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The next sentence is:

From May 2 to June 5, the efficacy rate in preventing hospitalization was 98.2%, compared with 93% from June 6 to July 3

That's a 4x higher chance of hospitalisation.

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It could be worse. It could have gone from a 99.9% to 99.1% in preventing hospitalization. That would be an 9x higher chance of hospitalization!

That's the difference between extended lockdown periods and normality in many countries.

I think you're confusing population wide death rates with post infection hospitalization rates. There's about 10x between death and hospitalization and there is about a 3-10x difference between population vs infection (for many countries 10-33% is a reasonable range of infection... except for China/Taiwan/Korea which are in the <1% range).

Here's a similar study for Ontario, breaking down efficacy based on variant:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaCoronavirus/comments/oe6ajn/c...

Two observations:

* as the top comment points out, the confidence intervals matter

* the numbers are all over the place

I don't know the data for the Israel study, but I'm not sure we can confidently conclude something as specific as "4x higher chance of hospitalization".

It's not as easy. Number of cases in that second period are ~10x the number of cases in that first period. Which means you have more propagation, potentially affecting more at-risk chunk of the population. E.g. the very few cases happening in May-June may have beeen predominantly occuring in young people with extensive social contacts, now that the transmission is going up it can spread to more isolated communities (e.g. old people with less social contacts, that are more at risk of isolation).

There is not a single number that you can look in isolation that will give you an answer.

Not including that people who are vaccinated's guard is down more, will likely be gathering more with wider social networks, etc; what are the chances an escape mutant variant occurs that spreads wide, has long delay before causing deadly effects, etc?

And when does Ivermectin come into mainstream and every COVID discussion? Based on the evidence it looks like used as a preventative, give it to literally everyone for 2 weeks, and we could close to abolish COVID and variants. The suppression of conversation and scientific debate is the biggest problem out of all of this.

Edit to add: whomever downvoted this, you're part of the problem of suppression - good for you.

It does not look like Ivermectin would provide a substantial benefit:

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

I'll do 99 better for you: https://c19ivermectin.com/ - "Database of all ivermectin COVID-19 studies. 100 studies, 63 peer reviewed, 61 with results comparing treatment and control groups."

COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein

https://vimeo.com/557811163 (2.5 hours; deleted by YouTube)

Joe Rogan then recently had Bret Weinstein and Pierre Kory on his podcast to raise awareness of issue

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D?si=7... (3 hours - heavily repeat of what was said in link before; Spotify desktop or mobile app lets you watch video)

How to save the world, in three easy [includes inventor of mRNA, if you care about credentials]

https://vimeo.com/562724784 (3.5 hours)

Bret Weinstein (evolutionary biologist) and Geert Vanden Bossche (virologist) explaining in lay how mRNA vaccine skips a step in innate immune response and may cause problem with escape variants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyAovuUxro (~2 hours)

Lots of ongoing updates from them:

Dr. Pierre Kory - https://twitter.com/pierreKory/

Dr. Robert Malone - https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD

Dr. Bret Weinstein - https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein

Two other main resources/organizations of doctors posting regular updates of latest data/charts, etc:

https://covid19criticalcare.com/ / http://flccc.net/ (same site)

https://bird-group.org/

I have a hard time taking things like this seriously:

https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1411158326726082565

Are all your links like this? Denying what we clearly can see (that vaccines work) to promote what they think will work (ivermectin)?

EDIT: It gets worse the lower you scroll. In addition to dismissing vaccines and promoting ivermectin, he signal boosts "natural medicine" too.

https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1410028792236679175

I don’t think they’re denying that vaccines do not work at all. Have you watched their interviews or listen to their podcasts? They’re quite long but they are challenging the fact that vaccines aren’t the only way out and we need to consider alternatives and one of that alternatives is ivermectin. If you want to reach herd immunity, you want people to get immunity through different means (like getting vaccines and getting covid but with lesser symptoms. Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization).

> I don’t think they’re denying that vaccines do not work at all

That's contrary to the message he signal boosts in the first tweet I linked to.

