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Comment by ucoclddau | Hacker News Reader

> Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause

This sounds like a red flag to me if you're trying to isolate the COVID vaccine as something safe. Table 2 data showed less drownings, less car crashes, less falls, less deaths related to chromosomal abnormalities... How can there not be a confounding variable or two here?

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It's obviously almost all confounders, since COVID mortality is low now and choosing to obtain the vaccine correlates strongly with other medical and non-medical factors affecting all-cause mortality. The point is that no adverse effect from the vaccine offsets that confounding beneficial effect. More covariates would shrink the confounding effect, but they did the best they could with their dataset.

That confounding effect turned out to be massive, which is bad news for anyone hoping to tightly bound the vaccine risk. It's good personal news for anyone in the vaccinated group, just more as to their general life choices than as to COVID.

Not being an idiot who takes dumb risks like being unvaccinated certainly does seem confounding.

So what you're saying is that they are comparing two distinct self-selected populations that differ in many other aspects than just taking the vaccine.

Why would you ascribe any difference to the vaccine rather to any other difference between the groups?

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