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.
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
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I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.
I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.
Where do you get decades? That study says 200 days.
You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.
mRNA can't cause wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that actually lives inside cells and gets transmitted through eggs to offspring. it's a persistent organism that reproduces. There's not a way for mRNA to grow bacteria.
mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.
The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.
And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.
I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.
I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?
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.
> but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious
That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,
“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”
It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.
(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)
The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.
If the vaccine was randomly administered among the study population, I'd buy this as the simple explanation.
Not sure it follows so cleanly with the actual study setup
There is plenty of evidence beside this study.
There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
1 out of 100 when billions are getting it is gonna be a large number. Mortality rate has gone down substantially since the vaccines.
I like to ask people who talk about a 1% mortality rate if they'd go to a football game in a stadium with 100k seats if 1k of those seats randomly had a small bomb attached.
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> Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.
Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.
What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
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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.
Not getting the vaccine is statisically correlated with distrust in traditional medicine, and suceptibility to giving undue attention and credit to unfounded and unsound practices.
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...
Could it mean that lots of Covid deaths are being attributed to other things?
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.
Papers like this are designed to fit into the conventions that allow knowledge to compound. Not that the conventions are perfect at doing this.
I would suggest that rather than changing this convention in a big way, there needs to be good pathways for communicating the most important takeaways to the general public. Unfortunately, there's kind of a chasm between academia and popular science.
With all due respect, I disagree.
You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.
I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.
The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.
Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.
Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.
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.
Read again.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
You should read my statement again.
If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
> If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%…
But you already agreed this is not the case, in your comment:
> If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases.
GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.
> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,
By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.
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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> "no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
My take is not quite as charitable as most of the comments, although my objection only barely applies to this particular paper. Biomedical research has long tradition of a very specific type of analysis: hypothesis testing. Roughly speaking, you make a hypothesis and test your data for compatibility with the hypothesis. In this paper, the authors are comparing two hypotheses: (a) there is an increased risk of all-cause mortality or (b) the increase in risk is zero or negative [0]. And the statement you’re quoting from the conclusion section sure sounds like it’s saying that the authors found that the data was consistent with (b) but not with (a).
Researchers love this. There are lots of papers with fancy-named tests with which one can do this analysis. Regulators often demand it.
And it produces papers that are correct in a fairly literal sense but miss the point entirely. For example, “we found no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of autism”. I, too, can look under my bed or study four people and find no evidence of anything at all about vaccines and autism, and I would be more or less justified in making that claim.
And because of this, you need to read papers very carefully to see what you can actually conclude. “No evidence” means a lot more in a large (“high powered”) study than in a small, weak study.
The right way to do this is something like “we looked at such-and-such data and found, with 95% confidence, that the increase in risk of X is <= 0.2%” or even that “the change in risk is <= -25%” (check out that minus sign!). If I look under my bed, I will find evidence that the increased absolute of autism caused by vaccines is <= 100%, and I didn’t need to study anything to confirm that :)
Fortunately, this particular paper has the silly throwaway starting you’re complaining about in a few places but is otherwise mostly on the right track. Quoting from the Results section:
> Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76]), with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause.
IMO that should have been the headline. The latter sentence there is giving some indication that the result is robust and that the researchers didn’t flub it or get unlucky in quality of their data.
P.S. The fact that the vaccines seemed to reduce the risk is death from causes other than severe covid is interesting. I wonder how much is reducing death from complications of COVID other than “severe covid”, how much is behavioral changes (vaccinated whole socializing more and leaving their houses more), and how much is bizarre off-target effects of the mRNA vaccines. Here’s an example of a surprising off-target benefit that no one understands well:
[0] I think. I didn’t reread it enough times to rule out the other common test: is the data consistent with the hypothesis that the risk didn’t change at all, which is also sadly common. But I’m moderately sure I’m right in the context of this paper.
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.
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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)
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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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.
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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.
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
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And when you do, the critics will just shift the goal posts, again.
most of the critics of this particular vaccine are the ones that took it. either the people who got covid anyway or were injured by it.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
> who got covid anyway
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
> 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.
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?
we could let people choose whether to participate, with informed consent. instead of getting them fired for not participating in the experiment.
Did you even follow the link provided? It leads directly to an informed consent page for the study, which was voluntary. You're probably thinking about what happened _after_ these studies found the vaccine to be safe and effective. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you work in a special environment, and if you are turning down a safe and effective vaccine, you are putting your patients at risk. It means that you are unqualified for your job, so yes, you should be fired.
