That's a remarkable attitude. I'm curious why you have a passionate aversion to a one-time dose of mRNA but you're quite happy dosing yourself dozens, if not a hundred or more times, with another unnatural chemical. I can totally understand Vitamind D and zinc, as you eat those things all the time, but ivermectin isn't a normal part of the human (or any animal) diet. It's not a natural compound at all, it's synthesized by bacteria and its primary effect is to kill insects and worms by frying their nerves.
It could screw up your nerves, too, if you get too much of it, and it's not even implausible that it could cause some very minor nerve or brain damage at moderate doses taken long enough. A recent survey of potential side effects:
Nobody knows or sure what might happen with long-term moderate use, because the normal treatment for worms is a short dose, and anyway the chance of some very minor neurological side effects would be totally acceptable if your other option is river blindness, so nobody has looked for this. But it seems like an odd risk to willingly run the clinical trial on yourself if you're otherwise in perfect health.
Do you know the CDC recommended ivermectin for international travel?
A little bit of research about this reveals there are many travelers who have taken it for months at the recommended doses, with no long-term side effects. There is plenty of long term data for its safety at the doses in doctor-recommended protocols for COVID.
In the case of COVID, instead of taking it prophylactically we could even just focus on taking it for the rare cases you go home with symptoms. That would reduce the risk profile even more drastically to basically an unprecedented low-risk level.
On the question of safety, it doesn't matter what the goal was in taking ivermectin.
But this is all sort of red herring to me: the problem isn't people taking ivermectin, the problem is people believing Steve Kirsch when he says "covid vaccines have killed over 150,000 people in America alone!" or wanting to believe that guy who claims 90% of people who took the vaccine will be dead in a year or two.
They both have very good reasons for saying that, and are most likely correct. Since either conclusion is a total disaster and the probability of them being correct is high, you have to assume they are correct because of expected value. Also, many other people have come to the same conclusions using different means.
Nope. The problem is people believing that Steve Kirsch must be wrong and vaccines couldn't possibly have killed anyone.
That's the problem.
Right or wrong thinking.
Black or white.
This or that.
And ad hominem. Personal hatreds, animosities taking the place of the real discussion.
I don't know how many people vaccines have killed but I'm more than ready to believe they've killed some. So why risk them?
Risk matching is the point. Isn't it?
But vaxers believe there's literally no risk with vaxes.
Vaxers generally believe a vax is something. Some 'thing'. You take 'a vax' and you've got some 'thing' that will now protect you against a virus.
Despite the evidence and clear statements everywhere that it won't.
And in apparent total ignorance of the fact that a vaccine only ever manipulates the immune system in one other way in the hopes of bringing forth a better performance from it.
They seem to be totally, totally ignorant of this.
To where they think : no vax = no protection. Vax = 100% protection.
Where the truth is, of course: no vax: 99.x% protection. Vax ( in best case scenario) 99.(x + 0.1) % protection. Plus risks.
And so on.
The whole narrative is about Vaccines.
And I maintain that is simply perpetuating a mass ignorance.
The question is all about the fire and the fire brigade which will put it out.
The fire is the virus.
The fire brigade is the immune system.
The vax is merely the fire alarm bell is the best analogy I can think of.
That corrupt narrative obscures the facts, all the facts.
That prior good health and attention to certain 'levels' of minerals and vitamins, etc can be equally or more effective at improving the performance of your immune system come the testing.
That's the problem. Ignorance and those who seek to perpetuate it, do nothing to diminish it.
Not only all that, but the so-called vaccines do not meet the medical or legal definition of vaccines. They are called vaccines to trick people into thinking they are vaccines. Nor are they genetic therapies. They're an experimental genetic manipulation. Who knows what they really do, or what they're meant to do, or what their long-term effects are. They sure don't protect against the virus - so what do they really do? And they are being mandated with a vaccine pass?
I see no benefit at all, except the $33 billion to Pfizer last year and $36 billion this year.
The vaccines are gates we're forced to line up for that state, "Vaccines will set your free." Don't believe them. And don't believe the sign with the arrow that says, "Showers," either.
It is odd that you do not believe Kirsch and 150,000 deaths. Have you seen the death data from openvaers.com? That data is CDC and FDA data. It is vastly underreported.
Are you not aware of the 2015 Harvard-Pilgrim VAERS study that found "only 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported"? That's an Under Reporting Factor of 100. Steve Kirsch used 6 independent methods to come up with his 41 URF. Have you seen them? Dr. Jess Rose, a biostatistician, applied mathematician, immunologist, biochemist, computational biologist, and 2019 woman's surfing champion, who programs in R, the VAERs language, calculated 31. 150,000 is a reasonable number. (For perspective the US has 55,000 deaths per week from all causes)
Are you aware (google: "S1 hypercoagulability" for the study) that the vaccines create micro-blood clots? Did you know that a BC physician, Dr. Charles Hoffe, found 62% of his vaxxed patients (900) had elevated D-dimer tests, which test for blood clots (https://tinyurl.com/wnrbc3hu). He lost his practice after writing a letter of concern to the Provincial Health Officer. Micro blood-clots block the capillaries that deliver O2 and nutrients to every cell and organ - think that could be causing those thousands of vaccine deaths reported in VAERS - and many more in a few years? Haven't you seen the UK study that found those Vaxxed lost their immunity after a few months where it went drastically negative and stayed there. Do you think that might kill you when need immunity? Guessin' you've not seen pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole's presentation: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Sjl0KqNIdNO2/
He's found that cancers are up by 20 times due to the immunity degradation from the Vax. Note the slides of clumped-up blood cells.
Seems like your approach is arguing from ignorance, like the fool MD who once told me, "If it were important, I'd have heard about it."
You have no data or studies - just wishful thinking. Your head is stuck in the sand. Get some data and studies if you want to present a credible comment.
I follow the principle "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
I wouldn't be surprised if Kirsch claimed to have "used 6 independent methods" to come up with his under-reporting factor, but looking at his article on the subject[1], I don't see 6 methods, I see only one. Even so. point taken: Kirsch is a master Gish Galloper, so he claims to have not one, not two, not six, but 12 methods in addition to his main VAERS-based method that "found an excess death rate of 150,000 or more".
Wow! 13 methods! Now, are any of those methods even the slightest bit reasonable? I'm sure you're nodding vigorously and indignantly without really thinking much about it. So, tell you what, why don't you deeply study method #5 entitled "Poll #1" and let me know what you find. Because as far as I can tell, Kirsch doesn't say what "Poll #1" even means.
