Comment by laichzeit0
3 hours ago
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.
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
And when you do, the critics will just shift the goal posts, again.
> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
> not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.
For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st...
This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"
If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.
What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
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morbidity is also bad and should be prevented
Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
Are there really antivax people that would know the word "covariate?" That's gotta be a small Venn diagram overlap.
Antivaxers surpisingly know quite a lot of lingo. What they lack is an understanding of experimental methods.
I'm fine with vaccines, i just dont want my kids to particpate in the experiemnt for a disease that they have 0% chance of dying from.
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They might know the word. Understanding what it means in context is a different matter.
You see this all the time where people will pick up niche jargon and misapply it.
Sovcits similarly use lots of complicated legal terms.
They just don't use them correctly and/or appropriately.