Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).
The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.
The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.
A common pattern you'd find in reliable research papers is that authors tend to understate their findings, which in practice strengthens the impact of their conclusions.
This is a general problem in many technical fields.
People in a technical field, learn to "chunk" complex phrases. Their natural communication style becomes complex. Which makes them hard to understand to those outside of the field. If they want to be understood, the solution isn't to try to educate the world. It is to educate themselves. To learn how to write simply and directly.
Depending on the readability test used, the section up to "Introduction" - which is supposed to be readable - is somewhere between advanced high school and university. See https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_... or other free tools to test it. That's bad. The percentage of Americans who can read this text is below the percentage who could read, say, a plain language version written in Spanish. We should expect people to misunderstand. We should not expect this paper to convince.
> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.
While you are being downvoted, this is actually an astute observation. However, your point is working against you in this case. If the vaccine was actually deadly, the unvaccinated individuals who survived the pandemic would be having better health outcomes. This is not what they found. If they included the pandemic in this study, the deaths by COVID would be much worse in the unvaccinated group.
> That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
That’s a nonsense comparison because the thing they are studying is the vaccine, not COVID itself. The vaccine was available at minimum, what, end of 2020? Exposure being defined as first dose May-October 2021 does not seem unreasonable at all (and probably not arbitrarily chosen right - it’s probably something to do with the availability of data)
It's a good observation, but I expect that even considering only people alive in 1950, survivors of the Hiroshima bombing or concentration camps (or a few other events), still have long term problems that increase mortality.
I honestly wonder if it's better to flag and downvote into oblivion rather than to engage in good faith. The sibling didn't seem like they were trolling, just misguided, and shutting down discussion doesn't allow for any reflection.
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.
It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
I think people throw these accusations around way too broadly.
There is a small subset of weirdos who think the Covid/mRNA vaccines contain microchips or were designed kill off some percentage of the population.
But I think there's another, much larger group who might care a lot about their health to the point where they don't even drink from plastic bottles, and who when presented with a novel vaccine which was developed and rolled very quickly were hesitant...
Rightly or wrongly, I think these health-conscious people were concerned during Covid by mainstream media orgs frequently broadcasting what can only be described as pro-vax "propaganda"[1], and in some cases state compelled vaccination.
I'm very pro-vax, but I remember at the time (2021) being a bit torn on what I should do. I was in my twenties and already contracted Covid. Did it really make sense for me to take a vaccine when my risk was so low and there were some reports that young men were suffering from myocarditis post-vaccination?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think most reasonable people who may have initially been nervous about the vaccine can look at data like this and feel much more comfortable with the risk profile today. This is exactly the kind of data a lot of people (including myself) wanted when their governments were trying to force them to take these newly developed vaccines.
In my mind it's those on the extreme pro-vaccine and extreme anti-vaccine side in 2021-2022 that were the ones lacking critical thought. The reality was that as a society given the absence of long-term data like this, we were taking a calculated risk. Because even if mRNA vaccines slightly increased all-cause mortality that wouldn't mean the vaccine rollout was a bad thing... Similarly chemo probably great for you either and I'm sure people who undergo chemo unnecessarily suffer from increased morality risk. But if you have cancer or if you're in the middle of a pandemic risk calculations change a little.
The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.
Worse it will be used to produce even more disinformation. Most of the stuff I've encountered takes studies like this, misrepresents or outright lies about the findings and includes a link (sometimes working) to the paper which nobody consuming the slop will ever check.
“Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!”
You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.
> If the results of this specific study were the opposite, would you behave any different than a skeptic?
This study supports all the other bits of evidence in the same direction; it's consistent with what we know.
Similarly, I'd be somewhat more dubious about even a very well constructed study that declares "there are no people in New York City" than one that found some people there.
Well blow me down, people being skeptical of a study that defied basically all other Science and goes against our entire understanding of how vaccines and immune systems work? Yeah, of course I'd be skeptical. I'd be interested and I'd read it (!) but yeah, I'd seriously question what was wrong with the study.
The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever.
If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine.
* I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
If the results showed that mRNA vaccines had negative health outcomes, then the obvious next question to ask is "are they worse or better than COVID's health outcomes?". If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot.
The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. Very similar to the general vaccine skeptic position. It ends up being a moving goalpost as well.
A truth seeking individual realizes that very few things in the world are black and white. They avoid trying to frame things as a black and white. Nobel and villainous framing. If you are truth seeking, you won't try to turn a non-binary evidence into binary thinking.
One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results.
By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
People who believe in baseless conspiracy theories have to convince themselves that people who don't are operating in the same epistemic mode, picking and choosing what to believe in order to reinforce their prior beliefs, because the alternative is admitting that those people are operating in a superior epistemic mode where they base their beliefs on most or all of the available evidence (including, in this case, the fact that the """vaxxed""" people they know are all still upright and apparently unharmed after years of predictions to the contrary).
Your comment is a manifestation of this defense mechanism. As real evidence piles up that you've been wrong, you retreat into these bizarre imaginary scenarios in which you've been right the whole time, and by projecting that scenario onto others you imagine yourself vindicated. But the rest of us just think you're nuts.
If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction.
That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
If the results were the opposite they'd be shockingly in conflict with what we've already learned and observed, so yes, we would of course react differently.