But you know what extraordinary claims require, other than extraordinary evidence? A story that fits together. So. The minimum 150,000 deaths is supposed to be in just the U.S. alone, implying that there have been over a million (maybe 2 million?) deaths worldwide. That's a hell of a lot! So why is it that excess deaths line up with Covid deaths just about everywhere, but don't tend to line up with vaccination rates anywhere?[2]
Obviously, you're not going to be the slightest bit convinced by this counter-evidence. But the interesting question is why? What anchor belief[3] makes you insist on the 150,000 figure, reject the fact that excess deaths line up with Covid rather than vaccinations, and reject the principle of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
> You have no data or studies - just wishful thinking.
I have studied this issue about as well as a guy with a full-time job can be expected to do on weekends for free, I think.[4] It doesn't take that much research to notice that he is a liar.[5]
By the way, this thing Kirsch said bothers me:
> The URF of 41 is a minimum URF; the URF for “less obvious” events (including death) is always larger than this value. So for example, if you had menstrual problems, peripheral neuropathy, or your cancer got worse after the jab, the URF for that event might be 100 or more.
Kirsch is claiming that 41 is the ordinary under-reporting factor, but that the under-reporting factor actually *increases*, not decreases, as the side-effect gets more serious. Really? He is apparently saying that, if you felt ill and had to take a day off work after getting vaccinated, there is a 2.44% chance you'd file a VAERS report for that. If, on the other hand, you *DROPPED DEAD* there would be less than a 1% chance that ANYONE would bother filing a report? Does that make sense to you?
Tell me, does Kirsch ever explain to his throng that filing a VAERS report is legally required after serious adverse events including (obviously) death? Here's an FDA FAQ[6]:
> The reporting requirements for COVID-19 vaccines are the same for those authorized under emergency use or fully approved. Healthcare providers who administer COVID-19 vaccines are required by law to report to VAERS the following after vaccination:
> ....
> Serious AEs regardless of causality. Serious AEs per FDA are defined as:
> Death
> A life-threatening AE
> Inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization
> (the list goes on for awhile)
Does Kirsch ever present evidence that doctors, family members and everyone else ignores these legal requirements?
And I've got two more words for you: base rate. Have you seen Steve Kirsch ever address the all-important issue of base rates? I haven't. Base rates are the key to understanding why there are so many VAERS reports, though I think it would also help to explore the reasons why 44% of VAERS death reports since June did not bother to mention the age of the person who died. They often have descriptions like this:
#1995488 "This spontaneous report received from a consumer via a company representative concerned a patient of unspecified age, sex, race and ethnic origin. The patient's height, and weight were not reported. No past medical history or concurrent conditions were reported. ... ... On an unspecified date, the patient died from unknown cause of death. .... This event(s) is considered unassessable."
So, you know, I have this theory that there is a lot of double-counting in VAERS because, in addition to the Physician's report, there will often be a witness or family member who causes an extra report to be filed that contains almost no information. Of course, you will disagree with my theory. But how, exactly, do you know I'm wrong? And again, base rates are even more important than this. How do you know that the base rates don't matter for analysis of VAERS reports?
Well, you might say "well David YOU aren't verifying your suspicions either". That's true, but I have a day job. I work morning to evening 5 days a week. I don't have time to do a detailed investigation.
But you know who DOES have time to do a detailed investigation and chooses not to? Steve Kirsch has "thousands" of paying subscribers on his Substack alone paying $5/mo or $50/year (not counting his other earnings from TrialSiteNews). He's also a multi-millionaire. So yeah, where's his detailed investigation of base rates, and his detailed investigation that proves that virtually all doctors ignore the FDA requirement to report deaths in VAERS?
I think his behavior makes sense, because what do you think his thousands of paying customers want from him? Would they be happy if he said "hi there my dear thousands of customers, I've been investigating this and discovered that my earlier conclusions were quite wrong"? No, I think the next words out of Kirsch's mouth had better be "it's actually WORSE than I've been saying all along!" Because if he said he was GENUINELY wrong, his customers would cancel their subscriptions in droves, because (1) they're angry that he misled them or (2) they think someone "got" to him and is speaking in his place or forcing him to change his tune or (3) they very much like his style, they're paying for that style, and for Kirsch to say he was wrong in a big way would not be Kirsch's style at all.
Nothing to do with civil liberties. Everything to do with preventing death and misery. Oh, I have know three people who died from Covid-19 over the last two years. So, what!
Preventing death is a modern day euphemism for taking away civil liberties. Some people figure that life would be a more joyful place if we did not have the freedom and power to harm ourselves or others, and that they way to achieve this is by ceding more and more power to the government.
Nope, not a euphemism. Just a fact. It is called living in a society. Stop at red lights, do not smoke in no-smoking places, get a driver’s license, vaccinate(polio, etc.), and on and on and on.
On and on until the people are enslaved to the government. Then there is eventually a rebellion or some other sort of collapse of the society and the process starts all over again.
Random note- when I think of the Fermi paradox (why we haven't heard from Aliens) and one scenario where humans hit a Great Filter (a wall we can't seem to overcome and explains why other intelligent species like us haven't reached out yet). The Great Filter is the perpetual cycle humanity has had for the last thousands of years where we just continually fight for freedom, get enslaved, fight for freedom, report.
Feels like the Ying and the Yang, the Electron and Proton, the Duality, That human nature is to perpetually be in this cycle; and that we are witnessing it yet again in our lifetimes. What if we don't break out, and this is what happens to many other intelligent species on other planets too, and this is why there's no communicate between species (none survive long enough and squabble to their deaths on their home planet).
This. Although, for me it's not so much Scott (I see some of that, I used to be libertarian leaning, the pandemic sure as hell cured me of that) but I definitely downrated the commenters. The whining about the vaccine sure does not give a good picture.
If the pandemic really "cured" your liberty leaning thinking, a.1) you never had a solid philosophical conviction or a.2) you're lying, and b) You lack analytical skills to realize what's real and what's a lie.
> If people pushing Ivermectin wanted to be treated seriously
I think you are confusing "the medical establish destroyed its own credibility" with "ivermectin people demand respect."
The ivermectin people (who I think were wrong, but that's not relevant here) were not trying to convince other people to take ivermectin. It is the medical establishment that wanted them to take vaccines.
If you want me to do something, I necessarily have power in that dynamic. If you cannot stomach the idea of me having any power because of how bad I suck, well, then you really didn't care that much about getting me to do that thing.
Yeah! Like what, are we just going to accept quantum mechanics because there's a "consensus"? No, it's because Juan and I have read the studies personally and understood for ourselves that hidden variable theories are incorrect. And of course, as free thinkers, we did not allow blogs or news outlets or YouTube videos to influence our opinions, no sir. Reasoned from first principles, we did, that's the Elon Musk way.