In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.
The case fatality ratio for measles infected children in high-income countries is also low. Nonetheless, we vaccinate children for this infectious disease because morbidity is also bad.
Which disease is that? I'm not aware of any disease that's commonly vaccinated against that has a 0% death rate in children.
The Covid deaths were measured in thousands before they could find a single individual under 18 yrs old who died from it. The only reason to vaccinate kids was to try to prevent them from spreading it to adults. Right from the beginning (eg. With the cruise ship that was infected), it was extremely obvious that the main factor in survivability was age. The younger you were, the safer it was. Weight was also very important but we learned that later
Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".
Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.
No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
Sovcits similarly use lots of complicated legal terms.
They just don't use them correctly and/or appropriately.
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.
> before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe
In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
The timelines were compressed because instead of doing all the safety trials one after the other, they were all done concurrently.
The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.
Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness.
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)?
Indeed. A lot of antivaxxers mockingly say "my body, my choice" but they are highlighting their own hypocrisy, not anyone else's. One critical difference between the cases is that pregnancy is not contagious.
Agree. Also I don't think any adults were forcibly vaccinated again their will, they just lost out on certain societal privileges.
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.
For example:
Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate
For a lot of people these aren't rational beliefs, they're beliefs based on appeals to emotion. They will only rationally re-evaluate those beliefs if you change the kind of media they consume.
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.
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 !"
> The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
you never get a second chance to make a first impression
Ultimately, natural selection might do it.
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
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.
Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.
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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.
some people might like to quantify the risks that may or may not be associated with both in order to make informed decisions
unfortunately that line of reasoning was so censured that people started weaponizing it
I assume that you mean "censored" and not "censured" (different thing), but it was not, in fact, censored. It was entirely in the open.
However, the information was definitely not distilled effectively for the average layperson. I remember thinking at the time that the CDC was seriously ham-handed when it came to communicating with the general public. I even initially blamed the Trump administration, but when the Biden administration took over, they did not improve communication either. My conclusion since then is that the CDC is dominated by academic types--which is largely appropriate given their mission--but that they also put academic types in PR roles, which was a disaster.
No. Questioning the dominant narrative was in fact censured.
I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.
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.
The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
Let's start with this question:
> For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are?
Much more likely than dying from the vaccine.
Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some.
The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday.
Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever.
It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk.
Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
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.
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.
That's not what I've seen. I live in very-red Tennessee. What I see is more like what you said yourself:
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 conclusion to this (within my bubble) being: since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
> That's not what I've seen.
It's common enough that there are state legislatures trying to ban mRNA vaccines all together. [1]
> since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
Kids spread covid and no vaccine is 100% effective.
I've not seen any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous to any age group. There is plenty of evidence that COVID is deadly to the very young, the very old, and a bunch of other people (including those with compromised immune systems).
It's exactly the same reason kids should get the flu shot.
That said, there's no requirement anywhere for kids to get either.
Who is requiring children to get the COVID vaccine?
> 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?
What if only the second type exists, but they always claim to be the first?
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.
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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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No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021.
Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too.
You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
Do you happen to have the metrics to hand? (Perhaps a visualisation, e.g. graphs?)
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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.
> 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.
>lymph node swelling
you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?
Yeah maybe forcing people to get them triggered some kind of skepticism, how about that
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.
Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS.
> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging
Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
> 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
That's why they are criticizing the application of the term to antivaxxers.
They aren't actually skeptical, though.
“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].
I respectfully disagree. VAERS can absolutely be used to establish causality when followed by proper expert investigation (which is exactly its purpose as a signal-detection system). The IOM has relied on VAERS data to confirm causal links in 158 vaccine-adverse event pairs, including rotavirus vaccine and intussusception.
Here, FDA career scientists conducted that follow-up: they reviewed 96 child death reports and concluded at least 10 were caused by COVID vaccine myocarditis. That expert finding, not politics, is what triggered the stricter protocols. Healthy skepticism means demanding the full data for review, not preemptively calling it invalid.
Where is that expert finding published?
As far as I have read about the ACIP decisions they didn't actually provide any real data to support this conclusion.
The FDA memo citing 10 vaccine-caused myocarditis deaths in kids came _after_ the Sept. 2025 ACIP vote. ACIP had already dropped routine vaccination for healthy kids 6 mo-17 yr and moved everyone under 65 to "shared decision-making" (high-risk only) [1]
The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo. In all honesty they should be fined for doing this.
