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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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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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