Hacker News Reader

This sounds like Simpson's paradox again: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

Anecdotally, my wife has been working covid ICU this month and to her it's not surprising. The people with breakthrough cases apparently have so many comorbidities that it's not surprising at all they'd get vaccinated with high priority but also have an immune system that doesn't do a great job learning new skills from the shots.

The people for whom the shot is least effective are the ones that get it the most.

Yeah it's kind of ridiculous both sides skewing statistics. (Granted, it's ridiculous that there are "sides" to this thing at all).

But I get super annoyed when I see things like CNN reporting 99% of deaths since January were unvaccinated. I mean, duh, hardly anybody was vaccinated then and those first months were the highest death rates. I'd like to give them a pass because, hey, maybe it'll convince more people to vaccinate. But it also creates cannon fodder for anyone who is viewing it critically. Both sides are so stupidly irresponsible.

>>The people for whom the shot is least effective are the ones that get it the most.

It's not that the vaccine is less effective for them. It's that they're starting with much poorer immunity, so even with the significant immunity boost provided by the vaccine, they still have significant susceptibility to the virus.

Without the vaccine, their numbers would look much worse than the unvaccinated.

sometime get the feeling percentage of people that would die from covid, die from vaccine.

they don't get counted

they bring the death count amongst vaccinated down.

and soon no treatment for the unvaccinated ?

Also it is very likely that the people with most comorbidities where vaccinated earlier, so have had the longest period of post-vaccination.

So we are likely looking at a sub-group that both has multiple comorbidities _and_ has had the longest period of post-vacination. Even assuming that the decay of effectivenesss is small over time it may be a contributor.

Makes sense, I have also heard first hand reports of this. Its very sad.

Glancing though the report you linked, it says 55-70% reduction in symptomatic disease after 1 dose and more after 2. Higher effectiveness against severe disease, hospitalisation and death. For delta, they quote a 10-15% drop of effectiveness after two/one doses respectively. That seems in line with the “official” line and different to your numbers? Or am I reading you wrong?

Another nugget in there is that something like 95-97 of the population has Covid antibodies, from either disease or vaccination. I’m surprised actually that is is going as strong as it is still. I know antibodies are no silver bullet, but that means that a huge proportion of the country has either been sick already or had a vaccine recently. That seems as good as it can be for a “herd immunity” case, and yet infections are high. Hmm...

> Another nugget in there is that something like 95-97 of the population has Covid antibodies

That is almost certainly wrong. Vaccine uptake in under-12 is 0% and vaccine uptake in young adults is low. There's no way to make those kinds of seroprevalence numbers work.

The PHE report measures both antibodies from natural immunity, and antibodies from (vaccine or natural infection or both). (They don't have a vaccine-only measure.) The former is in the 20% range, depending on age. The latter is in the 97%+ range, again depending on age, reaching essentially 100% for older people.

The big caveat is that the sample population consists of blood donors, which may or may not be representative of the overall population.

Are there any under-12 kids in the blood donors?

And yes blood donors aren't representative of the general population due to selection effects.

You can read the report, but the blood donor population is 17 years or older.

The result of the report is that some form of immunity exists in 97%+ of the blood donors at least 17 years old, in the UK.

And blood donors are either socially responsible (probably vaccinated) or economically disadvantaged (probably exposed).

There is no economic incentive to donate blood in England (probably UK/GB either).

The most you receive is a cup of coffee and a biscuit.

Natural immunity?

But then again, I seem to remember that the 97% number was not a fair enough random sampling.

The numbers are in table 5.

p.s. The table 5 mentioned above is in the week 36 report.

You appear to have missed the conclusions of the report:

“Analysis on the direct and indirect impact of the vaccination programme on infections and mortality, suggests the vaccination programme has prevented between 24.4 and 24.9 million infections and between 108,600 and 116,200 deaths”.

Seatbelts are highly effective at preventing car crash deaths, but if everyone wears seatbelts then 100% of people who die in car crashes will be seatbelt users.

It was always expected that vaccination would be less effective in elderly patients. Some research is underway now to see if that can be improved by administering rapalogs.

A graph of this - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E_PYKjSWYAEIyWG?format=png&name=...

I think your analysis doesn't account for the fact that the majority of double vaccinated people are also at far higher risk of covid to begin with. There was an interesting article about this (Simpson's Paradox, as it's known in the world of data analysis) recently: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-... -- the overall trend is reversed when the data are grouped properly.

The preponderance of evidence shows that the covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective and safe for the vast majority of people. Your alarmism and calling Government vaccination campaigns propaganda is contributing to the spread of an incurable but now preventable disease that is killing thousands of people daily and you should feel bad about that. You are a menace to society.

Propaganda is simply information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

How else would you explain the fact they used old data? Incompetence?

Its clear the vaccines don't prevent much, you still catch, spread, and die from covid after being fully jabbed. This is what the report shows, and unfortunately been seen by myself through friends, and family.

Could calling people a menace to society do damage to a society simply because they are showing other points to your own?

Indeed. I also thought the ad hominem at the end was uncalled-for and unnecessary.

I'm very glad for the vaccine, it allowed me to start acting a bit more like a human again.

But words like "overwhelming" and "fully preventable" are their own kind of evil. Even a risk reduction as high as 90% only means your previous risk is now a tenth of what it was, but not zero or anything close to it.

This means people should still be using other measures to stop the spread, and perhaps words like "overwhelming" and "fully preventable" are enabling cavalier behaviours that are detrimental. One might even go as far as saying that people who enable such detrimental behaviours are a menace to society?

See? It's quite easy to reverse the ad hominem. Best to leave it out of a conversation altogether.

“The PHDA dataset was used in order to calculate the ASMRs by vaccination status and Table 3. One of the main strengths of the linked PHDA is that it combines a rich set of demographic and socio-economic factors from the 2011 Census and 2019 Patient Register with pre-existing conditions based on clinical records. This unique dataset was linked to NIMS and Test and Trace to allow us to analyse how ASMRs differ by vaccination status, when people were infected relative to vaccination, and examine the characteristics of people by vaccination status and infection date.

The PHDA contains data on approximately 79% of the population of England aged 10 years and over and includes 85.9% of all deaths of residents in England that occurred between 2 January 2021 and 2 July 2021 and were registered by 28 July 2021.“

I think there are a couple points you missed: From that Table 5. in the PHE report, younger ages 20-59 are having less deaths still than unvaccinated. It is a clear pattern from this table the younger you are - the better off when double vaccinated.

68.1% efficacy against death is huge, and for that period is likely to be mostly delta variant, we can't just forget about Alpha variant which vaccine does amazing with, which the previous data shows.. not sure how this points to them being "government propaganda" campaign. Although I agree it's a bit disappointing they are not painting the full picture.

But people reading that "73% of new deaths were unvaccinated" would cause panic among people that don't understand you need to take into account ~90% of population aged >60 have been double vaccinated for a while now .

There is literally nothing dishonest in this report, and yet you seem very eager to call it propaganda.

The Delta variant does change things a lot over the past two months, but that's a different story that will warrant additional study and likely a v.2 of the vaccine.

I haven't said there is anything dishonest about the ONS report, simply that the data is out of date.

Propaganda is simply information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicise a particular political cause or point of view.