Comment by native_samples | Hacker News Reader

Comment by native_samples | Hacker News Reader

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"vaccinated people can spread it despite being over 10x less likely to"

UK data shows vaccinated people are drastically more likely to get it and spread it than the unvaccinated. In other countries VE drops to zero after only about 6-8 months, but the UK programme was ahead of other countries. Raw VE in the UK has kept going down after reaching zero and is currently deeply negative, with it being worse than negative 100% in some age groups. In other words, vaccinated people - for whatever reason - are far more of a problem from an infection control perspective than the unvaccinated.

The public health authorities don't have a good explanation for this and have been reduced to blaming a vague, highly speculative and sometimes unnamed set of confounders, for which they insist everyone make massive adjustments despite not being able to provide any evidence that these confounders are important or even exist at all. And in fact one study in California that did do a lot of these adjustments found they made very little impact (a few percent at most). That's an issue because public health's "adjustments" are now reaching absurd levels, e.g. taking AZ from 4% effectiveness to 73% VE!

It's very unlikely that Austrians are biologically totally different to British people, so we can say with 100% certainty that this latest quasi-Nazi move is going unlikely to have any effect on their case numbers, although we can also say that having taken the leap into such darkness the authorities there will never admit to any type of failure, thus the unvaccinated will continue to be blamed even as the data falls apart around them.

I'd like to reference your sources - could you provide them?

Sure, always.

Article graphing the UK data showing negative efficacy against disease in the raw data, and discussing the semi-public fighting that's broken out between arms of the civil service over how to disguise or de-emphasise the results:

https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-...

Norway finds no effectiveness against death (but oddly, some against ICU admittance)

https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/14/norway-study-finds-zero-...

Essay discussing how although raw UK data shows negative efficacy, it gets adjusted using a test negative case control design to show high efficacy. This contradicts data not only from Norway but also Sweden and Qatar, so is there a flaw in their approach:

https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/12/why-are-the-ukhsas-estim...

Another essay showing that the TNCC design requires absence of "viral interference" which may not be the case here:

https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/13/the-flaw-at-the-heart-of...

Daily Sceptic has been doing a lot of reporting and analysis on the UK data (it's a UK site), usually with very high quality of analysis. A lot of it comes from PhDs and data scientists of various kinds.

FWIW, the vaccine efficacy story is very muddled.

* UK shows negative VE

* US and Germany show 90-95% VE

* Medical literature shows 50% VE at six months and waning

Sadly, there is no longterm RCT in place to perform this basic, but extremely valuable measure. We have to rely on epi data, and epi data is very easy to mess up. I wonder how much of this is due to different testing regimens. Like CDC telling vaccinated people to not test unless symptoms, or UK school guidance instructing, on contact with known covid case, vaccinated people to do a PCR, but unvaccinated people to self isolate for two weeks. Plus copious doses of Simpson, as different age groups have vastly different covid outcomes and vastly different vaccination rates.

Well the US data is certainly garbage - obviously if you ignore "breakthrough" cases in the vaccinated unless they're very serious, the vaccines will look great. That's just lying though. It's exactly this sort of thing that destroys people's willingness to trust governments or take the vaccines: it's just obvious that public health will do or say anything to get people to take it and couldn't care less about the consequences.

Medical literature appears to be heavily adjusting the raw data and using a methodology that is known to overstate vaccine effectiveness if a vaccine causes "viral interference", without bothering to show that no such interference is taking place.

The entire thing is just a dystopian nightmare of lying and manipulation, really. In the past I've used the term anti-vaxxer as an insult, as I guess many of us have done. Never again. The whole story around vaccines will eventually have to be revisited - you can't witness this stuff up close and not conclude that public health has a blind, near fanatical ideological bias in favour of vaccination to the extent that any bad news is immediately covered up or obfuscated.

Agreed, the situation is a mess. Lest we remember that even particle physics, the canonical example for the success of the scientific method, can be subject to systematic bias due to social pressure.

"Decades ago, physicists including Richard Feynman noticed something worrying. New estimates of basic physical constants were often closer to published values than would be expected given standard errors of measurement. They realized that researchers were more likely to 'confirm' past results than refute them — results that did not conform to their expectation were more often systematically discarded or revised."

https://www.nature.com/articles/526187a

> UK data shows vaccinated people are drastically more likely to get it and spread it than the unvaccinated.

This is not true. Vaccinated people are less likely to get and spread Covid. I’d link you to the CDC but it’s probably redundant.

Er, the CDC is a US public health agency. The UK data comes from the UK HSA.

The US figures do indeed diverge strongly from data in other countries. This is very unlikely to be because the USA is somehow biologically special. US statistical quality is unfortunately garbage w.r.t. vaccines, as the CDC stopped tracking data at a national level a long time ago and the states often don't report in comparable ways. The UK data is of a much higher quality as it breaks out the population in the ways needed for this type of analysis.

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