We have no information about how highly motivated anti-vaxxers in positions of power over the FDA arrived at this conclusion except "the team has performed an initial analysis"[1]. That's literally it. Your claim that "FDA career scientists" conducted the follow-up can't even be based on this flimsy a statement. Moreover, these deaths have already been investigated by FDA career scientists and found these conclusions unwarranted.
Prasad spends the rest of the memo politically grandstanding (including claiming it was the FDA commissioner that was the hero here, forcing this issue, not FDA career scientists) and dismissing any objections to very obvious arguments against his claim (that have been made and published multiple times over the past five years) without any evidence, while providing no evidence of his own, in a memo addressing FDA career scientists.
Seriously, everyone should go read his memo. It's basically just a shitty antivax substack post, yet will apparently be FDA policy going forward. Another win for meritocracy.
> The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
The only "claim" here just sounds more official because RFKjr got a bunch of his best antivax buddies to be in charge of the FDA (same with the ACIP). There's no way to even consider it without evidence, so there's nothing to dismiss. Come back when you have something real.
They aren't lying, in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie.
They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.
Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction.
Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven.
What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule.
Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
> Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality…
Don't assume. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established."
> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
He gets to restrict vaccines, which is a thing he's wanted to do for decades.
What about this administration makes you think they care about having their false claims "shredded in 24 hours"?
Duh. VAERS guide says raw reports dont 100% prove causality. Nobody claims they do. That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
They could've just said "VAERS proves nothing" and left the recommendation unchanged. Instead they wrote it up, leaked it early, and invited the exact scrutiny you're giving it now.
If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown. They only take that risk if the OBPV analysis actually held up internally.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely".
We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown
He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
And we're back at the "Hitler provided free things to Jews" technical truth again. This is likely an accurate statement!
But it'd deeply missing important context.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown.
This is likely meaningless to the guy who leaves dead bears in Central Park. The biggest political innovation in the last 50 years or so is the discovery that you can look like a clown without much consequence.
I don't recommend eating poop, but that doesn't mean it causes autism.
You have no idea what a proof by contradiction is.
They're lying about the risk-benefit. Myocarditis afflicts covid-infected people in greater numbers.
Haha, who has claimed more victims, vaccines or Dunning-Kruger?
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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.
>"Exposure Exposure was defined as receiving a first mRNA dose between May 1 and October 31, 2021. Individuals who were unvaccinated by November 1, 2021, were assigned a random index date based on vaccinated individuals’ vaccination dates."
What?? So any first mRNA dose before May 1st and after Nov 1st 2021 was not considered an adequate exposure? Why are they only defining exposure as initial dose being administered within a six-month period for a vaccine that was released (A) before that; and (B) still continually offered - though in much lower capacities?
I'm all pro-vax but what? Lol.
> 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?
Its a cohort study, so you can only control for confounders. The 2nd paragraph of the discussion addresses the healthy-vaccinee effect you're referring to.
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.
No they didn't. They excluded those that got the vaccine pre-May 2021 or those that got another vaccine besides Pfizer or Moderna.
The target trial emulation specifies "individuals deceased or vaccinated during the 6 month grace period between the index date and the effective start of follow-up" as an exclusion criteria
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?
>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.
I am not a physician, but I expect that decades hence we will see the health effects of repeated Covid infections. I'm guessing specifically around cardio health and dementia risk.
and how many young persons do you know that have had COVID-induced myocarditis?
> 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.
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.
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.
Note that LLMs can easily deduce what your biases are based on your prompt and give you only information that confirms your biases.
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.
For me, it’s a way to break down and analyze articles more critically, not to pick a side.
Thank you!
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.
This is specific to the Trump administration. Previous administrations actually took critique and updated policies and advice based on the critique.
Nonsensical whataboutism.
> 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 obviously almost all confounders, since COVID mortality is low now and choosing to obtain the vaccine correlates strongly with other medical and non-medical factors affecting all-cause mortality. The point is that no adverse effect from the vaccine offsets that confounding beneficial effect. More covariates would shrink the confounding effect, but they did the best they could with their dataset.
That confounding effect turned out to be massive, which is bad news for anyone hoping to tightly bound the vaccine risk. It's good personal news for anyone in the vaccinated group, just more as to their general life choices than as to COVID.
Not being an idiot who takes dumb risks like being unvaccinated certainly does seem confounding.
I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer. But I do have doubt in vaccines especially mRNA vaccines nowadays, and I wish these studies do more than just this.
