That paper is one of those things that’s so bad it’s not even wrong. If you plot COVID rates vs. vaccination % for every country in the world you’ll get a mess. That doesn’t mean vaccines aren’t effective, it just means there are a million confounding variables like mask wearing, population density, reporting rate and so on and so on. The whole point of doing controlled experiments is that you don’t wind up making useless comparisons like that.
Their conclusion is “Hey, there’s more at play than vaccination rates alone.” Well no shit. Was that ever in doubt? To be fair, they don’t actually say that vaccines don’t work, but you can understand how anti-vaxx morons might lock onto this kind of paper.
Yeah I mean people “doing their research” that know absolutely nothing about doing research are going to spam this stuff unironically. Notice how many of the papers that horse pasters latched onto are unreviewed preprints, authored by geographers and high school students, or appear in the Nigerian Journal of Urology? It must be close to all of them.
As a penalty, Florida Board of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran has requested that funds for each district be withheld “in an amount equal to 1/12 of all school board members’ salaries,” in addition to withholding any amount equal to federal grant funds awarded to those districts by President Joe Biden’s administration.
One of the big lessons I have learnt during the pandemic is how much worthless bullshit and outright fraudulent information is out there dressed up as “scientific research”. At this point if it doesn’t appear in a journal I recognise the name of, I don’t really care what it says.
In its own statement, the state Board of Education said, in part, that the school board members of the eight sanctioned districts had “willingly and knowingly violated the rights of students and parents by denying them the option to make personal and private health care and educational decisions for their children.”
I’m starting to think the US has perhaps gone too far down one side of the individualist/collectivist spectrum.
“Elected school board members should set a good example for our leaders of tomorrow,” State Board of Education Chair Tom Grady said. “Instead, they are telling our younger generations that it is perfectly acceptable to pick and choose what laws they follow because they disagree with the underlying policy. That is simply unacceptable and antithetical to our Constitution.”
It would be one thing if they actually believed this and were standing on some higher ethical principle. But it’s more like:
“Let’s kill some children to own the libs.”
“You son of a bitch, I’m in.”
More on this non_paper that I noticed from earlier. Specifically this:
It turns out that they cite these preprints as justification for their opinion piece (surprise!).
It is also emerging that immunity derived from the Pfzer-BioNTech vaccine may not be as strong as immunity acquired through recovery from the COVID-19 virus [8].
[8] The Israeli preprint claiming natural immunity >>>>>> vax that has major flaws*.
Let’s break down the 10 citations appearing in this letter:
4 links to government data / tracker sites
3 links to popular press articles
3 links to preprints
0 links to peer-reviewed studies
Who has time to read this bullshit? Apparently not the editor of EJE.
*I saw Nebraska Medicine seems to be taking aim at these myths that have caught on bigly with the living brain dead. Dunno if this has been posted here yet. Second link is a video presentation that specifically addresses that Israeli preprint.
The whole economy of these fake journals really confuses me. Like, anyone with a passing familiarity with the field can tell which journals are bullshit, but somehow there’s an entire cottage industry of them. They must make money somehow but I don’t get how.
My state (in australia) has a vaccine mandate that is getting very real now.
Anyone who leaves home for work needs to be vaccinated by the end of next week, with employers enforcing.
Just in the middle of dealing with some anti vax lady from work. Her approach has been to email one of the senior exec’s a long copy and paste fake legal screed full of inaccurate and misleading claims.
This incident aside, she’s actually a lovely lady who’s good at her job. Ugh.
Kept my daughter home from school today because she has a sore throat. At home COVID test was negative. She’ll get a strep test and PCR COVID test at the Dr tomorrow.
No, the experts you love to troll have not been saying the opposite of what that article says. Maybe you should try reading it and understanding it rather than baring your ass in your haste to fire shots.
Allow me to cite it as you’re too lazy/biased or just downright dishonest to do that.
Article states that a French study showed antibody levels had dropped to 4 to 6 times lower 6 months after infection in unvaccinated people, and a year after infection everyone in a different unvaccinated sample showed extremely low levels with many showing no detectable antibodies at all.
It also says that finding has played out in other studies, and concludes
Overall, the variable immune responses to infection, lower neutralization against delta, and the clear boost in protection from a very safe, highly effective vaccine make a strong argument for vaccinating the recovered.
Far cry from the self-annointed “experts” vigorous assertion that infection gives lasting immunity via T cells.
