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.
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.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
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.
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.
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.
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...
What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID. They feel like they're being asked something risky in a vacuum, when in fact, they're being asked for something with (as best as we can tell) limited risk against a backdrop of a dangerous virus that killed millions and caused a global pandemic.
Even if they could demonstrably prove the vaccine created a higher risk of outcomes for people who took it, the risk compared to getting COVID is de minimus, and the likelihood of getting COVID is high. I would be surprised if there was a significant population of people who had avoided it at this point.
Why do people still frame this as either/or? How many people out there didn't get covid after they got some number of shots?
The only real scenario is covid with n shots, where n >= 0. In other words, when you got covid, how many shots had you gotten.
(Not anti vax myself, though generally avoid whatever drugs I reasonably can)
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 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?
The money arguments are a double edged sword.
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.)
Not sure it follows so cleanly with the actual study setup
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess I will say that I have thought for a long time that serializing research into linear documents seems archaic at this point.
> 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...
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.
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.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164643
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.
> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
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.
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?
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)
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
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.
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.
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.
>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
I read that many times. It was a totally unrealistic promise, because not even all the other vaccines do that, even after years of research and improvements. (In particular, here is a big trade off in the inyectable vs oral vaccine for polio.)
Who is the highest ranking person that said it? I guess it was not one of the researchers. Perhaps it was a politician that is probably a lawyer and not a medical doctor, or perhaps a tv show host, or perhaps a random internet commenter. Who hallucinated that?
>> “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
Actually that was what the trials show before the vaccines were approved. I think they had like 50k persons each. The number of deaths was too small to have a statistical significative result in the death toll. It was enough to have a statistical significative reduction of hospitalizations, like a 60% reduction in old style inactivated virus vaccines to 95% in the new style mRNA vaccines. And remember that hospitalization+ventilator is really bad.
So you want magic. Got it.
In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even more, perfect understanding of how good our information is at any given point in time is not always going to be available.
There were definitely some failures to communicate well with the public during that time, but demanding that only definite information be communicated, and then never be contradicted, is asking the impossible.
It also really doesn't help that there are so many people who were (and are) just so scared of everything during that time that any information coming out that wasn't 100% unquestionably positive about any new measure to try to improve things would cause them to shun it forever as too dangerous to try.
The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.
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
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.
> You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-...
Perhaps any statement in that context should be assumed to be oversimplified; but I don't think I can fault someone for taking words to mean what they literally say. The COVID vaccines look great so far on balance, but they absolutely were oversold to the public. We'll pay the price in public confidence for at least a generation.
Ah, heck, I'll do the work of pasting it in.
> But again, one last thing. I — we don’t talk enough to you about this, I don’t think. One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. -Biden
I'm not sure why out of all that Trump-lite-contradictory rambling (and the massive amounts of other words and ink spilled by both the 2020[1] and the 2021 administrations on this subject), that sentence is the singular, unqualified, pinky-swear blood-pact promise that you think the medical community made to the public regarding the vaccine.
---
As for Walensky:
> Three days later, on April 1, a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments, telling The New York Times “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview” adding that “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”
If you're only going to listen to the first thing that's said on a subject, and ignore everything that follows, I don't think that sort of approach will serve you very well. For one thing, it'll probably mean that you'll think that people who correct themselves are idiots.
---
[1] Which, if I may remind you, developed, recommended, and rolled out the vaccine and had nothing to do with Biden.
I also had covid this year, zero boosters, had a mild fever and sniffle for two days. not sure what you are demonstrating with this anecdote. or what goalposts you think I moved. the "milder symptom" stuff all came long after it was obvious that the covid shots were not doing what had been promised. that is what I would call moving the goalposts
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?
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.
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...
You see this all the time where people will pick up niche jargon and misapply it.
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.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
They just don't use them correctly and/or appropriately.
This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...
Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate
https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-die...
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 !"
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.
I swear these folks will be on their death beds 50 years in the future claiming this. There will be no amount of evidence or time that matters to them.