And if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. You're still trying to spin it as "but you won't be convinced no matter what!" on a story that demonstrates the exact opposite. This is just a pathetic round-about personal attack questioning someone's integrity using a bizarre hypothetical that's the exact opposite of what was actually found.
> clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such)
Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell?
Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.
“Doesn’t kill you” is the absolute bare minimum and a very low bar. Because the vaccines were so rushed, it’s still reassuring, but not at all a testament to the safety of mRNA vaccines.
The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.
While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.
Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
The political appointees pushing this new policy have not presented any evidence of these deaths beyond a vague assertion in a leaked internal email. They have not provided that evidence to career staffers either.
Pushing covid-19 vaccinations onto kids was always controversial. Covid isn't smallpox, people under 30 only get a serious case very rarely, and the vaccine isn't sterilizing anyway.
If we want to use medications responsibly and rationally, we must be careful about the cost/benefit analysis to the intended recipient groups. It makes great sense to vaccinate old people against Covid and teenagers against HPV. The other way round, much less so.
Of course the vendors will push for blanket use, as they make more money, but that is also the problem.
Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people.
Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine.
Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything.
- "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?"
- "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"
What specific impact do you think that would have on this study? Do you think vaccines prior to Nov-2021 were safe and they were unsafe after? Do you think short term results, captured after Nov-2021 are more relevant than inclusive results prior?
I've been using this prompt on articles that generate debate. Like microservices, or jwt's. It brings up some interesting points for this article...
Look at this article and point out any wording that seems meant to push a certain viewpoint. Note anything important the author leaves out, downplays, or overstates, including numbers that seem cherry-picked or lack context. Clearly separate basic facts from opinions or emotional language. Explain how people with different viewpoints might read the article differently. Also call out any common persuasion tactics like loaded wording, selective quotes, or appeals to authority.
One thing I don’t get: the study excludes the first 6 months after vaccination to avoid immortal-time bias. But if people died right away due to the vaccine (hypothetically), wouldn’t this design exclude those deaths?
>As unvaccinated individuals were alive between their random index date and November 1, 2021, corresponding to a maximum duration of 6 months, starting follow-up from the index date would have introduced immortal time bias. Therefore, we initiated the study of long-term mortality 6 months after the index date, while mortality within 6 months after vaccination was analyzed separately using SCCS models. While the SCCS models are well-suited for short-term vaccine safety studies, they are less appropriate for long-term mortality, particularly due to limited control periods among vaccinated individuals, and age differences within the same individual across risk or control periods, as age is by far a major risk factor for death. For both analyses, we introduced the calendar period as an adjusting factor to account for the infection dynamics, baseline mortality trends, and the varying propension to get vaccinated.
>Vaccinated individuals were older than unvaccinated individuals (mean [SD] age, 38.0 [11.8] years vs 37.1 [11.4] years), more frequently women (11 688 603 [51.3%] vs 2 876 039 [48.5%]) and had more cardiometabolic comorbidities (2 126 250 [9.3%] vs 464 596 [7.8%]).
This is interesting because of "supposed" cardiovascular effects of the vaccine that many folks were worried about. Even more confounding is the gender differences. You'd think skewing women would skew away from cardiovascular issues.
An alternate interpretation is that the at risk cardio unvaccinated died of COVID for some reason.
The increase in myocarditis from the vaccine is well-documented. (And very small.)
COVID causes myocarditis too (even for young people unlikely to die from COVID itself), at much higher rates. So you only need a 20% chance of contracting COVID for the vaccine to be net positive in the least obviously positive age group.
Your cite reads to me like a statement on the available data, which is interesting in its own ways but can be corrected for when it's irrelevant to the hypothesis.
Am I right in reading "Figure. Estimation of All-Cause Mortality at 4 Years in Vaccinated Compared With Unvaccinated Individuals Using Weighted Cox Models: Main and Stratified Analyses" to show that vaccines were more beneficial to the 18-29 age group than any older group? Isn't that unexpected?
> The main causes of death were cancer (769 and 853 cases per million in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, respectively), external causes of mortality (493 and 597 cases per million, including, among others, unintentional injuries, such as transportation crashes, falls, and drownings, as well as suicides or self-inflicted injuries) and diseases of the circulatory system (282 and 367 cases per million) (Table 2). Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
I don't think mRNA vaccination is likely to cause an increase in all-cause mortality. But this study is clearly comparing two radically different populations, and could not show a mortality increase from mRNA vaccination even if one existed.
I have to admit I checked the author on this paper. No surprise it is from outside of the US. It's hard to imagine a US institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.
I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
It goes the other way too. It's hard to imagine a {EU,German,whatever} institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.
> Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause
This sounds like a red flag to me if you're trying to isolate the COVID vaccine as something safe. Table 2 data showed less drownings, less car crashes, less falls, less deaths related to chromosomal abnormalities... How can there not be a confounding variable or two here?
It’s sad that these days anytime health studies or recommendations come out I half to make sure it’s not from an official US government source.
But to be honest even before the current shit show I was taking recommendations from foreign health departments when it came to COVID.
I got a booster shot after getting the J and J vaccine before it was officially recommended by the CDC because I saw other countries’ health departments publishing data about it. I can’t remember whether it was Isreal, the UK or the EU.
This is rather weird. Mortality in immediate connection with the vaccine (index time) would not have been captured here. I would hesitate to draw any conclusion from this paper.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
Honestly, the thing I find more interesting is the "Social Deprivation Index" where vaccinated individuals were 21% "most social" and 19% "least social" while unvaccinated individuals were 15% "most social" and 27% "least social".