I have 4 kids, and 3 of them got vaccinated for the covid (1 is a baby 2 years old) for the very first time with Delta. They struggle for weeks to recover, they get tired, they seem to have heart related symptoms. Eventually, those went away after months. The baby has never had covid (no vaccine). I then have never covid vaccinated them, and they have never been sick with covid even though my wife and I caught covid after our 3rd vaccine shots. We didn't do any isolation, we share things and direct contacts with them. They might have had Covid but very mild, the quick tests never showed positive.
My wife got blood clot issue that I saw blood coming out from her skin.
I struggled many months with the vaccines with weird fatigues (I'm normally very healthy in my late 30s). My gut biome seemed to change and I became quite sensitive to some food (milk proteins mostly, not just lactose intolerance)
My mom who lived in a different country got 3 shots and she struggled with heart condition for more than a year, Drs couldn't find the reason why. It was difficult for her to do anything with strength. She finally recovered after 1+ year.
There're many real and true stories like mine, I really have no idea what these studies saying anymore.
> I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer.
But you write anti-vax comments filled with the usual anti-vax post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.
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.
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?
This isn't an RCT and COVID mortality is no longer high, so the effect on all-cause mortality is almost entirely confounders. So that result just means people 18-29 who chose to get the COVID vaccine have other characteristics that result in the much lower mortality from non-COVID causes.
I'm not sure why. The top causes for that age group are usually non-medical, accident, suicide, or homicide. We might speculate those would anticorrelate more strongly with the prudence that leads people to get the vaccine than unavoidable medical causes, but looking at the V, W, X, and Y causes from Table 2 that doesn't seem to be true. I guess it could be true but only for the 18-29 group (and if it's not then what causes are responsible?), since they don't break that down by age.
The "problem" is that vaccine recipients are so much healthier overall than non-recipients that the vaccine would have to be spectacularly unsafe to offset that. So this analysis doesn't actually tell us much, but it's consistent with all other evidence that the vaccine is safe.
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.
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.
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".
That's entirely irrelevant to "what date do we pick as the cutoff for this research?"
From the chart, they picked a very reasonable spot to draw said line.
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.
Does this mean Brett Weinstein was wrong when he said it caused 17M deaths ???
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?
The vaccine was not tested on people that were already dead.
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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."
Yeah, admittedly while I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt, I assumed this wasn't coming from a place of good will.
200+? What was the quality of the data like for the Western Sahara?
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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...
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.
On the other hand, what would an intellectually honest comment look like?
If this were true, we would expect to see higher mortality among unvaccinated individuals in high-vaccination rate areas.
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
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.
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)
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
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 do not see any 'radical difference' in the numbers. Individuals who choose not to get vaccinated are likely to be less informed and more reckless in other aspects of managing their health and their lives in general, so the relatively small difference between the populations is perfectly understandable.
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%.
This comment helps me understand how folks see "your taxes will go up $10k but you won't pay $20k in health insurance premiums" as a hit to the pocketbook.
Well, if say the vaccine gave 1/100 fatal lung cancer then a population study would show a decrease in covid deaths and an increase in lung cancer deaths though.
It's only the case if the vaccine gave everybody slightly higher chances of dying from everything that it could hide in the weeds.
So in this specific example we can see from Table 2 that deaths/1 million are just lower for everything in the vaccinated so it's not the case that it lowered one kind of death drastically at the expense of another.
Don't those 99 enjoy being alive despite all of the things that would have killed some of them had they not taken the vaccine? If "some" is at least 1%, that sounds like an individual benefit to me.
If you take the vaccine, you have a lower chance of dying over those 4 years. You also have an infinitely higher chance (specifically 1% vs 0%) of dying from the vaccine, but that doesn't change the previous sentence.
1% mortality would be setting off sirens during this kind of trial
Yes, a 1% mortality either way would. Yet for some reason we're focused on just one of the possibly results of the decision tree
But this ignores the other counterfactual (what would happen to the 1/100 people had they not received the vaccine).
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.
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.
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.
Is the personal expense not dying or getting less sick or something?
If you really missed the personal "benefit" of mortality or morbidity there are many ways you could make up for that.
How? Not dying from preventable diseases seems like a pretty good deal for the individual.
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.
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.
I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.
https://www.gavinpublishers.com/article/view/detection-of-pf...
Where do you get decades? That study says 200 days.
You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.
mRNA can't cause wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that actually lives inside cells and gets transmitted through eggs to offspring. it's a persistent organism that reproduces. There's not a way for mRNA to grow bacteria.
mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.