Someone can prove me wrong, and tell me exactly what evidence would convince them that the vaccines are safer than the alternative.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
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.
> 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.
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.
Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
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.
unfortunately that line of reasoning was so censured that people started weaponizing it
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.
any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the alternative hypothesis was not an equally accepted decision
many people chose severe penalties rather than participate in a sudden worldwide field trial of mRNA vaccination by indemnified pharmaceutical companies, and in some parts of the world were not even given that choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
And yes the risks are very real. Vaccine induced myocarditis and pericarditis rates in young males are very high, and they can result in heart failure, life long damage, early mortality, and more. And for young males you're looking at multiple significant cases per 10,000. [1] For all cases of myocarditis/pericarditis the rates would be substantially higher yet still since most cases will go undiagnosed. For some contrast, the normal rate of significant side effects in vaccines ranges in the 1:100k to 1000k range.
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.
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?
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...
It is unclear what you mean by "skeptic"? Are you speaking of rational skepticism, or reactionary denial?
It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Covid vaccines are unnecessary because we can just infect everybody with covid and the ones that survive don't need one?
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.
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.
The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
1 = https://www.kff.org/quick-take/fda-memo-linking-covid-vaccin...
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.
As far as I have read about the ACIP decisions they didn't actually provide any real data to support this conclusion.
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 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.
Calling everyone "anti-vaxxers" is lazy. Most people I know who are skeptical of the covid shots (including plenty of doctors and scientists) are fully vaccinated against measles, polio, tetanus, etc. They just don't trust a product that skipped the usual 5–10 year safety window and got pushed with emergency authorization. That's not "anti-vax", that’s pattern recognition.
The memo is short on data and long on rhetoric, sure. That's exactly why we need the actual underlying review released in full.
You sound really invested in keeping those covid shots on the childhood schedule. Got a big Pfizer position in the 401k? Kidding, obviously. But the "anyone who asks questions is an anti-vaxxer" reflex is exactly why people stopped trusting the institutions in the first place. I respect every real skeptic, on any side. Asking questions is what moves science forward. Blind trust is stagnation.
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.
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.
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"?
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
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.
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.
1. Hitler gave Jews free stuff (technical truth used to mislead)
2. Dead bear guy doesn’t care about looking like a clown
3. Therefore the OBPV causality review must be deceptive sleight-of-hand
On Tylenol, FDA did add a "possible association" warning in Sept 2025 (RFK’s call), but even the new label says evidence is only _suggestive_, not proven. Poop analogy fits the anti side better: no, avoiding fever meds won't prevent autism, but it could harm pregnancies.
What exactly is the "important context"?
That's never bothered him before. Vaccines cause autism. WiFi causes DNA changes and opens up the blood-brain barrier allowing toxins into the brain. Chemtrails. HIV is not a major cause of AIDS, with lifestyle and drugs (particularly amyl nitrate) being the major causes.
> 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.
Making fake dangers out of junk data is why he has political power in the first place.
That's exactly how people used to shut down anyone questioning:
- Vioxx
- lab leak
- opioids
- PFAS
...all “crazy conspiracy theories” until proven true.
I'm not saying vaccines cause autism (the evidence still doesn't). But stay skeptical, even of your own side. That's how science actually moves forward.
That's why we evaluate relative risk. The vaccines that we recommend are significantly safer than not being vaccinated at all, for the population as a whole.
This isn't limited to vaccines of course. Everything from antibiotics to defibrillators to car airbags can kill people too, but it's extremely rare compared to how often they save lives.
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.
> study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals
These are the important bits for the non medical folks
"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."
did they control for that?
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.
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.
It's very hard to interpret this data given the massive confounder of "antivaxxers are suspicious of healthcare and take more risks".
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.
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.
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.
You could at least paste the points here.
What metrics do you focus on while reading an article that result in you confirming your own preconceived ideas?
If you have to come at an article like this in a hostile way, then you're not learning anythign about it, you're just confirming your own biases. I think I would recommend that you focus all of these criticisms inward at your own biases in terms of what you react to and need to explain and see if it's explained in the paper above. Then see if you find yourself convinced by the scientific method that they undertook?