There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.
If you're social you're more likely to care about those around you. Vaccines are also important for protecting vulnerable people in the community, so they were doubly motivated that way.
so anyone who didn't get vaccinated before Nov. 2021 is considered unvaccinated? if they got the same dose the "vaccinated" group got on Dec 1st 2021 they're still... unvaccinated? and this is the control for this study? am i missing something? im sure there are a ton of valuable findings in this study, but that seems like a flaw.
also, this is only tangentially related, but why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them? they made billions off vaccines.
remember martin shrkeli? he claimed he raised the price of a drug for a rare disease to make it commercially viable and he was crucified for it. less than 5 years later, a virus breaks out of a town with a lab dedicated to experimenting with (i.e. weaponizing) viruses and big pharma decided to convert to altruism when we needed them most? shrkeli's company made $65M in total off that (which a court ruled all of which had to be returned)... thats not even rounding error for pfizer, who sold $35B+ worth of mrna vaccines in 2021 alone.
if the guy who invented Daraprim came out and told us shkreli was a scumbag, we'd have believed him. but the mRNA guy comes out and he gets eviscerated. i get it, it's not 1:1, but still.
i'm not saying its all a hoax or a conspiracy, but "there doesn't need to be a formal conspiracy when interests converge". in the U.S., federal funding was given to anyone "treating" COVID. had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death. and a check to the hospital from uncle sam.
i don't think the vaccine killed 17M people, and i think there are definitely grifters on the skeptic side, but that doesn't discount skepticism as a whole. and i dont think this study vindicates anything completely either.
> so anyone who didn't get vaccinated before Nov. 2021 is considered unvaccinated?
The answer is in the first paragraph of the "Design, Study Populations, and Outcomes" section:
Exposure to COVID-19 vaccination was defined as the administration of a first dose of an mRNA vaccine between May 1 and October 31, 2021 (inclusion period), which was the mass vaccination period for adults in France, who primarily received mRNA vaccines. Multiple vaccinations in exposed individuals were not considered. The unvaccinated group was defined as individuals who remained unvaccinated as of November 1, 2021. Individuals vaccinated before May 1, 2021 (12.0%), or who received a first dose of another (ie, non-mRNA–based) COVID-19 vaccine during the inclusion period (1.4%) were excluded.
> why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them?
Are we? Says who? Certainly there are bad actors who profit off of the misfortune of others. There are also brilliant people who work hard to bring about access to lifesaving treatments. There have certainly been examples of fraud in the past, and there have also been examples of truly amazing public health benefits.
Do I personally think the US health system could be better structured to disincentivize the former and promote the latter? Definitely! Is that evidence of a global conspiracy? Nope.
> had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death
They define unvaccinated as anyone in the study who didn't get their first dose by Nov 2021. That feels like a pretty tight window to me. I don't think they checked to see if those "unvaccinated" people got vaccinated during the 4 year followup, especially given the mandates that forced people to get them.
It's the full vaccination rate; as of Dec 1 2021 it was 69.89%. A month later (i.e. those Nov folks are getting their second dose) it's 74%; latest number on the chart is 78.44%.
How would they calculate 4 year all-cause mortality on people who got vaccinated after Nov 2021? In case you haven't looked at a calendar recently, it's December 2025 now.
If you "know" that a study whose title you are predisposed to disagree with has "BS" in it, something tells me no amount of scientific evidence is going to persuade you.
We should not forget, that in most countries people who were unvaccinated came under severe social pressure. They often lost their jobs or got banned from social circles. You were basically rendered an outcast by not being vaccinated. So taking the vaccine did not only affect your immune system, but also gave you a higher social status. And there are plenty of studies that show that a lower social status significantly impacts mortality, with lower status linked to higher death rates. This may explain the lower all cause mortality among vaccinated people.
is it not possible that the kind of person who would've had negative side effects from an mrna vaccination already died from covid itself prior to wide rollout? presumably anyone who had any sort of minor illness during covid would be predisposed to get the vaccine, whereas anyone both lucky enough to be spared of that and ignorant of the vaccine would have their own illness due to the way this was designed. in addition anyone who for whatever reason didn't want to get the vaccine who didn't at this point would actually be uniquely at risk due to the combination of likelihood of getting covid plus disposition for an anti-health attitude.
I feel like you could have the same conclusion if you had groups that were people who go to the doctor vs people who do not in the same time period
they go into this themselves:
> It seems reasonable to assume that by early November 2021, 3 months after the introduction of the mandatory health pass39 (delivered when fulfilling one of these conditions: a negative COVID-19 test result, proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or a certificate of recovery from a COVID-19 infection) to enter and exit France as well as to access restaurants, theaters, and nonurgent hospital consultations, the majority of unvaccinated individuals were reluctant to get vaccinated.
> A study aimed at characterizing patient hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccination showed that categorical refusal of vaccination was associated with prior noncompliance with vaccination recommendations, a lower educational level, and a less severe perception of COVID-19.41
in any case i've yet to see a slam dunk study showing any negative effect of vaccination.