Even if the vaccines work (I think we do) we should still be looking for effective drugs, because the vaccines don't always work and can't always be delivered.
Well, fair enough, but bear in mind Scott's willingness to engage with disparate viewpoints is why *he* will have influence and you will not. When you write off people who don't share your worldview as complete orcs and morons, you necessarily write off your ability to influence them. There's nothing wrong with that -- so long as you are comfortable with the big decisions being made by, or influenced by, the people who are more patient.
If Bret Weinstein is a fair sample of people pushing Ivermectin, his intent seemed to be to encourage doubt about the vaccine, with pushing Ivermectin as a side effect of doubting the vaccine.
It was more like "the vaccines aren't proven safe, *and* they're concealing the effectiveness of Ivermectin".
I don't know which way this counts. Weinstein thought vaccines were a good idea for older people while sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines for anyone who isn't old.
That's interesting, given how Weinstein praised his guest Steve Kirsch, who claims (albeit not in the Weinstein podcast I saw) that vaccines mostly kill the elderly. This follows naturally from the observation that the distribution of deaths by age in sources like VAERS is roughly proportional to the base rate of how many natural deaths by age you would expect in the general population. Indeed, the number of VAERS deaths is well below the base rate, which by itself demonstrates underreporting in VAERS. Of course, if we look at how Kirsch has accounted for the base rate...
I have no idea. I'm pretty sure I remember Bret (and possibly Heather) talking about being pleased that parents were vaccinated. It's possible that Weinstein changed his mind, or that I'm mixing him up with Rogan, or that I'm just plain wrong.
I mean it's Scott, he's writing in the American Political context so the real take away is almost always going to be that liberals should altruistically give additional power to conservatives within liberal dominated institutions in hope that this will increase conservative trust in those institutions while ignoring the agency or interest of any conservative epistemological elites in undermining that trust.
I think there's a lot of meat to this analogy, but I do think it's a relevant real-world consideration that even the most ardent anti-vaxxers will generally concede the evidence that science has some particular power as a grand institution for generating truths or working mechanisms, given that they're having the discussion on the internet. And most of them are further prepared to concede that medical science in particular also generates working mechanisms. Rather than throwing out the whole edifice, they're looking for reasons to throw out elements piecemeal, without expertise relating to how participants in the edifice of science judge evidence.
In a symmetrical situation, you'd be challenging the orthodox church on its record on Covid, while acknowledging that orthodox miracle-powered airplanes and such are obviously real.
This might be the core of why anti-vaxxers behaviour is so hard to understand for me. There even seem to be a significant number of anti-vaxxers working in medical professions. It really puzzles me what makes people accept most of medicine/science, but not some specific other parts.
In the aliens analogy, the alien technology seems to demonstratedly work. So what about vaxination differs from other medicine so fundamentally?
What would be the thing you obviousls accept about the orthodox church? That thes have some superiour moral knowledge?
As a theoretical biophysicist (I have a Master of science in that, I dont work in the field though) who is heavily sceptical of mRNA Vaccines:
I distrust their "science", they have made too many mistakes, and emotionally speaking I really dislike getting heckled and shut down in my field of study by "journalists".
I also believe that the main problem with the m-RNA vaccine will be that Covid can escape quite quickly from an immune response only focused on a single viral protein, even if this protein is well chosen.
Furthermore, if Pfizer is unwilling to contribute to defeating the crisis by stopping to block the admission of Sinovac et. al, then I am equally unwilling to contribute by accepting escalating intrustions on my personal freedoms.
I would take Sinovac, or any other attenuated vaccine recogniced by the WHO, but to do this in the EU, I would have to:
1: first emigrate to Serbia,
2: succesfully apply for permanent residence there, then
3: get vaccinated with Sinovac (there is a EU-Serbia agreement that Vaccines used in serbia "count" as proof of vaccination, but only for serbian citizens or permanent residents) and well.
The rejection of non western vaccines in the west is just political stupidity motivated by greed, pride and stupidity on part of our ruling classes.
They need to clean up their act and be held accountable.
When you write you distrust the science behind the mRNA vaccines, do you mean that they don't work (and therefore the studies showing they do are fake), that they have short term side effects (therefore again faked studies) or that they have long term side effects?
--I believe that adverse effects from mRNA vaccines are underreported, but probably not terribly so.
--In particular, I believe that Myocardities risk could actually be smartly adressed, by adjusting mRNA (or also other vaccine) injection protocolls in a way that reduces the risks of accidental intravenous, rather then intramuscular, injection. Here I would argue that the "The vaccines are safe no matter what" crowd has essentially cost lives.
--I believe they work adequately, but less well then advertized. There is a certain range of +-15% here you can fudge/interpret the data. In particular, immunological theory would predict that a 1 protein vaccine (mRNA)would be far more susceptible to pathogen escape then a multi proteine (Vektor or conventional) vaccine. I cannot see any biological reason why Pfizer could possibly be better against Delta, which is characterized by no less then 3 mutations on the spike protein, and where you would expect a massive drop of immunity, then any of the vektor or conventional vaccines which also make use of other proteins. Now, one can make a case that Pfizer is just covering up adverse reactions, and that the real adverse reactions are far harsher then advertized and thus there is a stronger immune response.
But Pfizer essentially claims to be better against variants with mutated spike proteins, inspite of only showing the spike protein, also claiming less adverse reactions and higher efficacy against baseline covid.
Everything in immunology has tradeoffs. I call shenanigans.
Like, 1 of these is likely, 2 is possible, all 3? With a very new technology while competing against serious scientific concurrence?
In my view highly unlikely. There is also the issue that Pfizer, via their stranglehold on the EMA is blocking Sinovac, Sputnik or Indian vaccines in the EU. I am pro Vax, but also pro Vax choice.
In particular, I want to avoid a situation where the authorities or their pharma allies can force me, at pain of not having a social live anymore, to pay tribute to them.
Forcing me to pay tribute to one of their adversaries, well, they would have far less incentives to keep this up in perpetuity. I would prefer a Chinese/Russian vaccine in the west, and a western vaccine in Russia/China. Wanting to minimize control the authorities have over you is completely rational and in my logical self interest. If control is neccessary, I wish to minimize the incentives they have for keeping this control up indefinitly, and delivering resources to their adversaries would do just that.
Leaving the political aspects aside it does not change my conclusion about the risk/benefit order of magnitudes of the vaxines, but your point about efficacy against mutations sounds pretty plausible to my (amateur) ears, so I will pay attention to what happens when the next variants appear.
