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Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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