5 ms·

So vaccines are bad because Americans overestimate risks due to trusting media and government too much (and those apparently misusing that trust) and therefore

by icoder 5y ago

So vaccines are bad because Americans overestimate risks due to trusting media and government too much (and those apparently misusing that trust) and therefore don't go to the hospital (and apparently surviving at home instead of needing to be brought into a coma at the IC, because that's only for the hospital's profit) which confounds the numbers that were missing in the original trials?

native_samples 5y ago
Nearly - have you reversed a part of the argument there? The argument is that people over-estimate the risk of COVID if unvaccinated, meaning they do go to hospital. You said "therefore don't go". Lots of marginal cases will end up going to hospital, right up until those people get vaccinated at which point the publicity campaign switches direction and tries to convince people with COVID to stay home because they're protected. Which indeed would hopelessly confound any attempt to determine true effects on hospitalization from simple rate data, and the trials simply didn't measure this at all. In fact the study paper: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 doesn't even contain the word hospital anywhere in it. It's not just Americans by the way. There's a French survey that shows something similar with respect to estimated IFR. Actual value between 0.1% and 0.3% depending on study, estimated value average of 14%. The misinformation campaign has been global. I'm not saying something as simple as "vaccines are bad" - although COVID vaccines specifically could well be for younger age ranges, where disease risk is so low that it would require an astonishingly weak sauce to avoid tipping the cost/benefit balance negative. But the actual argument is that we don't really know any of these things with the level of rigor that should be required for a forced global vaccination programme. Literally all the data is either wrong or hopelessly confounded, and scientists are not only mostly ignoring these problems but doubling down on them by insisting that analyses of side effect databases are illegitimate because they're "correlational" (which is a bogus argument but apparently enough to repeatedly get such papers retracted).

by icoder 5y ago

native_samples 5y ago

Nearly - have you reversed a part of the argument there? The argument is that people over-estimate the risk of COVID if unvaccinated, meaning they do go to hospital. You said "therefore don't go". Lots of marginal cases will end up going to hospital, right up until those people get vaccinated at which point the publicity campaign switches direction and tries to convince people with COVID to stay home because they're protected. Which indeed would hopelessly confound any attempt to determine true effects on hospitalization from simple rate data, and the trials simply didn't measure this at all. In fact the study paper: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 doesn't even contain the word hospital anywhere in it. It's not just Americans by the way. There's a French survey that shows something similar with respect to estimated IFR. Actual value between 0.1% and 0.3% depending on study, estimated value average of 14%. The misinformation campaign has been global. I'm not saying something as simple as "vaccines are bad" - although COVID vaccines specifically could well be for younger age ranges, where disease risk is so low that it would require an astonishingly weak sauce to avoid tipping the cost/benefit balance negative. But the actual argument is that we don't really know any of these things with the level of rigor that should be required for a forced global vaccination programme. Literally all the data is either wrong or hopelessly confounded, and scientists are not only mostly ignoring these problems but doubling down on them by insisting that analyses of side effect databases are illegitimate because they're "correlational" (which is a bogus argument but apparently enough to repeatedly get such papers retracted).