Complying with vaccine mandates within Canada requires taking one of the more dangerous vaccines. I could enter the US if I took a less dangerous vaccine, but I could not travel or live freely within Canada.
Actually, strong side effects are the *hallmark* of an effective therapy. You don't expect chemotherapy to cure cancer without making you very, very, sick, do you? Powerful therapies have powerful effects, by definition, and since it is utterly impossible to precisely target the problem -- you get powerful side effects, and the stronger and more effective the therapy, the more of them you get.
Zero side effects are the hallmark of completely impotent therapies with do nothing at all. That's the main reason you can dismiss stuff like homeopathy and crystal healing. *Because* they have zero side effects, it's an excellent rebuttal presumption that they have zero effects at all, which means they can't possibly be doing any good.
Yeah, sorry, you're just wrong on the facts. The effectiveness of a therapy within a given class does indeed scale with its bad side effects. That's kind of like basic chemistry.
Thought of this afterward: here's an easy way to prove this to yourself. Write down all the pain relievers you know, from the least to most effective, starting with acetaminophen and ending up with morphine. Now arrange them according to noxious side effects. Weird! It's the same order...
I was talking with my wife about homeopathy last night, and I realized I want someone to accuse a manufacturer of them of causing a heart attack or something. Just to see how they respond.
Well hell if homeopathic or herbal medicine or magic crystals *did* cause a heart attack or two, now and then, I'd take the proposition that they are effective a lot more seriously.
>Actually, strong side effects are the *hallmark* of an effective therapy
No they absolutely are not. Chemotherapy and radiation are extreme outliars in that they are known to be very toxic, but people generally consider cancer to be a worse option. If preventative chemotherapy were a thing, almost nobody would ever consider it. The vast majority of therapies cause absolutely no side effects in the vast majority of cases. Nobody pretends aspirin doesn't work because it didn't cause them to have uncontrollable bleeding for 8 months.
Yes and no. Traditional chemotherapy still mostly uses the same agents, e.g. 5FU or cisplatin and they still have the same evil side effects. They kind of have to, since the whole goal here is trashing DNA replication, so *anything* that's fast-dividing, like your hair cells or lining of the gut, gets trashed along with the cancer cells. Nobody has yet figured out how to screw with the DNA replication of *only* cancer cells, although there are some amazing potentialities out there perhaps with micro RNAs and CRISPR-Cas9 tech:
But there are also a burgeoning number of biologicals which are making their way into the clinic, e.g. the justly famous CAR-T treatment, and *these* are indeed often far more targeted and do far less collateral damage. When one of these works it's like a freaking miracle cure.
I believe most other new non-chemotherapy therapies are along the lines of inhibitors -- they slow down or stop cancer growth, but they do not actually kill cancer cells (although slowing them down might allow the immune system to catch up, I would guess, and is a very worthy goal in itself). You need chemo for that (or the biologicals, or radiation), I believe, although this field is sufficiently complex I speak under correciton if anyone knows better.
Not that this has much to do with the question of the vaccines, but menstrual problems in general get short shrift. "Oh, your periods are painful/irregular/you're bleeding when you shouldn't be? Just go home and take paracetamol". Even consultant gynaecologists, in my experience, tend to glaze over when you're trying to tell them no, this is NOT normal, this is NOT how my periods go.
So yeah, even in the best of times, you're going to get the brush-off as an hysterical female when it comes to 'women's troubles'.
I don't think it is a brush-off as a hysterical female, I think it is just a lack of anything productive to offer and an unwillingness to admit they don't really know much about what they are doing. It seems a bit far fetched to assume female gynecologists just dismiss women as being hysterical because they are women, yet they anecdotally seem more likely to do it and are more casual about it than males. "Why am I bleeding immediately following a "routine procedure" you did not warn me could cause bleeding?" "Its just your period." "No, my period just ended a week ago this is not normal." "Yeah it is you are just irregular quit worrying about nothing". At least men tend to act sympathetic before dismissing you.
I can't speak to your second point, but as to your first, I'll just say that my second dose was about equivalent to the worst day of my smallpox vaccine. If I can rate it as about the same as a vaccine we've been using for over a century without much issue, I think I can call it safe (if admittedly very unpleasant).
And yeah, you probably don't want to go partying on the day you're getting your second shot. Then again, you probably also don't want to go partying on the day you're donating blood, but I would also consider that pretty safe.
Vaccines can make you feel sick even though you're not sick, and it's well known why.
A little know fact is the fever and general sick feeling we get when infected come from the immune system response, not the infection itself.
Vaccines work by putting virus like particles in your body, tricking the immune system to think you've been infected. It then launches a fight against the intruder, which will leave behind antibodies etc for if you really get infected.
If this a big enough effort for the immune system you'll feel it as a fever. But that does NOT mean the vaccine is toxic or that you've been injured.
The mRNA vaccines don't contain the Covid-19 Spike Protein.
But they do contain mRNA that makes our human cells to produce the Covid-19 Spike Protein. That's the "extra step".
The immune system doesn't know or care where the Spike Protein came from, and reacts the same way as if they had been directly injected. That's the theory, and the experience of billions of given doses confirm it.
First of all, the mRNA vaccines *do* cause the synthesis of viral components, that's the whole point. Secondly, it's not clear the presence of *any* viral particles (or components) is necessary for an inflammatory reponse. The body does that all the time in response to a wide range of insult or injury, only some of which are viral infections, and sometimes for no reason at all (alas). We don't know how exactly inflammation gets started, but it's reasonable to assume cells have some way of noticing when abnormal things are going on and they send out cytokines annnouncing that fact -- which is what inflammation is. What are they noticing? How are they noticing it? This we don't really know in great detail. I mean, it would be great if we did, since inflammation in general contributes mightily to all kinds of poor outcomes.
No insight into the second part (menstrual symptoms) but to the first, I don’t get the impression at all that knowledge of those types of side effects (fatigue, fever) are being suppressed. Far from it - that you should be prepared for such symptoms, especially from the second shot, seems to be widely acknowledged (indeed signing off that you were aware of such potential side effects was part of getting the vaccine).
But 1) it doesn’t seem like “most” people are having significant immediate side effects (in my circles, “most” people had very mild effects, with maybe 1 in 10 having anything worse than arm soreness and mild fatigue).
And 2), these seem like common side effects for all vaccines, not unique to the COVID shot. I get the same side effects warnings for the flu shot. It makes sense - most of the side effects are due to your own immune response, and the whole point of vaccines is to provoke an immune repose.
There’s also a degree of confirmation bias - fatigue and muscle soreness aren’t exactly unheard of for the average adult, and are normally written off. But if you’re tired the day after a shot - well, must have been the shot right?
