)

Every country developed enough for a vaccine campaign (except for China) has used the Western mrna vaccines

Did Russia / Belarus / Ukraine use western mrna vaccines ?

They used copies of them, so basically. Not sure about Ukraine but Russia and Belarus did.

This is false, Sputnik is an adenovirus vaccine like J&J. It would still be subject to potential issues around using a small subunit of the virus (the spike) to generate immunity, but not anything to do with the mRNA approach to replication.

I think some of those countries may have used Sinovax to some extent also? (which is more like a regular flu shot)

My bad. I'm just working off memory of Russia making a big deal over it years ago.

Also very low vaccine uptake rates in those countries.

Ukraine mostly didn’t get vaccinated, and Sputnik is sort of a hybrid between MRNA tech and more conventional vax.

We're talking about excess death statistics, not some nuanced "died after getting vaxxed" vs. "died because of the vax". There are some countries dysfunctional enough that they might routinely miss a bunch of dead bodies in their statistics, but why should that effect be more pronounced post-covid relative to during-covid?

Regarding comparing Europe to Africa, surely there are some countries with a similar age profile, with some variance in how many people got vaxxed?

You should have a look at Hungary -- their rate is lowish for Europe, and a significant number of those who did get it had Sinovac or Sputnik, due to Hungary opting out of the EUs Pfizer/Moderna supply in order to get quicker access.

Also I think Peru used a lot of Sinovac -- not sure they are devoloped enough for you, but clearly moreso than most places in Africa.

Those sound like the sorts of things that would increase mortality from the baseline? Anyways I'm not particularly fixated on Hungary; the fact that there are such large differences at the moment (and that many places are quite elevated) is profoundly weird.

"The monthly excess mortality indicator is expressed as the percentage rate of additional deaths in a month, compared to a baseline period. The baseline is given by average monthly deaths in the period 2016-2019."

This is a very crude methodology compared to the Euromomo approach.

Well you click on "methods" at the link above, but I'll link it for you:

https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/

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Would you trust data from Peru or Hungary? I sure wouldn't. I suspect even US data is quite fuzzy.

Sure, why not? You don't need to be a technostate to count dead people.

The cause of death and data surrounding it would be more what I'm worried about.

That information is not required to calculate excess mortality.

It's required to tell what excess mortality means, which is the whole point of this discussion.

Excess mortality (above usual) is often used as a way of estimating deaths in times and places where reliable statistics are problematic -- it's a way of solving the exact problem you were complaining about earlier. Yes a database of all deaths paired with vaccine intake of those individuals would be better, but it's not available anywhere that I'm aware of.

Yes, and yes. I might be more skeptical of Ukraine, and not because I'm throwing shade at them, but because they're currently at war.

Have you ever been in either of the countries you criticize? You're acting like they're both worse than a 3rd world basket case.

I'm not criticizing anything. You don't have to be a 3rd world hell basket to have poor data. It's a pretty common problem. Detroit has poor data tracking and is not anything approaching a 3rd world hell basket, even if it's crime is pretty close. There are pretty big swathes of most countries which don't track data well. For example, its pretty well established that China probably isn't quite sure what it's exact population or GDP are. The specific problems in China are likely different (incentives for people collecting data to lie) but the problem as a whole is pretty universal.

EDIT:I'm not sure why you wouldn't just compare US vaccinated vs unvaccinated. That's basically what the trials did, and the data is public.

https://eua.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/providers/clinical-trial-data

You don't have to be a 3rd world hell basket to have poor data. It's a pretty common problem.

We're talking about counting corpses. Things would have to get very bad for a given government to have significant problems with that data.

EDIT:I'm not sure why you wouldn't just compare US vaccinated vs unvaccinated. That's basically what the trials did, and the data is public.

I'm skeptical of findings from controlled trials that don't show up in population level data in any way. There could be good reasons for that, but my first guesses are that the conclusions of the trial were wrong, or that the effect size is way smaller than it's made out to be.

As I recall total mortality did not differ significantly between the groups during the trials -- expanding this analysis to a larger population group would be great, but sadly no country that I'm aware of tags all death certificates with vax status -- and you do get into data quality/sampling bias issues whenever you start looking at a convenience sample for which you happen to be able to get the two bits is_vaxxed and is_dead.

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