Is it contrary or is he’s saying that ivermectin can be a good alternative to the vaccine? It still doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work, but why not authorize it (especially in places were the cases are high and hospitals are overwhelmed with a vaccine shortage, why not try?). You can skin the cat multiple ways. You’re going to have people who don’t want to take the vaccine or vaccines effectiveness is starting to drop (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/8003930/israe...) and we need to come up with another plan.

> one of that alternatives is ivermectin.

The old, safe antihistamine/anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine is promoted by a few lucid doctors as basically an antidote for the serotonin storm that underlies severe cases of COVID-19. @farid__jalali (tweets are now private, maybe he got tired of harassment?) is one of the major advocates for this treatment strategy. He liked my recent comment about "missing the forest for the trees" [0].

> Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid

A lot of people have already had a case of SARS-CoV-2 (and are therefore already immune), as it was spreading like wildfire well before the tests became available in March 2020 [1]. I had an odd headache in the December 2019/January 2020 period; in June 2020 I met a woman who claimed the symptoms of her eventually-diagnosed COVID-19 started December 7, 2019, "soon after [her] friends came back from their trip to China."

I had a blood draw for the T-Detect test last week. This will determines if my T-Cells recognize SARS-CoV-2. T-cells are a more long-lasting indicator of immunity than antibodies.

> and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization

The problem with hospitalization is that doctors have forgotten that pure oxygen is toxic and causes a cascade of harm to the whole body. I've put some effort into exposing the routine use of oxygen by our medical system as #MedicalHyperventilation [2]. The tragedy of routine hyperventilation is that the antidote is simple, effective, and profoundly therapeutic. While most doctors are aware of #OxygenToxicity, they are not aware of the antidote. :(.

p.s. Welcome to Hacker News, I noticed that your first comment was ~5 days ago. Here's some upvotes. :)

[0] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1412654755415879690

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750472

[2] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...

Thanks! I’ve been trying to find a place where people debate and discuss with less rage. Hopefully this is the place. Though I think my upvote is gone haha. I’m interested in learning about your test results!

I upvoted two of your comments. I think the upvote on your comment above disappeared when I replied to it.

From 61 studies on Ivermectin you cherrypicked one of the 5 with a negative effect:

https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpall

When you look at rare events, then it is easy to get a quadrupling (or more) due to tail effects.

That's the relative risk increase. What's the absolute risk increase?

Varies by age, but for a young person we're talking the risk going from 0.001% to 0.004%.

That's not a one time risk though! So far it seems a person can be infected multiple times.

Say you get Covid once a year, that's 0.004% per year. Also, wether you need hospitalisation or not, doesn't change the fact that some people are having permanent issues like lost their stamina, hair loss, loss of smell. I have a coworker with neurological issues, but he is not in a hospital.

So the big question is: how effective are the vaccines against long Covid?

And we need that number at or below 0.001% or Covid will overtake other diseases in terms of life expectancies and QoL implications. Assuming we would get once every one to two years.

That's just too much rounds of Russian roulette.

You are much less likely to get infected with the same variant once you've recovered from it, and once vaccinations and natural immunity is more widespread worldwide new variants will arise at a slower rate, similar to flu or cold.

Complaining that your glass is 7% empty while mine is 93% full. This is a relatively good result.

I'm not complaining, I'm pointing out that the Delta variant also has a higher chance of hospitalisation, not just getting sick.

Yeah, but it's still an astonishing result. Most of the non mRNA vaccines have efficacies below 90%, not taking into account the delta variant.

I think efficacy is usually defined as preventing symptoms, a higher bar than preventing hospitalizations. I believe most vaccines were extremely successful at preventing hospitalizations.

Edit: Pfizer's primary endpoint was efficacy against lab-confirmed Covid-19 [1].

[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

This is pure anecdata, but I’m hearing nearly daily from a friend in Indonesia about someone he knows dying of Covid. They’ve all had their sinovac shots.

How do you conclude that?!

The percent of hospitalization increased from 1.8% to 7%, which is about four times. This is basically lying with statistics

As I understand it that's still better than the non-mRNA vaccines, because it's an increase from a very small rate. What exactly is the lie?

The “lie” (it’s not a lie, it’s just deceiving) is saying that it’s a four times increase. You could also say “6% increase”, but that sounds smaller

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