You mostly took the words out of my mouth, but you forgot the relatively recent high profile cases when the process "worked" (i.e. years of trials) and still the end result wasn't safe: Vioxx anyone? Or the more salient Dengvaxia controversy?
Medical science is HARD. Does doing something hard at Warp Speed make it more or less error prone?
Wow, those sound like some severe reactions indeed. I can share my anecdotes:
Of the 50 or so odd people I've had conversations with in person and know well in real life (through work, social clubs, sports, etc) I can report:
1. Those who received Moderna had strong reactions and were generally sick the day after. A few reported fever, a few nausea, etc. All recovered quickly and all really only reported the severe reaction to one of the shots not both.
2. Those who received any of the other shots generally reported little to no effect. My wife and I (30s) received Pfizer. She had no effect really and continues to menstruate healthily. I was groggy headed the next day and was fine after that.
So my anecdotal world is extremely different than yours. I'm from the US if it matters and the age range of folks I'm interacting with is 30 - 50.
Either way, VAERS offers an objective way to look into this information. I searched for all incidents of menstruation reported issues in the database resulting from COVID 19. There were 697 reported cases of menstruation issues in VAERS.
697 out of 201,922 women in the US 18-49 who have reported to VAERS after receiving the COVID-19 shot. 0.3% incidence.
The literature I can find reports 5% - 35% incidence of menstruation irregularity in this age range depending on a range of factors, including stress.
While I appreciate the anecdotes you shared, when I include them in with the 201,922 other anecdotes shared in VAERS it appears you just happened to have some very unlucky or stressed female friends and have not uncovered a hidden side effect plaguing the hundreds of millions of women who have received mRNA vaccines. Thankfully.
To each their own. To me VAERS is more trustworthy then anecdotes for various reasons (all the same reasons as review biases + to your own point the general hysteria around COVID on BOTH sides).
When I received my COVID vaccine I was handed a slip of paper that informed me about VAERs and how to participate. I signed up and since then I receive text messages every couple days in the beginning, then weekly, now only monthly.
One time I reported having an infection that for all intents and purposes I could see no reason why it would be related to my covid vaccine months ago. I received a phone call from VAERs within 2 days of submitting the report. They gathered more information about my infection and how I treated it, and then we moved on.
This is an audited, public database. I certainly agree that participation is fairly low (way more than 220k women 18-49 have been vaccinated, including my wife who did not participate in VAERs), but it is also certainly statistically significant.
Pardon me for being a smug bitch, but this is what I have been maintaining all along in the ivermectin discussions - it probably gives good results where people have, or are prone to, parasitic infections. In places where there is less to no risk of these, the results are not going to be as good.
Only in comments on here whenever we were discussing Covid, ivermectin, etc. So I haven't a record written down anywhere, unless anyone wants to go plough through the million words we're all thrashed out on this.
But yeah, I felt all along that "parts of the world showing good results = parts of the world with lots of poor, rural populations pretty likely to have worm infestations" was the major explanation for ivermectin success, if any.
I think people are seeing positive results (and that Cochrane meta-study has links to a lot of studies that are "no result/slight result" rather than "wowzers, this is a miracle cure!") is because (a) many of the studies, as listed above, are done in countries where I'd expect a lot of poor/rural communities with bad/poor health outcomes, including worm and other parasite infestations and (b) everyone is looking for the new silver bullet.
So you're a peasant farmer in Bangladesh and you picked up a worm infestation. You also picked up a dose of Covid. Treating you with an anti-parasitic drug in combination with other therapies is going to show a better result than leaving your system to fight off both at once."
I also dived into some of the Cochrane meta-study on the Ivermectin studies to see where all the countries were located:
"Deiseach Sep 7
Well, I could be totally wrong and ivermectin turns out to be an amazing anti-viral on top of everything else. But I'm going to stick to "it does what it says on the tin and if you're suffering from sarcoptic mange mites, go right ahead, but otherwise cool it unless a doctor prescribes the human version to you".
People are so anxious for "definite sure-cures!" that they'll swallow (ha!) any story about "this showed up in clinical trials as IT REALLY WORKS". I'm just surprised to see otherwise reasonable people jumping at "Doctors hate this ONE WEIRD TRICK" kind of story, but hey, we're all only human!"
Also got into some arguing with another commenter, but sure, that's me for ya!
"
Deiseach Sep 7
"One even needs zero studies when looking at the raw figures which came out of India where a ‘natural’ experiment happened with their big covid wave a few months ago. These are extremely positive results and we should be trying whatever we can in a pandemic as long as it is safe. There is even passive evidence from lower covid rates in some parts of Africa, quite possibly matching up well with existing use of ivermectin for its well known and longstanding use against parasites which can cause blindness."
Ivermectin is well-known and longstanding use *against parasites*, which you mention in your comment, but seem not to have understood. You are saying "this is a safe and effective drug!" and yes it is - *when used as intended*.
What you are extrapolating from "it's used to treat parasitic infections in humans" is "therefore it should be used for covid", with a side of "what can it hurt, it won't kill you" and unexamined anecdotes about "and they used it in India and they're getting fabulous results!"
I'm not so convinced about those fabulous results, I imagine that any benefits may come from the anti-parasitic treatment. If you have two patients, A and B, both in hospital undergoing treatment for Covid, and both have roundworm infestations as well, and A gets treated with Ivermectin which kills off the roundworms but B does not - I am going to guess that A will do better than B. But I don't think you can conclude from that "Ivermectin cures Covid!"
And the problem with this sunny assumption of "what harm can it do?" is that some people are refusing to get vaccinated, which is our best preventative at present, and along with others are all rushing off to buy veterinary products containing ivermectin, which are graduated for animals much larger than humans; believing this will save them; overdosing then because they're taking dosages calibrated for horses and cows; then ending up in the hospital with the side-effects of same."
Any credit is purely down to the agricultural ads on the national television and radio broadcaster of my nation and my youth; that so firmly fixed ivermectin in my brain as cattle drench and for sarcoptic mange mites, I had incredulity built up about "it'll cure Covid".
I remember you writing that. That was freaking brilliant, honestly. Your talents are wasted on whatever you're doing, unless it actually is teaching empirical skepticism to young people so they need not repeat endlessly the mistakes of their forefathers.
Oh gosh, my vanity is getting stroked here! 😁 Really, it came down to nothing better than years of "what the hell are sarcoptic mange mites?" listening to ads for cattle drench, then along comes the ivermectin recommendation and my sluggish rural roots bestir themselves with "who the hell is thinking dosing yourself with fluke cure is a good idea?"