These are fair questions. I guess I'd first say that there were studies on reactogenic/immunogenic effects coincident w/ the original rollout. But perhaps more importantly, this study conditions on the time frame, meaning that it applies to all participants, and should thus not affect the risk ratio. I think knowing the current hazard risk ratio is more scientifically/medically valuable than the previous one (even if I'm skeptical that it has changed significantly for reasons other than noise)
Findings: In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months. Findings In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months
Looking forward to reading your work, please do link it when it's available as there's no point in arguing for or against something that we don't yet have access to.
They claim "Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc., who had 0 deaths from COVID-19 during the "pandemic", and only had COVID-19 deaths ever recorded AFTER the experimental injections were administered."
NB: most people choosing not to take it in France tend to fall into the medically at risk, stubborn, or, "so far down the rabbit hole that you probably can't trust these people to make sensible life choices" groups.
(This alone being a good reason why this 'control' group had a slightly higher all cause mortality at 6months)
Remember, France was one of the wonderful countries where you couldn't legally shop or work if you were deemed to be 'not at risk' && 'unvaccinated' and achieved a very high rate as a result biasing the control group. (This is a purely statistical statement)
And for reference, I do think the vax is dangerous in terms of massive populations and we don't have mass graves due to mRNA problems (although several large cancer blips). In the same way in countries with low vaccination rates we don't have mass graves at 10% population or higher. Cv19 was always going to kill and an untested treatment is likely to kill those who were at risk.
(I'm willing to bet in the case of cv19 the ones who were hit hardest would have been hit badly by either vector, virus or mRNA. But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...)
I'm sure both extremes will jump to the rallying cry of "2 more weeks..." So yes of course I'm wrong, I only worked on analysing early 'data' and pulling apart the models so what do I know.
No it doesn’t. I’m not trying to make a point about vaccines, just that the study is a population study and so shows benefits on average to a population.
If the vaccine killed 1/100 people (again I don’t believe this but it’s the internet) but made the other 99 immune to dying over the 4 years, it would look really good on average even if it was directly responsible for the deaths of 1%.
For vaccines like the measles vaccine where it can entirely stop the spread in a vaccinated population this can be true until enough people think this way that measles starts spreading in your vicinity.
But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn't able to eliminate its spread so it mostly is about protecting yourself rather than protecting others.
I found the intro very confusing, tbh.
Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).
The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
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Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.
The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.
Yeah, but there's a plausible explanation for this: Likely, people who get vaccinated also are more likely to do other things to improve their health.
Could it mean that lots of Covid deaths are being attributed to other things?
If you don't get the covid vaccine you probably do other risky things. Not get other vaccines, don't see the doctor about various issues...
A common pattern you'd find in reliable research papers is that authors tend to understate their findings, which in practice strengthens the impact of their conclusions.
This is a general problem in many technical fields.
People in a technical field, learn to "chunk" complex phrases. Their natural communication style becomes complex. Which makes them hard to understand to those outside of the field. If they want to be understood, the solution isn't to try to educate the world. It is to educate themselves. To learn how to write simply and directly.
Depending on the readability test used, the section up to "Introduction" - which is supposed to be readable - is somewhere between advanced high school and university. See https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_... or other free tools to test it. That's bad. The percentage of Americans who can read this text is below the percentage who could read, say, a plain language version written in Spanish. We should expect people to misunderstand. We should not expect this paper to convince.
It's interesting that they leave things at 18-59. Do they later stratify into 18-28, 29-38, 39-48, 48-58?
Looks like they do, yes.
> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
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Eh, it's an important point. "It made COVID things much better, and it didn't make other unrelated things worse."
Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.
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Because this whole paper is bullshit and is a bias confirmation report
It assesses persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"
That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?
No, because the same conditional is applied to both participant groups. Its good to specify a time frame.
While you are being downvoted, this is actually an astute observation. However, your point is working against you in this case. If the vaccine was actually deadly, the unvaccinated individuals who survived the pandemic would be having better health outcomes. This is not what they found. If they included the pandemic in this study, the deaths by COVID would be much worse in the unvaccinated group.
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> That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
That’s a nonsense comparison because the thing they are studying is the vaccine, not COVID itself. The vaccine was available at minimum, what, end of 2020? Exposure being defined as first dose May-October 2021 does not seem unreasonable at all (and probably not arbitrarily chosen right - it’s probably something to do with the availability of data)
It's a good observation, but I expect that even considering only people alive in 1950, survivors of the Hiroshima bombing or concentration camps (or a few other events), still have long term problems that increase mortality.
It's a shame that sibling comment got flagged to death, it was hilarious!
I honestly wonder if it's better to flag and downvote into oblivion rather than to engage in good faith. The sibling didn't seem like they were trolling, just misguided, and shutting down discussion doesn't allow for any reflection.
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
Unfortunately, I don't think any additional evidence will convince vaccine skeptics of the safety of mRNA vaccines
Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
Establishing a causal graph like this is not realistic for medical studies. Luckily we have multiple RCTs
doing a double blind study of a vaccine that seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease seems morally questionable
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Are there really antivax people that would know the word "covariate?" That's gotta be a small Venn diagram overlap.
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Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.
It's not obvious at all. Many vaccine candidates about previous covirus were rejected because they didn't pass the safetly trial.
The "secret" part is that before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe.
This is discussed too few times.
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Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness.
This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...
It seems like even that's not good enough. I have a few skeptics in my family and have had family members die from covid.
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It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
Ultimately, natural selection might do it.
you never get a second chance to make a first impression
Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.
