All of cistrane's Comments + Replies

For your CDC file:

The CDC lowers a developmental milestone for speech development:

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/milestones-30mo.html

A child must know 50 words by 30 months.

Used to be 24 months.

The gender gap is further compounded by the menstrual irregularities the vaccine is somewhat likely to cause.

Women talk, and that is hardly a very pleasant experience and it appears common enough for many to notice.

People who do not vaccinate now are not making this decision because you point out failures.

They can point out failures themselves and do it too.

2Davidmanheim
That completely ignores the social dynamics behind knowledge sharing and creation - there's a lot of work on this related to how information and misinformation spreads among the public.

And there are some results

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/21/11688/pdf

The trial is under way

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04871867

Right, I did misunderstand. I thought you were proposing taking 10% and trying to convince some of them who can be convinced. But the value of that is decreasing every day now. Half the population has already been infected at least once and recovered which is probably equivalent to vaccination.

3gabrielrecc
Just to clarify - given that your first link seems concerned about athlete collapses/deaths following vaccination (supposedly, although the comments there imply insufficient fact-checking), but your second link is about athlete collapses/deaths following COVID-19 infection and your comment is on a post about long COVID, is your concern about heart issues following vaccination or following COVID infection? If the latter, yes, heart disease and stroke do seem to be more probable following COVID infection according to this recent large study. It should be noted that the control group came from 2017, but the effect sizes they find are so large that it doesn't seem like differences in average heart disease frequency between 2017 and 2022 in a counterfactual world without COVID are especially relevant.
2Owain_Evans
I don't see a comparison to the base rate (before Covid).

Why did these vaccines produce close to 1000 cases of heart and pericardium inflammation in young men while flu vaccines do not?

What if we make covid vaccines with older technology, the way we make flu vaccines. This is not being done. No one can choose older tech vaccines over newer tech vaccines. 

2methree
It is being done, search for inactivated vaccines in https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker . I seem to recall there's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance of some viruses not being inactive, so I don't see an advantage. Also, all the adverse reactions of an mRNA vaccine seem to be related to the configuration of the spike protein they produce because it is very similar to the virus' spike protein, and an inactivated virus vaccine has the actual spike protein, so no gain there either. It is an alternative, though. Also, there's no "free lunch" in this pandemic: either one accepts the risks associated with infection without a vaccine, or the risks associated with a vaccine, or sacrifices contact with fellow humans. In that calculation, the more information one has, the better off one is. It would be nice to see more funding in personalized recommendations (i.e. better prior determination of someone's propensity to permanent or deadly side effects to the virus'and the vaccine), but making health recommendations is very regulated and carries high liability.

What's the point of being silent about the failures of FDA and CDC? The silence will not convince anyone.

7Davidmanheim
If fewer people get vaccinated because we loudly point to failures, the point would be to have more people vaccinated. There is a reasonable argument that the price of silence is too high, and that it's better that people die due to not getting vaccinated so that we all see more clearly that the institution is broken, but as I said, I'm note sure it's a net positive.

In US, the number of unvaccinated is closer to 30%. This is no long tail. 

2dbasch
I threw 10% there as an example of a target that you might convince with some intervention. By "long tail" I don't mean a small number of people, a long tail can be 50% of a distribution. I am using the term to refer to the reasons they don't get vaccinated. The post mentions 34 distinct responses, so if one were to optimize for impact then the idea would be to identify the most "nudgeable" class, evaluate the cost/benefit of the nudge, etc. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my original comment.

There is anxiety in there. That could stand for needle phobia.

Do you think a policy of mandatory booster vaccination is now less likely or more likely after the convoy?

We also suspect many asymptomatic cases. So, your presumption that the virus only managed to infect gastrointestinal cells is insufficiently founded. It is perhaps as likely that the virus infected both gastrointestinal cells and respiratory system but was not successful enough to cause respiratory symptoms.

A related question is how many boosters of the same vaccine formulation will be required in the future and what is the safety profile of regularly repeated mRNA boosters, because the second Faustian hypothesis is that these vaccines are doing subtle but permanent damage to organs (e.g. heart or reproductive system or brain) which will accumulate until the damage is apparent and common. The appearance of increased myocarditis/pericarditis and menstrual disorders for which no mechanism is proposed is the smoke hiding a much bigger fire. 

0abstractapplic
I know it's technically on-topic, but: downvoted. I have a specific question I want answered one way or another, and I think bringing up peripheral issues is unlikely to help me achieve that.
2ChristianKl
Covid itself is a perfectly fine mechanism to explain that. 

We all live in Dunbar sized bubbles. Very few people have more than 150 people for which they could know medical histories enough to answer these questions.

Which is why the Wikipedia article says that ADE is definitely not a problem for the initial strain. All the vaccine trials looked for it and did not find it 

2TLW
...which would make sense, in the model where this is a long-term effect, no? Everyone's password being changed to SHA256(username|"foo") in the short term is (likely) good for security. It's only once someone picks up on the pattern and starts exploiting it that it becomes a negative.