It has nothing to do with superior ratiocination, I regret to say!
Same, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I feel even worse for not getting it because I think/talk about worms *really frequently* in relation to effective altruism causes, including the immunological impacts. One for the humility box!
I had the same reaction, but then I felt sort of manipulated — why go through the tedious exercise of winnowing the good studies from the bad ones, if even the good ones are trumped by the helminth observation?
Agreed. Scott analyzing lockdowns, cloth masks, surgical masks, voluntary social distancing (estimated from cell phone activity) etc would be a very interesting post.
The massive RCT from Bangladesh essentially found no impact on increased masking (no statistical significance for cloth masks, possibly maybe some statistical significance for surgical masks but for a bizarrely small infection rate)
Masks actually work very well according to the data. The issue is more that a lot of people just don't wear masks consistently/properly. When you look at people who *actually* wore masks correctly, and did so consistently, their infection rates are very significantly lower (though not zero, either).
So it's actually good advice to encourage people to mask up, even if all the incompetent people will get only mild benefits, because the competent people will get large benefits, and we actually care more about the competent people anyway because they end up contributing more per capita to society.
That's my interpretation of looking at the body of evidence going back to 1920 in both community and hospital settings. Of course, those studies were for influenza, but seeing that a coronavirus is smaller in size, it's logical to conclude the masks (ie breathing barriers - or dare I say amulets) are ineffective against it too. it's interesting to note actual PPE experts and industrial hygienists, at least the ones I've come across, don't think mass mask wearing do a thing. Not sure we should be conditioning people via mandates to wear them based on the evidence.
They work in the same manner that coughing into your sleeve works. Perhaps they provide a little personal protection but nowhere near enough to make an observable impact on the progression of the pandemic.
I’d add vaccines to your list as well. It’s misleading to assert that vaccines are an effective treatment without performing a similar meta analysis on their studies. Without such an analysis, the author is no different than the “proponents of pseudoscientific medicine” mentioned in the article; he is just as guilty of blindly trusting papers because they sound good and come from an authoritative place.
Furthermore, after billions of people vaccinated (with a broad set of different vaccines) and effects seen in the field, the phase 3 studies have long been amended by much better data. We know things the phase 3 studies haven't even asked (like “does it prevent transmission, and if, to what extent” or “how about variants of concern?” and ”is the immunity fading, and if, at what pace, and when do we need a third shot?”).
I'm not an immunologist. But the really important basics of immunology like antibodies are middle school biology stuff, at least here in Germany, just like evolution. I have no idea why the German speaking world has such a large minority believing the same bullshit as in the USA, where anti-scientific sentiments for lack of education are much more widespread. This must be the quantum memetic plague mentioned above, a disinfodemics spreading memes through entangled brain cells.
Do not underestimate the political identity aspect. Academia and the Press are, to a large extent, at least as hostile towards the 10-15% percent citizens who consider themselves conservative but do not support centrist parties as it is in the US. And their voting pattern and CoVid denialism in all its forms show some significant geographic overlap.
The idea that the US has worse science education than Germany is actually false. It actually has *better* science education than Germany does.
This is obscured by poor statistical methodology. The US has far more disadvantaged minorities than Germany does (roughly a third of our population is disadvantaged minorities).
If you just compare white Americans to Europeans, white Americans outscore every country in Europe on standardized science tests. (The same applies to Asian Americans)
The US's "poor education" is a statistical artifact. If you look at comparable demographics, the US actually has one of the best educational systems in the world.
Ii would hazard a guess that Russia has a lot to do with German vaccine hesitancy. The GRU has been actively spreading anti vax propaganda throughout the western world as a part of a campaign to destabilise their rival nations. Add to that the legacy of East Germany where the politics lean right and (I imagine) that the educators are not as sharp as their colleagues that were educated in the western side, and you have a recipe for ignorance and division.
"The fraud was small" is a strange argument. It suggests one of two possibilities:
1) The small fraud was nevertheless meaningful to the overall outcome of the study, or they wouldn't have bothered.
OR
2) If they perpetrated a small fraud with little effect on the overall results, it suggests their SOP is simply to commit fraud wherever and whenever it's convenient, and in that case how could one reasonably assume this one 'insignificant' fraud that we happened to discover is the extent of the total fraud?
I mean, is this one team doing fraud only in one area, or are there separate teams per area? I agree with your 2) take, but the consequences for the study probably differ between the two cases.
The issue is the most obvious motivation behind the fraud there was not to change the conclusions of the entire trial. It was a subcontractor trying to cover up sloppy data gathering practices and cutting corners about meeting followup deadlines. Backdating results doesn't do much to change the analysis but it does do a lot to save your ass from awkward questions about why you didn't follow the plan you were given. In that case the fraud can be both inconsequential to the overall conclusion and rationally motivated.
That is what we know of. There are probably more mistakes that were covered and hidden from the public. I can understand that they were rushing to get the vaccine approved and people being people and companies being companies with their tendency to cut corners and cover mistakes. I don't think it changes the outcomes substantially but it might be that the vaccine effectiveness is actually slightly less than originally thought.
My issue is that when Astra Zeneca found some irregularities with their studies due to very bizarre circumstances with product testing and they were completely open and forthcoming, they were completely vilified by the media and politicians. It doesn't provide any incentives for companies to be open at all. Pfizer's incident shows that it is better to deny or cover up everything and when they are finally exposed then say that it is not a big deal.
No, it's not the same thing at all. Unlike the ivermectin studies the vaccines were developed in HUGE randomized controlled trials, and have been administered billions of times with careful monitoring of safety signals by teams across the world. This is not even in the same ballpark as the small ivermectin studies analyzed here. You could still do a meta analysis, but the results are not murky - we already know they work amazingly well. Your comment reeks of conspiratorial motivations.
"careful monitoring of safety signals" Imma need some evidence here, because we have real examples of missed safety signals. Also, there is still disagreement in safety. There are several European countries not using mRNA on large cohorts due to safety concerns.
The studies were not powered to detect the safety signals that have emerged in real world tests - they were powered to detect relatively common (1% - 0.01%) side effects that occurred in the general population within the time frame of the trial.
The safety signals that have emerged in real world tests (VITT with adenoviral vaccines in young-to-middle age women, myocarditis with mRNA vaccines in young men) have a frequency more on the order of magnitude of 0.001% in the specific subpopulation. And they can easily be circumvented by just using a different vaccine technology in those subpopulations: mRNA for young-to-middle aged women, single shot mRNA + 1 dose J&J with young men (or 2 dose J&J if you prefer).