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I give you this pill that makes you suffer for a year, but you will not die in 4 years. If it's safe to you, then alcohol and smoking are safe too.
Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
I think people throw these accusations around way too broadly.
There is a small subset of weirdos who think the Covid/mRNA vaccines contain microchips or were designed kill off some percentage of the population.
But I think there's another, much larger group who might care a lot about their health to the point where they don't even drink from plastic bottles, and who when presented with a novel vaccine which was developed and rolled very quickly were hesitant...
Rightly or wrongly, I think these health-conscious people were concerned during Covid by mainstream media orgs frequently broadcasting what can only be described as pro-vax "propaganda"[1], and in some cases state compelled vaccination.
I'm very pro-vax, but I remember at the time (2021) being a bit torn on what I should do. I was in my twenties and already contracted Covid. Did it really make sense for me to take a vaccine when my risk was so low and there were some reports that young men were suffering from myocarditis post-vaccination?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think most reasonable people who may have initially been nervous about the vaccine can look at data like this and feel much more comfortable with the risk profile today. This is exactly the kind of data a lot of people (including myself) wanted when their governments were trying to force them to take these newly developed vaccines.
In my mind it's those on the extreme pro-vaccine and extreme anti-vaccine side in 2021-2022 that were the ones lacking critical thought. The reality was that as a society given the absence of long-term data like this, we were taking a calculated risk. Because even if mRNA vaccines slightly increased all-cause mortality that wouldn't mean the vaccine rollout was a bad thing... Similarly chemo probably great for you either and I'm sure people who undergo chemo unnecessarily suffer from increased morality risk. But if you have cancer or if you're in the middle of a pandemic risk calculations change a little.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq76QSlRiPo
The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.
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Worse it will be used to produce even more disinformation. Most of the stuff I've encountered takes studies like this, misrepresents or outright lies about the findings and includes a link (sometimes working) to the paper which nobody consuming the slop will ever check.
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“Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!”
You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.
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> If the results of this specific study were the opposite, would you behave any different than a skeptic?
This study supports all the other bits of evidence in the same direction; it's consistent with what we know.
Similarly, I'd be somewhat more dubious about even a very well constructed study that declares "there are no people in New York City" than one that found some people there.
Well blow me down, people being skeptical of a study that defied basically all other Science and goes against our entire understanding of how vaccines and immune systems work? Yeah, of course I'd be skeptical. I'd be interested and I'd read it (!) but yeah, I'd seriously question what was wrong with the study.
Yes, but it would depend on the results.
The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever.
If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine.
* I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
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That's a false dichotomy.
If the results showed that mRNA vaccines had negative health outcomes, then the obvious next question to ask is "are they worse or better than COVID's health outcomes?". If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot.
The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. Very similar to the general vaccine skeptic position. It ends up being a moving goalpost as well.
A truth seeking individual realizes that very few things in the world are black and white. They avoid trying to frame things as a black and white. Nobel and villainous framing. If you are truth seeking, you won't try to turn a non-binary evidence into binary thinking.
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> would you behave any different than a skeptic?
It is unclear what you mean by "skeptic"? Are you speaking of rational skepticism, or reactionary denial?
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But the results weren't the opposite.
One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results.
By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
People who believe in baseless conspiracy theories have to convince themselves that people who don't are operating in the same epistemic mode, picking and choosing what to believe in order to reinforce their prior beliefs, because the alternative is admitting that those people are operating in a superior epistemic mode where they base their beliefs on most or all of the available evidence (including, in this case, the fact that the """vaxxed""" people they know are all still upright and apparently unharmed after years of predictions to the contrary).
Your comment is a manifestation of this defense mechanism. As real evidence piles up that you've been wrong, you retreat into these bizarre imaginary scenarios in which you've been right the whole time, and by projecting that scenario onto others you imagine yourself vindicated. But the rest of us just think you're nuts.
If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction.
That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
If the results were the opposite they'd be shockingly in conflict with what we've already learned and observed, so yes, we would of course react differently.
And if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. You're still trying to spin it as "but you won't be convinced no matter what!" on a story that demonstrates the exact opposite. This is just a pathetic round-about personal attack questioning someone's integrity using a bizarre hypothetical that's the exact opposite of what was actually found.
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Your argument is what exactly?
Covid vaccines are unnecessary because we can just infect everybody with covid and the ones that survive don't need one?
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> MRNA technologies are not "vaccines" per se.
Define vaccine for us.
> The results would likely have been much better had they gone with more traditional vaccine formulations.
Several non-mRNA vaccinations were produced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novavax_COVID-19_vaccine remains available, if you want). They did not have better apparent efficacy.
> clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such)
Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell?
Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.
Yeah maybe forcing people to get them triggered some kind of skepticism, how about that
The comments from @exceptthisthing here perfectly illustrate the comprehension and reasoning levels of the vaccine sceptic.
“Doesn’t kill you” is the absolute bare minimum and a very low bar. Because the vaccines were so rushed, it’s still reassuring, but not at all a testament to the safety of mRNA vaccines.
The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
>lymph node swelling
you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.
While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.
Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
> punitive limitations on dissenting speech
Rank bullshit or whining that people aren’t forced to associate with others against their will - not sure which basis for your statement is worse.
Exactly this. Science and evidence is not high on the list of priorities for most skeptics.
"Skeptics" is a very kind term for these people. I bet my life if you polled these people, they have not read any material on the matter.