Look on the bright side. If the next variant is even less virulent than Omicron, you will stop caring about covid too.

1tkpwaeub
I mean, I'm almost there? It's really just about mental health and survivors guilt at this point.

They were put down, put underground and contaminated ground waters. There were 55 million of them

Coincidentally, Serbia just revoked the exploration licenses of Australian mining company Rio Tinto in Serbia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60081853

Is that retaliation for the way Australia treated their best tennis player? 

1angmoh
Apparently the issue was subject to a quite a bit of activist opposition anyway - but the timing is suspicious, especially since the Serbian PM was personally involving herself in the issue.

What is the cause of this? If Omicron is so very contagious, and it is already close to peak in many places in Europe, why is Ukraine so late?

How do you assign probability that a child will develop complications from the vaccine, they will be permanent but not lethal. E.g. The child will be sterile.

2methree
I read studies (seriously, it's super time-consuming!) and consider the best evidence available. Because of the lag introduced by studies, sometimes hearsay is enough to put in a guesstimate. It's interesting to play around with the values, however, and see what magnitude change in a single one would lead to a change in the ultimate decision. Sometimes you find out it doesn't make a difference, and more precise information would be irrelevant, so you can move on.

You are going to be freezing a lot of other microorganisms in your sample. Some of them could be harmful when introduced to nasal cavity at the wrong time. 

At the end of 2020, the CDC estimated ~85 million infections. There were however only 32 million cases at that time. A large fraction of the difference would be asymptomatic.

The point is, it might not matter what we do with omicron, the next VOC can still come out of some animal viral pool from a virus variant we know nothing about 

In your counterfactual example, we would have a much better warning coming from the third world. They would be hit much harder by the virus that affects the young disproportionately. We would literally see on TV millions of dead children in Third World countries perhaps even before the virus established a strong foothold. The beginning of the pandemic would look completely different. Isolating small children from any ways of getting in contact with the virus would become the highest priority until vaccines were developed. More different treatments would be tried. Small children would become treated as immune compromised bubble boys. They would be living in a bubble. 

Does this mean that it is too late to vaccinate now or that the deadline for an unvaccinated to vaccinate is rapidly approaching?

2Zvi
Vaccination will be net positive for a while but majority of benefit is in the past.

I am not answering the question but what do you think of this?

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-eyes-higher-covid-19-vaccine-prices-after-pandemic-exec-analyst

Should Pfizer now or in the future be able to collect a 500% premium on these vaccines?

Vaccinated people are also at risk from other vaccinated people.  If vaccinated people are careless and engage in many high risk activities in the enclosed environment, the advantages of vaccination will be reduced. 

Well, if this is consistently applied across many events, the unvaccinated will not be allowed risky activities and the vaccinated will be allowed risky activities. Which means in practice consistently higher number of risky activities available for the vaccinated. I agree that this effect might not be significantly big and more measurements would be needed.

When you wear it for a day. For longer periods one also needs to be trained to take care of the PPE. Cleaning, storage, retc.

Half the population have IQ less than 100. You are going to set up training stations or the PPE will fail soon for a large percentage of population.

1Florin
Mild soap and water can be used to clean the seal, and that's it. Anyone can do that without any special training.

I don't understand why vaccinated people should prefer not being close to unvaccinated people.

7MikkW
Vaccines provide a high, but imperfect, degree of immunity, so vaccinated people are still at risk of getting sick from unvaccinated people. In a vaccine-only environment, you both are surrounded by people who are much less likely to get infected, and less likely to transmit if they do.

More effective PPE require more training in their use. 

1Florin
The training is minimal.

But effectively, the unvaccinated were not allowed to have the same level of risk as vaccinated if they couldn't come to the event, right?

2tivelen
A vaccination requirement could result in lower apparent effectiveness; so could risk compensation. In order to determine how much risk compensation occurred, we have to determine how much the vaccination requirement lowered the effectiveness. Without that analysis, concluding that risk compensation has a big enough effect to cause or contribute significantly to negative effectiveness is premature. I am otherwise unsure of what you are trying to get at. The unvaccinated were prevented from doing a risky activity, and the vaccinated were allowed to do the activity (with a lower risk due to their status), yes.

Would you expect a fairly large noticeable nocebo effect in populations which are scared by vaccination but forced into it by government or employer vaccine mandates?

1arunto
That depends on the outcome measure. For self reported health I think that is quite possible. However, for all cause mortality (as in the paper) as an outcome measure I don't think a nocebo effect to be likely.

Consider that in March it is much more likely that Paxlovid will be widely available than in February.

