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Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to hop on this. I am a structural biologist, I study mainly viruses, admittedly not normally mammalian viruses. Recently, I've been involved in a collaboration for developing a new, Covid vaccine. Full disclosure - not mRNA. As part of that, I've been working directly with Covid-19. I'm not a Covid expert, but I am aware enough of the science to spot many obvious falsehoods.

I didn't write this article, nor did I rigorously fact check it. But it struck me as at least, mostly reasonable questions around which to foment a discussion. Most of the points in this article I'd be comfortable asking to a room of PhD scientists with expertise on Covid and vaccines. I'd be disappointed to see this flagged.

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It's worth noting that the author is a PhD biochemist from Rutgers.

I have no idea if her concerns have merit, but I don't believe it should be shot down without consideration either.

BBC: “ Scientists not backing Covid jabs for 12 to 15-year-olds”. Link below.

UK’s vaccine top advisory body (that refused to recommend the vaccine for 12-15 age bracket) membership:

Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford)

Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals)

Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)

Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England)

Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England)

Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust)

Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick)

Alison Lawrence (lay member) Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital)

Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)

Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol)

Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands)

Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen)

Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London)

Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol)

Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals)

Approved government media: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669

What was the risk and is it approved for discussion if the absolute top vaccine experts declined to recommend it and a government funded news media, BBC, reported on that?

Is this too fringe to talk about?

Is BBC anti-vaxx now? Are these professors anti-vaxxers?

I'm surprised by the ever growing HN trend of not reading articles before commenting. This time the comments fail to guess what the article is about spectacularly.

Tell me again how the public should not get involved in the debate but this time give the right example and do it silently?

"Approved government media"

That's not what the BBC is

It's literally the national broadcaster, and governed by the culture secretary.

How much more government approval do you need? The Queen to notarize personally every utterance, noise and word they say/write?

It's literally as close to that as one can get, has a Royal Charter too.

Next would be the queen herself broadcasting live 24/7/365, might be hard to get that much juice out of a 90 year old. Maybe one day.

No, government broadcaster would be the government broadcasting directly from a government broadcast centre over other platforms

This is the youtube outlet for it

https://www.youtube.com/user/number10gov

Are you American by any chance? Is CBS a government mouthpiece because they carry actual government broadcasts like presidential addresses and have some oversight from a government agency (FCC)?

CBS is a 100% private corporation.

BBC is 100% government owned.

You are basically saying there is no difference between the Empire State Building and the White House.

phd in algae/oil production. So they'd have plenty of base knowledge about biology, but hard to say that they learned anything about human medical biology.

Sure, but it makes me question these HN comments like "the author is clueless about statistics" and the like.

the vast majority of scientists are know are clueless about statistics. Biochemisty isn't a field that is strongly dependent on stats, in a way that (for example) genomics is.

"Clueless" is misleading. It seems fair to assume anyone with a PhD in a hard science is probably in the 99%+ percentile for statistical knowledge. Sure, even at this level the statistics often get applied incorrectly, but I'm not sure how well statistical intuition correlates with the number of courses taken.

Deep within the linked piece there is a small section entitled 'On “statistical significance”'. It says this:

Now, this result does not happen to be “statistically significant.”

People often use arguments like “but it’s not statistically significant” to try to discount results. I even hear people with PhDs or MDs say this, because somewhere in their schooling they were falsely taught that results need to be “statistically significant” to be “real.”

But even if a result is not statistically significant, absent better data, it still remains the best available estimate for the effect in question. This is just common sense. “Statistically insignificant” does not mean that there is no effect. More on statistical significance here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9.

As a non-PhD who has (relatively) thought a lot about statistics, and who has previously linked others to that Nature article, this is the sort of balanced statement that makes me think she is not clueless. How about you?

I've talked to nearly every PhD scientist I've worked with about multi test corrections. It's one of my favorite things. I didn't really understand it, and totally ignored it for many years until it was pointed out, and after that, I noticed that nearly everything I saw published did multiple tests without corrections (combined with very, very large numbers of tests, and fairly loose p--values). I don't think anybody mentioned multi test corrections until I voluntarily took an intro stats class in grad school.

BTW, I strongly disagree the quote you have about statistically insignificant data. It cannot be used to say there is no effect, or anything about the direction or magnitude of the effect. I'm not sure what a statement like """somewhere in their schooling they were falsely taught that results need to be “statistically significant” to be “real.”""" even means, significance is a mathematical/probabilistic formalism that has nothing to do with underlying reality, just with the event system you're working on.

Thanks for the response. I'm confused by your "BTW", though. Are you saying you strongly disagree with her sentiment that "even if a result is not statistically significant, absent better data, it still remains the best available estimate for the effect in question"? Because I feel like this is a useful insight which often gets lost among statisticians: if you have limited information and are forced to make a bet, you probably should bet that whatever actually happened will happen again. True, you should have low confidence in this bet, but you shouldn't throw away information just because 6 times out of 100 (p>.05) it might have occurred purely by chance.

yeah, I don't think that's a useful insight. I would say that if a result is not statistically significant, you shouldn't consider it to be the "best available estimate" (which is sort of a different concept anyway) unless you're willing to deal with a very high false positive rate.

BTW I set my p threshold at 1e-6 for a single test, 0.05 is just crazy. On the other hand, I've worked with systems where nobody cared about the significance, just that the weights that got pushed to production made more money than the last set of weights.

If the people I talked to in college for a science were any indicator, I'd still believe plenty of scientists are clueless about statistics.

