[_heimdall]

> Covid disinformation got people killed.

You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.

[ordersofmag]

Even in science there is not a 'requirement' that you have a controlled experiment in order to have evidence that a claim is true. Following your argument you can't substantiate that humans are the result of evolution because we can't take two groups of early primates, subject one to evolutionary forces and the other not and see what happens. Instead we can observe a chain of correlations with plausible mechanisms that indicate causation and say it's evidentiary. For example, data that indicates unvaccinated people died at a higher rate and data that indicates people who chose not to vaccinate self-report that the reason they made that choice was based on particular information that they believed. That would be evidence that helps substantiate the theory the information led to deaths. It's not 'proof'. We can't 'prove' that exposure to the information actually led to the decision (because people sometimes misattribute their own decisions) and it would be impractical to imagine we can collect vaccine-decision rationales from a large number of folks pre-death (though someone might have) and you can't attribute a particular death to a particular decision (because vaccines aren't perfectly protective) so you have to do statistics over a large sample. But the causal chain is entirely plausible based on everything I know and there's no reason to believe data around those correlations can't exist. And science isn't about 'proof'. Science is about theories that best explain a set of observations and in particular have predictive power. You almost never run experiments (in the 8th grade science fair sense) in fields like astronomy or geology, but we have strong 'substantiated' theories in those fields nonetheless.

[_heimdall]

A causal chain being plausible does not justify or substantiate a claim of causation.

I absolutely would say that we can't prove humans are the result of evolution. The theory seems very likely and explains what we have observed, but that's why its a theory and not a fact - its the last hypothesis standing and generally accepted but not proven.

My argument here isn't with whether the causation seemed likely, though we can have that debate if you prefer and we'd have to go deep down the accuracy and reliability of data reporting during the pandemic.

My argument is that we can't make blanket statements that misinformation killed people. Not only is that not a proven (or provable) fact, it skips past what we define as misinformation and ignores what was known at the time in favor of what we know today. Even if the data you to point to shows correlation and possible causation today, we didn't have that information during the pandemic st the time that YouTube was pulling down content for questioning efficacy or safety.

[pmarreck]

Come on, man. COVID deaths per capita were highest in countries that had very active vaccine skepticism. While this is not causation establishment, it is super highly correlative:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact using a very reasonable methodology.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... illustrates that it's hard to nail this relationship down since UNDERREPORTING was ALSO highest in countries with high vaccine skepticism.

While establishing causation is the gold standard, dismissing strong correlative relationships where everything reasonably considered conflationary has been ruled out (which a raw death count would ostensibly do much of) is not arguing in good faith, IMHO

[_heimdall]

Sure, you can absolutely claim correlation there and say something like "information making people hesitant to get the vaccine may have increased risk of death." That's wildly different than claiming that misinformation killed people.

Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all, here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in the populations are vaccination rate. Plenty of other factors could come into play; environmental differences, average health, average number of prescription drugs, preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes, etc. You can't just hand wave away any other population differences and assume that vaccination rate was the key there.

As you pointed out the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing. How can you skip past that and still land on misinformation caused deaths?

[pmarreck]

> the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing

That is why The Economist used excess-death estimates, skipping right over the whole "death caused by COVID" vs. "death caused by comorbidity" debate. Since COVID was arguably the only worldwide difference between 2019 and the following years, a presumption that the very-statistically-significant excess deaths were largely due to COVID was thus reasonable.

Where even raw death reporting was suspect, they used reasonable estimates. They made their data and analysis public, you can analyze it yourself and counterargue, or have an AI do it these days. Hey, maybe that would be a good exercise!

> Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate

It compares countries with their own prior years first AND THEN to each other, not countries directly to other countries. This should factor anything systematic at a per-country level, out, such as average health.

Hey, I'm not saying it's flawless (does that even exist?), I was just impressed by their work here back when I last looked at this. I am generally a skeptic and enjoy critical thinking, so I do not attribute this lightly.

[ndriscoll]

Measuring excess deaths doesn't skip that debate. e.g. consider a world where the only populations that died were very old people and morbidly obese people, and everyone else experienced mild or no symptoms. In that world, it would be fair to say that being very old or morbidly obese caused people to die from what was otherwise a mild cold; i.e. those comorbitities were "the cause". Then it would be fair to say excess deaths are a measurement of how prevalent those groups are.

[_heimdall]

Excess deaths is an interesting one, and again can show correlation, but it still can't distinguish cause. Obviously the death numbers were much higher those years, but two major factors were different - the virus was spreading and society responded to it in drastic ways. We can't say how many people died due to lack of access to care for example, or how fear and loneliness factored into death rates.

Excess death rates, at least in the US, are particularly interesting because they didn't follow the pattern I would have expected. Pandemics will effectively pull forward deaths, that didn't seem to happen here. Our all cause mortality spiked noticeably during the pandemic but it came back down to a more normal rate, I would have expected it to be below normal for at least a year or two. Its not as simple as pointing to all cause or excess deaths and saying it must have been vaccine hesitancy - we can't distinguish why those people died and it wouldn't explain the mortality rate after the pandemic.

[xorcist]

Right, but covid disinformation != vaccine skepticism.

As a sibling commenter pointed out, a big part of the covid disinformation that was removed at the time was by established researchers in respected institutions or countries such as Sweden whose pandemic strategy was just different from what many US state institutions implemented.

Sweden turned out to have one of the highest vaccine acceptance levels and also lowest deadliness in the disease. One cofounding factor is the purported high trust in institutions, but such trust is built on having clear and direct communication, and the perception of information being filtered for policitcal or personal career reasons can never yield rust.

Pandemic awareness is a much too complicated issue to be simplified into crazies and vaccine skeptics against everyone else.

[shakna]

Apart from all the accidental suicides from overdosing on alcohol, or taking cleaning products, or... There were a lot of news articles about this, at the time. They got to interview dying people, who admitted their mistakes.

Which is sorta why there actually is studies done on the impact of the misinformation [0].

> Following this misinformation, approximately 800 people have died, whereas 5,876 have been hospitalized and 60 have developed complete blindness after drinking methanol as a cure of coronavirus.34–37 Similar rumors have been the reported cause of 30 deaths in Turkey.38 Likewise, in Qatar, two healthy South Asian men ingested either surface disinfectant or alcohol-based hand sanitizer after exposures to COVID-19 patients.39 In India, 12 people, including five children, became sick after drinking liquor made from toxic seed Datura (ummetta plant in local parlance) as a cure to coronavirus disease.40 The victims reportedly watched a video on social media that Datura seeds give immunity against COVID-19.40

[0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/article-p1621...