I thought skepticism was a key part of science
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“Read?” No. But they probably spend hours listening to Joe Rogan and going down a YouTube antivaxxer rabbit hole.
FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis [1].
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to a long-term anti-vaxxer at the helm of HHS.
RFK Jr's FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.
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The political appointees pushing this new policy have not presented any evidence of these deaths beyond a vague assertion in a leaked internal email. They have not provided that evidence to career staffers either.
Pushing covid-19 vaccinations onto kids was always controversial. Covid isn't smallpox, people under 30 only get a serious case very rarely, and the vaccine isn't sterilizing anyway.
If we want to use medications responsibly and rationally, we must be careful about the cost/benefit analysis to the intended recipient groups. It makes great sense to vaccinate old people against Covid and teenagers against HPV. The other way round, much less so.
Of course the vendors will push for blanket use, as they make more money, but that is also the problem.
I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584
Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people. Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine.
Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything.
- "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?"
- "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"
> no increased risk of all-cause mortality
> study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals
These are the important bits for the non medical folks
And this bit:
"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
> These are the important bits for the non medical folks
Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."
that in itself could be healthy user bias (if a healthier subset was taking up the vaccine).
did they control for that?
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They define unvaccinated as anyone who wasn't vaccinated by Nov 2021. What if they got vaccinated afterwards?
This is specified as an exclusion criteria in the Supplementary.
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What specific impact do you think that would have on this study? Do you think vaccines prior to Nov-2021 were safe and they were unsafe after? Do you think short term results, captured after Nov-2021 are more relevant than inclusive results prior?
I've been using this prompt on articles that generate debate. Like microservices, or jwt's. It brings up some interesting points for this article...
Look at this article and point out any wording that seems meant to push a certain viewpoint. Note anything important the author leaves out, downplays, or overstates, including numbers that seem cherry-picked or lack context. Clearly separate basic facts from opinions or emotional language. Explain how people with different viewpoints might read the article differently. Also call out any common persuasion tactics like loaded wording, selective quotes, or appeals to authority.
Who would win, the combined efforts of the best scientists in the field, or innuendo from a fancy markov model?
You could at least paste the points here.
Note that LLMs can easily deduce what your biases are based on your prompt and give you only information that confirms your biases.
Thank you!
One thing I don’t get: the study excludes the first 6 months after vaccination to avoid immortal-time bias. But if people died right away due to the vaccine (hypothetically), wouldn’t this design exclude those deaths?
>As unvaccinated individuals were alive between their random index date and November 1, 2021, corresponding to a maximum duration of 6 months, starting follow-up from the index date would have introduced immortal time bias. Therefore, we initiated the study of long-term mortality 6 months after the index date, while mortality within 6 months after vaccination was analyzed separately using SCCS models. While the SCCS models are well-suited for short-term vaccine safety studies, they are less appropriate for long-term mortality, particularly due to limited control periods among vaccinated individuals, and age differences within the same individual across risk or control periods, as age is by far a major risk factor for death. For both analyses, we introduced the calendar period as an adjusting factor to account for the infection dynamics, baseline mortality trends, and the varying propension to get vaccinated.
> But if people died right away due to the vaccine (hypothetically), wouldn’t this design exclude those deaths?
Yes. That's what we have plenty of other studies for, including the clinical trials that led to the vaccines being approved in the first place.
>Vaccinated individuals were older than unvaccinated individuals (mean [SD] age, 38.0 [11.8] years vs 37.1 [11.4] years), more frequently women (11 688 603 [51.3%] vs 2 876 039 [48.5%]) and had more cardiometabolic comorbidities (2 126 250 [9.3%] vs 464 596 [7.8%]).
This is interesting because of "supposed" cardiovascular effects of the vaccine that many folks were worried about. Even more confounding is the gender differences. You'd think skewing women would skew away from cardiovascular issues.
An alternate interpretation is that the at risk cardio unvaccinated died of COVID for some reason.
The increase in myocarditis from the vaccine is well-documented. (And very small.)
COVID causes myocarditis too (even for young people unlikely to die from COVID itself), at much higher rates. So you only need a 20% chance of contracting COVID for the vaccine to be net positive in the least obviously positive age group.
non-scientific but every young person I know has had covid at least twice.
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> First, individuals who choose vaccination may differ from those who do not, potentially introducing confounding bias.
It's very hard to interpret this data given the massive confounder of "antivaxxers are suspicious of healthcare and take more risks".
I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Your cite reads to me like a statement on the available data, which is interesting in its own ways but can be corrected for when it's irrelevant to the hypothesis.
Am I right in reading "Figure. Estimation of All-Cause Mortality at 4 Years in Vaccinated Compared With Unvaccinated Individuals Using Weighted Cox Models: Main and Stratified Analyses" to show that vaccines were more beneficial to the 18-29 age group than any older group? Isn't that unexpected?
From the paper:
> The main causes of death were cancer (769 and 853 cases per million in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, respectively), external causes of mortality (493 and 597 cases per million, including, among others, unintentional injuries, such as transportation crashes, falls, and drownings, as well as suicides or self-inflicted injuries) and diseases of the circulatory system (282 and 367 cases per million) (Table 2). Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
I don't think mRNA vaccination is likely to cause an increase in all-cause mortality. But this study is clearly comparing two radically different populations, and could not show a mortality increase from mRNA vaccination even if one existed.
