Comment by dalbaugh

I did read the book, and the takeaway is that causal disentaglement is hard and a high bar, with even the causal link between cigarette smoking an cancer hard to "prove" until recently

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

Are there really antivax people that would know the word "covariate?" That's gotta be a small Venn diagram overlap.

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.

Also, what's the overlap here between people who believe a) the unborn have a "right to life" (or forced birth as some others call it, where the parent has no choice but to take the pregnancy to term and give birth), and b) those who think the parents have every right to decide not to vaccinate their children? If you believe (a), shouldn't you believe (not b)? And if you believe (b), shouldn't you believe (not a)?

Another thing that seemed to work is the unvaccinated getting sick themselves.

2/3 of the unvaccinated COVID patients who were admitted to hospital regretted their decision, declared they would promote the vaccine post-discharge, and declared they would get it post-discharge.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/

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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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.

“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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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?

> 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.

>lymph node swelling

you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?

> 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.

I thought skepticism was a key part of science

“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 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.

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.