Comment by lesuorac
4 hours ago
Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
I am speaking about what the paper shows.
There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.
I wouldn't bother critiquing methodology without current, masters-level experience in the domain. I make incorrect assumptions when I'm even narrowly outside my own lane, and end up asking questions that clearly demonstrate e.g. my inability to parse fig. 4a.
I wouldn't bother commenting if I were hallucinating figures. There is no figure 4a.
If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.
Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.
OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?
That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.