I have to admit I checked the author on this paper. No surprise it is from outside of the US. It's hard to imagine a US institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.
I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
It goes the other way too. It's hard to imagine a {EU,German,whatever} institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.
> Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause
This sounds like a red flag to me if you're trying to isolate the COVID vaccine as something safe. Table 2 data showed less drownings, less car crashes, less falls, less deaths related to chromosomal abnormalities... How can there not be a confounding variable or two here?
It’s sad that these days anytime health studies or recommendations come out I half to make sure it’s not from an official US government source.
But to be honest even before the current shit show I was taking recommendations from foreign health departments when it came to COVID.
I got a booster shot after getting the J and J vaccine before it was officially recommended by the CDC because I saw other countries’ health departments publishing data about it. I can’t remember whether it was Isreal, the UK or the EU.
This is rather weird. Mortality in immediate connection with the vaccine (index time) would not have been captured here. I would hesitate to draw any conclusion from this paper.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
As others have mentioned that data is captured in other studies and isn't the point of this paper
Honestly, the thing I find more interesting is the "Social Deprivation Index" where vaccinated individuals were 21% "most social" and 19% "least social" while unvaccinated individuals were 15% "most social" and 27% "least social".
There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.
If you're social you're more likely to care about those around you. Vaccines are also important for protecting vulnerable people in the community, so they were doubly motivated that way.
so anyone who didn't get vaccinated before Nov. 2021 is considered unvaccinated? if they got the same dose the "vaccinated" group got on Dec 1st 2021 they're still... unvaccinated? and this is the control for this study? am i missing something? im sure there are a ton of valuable findings in this study, but that seems like a flaw.
also, this is only tangentially related, but why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them? they made billions off vaccines.
remember martin shrkeli? he claimed he raised the price of a drug for a rare disease to make it commercially viable and he was crucified for it. less than 5 years later, a virus breaks out of a town with a lab dedicated to experimenting with (i.e. weaponizing) viruses and big pharma decided to convert to altruism when we needed them most? shrkeli's company made $65M in total off that (which a court ruled all of which had to be returned)... thats not even rounding error for pfizer, who sold $35B+ worth of mrna vaccines in 2021 alone.
if the guy who invented Daraprim came out and told us shkreli was a scumbag, we'd have believed him. but the mRNA guy comes out and he gets eviscerated. i get it, it's not 1:1, but still.
i'm not saying its all a hoax or a conspiracy, but "there doesn't need to be a formal conspiracy when interests converge". in the U.S., federal funding was given to anyone "treating" COVID. had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death. and a check to the hospital from uncle sam.
earlier this year (MIT got duped)[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2GzdAGbxwinERSEt/a-widely-s...] by a second year student when no one critiqued his fraudulent AI research. its a reminder that skepticism is an important part of the feedback loop.
i don't think the vaccine killed 17M people, and i think there are definitely grifters on the skeptic side, but that doesn't discount skepticism as a whole. and i dont think this study vindicates anything completely either.
> so anyone who didn't get vaccinated before Nov. 2021 is considered unvaccinated?
The answer is in the first paragraph of the "Design, Study Populations, and Outcomes" section:
Exposure to COVID-19 vaccination was defined as the administration of a first dose of an mRNA vaccine between May 1 and October 31, 2021 (inclusion period), which was the mass vaccination period for adults in France, who primarily received mRNA vaccines. Multiple vaccinations in exposed individuals were not considered. The unvaccinated group was defined as individuals who remained unvaccinated as of November 1, 2021. Individuals vaccinated before May 1, 2021 (12.0%), or who received a first dose of another (ie, non-mRNA–based) COVID-19 vaccine during the inclusion period (1.4%) were excluded.
> why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them?
Are we? Says who? Certainly there are bad actors who profit off of the misfortune of others. There are also brilliant people who work hard to bring about access to lifesaving treatments. There have certainly been examples of fraud in the past, and there have also been examples of truly amazing public health benefits.
Do I personally think the US health system could be better structured to disincentivize the former and promote the latter? Definitely! Is that evidence of a global conspiracy? Nope.
> had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death
There's a good analysis of that here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million...
TLDR is that all-cause death increased in line with the reported covid deaths which strongly refutes the "had covid got hit with a bus" theory.
They define unvaccinated as anyone in the study who didn't get their first dose by Nov 2021. That feels like a pretty tight window to me. I don't think they checked to see if those "unvaccinated" people got vaccinated during the 4 year followup, especially given the mandates that forced people to get them.
That's a year into its availability in France. Anyone who didn't have their first dose by then probably wasn't getting a dose.
You can see that in this chart (click the 5Y range): https://ycharts.com/indicators/france_coronavirus_full_vacci...
It's the full vaccination rate; as of Dec 1 2021 it was 69.89%. A month later (i.e. those Nov folks are getting their second dose) it's 74%; latest number on the chart is 78.44%.
> That's a year into its availability in France. Anyone who didn't have their first dose by then probably wasn't getting a dose.
You are aware of the "incentives" offered by the French govt?
Such wonderful options as the ability to go the shops without being arrested that came with, "take the mandated medicine".
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How would they calculate 4 year all-cause mortality on people who got vaccinated after Nov 2021? In case you haven't looked at a calendar recently, it's December 2025 now.
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> I knew there would be BS like this in the study
If you "know" that a study whose title you are predisposed to disagree with has "BS" in it, something tells me no amount of scientific evidence is going to persuade you.
