| I took the bait, I'm ashamed. I try to keep an open mind, so I read some of it. The thrust of the article is that vaccines work well at preventing infection, but that if you do get infected, it is _possible_ that you might die at a higher rate. _Possible_ comes from a big spread in the standard deviation of P(death|infected & vaccinated). I didn't check his calculations, I took his numbers at face value and just looked at the charts. The author uses big standard errors to make claims about what could or could not be true, because the standard errors straddle both favorable and unfavorable statistics for the vaccine. However when the standard errors are too small for this dubious reasoning, they come out in favor of the vaccine. The author appears to me to be using motivating reasoning to push an agenda. Edit: sorry I am not completely right, because I wrote this comment before thoroughly reading the whole article. Sometimes his standard errors come out against the vaccine, and for all I know his math could be right. But I don't want to check the math because I have limited time and I don't care if my death rate goes up given conditions {x, y, z.} I care if getting the vaccine makes me less likely to get sick and die, which it does, because if you look at all the tables and charts that's exactly what it shows. |
> The death rate if infected was always going to be higher in the vaccinated groups if most of the vaccinated were those likely to die in the first place.
IOW: Those most likely to die were most likely to get vaccinated. Obviously true, but not interesting - a correlation we need to account for. When you do control for prior risk, the results are as expected, i.e., vaccines make you much safer.
The quoted tweet ("100x") was inaccurate and exaggerated. That's worth briefly correcting. But the lengthy article's points are only minor and pedantic, and do not change what we know, which is that our vaccines are very effective.