A trial powered to detect those kinds of effects would have had to enroll hundreds of thousands of people, and would have delayed roll out of the vaccine by months, costing thousands - if not tens of thousands - of lives.
How do the Myocarditis concerns apply to booster shots? I am a man in my 20s vaxxed with Pfizer, but I've been avoiding booster shots because from what I've seen it I think the risk of vaccine complications from a booster outweighs the risk of getting covid once already vaccinated with the original dosing. But in the case that I am forced to get a booster, should I be seeking out J&J?
I'm not even confident that myocarditis is caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. Myocarditis is a known side effect of COVID itself. It's basically impossible to control for myocarditis rates at this point because there's a disease going around that increases risk of myocarditis by about 20x. Myocarditis is rare, but you only need a few infections that lead to it to screw up your numbers precisely because the numbers are so small.
Really? They work for 6 months and they don't stop infection or transmission. To call that "amazingly well" seems disingenuous. Compared with traditional vaccines that stop infection and transmission and last for decades or longer, I would have to say the COVID vaccines work very poorly.
"careful monitoring of safety signals by teams across the world"
Sounds good, the experts are looking out for us! Unfortunately the experts have failed us so many times that I now want to review their work, and I've yet to see them actually publish their work in this area. Hmm... are they actually doing the work?
They worked better than initially expected and REDUCE infection, transmission, severe illness and death a great deal.
I have read of a vax under development that will be administered as a nasal spray and promises to provide the "sterilising immunity" that is more in line with your unreasonably high expectations.
Most vaccines do not work perfectly - they work by reducing community transmission to the point where the virus runs out of hosts and goes extinct.
Are you a shill? This is absolutely not an accurate recounting of events. The COVID vaccines were initially expected to confer immunity and to allow us to build herd immunity. It is now known that they do neither. We have literally broadened the idea of what a vaccine is because the COVID vaccine was unable to achieve what used to be expected of vaccines.
I've read they're effective for anywhere between 2 - 8 months. It's especially does lower hospitalizations and deaths inside three months. But they do wane - hence the boosters. The interesting thing is the vaccinated have become asymptomatic silent spreaders and the vaccines - or experimental gene therapy - don't halt transmission nor protect people. They were designed to lower symptoms. Basically it's a flu vaccine in drag. Whatever, it certainly doesn't justify mandates or passports on any grounds as it will not lead to herd. Have we ever really reached herd with influenza? We rely on natural immunity to get by. These are not diseases we can possibly control and 'defeat' with vaccines. I don't see how.
The vaccines were designed to give human immune systems a chance to prepare to fight a covid infection. They are only as good as the immune system that they are assisting. While effectiveness does wane disappointingly fast, that does not mean that the vaccines are not beneficial. What is apparently beneficial is a longer period between doses. This will make the 3rd dose that much more effective. Your argument that the Covid vaccines are not as effective as purported is counter to your overall point that they are not justified. Rather, It suggests that higher vaccination rates are needed to control the virus.
Ultimately it is always about the hospitalizations.
Not to mention situations like Marek's disease in chickens, where vaccination results in strains adapting to be resistant to the vaccine and the very specific immunization provided by it. In the case of Marek's this resulted in a disease so deadly and virulent ONLY vaccinated chickens have a chance. Alternatively, a resistant strain could be more dangerous to the vaccinated than those who have a more varied and complete immune adaptation from natural immunity alone, as opposed to a high alert but highly specialized immunity driven by a vaccine.
Ultimately the biggest problem is not the vaccine itself though, anyone should be able to get one if they want it. The problem is the bribery and ultimately coercion being enacted to try to force it on people.
Akoluthic - At one time, perhaps before you came of age on the internet, many arguments ended by one party resorting to acccusing the other of being Hitler. That phenomena became known as Godwin's Law. Fast forward to today, Hitler doesn't come up so often. Now, the adversary, especially if they hold views critical of the government, is a conspiracy theorist. As if conspiracy itself is a fantasy; Pharma cannot/does not have deep and wide influence on the government and media. Of course "conspiracies" exist and are pervasive in modern society. A person unwilling to contemplate the existence of conspiracies should ask them self a hard question: am I authoritarian; one who irrationally defers to authority?
Wrong. There are big RCT's that show efficacy and safety. A meta-analysis would be fine, but isn't necessary when you have well-done, large RCTs with sensible and meaningful endpoints.
Yes, I don't like that we're not allowed to question or debate vaccines. How can this help anyone? How can we improve the vaccines if we can't be open and honest about adverse reactions? I'm not comfortable with vaccines being used as a means to a medical end. I gotta say. It has an element of quackery to me vaccines. There. i said it. Reading up on Jenner and Pasteur and the vaccine roll outs for mumps, rubella, measles, diphtheria, pertussis opened my eyes. It's not conspiratorial or unreasonable this is a huge money maker from the beginning and they probably believed the harms were low enough to justify continuing profiting off it.
Why do you say that we are not allowed to question or debate vaccines Paul? There is a lot of that going on here and on forums elsewhere.
Do you acknowledge that laypersons are not equipped to evaluate the safety or efficacy of vaccines? You need to do massive population studies of people who have received the vaccine to tease out if there are a significant number of adverse reactions that can be associated with vaccine.
Vaccine are developed in an entirely different fashion today than they were in the days of Jenner and Pasteur. It is disingenuous to try to make a comparison.
Vaccines are not big money makers for anybody. This is why there are so few companies that make them. Covid vaccines are the exception because of the urgent need for them. One could make the argument that we should not rely on for profit institutions to develop and manufacture drugs, but that is the system we have chosen. It is a false argument to suggest that you should avoid getting a covid-19 vaccination because some pharma company will profit from it.
Agreed. Didn't RFK jr & Children's Health Defense win a landmark case asserting no vaccines could ever be mandated/forced due to the fact not one safety study could be produced for any of the ridiculous amount of "school/travel required" vaccines from time of inception to date? I trust my own biology, physics, chemistry & lab skills over any doctor, paper, government. We need to ho back to the days of using basic skills & analysis, with a foundation in natural scientific observation.
For the record, if this is the GiveWell study, I believe that they found a significant result for cloth masks in their infection-based endpoint while for their hospitalization-based endpoint only surgical masks showed a significant difference.
The effect size was low, but it's not like they were comparing 100% masked villages to 0% masked villages. Encouraging mask use in a village like their study did had a real effect on mask wearing but it was modest and dissipated over the period of the study. So it's hard to get much from the RCT except "some increase in surgical mask wearing caused some decrease in infection as measured by seropositivity". Hard to know what the effect size is.