The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.
And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.
I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.
I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?
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.
> but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious
That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,
“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”
It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.
(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)
The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.
If the vaccine was randomly administered among the study population, I'd buy this as the simple explanation.
Not sure it follows so cleanly with the actual study setup
There is plenty of evidence beside this study.
There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
1 out of 100 when billions are getting it is gonna be a large number. Mortality rate has gone down substantially since the vaccines.
I like to ask people who talk about a 1% mortality rate if they'd go to a football game in a stadium with 100k seats if 1k of those seats randomly had a small bomb attached.
> Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.
Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.
What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
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.
Not getting the vaccine is statisically correlated with distrust in traditional medicine, and suceptibility to giving undue attention and credit to unfounded and unsound practices.
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...
Could it mean that lots of Covid deaths are being attributed to other things?
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.
Papers like this are designed to fit into the conventions that allow knowledge to compound. Not that the conventions are perfect at doing this.
I would suggest that rather than changing this convention in a big way, there needs to be good pathways for communicating the most important takeaways to the general public. Unfortunately, there's kind of a chasm between academia and popular science.
With all due respect, I disagree.
You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.
I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.
The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.
Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.
Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.
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.
Read again.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
You should read my statement again.
If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
> If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%…
But you already agreed this is not the case, in your comment:
> If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases.
GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164643
> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,
By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.
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.
> "no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
My take is not quite as charitable as most of the comments, although my objection only barely applies to this particular paper. Biomedical research has long tradition of a very specific type of analysis: hypothesis testing. Roughly speaking, you make a hypothesis and test your data for compatibility with the hypothesis. In this paper, the authors are comparing two hypotheses: (a) there is an increased risk of all-cause mortality or (b) the increase in risk is zero or negative [0]. And the statement you’re quoting from the conclusion section sure sounds like it’s saying that the authors found that the data was consistent with (b) but not with (a).
Researchers love this. There are lots of papers with fancy-named tests with which one can do this analysis. Regulators often demand it.
And it produces papers that are correct in a fairly literal sense but miss the point entirely. For example, “we found no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of autism”. I, too, can look under my bed or study four people and find no evidence of anything at all about vaccines and autism, and I would be more or less justified in making that claim.
And because of this, you need to read papers very carefully to see what you can actually conclude. “No evidence” means a lot more in a large (“high powered”) study than in a small, weak study.
The right way to do this is something like “we looked at such-and-such data and found, with 95% confidence, that the increase in risk of X is <= 0.2%” or even that “the change in risk is <= -25%” (check out that minus sign!). If I look under my bed, I will find evidence that the increased absolute of autism caused by vaccines is <= 100%, and I didn’t need to study anything to confirm that :)
Fortunately, this particular paper has the silly throwaway starting you’re complaining about in a few places but is otherwise mostly on the right track. Quoting from the Results section:
> Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76]), with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause.
IMO that should have been the headline. The latter sentence there is giving some indication that the result is robust and that the researchers didn’t flub it or get unlucky in quality of their data.
P.S. The fact that the vaccines seemed to reduce the risk is death from causes other than severe covid is interesting. I wonder how much is reducing death from complications of COVID other than “severe covid”, how much is behavioral changes (vaccinated whole socializing more and leaving their houses more), and how much is bizarre off-target effects of the mRNA vaccines. Here’s an example of a surprising off-target benefit that no one understands well:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-and-...
[0] I think. I didn’t reread it enough times to rule out the other common test: is the data consistent with the hypothesis that the risk didn’t change at all, which is also sadly common. But I’m moderately sure I’m right in the context of this paper.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.
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.
most of the critics of this particular vaccine are the ones that took it. either the people who got covid anyway or were injured by it.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
> who got covid anyway
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
> 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?
we could let people choose whether to participate, with informed consent. instead of getting them fired for not participating in the experiment.
Did you even follow the link provided? It leads directly to an informed consent page for the study, which was voluntary. You're probably thinking about what happened _after_ these studies found the vaccine to be safe and effective. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you work in a special environment, and if you are turning down a safe and effective vaccine, you are putting your patients at risk. It means that you are unqualified for your job, so yes, you should be fired.
In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
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.
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.
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.
The case fatality ratio for measles infected children in high-income countries is also low. Nonetheless, we vaccinate children for this infectious disease because morbidity is also bad.
Which disease is that? I'm not aware of any disease that's commonly vaccinated against that has a 0% death rate in children.