Otherwise you're prepping yourself to continue living in an echo chamber.
1. You assume that your LLM of choice is perfect and impartial on every given topic, ever.
2. You assume that your prompt doesn't interfere with said impartiality. What you have written may seem neutral at first glance, but from my perspective, a wording like yours would probably prime the model to try to pick apart absolutely anything, finding flaws that aren't really there (or make massive stretches) because you already presuppose that whatever you give it was written with intent to lie and misrepresent. The wording heavily implies that what you gave it already definitely uses "persuasion tactics", "emotional language" or that it downplays/overstates something - you just need it to find all that. So it will try to return anything that supports that implication.
I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
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?
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.
Disclaimer: I'm pro vaccine, I do think Covid vaccines saved a lot of lives. I still think the risk is relatively low even after getting an onset of auto-immune disease 3 days after the shot (diagnosis confirmed 2 years after it started after mRNA booster) and sister in law getting another auto-immune months after the vaccine (also confirmed diagnosis by now).
I did read the article and while deaths from Covid were clearly lower in vaccinated group, the sample selection has signs of various problems, starting from representation (why significantly more disadvantaged groups in unvaccinated group), to results like external causes of mortality 25% lower in the vaccinated group. 32% lower deaths from transport crashes - clearly healthy/selection bias.
Such studies bring nothing to pro-science crowd and give anti-vaccine propaganda another advantage.
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.
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.
There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.
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%.
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".
From the chart, they picked a very reasonable spot to draw said line.
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.
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 the 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.
edit: tl;dr: covid-19 mRNA vaccine was effective and did not contribute to increased deaths.
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.
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.
How convenient for you...
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.
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.
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.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
> 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.
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%.
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.
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.
But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn't able to eliminate its spread so it mostly is about protecting yourself rather than protecting others.
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.
That's my biggest problem with the "I now have X problem after the vaccine" crowd; quick to blame the vaccine, but they never question whether it was the virus itself that caused it.
My dad is one of these people and it infuriates me to no end that he defaults to "vaccine bad" and not his irresponsible behavior during the height of the pandemic which caused him to get very sick from the virus itself. Nor the fact that he had a very visible lyme disease rash 20 years ago and refused to get treatment because "MDs bad". He's quick to blame his neurological disease on the covid vaccine though, so frustrating.
I am not quick to blame the vaccine. If you take the vaccine and immediately after you start develop symptoms, then the chances that the vaccine are doing something strange to the body are very likely, not the virus infection.
And these don't get diagnosed with Covid or having Covid symptoms before, it must be something related to the vaccine. That's evidence, not just observation.
I went to UCI, SoCal Kaiser hospitals and cardiologists 6-7 times, a bunch of tests, no doctors could explain why.
I took the vaccines myself, I am no anti-vaxxer, and when it comes to this situation, I don't see there's conclusive studies about the vaccines.
But you write anti-vax comments filled with the usual anti-vax post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.
Appealing to an informal fallacy, and not even using it right. The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy hinges on the fact that one's argument assumes that just because one event happened chronologically first, it must have caused the one(s) that chronologically came after.
GP did more than that and didn't simply say "X happened first, so I think it's responsible for Y." He gave correlative observations and suspected a possibility of causation OUTSIDE of chronological timeline. Regardless of whether I agree with him, it's easy to see this comment having more than fallacy.
I didn't appeal to one, I pointed one out. And there's something wrong now with pointing out fallacies just because they are informal? Apparently you don't understand what "informal" means in logic. (Or there's bad faith--a good case can be made here.)
> it's easy to see this comment having more than fallacy.
And yet you failed to point out a single one. You say that I used post hoc ergo propter hoc incorrectly, which I disagree with, but even if I did, that isn't a fallacy, it would simply be an error of fact. But remarkably you find multiple unnamed fallacies (formal, or informal?) in my one sentence.
I won't respond further.
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.