COVID-19: Chapter 8 - Ongoing source of viral information, and a little fun

Zero CONFIRMED deaths from taking the vaccine! The MSM is deliberately hiding all the vaxx deaths you sheeple!

Yeah, thatā€™s just horrible writing. Seems like a lot of stories on the web get no editorial scrutiny prior to publishing. He never says ā€œone was vaccinatedā€, so weā€™re left to wonder what he was trying to say.

Though LOTRing someoneā€™s sacrifice isnā€™t far behind.

(Sorry for meme-ing up this very important thread)

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According to some comments on reddit 3 were unvaccinated and vaccination status of the 4th was unknown at time of press.

Odds are that all of them were unvaccinated.

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Itā€™s also ā€˜if you pull a gun on me you really should pull the triggerā€™. Seriously.

Too many people are conflict avoidant to the point where itā€™s hugely hugely exploitable.

I do generally warn people that theyā€™re about to initiate conflict with me at least once, but if they proceedā€¦ well that was a choice they made. Generally speaking 90%+ of the the time people back off with the warning for me at least. Probably pretty obvious Iā€™m not bluffing if youā€™re an experienced bully.

I kind of like desantis for this one. Basically telling deplorables that even if they get really sick thereā€™s a miracle cure. Leaving out that it might not be available or if it is, will bankrupt them.

We really need a broad social movement to teach people to be firm but polite in their dealings, with a willingness to combat assholes with some aggression. We bizarrely seem to have coached individuals to be either an obnoxious asshole (because it works) or a pushover (because then you can feel good about not being one of the assholes). This is a catastrophic dynamic because the worst people get the most power.

Youā€™re never going to get beyond reasonable doubt in these cases. For example, with the kid who was positive who went to school, there is no way of knowing for sure you caught it from him. There is a chance you could have caught it from another asymptomatic person at the school. Or someone else that you interacted with elsewhere. Given how widespread the disease is and the ubiquity of asymptomatic spreaders, itā€™s is very tough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you caught COVID from a specific person in most cases. Itā€™s an entirely different situation from HIV.

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I mean you could just make sending your kid to school knowing they have covid very illegal regardless of outcome.

The real problem here is the same with the HIV laws, if it became illegal to go somewhere with covid, or send your kid anywhere, people would just not get tested for covid and have plausible deniability.

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Thatā€™s true, but making a new law like that is not what was suggested in the post I responded to. Any such law could not include any sort of ā€œif you infect someoneā€ type of language if you want criminal charges to stick.

https://twitter.com/HelenOfTheCleve/status/1426185496330395650

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My brother and his wife are finally getting their shots today. I would like to say he was vax hesitant and I heroically changed his mind but right off the bat he was like ā€œI donā€™t know about the shot, but all these different companies are making their employers get it so mineā€™s probably going to soon so I might as well get itā€.

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Sorry, I just gotta nitpick that second tweet. Every single study of vaccine effectiveness, even ones we didnā€™t like that much like the Israeli study, has published a 95% CI. It stands for 95% confidence interval, which means that the next numbers that follow are the error bars straddling the main value that preceded the ā€œ95% CIā€ text. So here, the measured effectiveness was 88%, and statistically, if we repeated this study 100 times, weā€™d expect to measure something between 85.3% effectiveness and 90.1% effectiveness 95% of the time, and 5% of the time weā€™d get something outside of those values. The third tweet is correct, that these error bars are remarkably tight compared with just about every study of vaccine effectiveness to date, perhaps even including the original Pfizer study with tens of thousands of people. But that second tweet, thereā€™s nothing remarkable about publishing a 95% CI. To not do so would be statistical malpractice.

I donā€™t think there has ever been a study showing 42% effectiveness for Pfizer and 88% for Moderna in the same study. Those two vaccines are very similar, and it would indeed be freaky if they produced such disparate results, but unless you have a citation handy, I think youā€™re just misremembering (which is understandable, given the barrage of information and the myriad minutiae youā€™re no doubt trying to keep straight). But for why so many studies get different results, the first is random chance. We expect variability, because a few extra cases of covid in the vaccinated or unvaccinated column can change the answer a fair bit. The second, as we saw with the Israeli study that had the low effectiveness number for the Pfizer vaccine, is that an accurate estimate of the effectiveness requires that the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations be roughly equivalent. The Israeli study dropped the ball here, because the vaccinated portion of their study was much older and thus more susceptible, making the vaccine look less effective than it actually is.

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Whatever it takes. Totally fine to be results oriented when it comes to vaccines.

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Cliffs on problem with the Israel study?

It seemed like the person who tweeted that and the person who replied both know what a confidence interval is.

I think their point is that a study with 95% CI that shows 91% effectiveness wouldnā€™t make the news (not that it wouldnā€™t be published) because itā€™s not saying anything new. But a study with huge error bars that shows say 60% effectiveness would make the news because itā€™s scary.

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Here:

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Thanks for breaking that down. I was referencing the Mayo Clinic Heath systems study. 42% Pfizer and 86% against infection. Iā€™m sure Iā€™m misinterpreting what the study actually says. The frustration is itā€™s just blasted all over Twitter and every headline says ā€œPfizer only 42% effective against delta.ā€ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.06.21261707v1

The Israeli study also looked at vaccine waning, hence the sample was mainly vaxxed December to April, hence the older age profile.

The report has also reflected the decreasing potency of the vaccination, showing a mere 16 percent effectiveness against transmission among those vaccinated in January, compared to 44 percent of those vaccinated in February, 67 percent of those who received their shots in March, and 75 percent for those vaccinated in April

Like the people were older or like the study was older or they had their vaccine awhile ago?