The Covid deaths were measured in thousands before they could find a single individual under 18 yrs old who died from it. The only reason to vaccinate kids was to try to prevent them from spreading it to adults. Right from the beginning (eg. With the cruise ship that was infected), it was extremely obvious that the main factor in survivability was age. The younger you were, the safer it was. Weight was also very important but we learned that later
Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".
Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.
No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
Sovcits similarly use lots of complicated legal terms.
They just don't use them correctly and/or appropriately.
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.
> before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe
In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
The timelines were compressed because instead of doing all the safety trials one after the other, they were all done concurrently.
The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.
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...
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)?
Indeed. A lot of antivaxxers mockingly say "my body, my choice" but they are highlighting their own hypocrisy, not anyone else's. One critical difference between the cases is that pregnancy is not contagious.
Agree. Also I don't think any adults were forcibly vaccinated again their will, they just lost out on certain societal privileges.
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.
For example:
Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate
https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-die...
For a lot of people these aren't rational beliefs, they're beliefs based on appeals to emotion. They will only rationally re-evaluate those beliefs if you change the kind of media they consume.
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/
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 !"
> 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
From that study:
> Conclusions
> The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
you never get a second chance to make a first impression
Ultimately, natural selection might do it.
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
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.
Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.
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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.
some people might like to quantify the risks that may or may not be associated with both in order to make informed decisions
unfortunately that line of reasoning was so censured that people started weaponizing it
I assume that you mean "censored" and not "censured" (different thing), but it was not, in fact, censored. It was entirely in the open.
However, the information was definitely not distilled effectively for the average layperson. I remember thinking at the time that the CDC was seriously ham-handed when it came to communicating with the general public. I even initially blamed the Trump administration, but when the Biden administration took over, they did not improve communication either. My conclusion since then is that the CDC is dominated by academic types--which is largely appropriate given their mission--but that they also put academic types in PR roles, which was a disaster.
No. Questioning the dominant narrative was in fact censured.
I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.
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.
The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
Let's start with this question:
> For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are?
Much more likely than dying from the vaccine.
Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some.
The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday.
Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever.
It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk.
Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
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.
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.
That's not what I've seen. I live in very-red Tennessee. What I see is more like what you said yourself:
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 conclusion to this (within my bubble) being: since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
> That's not what I've seen.
It's common enough that there are state legislatures trying to ban mRNA vaccines all together. [1]
> since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
Kids spread covid and no vaccine is 100% effective.
I've not seen any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous to any age group. There is plenty of evidence that COVID is deadly to the very young, the very old, and a bunch of other people (including those with compromised immune systems).
It's exactly the same reason kids should get the flu shot.
That said, there's no requirement anywhere for kids to get either.
[1] https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/idaho/proposed-idaho...
Who is requiring children to get the COVID vaccine?
> 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?
What if only the second type exists, but they always claim to be the first?
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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No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021.
Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too.
You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
Do you happen to have the metrics to hand? (Perhaps a visualisation, e.g. graphs?)
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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.
“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?
Yeah maybe forcing people to get them triggered some kind of skepticism, how about that
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.
Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS.
> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging
Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
> 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
That's why they are criticizing the application of the term to antivaxxers.
They aren't actually skeptical, though.
“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.
Are they lying about the deaths? I'm not following.
VAERS cannot be used to establish causality; it cannot correctly be used in the way in which they are purporting to use it[1].
1 = https://www.kff.org/quick-take/fda-memo-linking-covid-vaccin...
I respectfully disagree. VAERS can absolutely be used to establish causality when followed by proper expert investigation (which is exactly its purpose as a signal-detection system). The IOM has relied on VAERS data to confirm causal links in 158 vaccine-adverse event pairs, including rotavirus vaccine and intussusception.
Here, FDA career scientists conducted that follow-up: they reviewed 96 child death reports and concluded at least 10 were caused by COVID vaccine myocarditis. That expert finding, not politics, is what triggered the stricter protocols. Healthy skepticism means demanding the full data for review, not preemptively calling it invalid.
Where is that expert finding published?
As far as I have read about the ACIP decisions they didn't actually provide any real data to support this conclusion.
The FDA memo citing 10 vaccine-caused myocarditis deaths in kids came _after_ the Sept. 2025 ACIP vote. ACIP had already dropped routine vaccination for healthy kids 6 mo-17 yr and moved everyone under 65 to "shared decision-making" (high-risk only) [1]
The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo. In all honesty they should be fined for doing this.
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/acip-recommends-covid19-vacci...
> Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo.