We should not forget, that in most countries people who were unvaccinated came under severe social pressure. They often lost their jobs or got banned from social circles. You were basically rendered an outcast by not being vaccinated. So taking the vaccine did not only affect your immune system, but also gave you a higher social status. And there are plenty of studies that show that a lower social status significantly impacts mortality, with lower status linked to higher death rates. This may explain the lower all cause mortality among vaccinated people.
If this were true, we would expect to see higher mortality among unvaccinated individuals in high-vaccination rate areas.
Does this mean Brett Weinstein was wrong when he said it caused 17M deaths ???
The guy who says HIV is caused by poppers?
is it not possible that the kind of person who would've had negative side effects from an mrna vaccination already died from covid itself prior to wide rollout? presumably anyone who had any sort of minor illness during covid would be predisposed to get the vaccine, whereas anyone both lucky enough to be spared of that and ignorant of the vaccine would have their own illness due to the way this was designed. in addition anyone who for whatever reason didn't want to get the vaccine who didn't at this point would actually be uniquely at risk due to the combination of likelihood of getting covid plus disposition for an anti-health attitude.
I feel like you could have the same conclusion if you had groups that were people who go to the doctor vs people who do not in the same time period
they go into this themselves:
> It seems reasonable to assume that by early November 2021, 3 months after the introduction of the mandatory health pass39 (delivered when fulfilling one of these conditions: a negative COVID-19 test result, proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or a certificate of recovery from a COVID-19 infection) to enter and exit France as well as to access restaurants, theaters, and nonurgent hospital consultations, the majority of unvaccinated individuals were reluctant to get vaccinated.
> A study aimed at characterizing patient hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccination showed that categorical refusal of vaccination was associated with prior noncompliance with vaccination recommendations, a lower educational level, and a less severe perception of COVID-19.41
in any case i've yet to see a slam dunk study showing any negative effect of vaccination.
These are fair questions. I guess I'd first say that there were studies on reactogenic/immunogenic effects coincident w/ the original rollout. But perhaps more importantly, this study conditions on the time frame, meaning that it applies to all participants, and should thus not affect the risk ratio. I think knowing the current hazard risk ratio is more scientifically/medically valuable than the previous one (even if I'm skeptical that it has changed significantly for reasons other than noise)
Findings: In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months. Findings In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months
tl;dr: no, covid-19 vaccinated group had no increased risk of death, but did have decreased risk of death for covid (except in Corse region?)
edit: tl;dr: covid-19 mRNA vaccine was effective and did not contribute to increased deaths.
if you were among persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"
can you make explicit the point you are making?
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Looking forward to reading your work, please do link it when it's available as there's no point in arguing for or against something that we don't yet have access to.
They claim "Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc., who had 0 deaths from COVID-19 during the "pandemic", and only had COVID-19 deaths ever recorded AFTER the experimental injections were administered."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande... says Thailand's health ministry publicly recorded their first death in March 1, 2020. So it's transparently bullshit.
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200+? What was the quality of the data like for the Western Sahara?
NB: most people choosing not to take it in France tend to fall into the medically at risk, stubborn, or, "so far down the rabbit hole that you probably can't trust these people to make sensible life choices" groups. (This alone being a good reason why this 'control' group had a slightly higher all cause mortality at 6months)
Remember, France was one of the wonderful countries where you couldn't legally shop or work if you were deemed to be 'not at risk' && 'unvaccinated' and achieved a very high rate as a result biasing the control group. (This is a purely statistical statement)
And for reference, I do think the vax is dangerous in terms of massive populations and we don't have mass graves due to mRNA problems (although several large cancer blips). In the same way in countries with low vaccination rates we don't have mass graves at 10% population or higher. Cv19 was always going to kill and an untested treatment is likely to kill those who were at risk.
(I'm willing to bet in the case of cv19 the ones who were hit hardest would have been hit badly by either vector, virus or mRNA. But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...)
I'm sure both extremes will jump to the rallying cry of "2 more weeks..." So yes of course I'm wrong, I only worked on analysing early 'data' and pulling apart the models so what do I know.
> But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...
How convenient for you...
Vaccines benefit the population, at the expense of the individual
This study demonstrates that it benefits the individual (and therefore the population).
No it doesn’t. I’m not trying to make a point about vaccines, just that the study is a population study and so shows benefits on average to a population.
If the vaccine killed 1/100 people (again I don’t believe this but it’s the internet) but made the other 99 immune to dying over the 4 years, it would look really good on average even if it was directly responsible for the deaths of 1%.
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Explain how? there is a right answer but you'll probably not get it by relying exclusively on the reported data.
Not getting measles, polio, etc… seems like a pretty big benefit to the individual.
For vaccines like the measles vaccine where it can entirely stop the spread in a vaccinated population this can be true until enough people think this way that measles starts spreading in your vicinity.
But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn't able to eliminate its spread so it mostly is about protecting yourself rather than protecting others.
Vaccines benefit both! Not dying or even really getting sick from preventable but horrific diseases is a huge benefit to the individual!
As a young person with a healthy immune system, there was 0 benefit of injecting something that was given immunity from liability.
If you really missed the personal "benefit" of mortality or morbidity there are many ways you could make up for that.
Is the personal expense not dying or getting less sick or something?
How? Not dying from preventable diseases seems like a pretty good deal for the individual.