Maybe it also does not make sense for NIH to have a PhD in philosophy (not medical doctor) https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/meet-our-doctors/cgrady.html

be the Chief of the Department of Bioethics approving questionable research such as sand flies eating live Beagles. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10130709/NIH-says-b... 'The NIH said that they did do leishmaniasis research on dogs in a laboratory in 2016, and in an enclosed open space in Tunisia, but not the research pictured.'

The person you're referring to, Christine Grady, does indeed have a PhD in philosophy (which seems to make perfect sense for somebody who works in bioethics). But in addition to that, she is a trained nurse with an immense amount of experience. It's not clear to me that a doctor would make a better decision than a nurse here (or in the clinic, TBH).

I think you have a different issue given your highly specific criticism of dog bioethics. THe NIH primarily concerns itself with human bioethics and permits some amount of very unpleasant research on model organisms.

She is also the wife of medical Dr. Fauci of the NIH, which may raise claims of influence and bias.

Yeah, sorry, don't really put much weight into that. Fauci is a dedicated civil servant and pretty much everything he does is seen by large numbers of people. Oh, look: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-170254166936

If my goal was to cast fear, uncertainty and doubt into vaccines, I think I'd be able to weave a far more convincing web of lies that the folks worrying about a married NIH power couple.

I guess the way I look at Fauci is that he already proved his value in the HIV/AIDS crisis and it would be crazy not to trust somebody with that level of knowledge, levelheadedness, and connections.

Connections for posing for pictures with Trump doesn't prove medical ability.

During AIDS outbreak, Fauci pushed for FDA to approve the toxic and expensive drug known as AZT which was eventually discontinued. https://www.spin.com/2015/10/aids-and-the-azt-scandal-spin-1...

Bactrim was cheap and not approved. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whitewashing-aids-history_b_4...

'Dr. Anthony Fauci is rewriting history. He is doing so to disguise his shameful role in delaying promotion of an AIDS treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in the first years of the epidemic.

In my book, Body Counts, A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, I recount how slow the federal government was in publicizing the use of Bactrim and other sulfa drugs to prevent PCP (the pneumonia that was then the leading killer of people with AIDS) in addition to its long-time and well-known use to treat PCP.'

I'm sorry exactly what are you saying is wrong with AZT? It wasn't discontinued, it's still in use and was the first drug that really started to turn around HIV. I know all about this because my research into pharmaceutical chemistry during my phd contained a lot about nucleoside analogs (I worked with a similarly toxic one, gemcitabine), and because I was working near the forefront of HIV antiviral research at the time.

Bactrim addresses a symptom of AIDS (specifically, a side bacterial infecftion that many people infected with HIV are prone to getting) while AZT reduces viral infections. Two completely different things. The former is for people who are infected, the latter for people to not get infected. The fog of virus is like the fog of war: easy to criticize from the distance of time.

I think you've said enough. It's clear what your opinion about Fauci is, and it's adding absolutely nothing to this discussion.

It was the quick magic cure the public was demanding. With more testing it was shown to have significant side effects and is no longer used across the board. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-rise-an... 'The AZT will work for you for a little while, for the maximum of one year, as it did for me, and afterwards the damage became visible.'

I wonder if the current quick magic cure demanded by the public may also overlook harmful side effects. The current pressure to dose those in low risk groups may be short-sighted. Ignoring risks is the subject of the thread.

Like I said earlier, you've said enough. You've exposed yourself as somebody who believes anecdotes, not science.

There are no quick magic cures. AZT made a huge difference for a lot of people but it wasn't until later retrovirals (based on tech that didn't exist at that time) were released. It's still used in combination with other therapy.

You have to admit that a similar development around Covid vaccines would be quite unfortunate.

"Most of the points in this article I'd be comfortable asking to a room of PhD scientists with expertise on Covid and vaccines."

How about discussing those points with a roomful of non-PhD, non-scientists, with no particular knowledge of medicine in general?

I think its important we have the same conversations in public as we do behind closed doors in academia. Especially when we are asking people to inject medicine in their bodies.

Are you wanting to invite the public as spectators or participants?

If they get injected they are participants already.

They're participants in society but not the scientific community. They're not even part of a study. What makes their opinions on the science worth entertaining? Do you think John and Jane Q Public should be involved in network architecture because they have phones? Or civil engineering of bridges because sometimes they drive over one? I cannot find th logic in these arguments.

This is exactly what the article [that you didn't read] talks about.

The end user can usefully participate in the network architecture debate if enough of their messages are vanishing. If the expert then says: "oh, but 1 in 2680 is rare" other professionals may adjust their opinion about them personally.

If they then go on a crusade to get the exchange scrubbed from the record it would make them more credible to you?

Their doubts are worth entertaining because their health and freedom is directly on the line. They correctly suspect they are being fed only specific information and all counter discussion is getting labeled as "misinformation" by what is supposedly the Fourth Estate.

If I drive across a bridge I should have the right to question the competency and the trust being put in the engineers. If something looks like a crack, I would ask detailed questions and I hope my fellow citizens would do the same. Can you really not find the logic, in good faith?

Should we cut off people below certain h-index?

What’s yours?

Are you part of the scientific community? If not, I'd ask you defer to my opinion on this matter, thanks.

When the public is discussing if we should mandate vaccines or not, and at what age, and in order to do what activities... including important activities like receiving an education... yes, you need to have these conversations outside of the ivory tower.

Should we let the uninformed masses make decisions based on wild speculation? Should non experts get to weigh in in the technical merits of your field? What value do people with no prior knowledge and no expertise add to scientific discussions?

One weird trick tried by the JCVI, the UK’s vaccine top advisory body, that refused to recommend the vaccine for 12-15 age bracket.

Their membership:

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