Blame them for what, exactly?
We have no information about how highly motivated anti-vaxxers in positions of power over the FDA arrived at this conclusion except "the team has performed an initial analysis"[1]. That's literally it. Your claim that "FDA career scientists" conducted the follow-up can't even be based on this flimsy a statement. Moreover, these deaths have already been investigated by FDA career scientists and found these conclusions unwarranted.
Prasad spends the rest of the memo politically grandstanding (including claiming it was the FDA commissioner that was the hero here, forcing this issue, not FDA career scientists) and dismissing any objections to very obvious arguments against his claim (that have been made and published multiple times over the past five years) without any evidence, while providing no evidence of his own, in a memo addressing FDA career scientists.
Seriously, everyone should go read his memo. It's basically just a shitty antivax substack post, yet will apparently be FDA policy going forward. Another win for meritocracy.
> The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
The only "claim" here just sounds more official because RFKjr got a bunch of his best antivax buddies to be in charge of the FDA (same with the ACIP). There's no way to even consider it without evidence, so there's nothing to dismiss. Come back when you have something real.
[1] https://www.biocentury.com/article/657740
They aren't lying, in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie.
They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.
Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction.
Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven.
What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule.
Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
> Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality…
Don't assume. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established."
> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
He gets to restrict vaccines, which is a thing he's wanted to do for decades.
(And not just COVID ones; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-acip-vaccine-panel-hepatiti... happened this morning. Or the spurious claims about Tylenol and autism.)
What about this administration makes you think they care about having their false claims "shredded in 24 hours"?
Duh. VAERS guide says raw reports dont 100% prove causality. Nobody claims they do. That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
They could've just said "VAERS proves nothing" and left the recommendation unchanged. Instead they wrote it up, leaked it early, and invited the exact scrutiny you're giving it now.
If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown. They only take that risk if the OBPV analysis actually held up internally.
Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely".
We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown
He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
And we're back at the "Hitler provided free things to Jews" technical truth again. This is likely an accurate statement!
But it'd deeply missing important context.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown.
This is likely meaningless to the guy who leaves dead bears in Central Park. The biggest political innovation in the last 50 years or so is the discovery that you can look like a clown without much consequence.
> Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978
I don't recommend eating poop, but that doesn't mean it causes autism.
You have no idea what a proof by contradiction is.
They're lying about the risk-benefit. Myocarditis afflicts covid-infected people in greater numbers.
Haha, who has claimed more victims, vaccines or Dunning-Kruger?
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.
>"Exposure Exposure was defined as receiving a first mRNA dose between May 1 and October 31, 2021. Individuals who were unvaccinated by November 1, 2021, were assigned a random index date based on vaccinated individuals’ vaccination dates."
What?? So any first mRNA dose before May 1st and after Nov 1st 2021 was not considered an adequate exposure? Why are they only defining exposure as initial dose being administered within a six-month period for a vaccine that was released (A) before that; and (B) still continually offered - though in much lower capacities?
I'm all pro-vax but what? Lol.
> 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?
Its a cohort study, so you can only control for confounders. The 2nd paragraph of the discussion addresses the healthy-vaccinee effect you're referring to.
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.
No they didn't. They excluded those that got the vaccine pre-May 2021 or those that got another vaccine besides Pfizer or Moderna.
The target trial emulation specifies "individuals deceased or vaccinated during the 6 month grace period between the index date and the effective start of follow-up" as an exclusion criteria
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?
>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.
I am not a physician, but I expect that decades hence we will see the health effects of repeated Covid infections. I'm guessing specifically around cardio health and dementia risk.
and how many young persons do you know that have had COVID-induced myocarditis?
> 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.
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.
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.
Note that LLMs can easily deduce what your biases are based on your prompt and give you only information that confirms your biases.
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.
For me, it’s a way to break down and analyze articles more critically, not to pick a side.
Thank you!
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.
This is specific to the Trump administration. Previous administrations actually took critique and updated policies and advice based on the critique.
Nonsensical whataboutism.
> 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 obviously almost all confounders, since COVID mortality is low now and choosing to obtain the vaccine correlates strongly with other medical and non-medical factors affecting all-cause mortality. The point is that no adverse effect from the vaccine offsets that confounding beneficial effect. More covariates would shrink the confounding effect, but they did the best they could with their dataset.
That confounding effect turned out to be massive, which is bad news for anyone hoping to tightly bound the vaccine risk. It's good personal news for anyone in the vaccinated group, just more as to their general life choices than as to COVID.
