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Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

This calculates the NNE which is similar to NNT: The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is the number of patients you need to treat to prevent one additional bad outcome (death, stroke, etc.). For example, if a drug has an NNT of 5, it means you have to treat 5 people with the drug to prevent one additional bad outcome.

As a general rule of thumb, an NNT of 5 or under for treating a symptomatic condition is usually considered to be acceptable and in some cases even NNTs below 10.

https://www.uws.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Number_Needed...

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I'm so confused by the math here, since the same authors in another paper find that the NNV (number needed to vaccinate) to prevent a transmission is less than 20, but the number needed to exclude is 100x higher.

My guess is that you can look at this over a time period: how many places do you go into in a (week/month/year) that you could not if you were unvaccinated. People can be vaccinated, but can be excluded many times. How many people are excluded by a single restaurant per week? At higher prevalence rates, this translates to like an infection prevented per restaurant per day or higher, and at lower rates, its a few per month.

Time periods kinda messes up these analyses because statistics is hard for a lot of people.

"Second, while risk over time is important, people are primarily concerned about the risk of getting infected with SARS- CoV-2 right now, not, for example, over the last 3 months."

The authors just kinda brush this aside. Their analyses are focused on singular events such as social gatherings, going to work, transportation, etc. Incase I'm not getting my point across, this is REALLY, REALLY STUPID, and I'd be embarrassed to publish this kind of analysis..

They also focus solely on the psychological harm of exclusion of unvaccinated people (very real consequences of serious mental and economic impacts to these people). Not actual harm of adverse reactions to the vaccines (effectively 0 actual harm), but make comparisons to drugs with considerably more side effects.

Not considering cumulative effects of even a single week on transmissibility radically skews their analysis. We don't do this in health and safety when death is on the line for a reason...

To put this another way, their analysis compares statins, a drug used to combat a constant exposure to heart-attack and stroke risk (from cholesterol), to a 1-8 hour singular event of exposure of unvaccinated people who may or may not have CoViD.

No Doctor I know would prescribe statins if you only had risk of heart-attack or stroke for a 1-8 hour event on a single day.

> effectively zero harm

What? There’s multiple studies showing the risk of a young boy between 16-24 developing myocarditis is higher than their risk of getting hospitalized from Covid. And this myocarditis risk rises based on the interval between first and second dose, rises for each dose, is even higher for Moderna.

Also for men under 40, the risks of developing myocarditis from the shots is higher than the risk of myocarditis from Covid.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...

Is makes absolutely no sense to mandate the shots for any young person, especially if they are fit and healthy.

Do you even know what myocarditis is?

Do you understand that even young people are 100 times more likely to suffer from CoViD-19 induced myocarditis than from the vaccine?

Here’s a Nature article explaining the risks of it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-021-00662-w

Stop reading social media and antivax propaganda before you get someone killed with your ignorance.

And if they've already had COVID, let's just vax vax vax anyway? I'd rather take my chances with busymom's ignorance than the CDC's knowledge.

Unless you have specific knowledge that someone is ignorantly passing on an active infection I urge you to quit making accusations about death related to stochastic events, its pointlessly inflammatory and quite baseless.

Read her posts and linked studies. Every single one is a misrepresentation or misinterpretation or misquote.

I do not think you read the study I linked to in my comment. Men under 40 are more likely to suffer from vaccine induced myocarditis than from the infection. Your linked article does a population average and not specifically for men under 40.

Please stop using inflammatory language like you did at the end of your comment.

Something like 95% of people who get myocarditis from the vaccine will have it resolve on their own in a month. There have been 8 myocarditis related vaccine deaths total. Further, myocarditis isn't the only risk from covid (not is death), so your overall risk of serious (long term) complications is higher from covid than the vaccine.

I'm I man under 30, and got my (Moderna) booster. It was an easy choice.

It being an easy choice for you has nothing to do with whether it should be mandated for everyone.

You are making bald speculative comments about long term complications when the vaccines have had zero long term studies.

Myocarditis is not a non serious issue. We are talking about heart inflammation of young and healthy people who have negligible risks from Covid.

In Ontario, 70% of myocarditis required hospitalization.

When there’s a risk, there must be a choice.

> Myocarditis is not a non serious issue. We are talking about heart inflammation of young and healthy people who have negligible risks from Covid.

Myocarditis that resolves itself in a month is not a long term serious issue.

> when the vaccines have had zero long term studies.

Yes they have. Or do you mean irrelevant decade long studies that are incapable of detecting anything due to how the vaccines work? The vaccine will fully exit your system after only a few days, leaving only the spike protein. In other words, any impact from the vaccine after a week or so will be strictly less severe than covid.

> In Ontario, 70% of myocarditis required hospitalization

The only data I can find related to Ontario is actually a us CDC source that agrees with me going further and saying that 95% of the myocarditis that resulted in hospitalizations fully resolved in under a week. That is to say, 95% of serious vac related myocarditis resulted in no long term impacts.

> When there’s a risk, there must be a choice.

And unvaccinated people pose a greater risk to everyone else. What's our choice? What choice do people who have a heart attack or need surgery on a tumor get when hospitals are full of disproportionately many umvaxxed covid patients.

There are drugs that are taken by millions with NNT in ~100s e.g., statin.

You are missing the point. This NNE is regarding whether mandating vaccine passport at gyms, restaurants has any benefit to reducing transmission.

I said nothing about NNE. My comment is point out that NNT <10 is too optimistic

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