Comment by DocSavage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocSavage | Hacker News Reader

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Completely correct? GBD advocated letting SARS-CoV-2 rip through the general pop BEFORE vaccines while "targeting" protection of the elderly, which of course no country managed to do, particularly their poster-child Sweden. Now GBD fans pretend Sweden was a success story when any observation of the COVID impact on Sweden vs their neighbors through the vaccine rollout shows a completely different story. (Sweden had ~10x death rate of bordering Norway for first year of pandemic.)

Also GBD pretends mortality is the only worthy metric. There's such a thing as morbidity as the millions of people with Long COVID would like to discuss.

But Bhattacharya and friends with strong connection to Hoover Inst have a particularly nice revisionist view of their early work:

* Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.

* Write seroprevalence papers with suspect specificity (changed between v1 and v2 of pre-print due to outrage from stat experts) that don't describe how the visual tests were interpreted, why they differ from the CZI BioHub paper's measurement of the Premiere test, or why a pathologist running ELISA tests to verify wanted off the paper.

* Stand by while friends like Scott Atlas make a media tour saying the seroprevalence paper suggests as many as 10,000 dead from COVID. Thus a fair portion of our population decides COVID is just the flu, and some of the GBD supporters still think it's "just a cold" despite the incredible evidence we have that it's much much worse (for example, see Iwasaki's work) and there's the little matter of over 1 million Americans dead.

* Then write the GBD before we have the vaccine or have any real public effort to try to protect the elderly.

On the bright side, Bhattacharya has been a proponent of the vax and many people (including me) agreed that targeted protection of elderly was very important. It's just that the revisionist commentary from his supporters is they were the only ones saying it. Completely false.

> * Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.

They only were able to go on "FOX" because the left media's mind was already made up. Going against the narrative was absolutely forbidden.

I can't believe people still honestly believe anything "the experts" told them at this point. It takes massive privilege and echo-chamerism to look back over the last three years and still believe what "the experts" told them.

> ...BEFORE vaccines...

At least for America, the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity, even though the FDA grant an emergency use and later approval.

I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot). It would've probably been better if they never existed since people were fired to take useless experimental medical drugs with no proven positive effects.

The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.

"the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity"

You must be explicitly ignoring a ton of papers and data showing the opposite. The death rate of unvaxxed vs vaxxed is incredibly higher and CDC has data for it.

"I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)."

In early 2021, the US had the largest vaccination campaign ever peaking at about 3.5 million shots per day in mid-April. Do you know what happened to the death rate (excess mortality) in 2021 through June? It dropped substantially. Isn't it odd to you that mass vaccination using a "clot shot" somehow drops the death rate substantially? It's rhetorical because to form the opinions you have, you must go out of your way to cherry pick papers and ignore data (or have conspiracy theories that data contradicting your opinion is fake).

> I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)

Would you mind sharing at a high level what research led you to this conclusion?

> The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.

Ah.

Yes. Completely correct, you are wrong.

> Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

Compare Sweden vs "their neighbors" as I said above. They had much worse COVID death rate from their Nordic neighbors (Norway, Denmark, Finland) through initial COVID and the vaccine rollout to summer 2021.

Go to https://ourworldindata.org/ and check Sweden vs Norway, Finland through the vaccine rollout.

https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-covid

https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-cumulative

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7797349/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5

Good ol' non-stratified comparisons.

Feel free to construct a competing comparison showing how the 10x death rate of Sweden is just an artifact and not a failure of public health. Or are you going to claim they're just old people so no big deal?

I shouldn't have to do that, if someone wants to compare two nations' handling and come to a conclusion using statistics then they should be compelled to do the statistics correctly.

If you honestly think sweden has a “10x death rate” I think you are badly misinformed. That sounds not believable at all. Just like the “1 out of 4 (no wait, 10) people suffer from long covid”

10x the death rate is a huge difference. You’d be seeing mass death, far more than anywhere else. It would be extremely visible.

Every ounce of data generated for covid was highly politically motivated and extremely biased. It should all be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Sweden had a 10x death rate for the first year of the pandemic vs its direct neighbors. That's the data published by Sweden, Norway, and Finland. You can ignore it if you want or just claim it's "highly politically motivated and extremely biased" because it's against what you want to believe. All Nordic countries did relatively well on death rate, that's why GBD have seized upon Sweden as a success story, but it was obviously worse than Norway and Finland.

When I talk with GBD proponents it always boils down to this: they won't believe the data and make up a variety of reasons why not to trust it, then they turn around and trust far worse analyses like the article comparing Sweden and non-Nordic countries with much worse obesity and far different systems (like the article comparing Sweden vs other EU).

The “death rate” of covid wasn’t the only problem to solve for you know. The myopic fixation on covid to the exclusion of literally everything else was a huge mistake. There is more to track than just “covid death rates” or “covid spread”… covid didn’t exist in a vacuum and asking society to do what it did was so absurd I still can’t believe people bought into it.

It takes immense privilege and a very sheltered life to think covid was the only thing worthy of focus. There is a balance to be had when treating a disease.

People needed to take off their blinders and see what damage their mitigations causes.

Andy point still stands. 10x the “death rate” is massive and would be very visible. It wasn’t. It was only visible if you looked at it with a microscope.

What society did to attempt to mitigate covid was a disaster no matter how well it worked. And the kicker is it didn’t work at all… which is probably why every pandemic plan said explicitly not to do masks and lockdowns and school closures.

Glad to hear we've moved from me being "badly misinformed" (now that you took a second to look at the actual data) to now having a "myopic fixation on covid".

Speaking of myopic, please do talk to the families of the ~1200 additional deaths per million people in Sweden and tell them their tragedy was "only visible if you looked at it with a microscope."

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