Not being an idiot who takes dumb risks like being unvaccinated certainly does seem confounding.
I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer. But I do have doubt in vaccines especially mRNA vaccines nowadays, and I wish these studies do more than just this.
I have 4 kids, and 3 of them got vaccinated for the covid (1 is a baby 2 years old) for the very first time with Delta. They struggle for weeks to recover, they get tired, they seem to have heart related symptoms. Eventually, those went away after months. The baby has never had covid (no vaccine). I then have never covid vaccinated them, and they have never been sick with covid even though my wife and I caught covid after our 3rd vaccine shots. We didn't do any isolation, we share things and direct contacts with them. They might have had Covid but very mild, the quick tests never showed positive.
My wife got blood clot issue that I saw blood coming out from her skin.
I struggled many months with the vaccines with weird fatigues (I'm normally very healthy in my late 30s). My gut biome seemed to change and I became quite sensitive to some food (milk proteins mostly, not just lactose intolerance)
My mom who lived in a different country got 3 shots and she struggled with heart condition for more than a year, Drs couldn't find the reason why. It was difficult for her to do anything with strength. She finally recovered after 1+ year.
There're many real and true stories like mine, I really have no idea what these studies saying anymore.
> I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer.
But you write anti-vax comments filled with the usual anti-vax post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.
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.
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?
This isn't an RCT and COVID mortality is no longer high, so the effect on all-cause mortality is almost entirely confounders. So that result just means people 18-29 who chose to get the COVID vaccine have other characteristics that result in the much lower mortality from non-COVID causes.
I'm not sure why. The top causes for that age group are usually non-medical, accident, suicide, or homicide. We might speculate those would anticorrelate more strongly with the prudence that leads people to get the vaccine than unavoidable medical causes, but looking at the V, W, X, and Y causes from Table 2 that doesn't seem to be true. I guess it could be true but only for the 18-29 group (and if it's not then what causes are responsible?), since they don't break that down by age.
The "problem" is that vaccine recipients are so much healthier overall than non-recipients that the vaccine would have to be spectacularly unsafe to offset that. So this analysis doesn't actually tell us much, but it's consistent with all other evidence that the vaccine is safe.
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.
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".
That's entirely irrelevant to "what date do we pick as the cutoff for this research?"
From the chart, they picked a very reasonable spot to draw said line.
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.
Does this mean Brett Weinstein was wrong when he said it caused 17M deaths ???
The guy who says HIV is caused by poppers?
i was referring to this https://youtu.be/P3nXJB5PoBM?t=39
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?
The vaccine was not tested on people that were already dead.
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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.
Yeah, admittedly while I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt, I assumed this wasn't coming from a place of good will.
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...
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.
On the other hand, what would an intellectually honest comment look like?
If this were true, we would expect to see higher mortality among unvaccinated individuals in high-vaccination rate areas.
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.
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)
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
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 do not see any 'radical difference' in the numbers. Individuals who choose not to get vaccinated are likely to be less informed and more reckless in other aspects of managing their health and their lives in general, so the relatively small difference between the populations is perfectly understandable.
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%.
This comment helps me understand how folks see "your taxes will go up $10k but you won't pay $20k in health insurance premiums" as a hit to the pocketbook.
Well, if say the vaccine gave 1/100 fatal lung cancer then a population study would show a decrease in covid deaths and an increase in lung cancer deaths though.
It's only the case if the vaccine gave everybody slightly higher chances of dying from everything that it could hide in the weeds.
So in this specific example we can see from Table 2 that deaths/1 million are just lower for everything in the vaccinated so it's not the case that it lowered one kind of death drastically at the expense of another.
Don't those 99 enjoy being alive despite all of the things that would have killed some of them had they not taken the vaccine? If "some" is at least 1%, that sounds like an individual benefit to me.
If you take the vaccine, you have a lower chance of dying over those 4 years. You also have an infinitely higher chance (specifically 1% vs 0%) of dying from the vaccine, but that doesn't change the previous sentence.
1% mortality would be setting off sirens during this kind of trial
Yes, a 1% mortality either way would. Yet for some reason we're focused on just one of the possibly results of the decision tree
But this ignores the other counterfactual (what would happen to the 1/100 people had they not received the vaccine).
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.
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.
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.
Is the personal expense not dying or getting less sick or something?
If you really missed the personal "benefit" of mortality or morbidity there are many ways you could make up for that.
How? Not dying from preventable diseases seems like a pretty good deal for the individual.