1arunto
It is an interesting research idea, but after skimming the paper I don't really trust their methods. 1. If I understand it correctly, then they are adjusting their results based by the deaths from 2020. Contrary to their claim I think it does not make sense to do that to control for seasonality. In 2020 Covid deaths in the US only became an issue by the end of March. And the countermeasures against Covid in 2020 could have changed typical behavioral patterns (e.g. travel) associated with possible deaths. 2. Their analysis methods don't seem to be adequate for this kind of panel data. They are running separate regression models for each month and each age group (table 2) - I don't think this is the way panel data should be analyzed (but I am no expert in that - one could ask someone with a background in econometrics about that). 3. If I understand it correctly, they ran multiple models and for aggregating the predicted vaccine deaths they have picked the submodel supporting their claim, which would be a big red flag from my perspective [see notes to table 3, "If a model using same (not previous) month vaccinations was significant and the equivalent models using previous month was not, then death estimates from those models were used instead (light gray boxes). Similarly, if a model using age-specific vaccination (i.e. doses administered to people >65 yrs) was significant and the equivalent model using all vaccine doses administered was not, then death estimates from those models were used instead (dark gray boxes)"]. 4. One problem with their basic approach could be that vaccinations change behaviour and this changed behaviour could lead to deaths (that are unrelated to the vaccines). To control for that one would need e.g. the number of accident deaths (to subtract them from the total numbers before running the analysis).

If you are vaccinated, disregard any advantage microcovid gives to vaccination status. Then adjust all microcovid estimates upward by about 50%. This should give you a risk estimate consistant with new omicron data.

"Half the people who aren’t vaccinated have sufficiently strong priors against doing anything new that they’re having none of it, it all sounds super suspicious to them, and you’re not going to tell them different. The alternative hypothesis, which I find less plausible, is that the political divide carries over to everything else automatically at this point, which is functionally the same but has some different implications."

Could a significant number of people refusing both vaccines and Paxlovid be biased against Pfizer? 

5Nicole Dieker
There's at least some possibility that it's less of a Pfizer bias than it is an "unnecessary medical intervention" bias (my family of origin made sure we all got our 1980s-recommended vaccines, but they also said "taking Tylenol for a headache doesn't solve the underlying problem, drink a glass of water instead"). You may believe that Paxlovid could be helpful in some situations but you'd rather not take it unless you absolutely have to. That said, we've also been exposed to two years of "this will work!" followed by does not work, does not work as promised, or reliable sources come to different conclusions about efficacy, and at this point it really doesn't matter if you think the vaccines are full of nanobots or if you think they lead to an increased risk of myocarditis because the actual fact on the ground is that the vaccines may reduce [spread, severity] but they do not work in the way that we were initially told they would work. Therefore, the claim that Paxlovid "will work" is automatically suspect, whether or not it should be. 

How long is that long term? We don't know yet but it could be fairly short compared to a condition that can permanently damage one's heart.

1c0rw1n
i'd bet at at least 1:20 that lung scarring and brain damage are permanent.

That depends on age and comorbidities. That probability is highly stratified. There are some population where P(hospitalized|covid) is >5%

Vaccinating to herd immunity proved impossible

5ChristianKl
If you look at what people who actually care about vaccine effectiveness do because they are mainly driven by personal benefits instead of trying to get a drug approved you can look at examples. Stöcker gave more then two vaccine doses in the first months to build more immunity and on the other hand it seems that the official approved vaccines restricted the amount of doses that were given to make people more likely to sign up for the vaccine.  The other is the RaDVaC project that focused on vaccinating in a way that gives muscosal defense (the first line defense against infections) and also focused on building antibodies in a way that makes the vaccine more effective against variants.  More dakka would have been possible.

Let's say you are a man in his 20s. in USA You believe (perhaps mistakenly) that if you get sick with covid, the government will foot the bill. On the other hand, if you get the rare myocarditis from the vaccine, you will be stuck with the bills. Does this create a weird incentive for a young man to avoid vaccination on the grounds of financial risk of ruin?

4ChristianKl
Why would you believe that?  Long-COVID can give you long-term medical costs that are very unlikely to be paid for by the state.

We live in in a roughly Dunbar-sized group. If no one died of Covid in your group but one or two people were hurt by vaccines, you will be scared of vaccines.

3tivelen
If you compare deaths to harms, you can end up scared of vaccines or Covid, depending on which you compare. If no one died of a vaccine in your group but one or two people were hurt by Covid, you will be scared of Covid. The question is, where does the framing come from? If no one died of Covid or a vaccine in your group (which seems to be the most likely case for a given group), which do you become scared of, and why?

And that new variant is even more infectious. Otherwise it gets drowned.

FDA is wrong. If tests are abundant, one can test every day and there is no problem of misplaced confidence.

How many were affected by more than 7 days?

it is possible that over 50% will get it. 

In US, the CDC estimates 145 million infections to date, which is close to 45% of population. 

On what data do you base the estimate that 90% of the world population haven't been infected by the novel coronavirus by now?

2Gurkenglas
I googled "covid cases worldwide" for ~3% and thought "probably a bunch of cases are never tested". Do you think even more people have been infected?

The answer to your question 4 "When supply isn’t limited, how do we get it to people in time?" is the same way Viagra is distributed, through spam messages in your email

Load More