Yeah, it sure seems like most of the evidence for normal (non-N95/KN95) masks being helpful is basically along the lines of "this seems like it probably helps some." For good masks, if you're getting a good seal (you can't smell smoke through the mask), then it sure seems like you ought to be getting good protection there, since 95%+ of virus-bearing droplets should not be making it into your nose/throat/lungs.
That Bangladesh study showed that a 30% increase in cloth masks led to a 5% decrease in infections, and a 30% increase in surgical masks led to a 10% decrease in infections. Both of these were statistically significant.
Restricting to seroprevalence-verified cases is a serious restriction that drastically cuts the power of the study, given the difficulty of getting these tests. It's not surprising that it gets some of the important results outside the significance level.
Worrying about confounds like distancing is more reasonable.
I still wouldn't think it's appropriate to summarize this as "essentially no effect".
In general there's always an effect (positive or negative) and you want a powerful enough study to detect the effect so that you can understand its magnitude, to know whether it matters or not (and whether it's positive or negative). Even if the individual data points are noisier, having a lot more of them can be helpful in confirming trends that are only suggestive with a small number of data points.
No significant impact of cloth masks in a vaccinated population. Surgical masks in an unvaccinated one probably worked better, because more to affect, better tools to affect it. Which is why I was fervently pro mask until widespread rollout of vaccines, and now I find most of it total theater.
I think it failed by the experts' own standards, I think there were better options than "nothing" and "everything", but I've taken it out since it wasn't as strong an example.
I remember a few years ago reading about how Southeast Asian mask use was basically superstition. It's bizarre to me to see that turned completely on its head.
Do we have a good explanation for why Asian countries generally seemed to do so much better with covid? Is it likely to be widespread mask use? Prior exposure to similar coronaviruses? Something else?
Good question. Apart from lower rates of obesity and a generally healthier diet and lifestyle, in Asian countries there tends to be a near universal compliance with social distancing, contact tracing and mask-wearing mandates.
John Campbell just mentioned in a video that a lot of Asians produce an enzyme which protects against covid. If you search his channel on youtube for a video called 'the japanese miracle' you'll find it.
I wrote on the prior OT that someone should be doing the RCTs on masks, at least for influenza. Even if expensive, they'll pay off with knowledge that billions of people can use in the short-term.
Put a bunch of people in a dorm. Everyone wears masks, but you can't easily tell how good the mask is -- some don't keep out anything, some are N95 or better, and lots in-between.
Deliberately infect several people with the flu (like we do for challenge testing) and then test everyone daily.
The very very first tests might just have 2 people in a hotel suite for a week (repeated a few dozen times).
You don't even have to deliberately infect people - presumably in any study like this you want some number of known positives and some number of known negatives going into the study, so you want to recruit a lot of people and testing them all. But if you recruit enough people, and the disease is spreading quickly, you'll surely find a reasonable number of positives without having to infect anyone. It's only the negatives being used to test the masks that run the risk of getting infected by the study.
The UK's plan involved minimal attempts to prevent or slow transmission, and 210,000 - 315,000 deaths in a fifteen week period. It rested on the assumption that the population of the UK would allow the government to do almost nothing while 210,000 - 315,000 people died over a short period. Whether or not it was a good plan is irrelevant. The assumption was obviously insane, and the plan was worthless.
The document setting out the plan is an interesting example of a well-written, coherent and convincing 70 page strategy document being worse than useless. It's not perfect, but you can tell that a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable people have put a lot of work into it, and you can see why the UK got such good marks for pandemic preparedness from international assessors. Ignore the "Influenza Pandemic Strategy" title, the plan specifically states that it can be applied to a SARS virus, and Covid falls within its assumptions as to possible transmissibility and case fatality rate.
It's worse than useless because it hides the reality of the situation it's planning for. The first sentences of the introduction should have been "This plan is based on 200,000 to 300,000 people dying from the infection in a three month period. We aren't going to try to stop that happening." But over seventy pages, and no doubt hundreds of other documents stemming from those seventy pages, the ludicrous assumption at its heart is swathed in layer after layer of reassuring competence, and utter nonsense was transformed into a gold standard public policy strategy.
Public support for lockdowns in March 2020 in the UK was 93%, with 76% of those 'strongly' supporting it (YouGov). Politicians don't tend to survive ignoring their voters in such situations.
It's not impossible that the House of Commons could have triggered a snap election anyway, with a loss of confidence in the Govt, or the governing party could have replaced the PM who serves at the pleasure of his/her party only. 'First among equals'.
If 93% of people supported taking ivermectin instead of vaccines, should the government just roll over and say "well, I guess the people have spoken"? Not try and all to change people's minds?
As we've seen, people get sick of lockdowns, so they can only be done in limited amounts. The UK officials knew this and said this beforehand, directly to the people: "you think this is fun now, but you'll hate it in 8-12 weeks."
But, just like ivermectin, there was media hostile to following the recommended scientific plan, telling people that the government's plan was evil and stupid and going to kill them.
I'm not sure I agree that lockdowns are as limited as you claim.
The population of the UK has by and large been pretty happy about government measures to protect them from the pandemic. They have supported essentially every lockdown, even in Jan-March 2021, almost a year on from the start of the pandemic restrictions. Yes there's absolutely a vocal minority who don't support them, but the majority consistently did as we know from all polling data.
The first lockdown was almost inarguably a good idea, and that's the one we're referring to, as it allowed breathing space to create a massive expansion of govt and medical capacity, as well as the space to do large-scale trials that revealed dexamethasone by June 2020, which dramatically improved the survival chances going forward. There would have been a far higher death rate without this discovery.
Much of the media hostility revolved around the fact that the likely death rate for an un-checked pandemic at that time, without proper medical treatments, was going to be more than half a million people.
Lockdowns are a terrible idea with catastrophic consequences. They were never rooted in facts or science. And even the way the lockdowns were applied were unjust and illogical. 'Essential v. non-essential' is dumb. The local small grocery guy had to close but Wal-Mart could stay open? Please. Foolish and the fact it's still being considered is madness. All part of the moral panic I guess. America is definitely wise to not be discussing this.
> If 93% of people supported taking ivermectin instead of vaccines, should the government just roll over and say "well, I guess the people have spoken"?
Don't try to stop people from taking ivermectin if it's not dangerous. Do encourage them to take vaccines because they're safe and effective.
But if the government says "it's safe and effective" and 93% don't believe it, a coup is probably imminent.
The UK govt. had successfully sold financial austerity with majority support for years prior to this. There's at least one reason for them to believe they could indeed convince the UK populace to accept the argument "210,00 - 315,000 people will die in the short term, so that >>315,000 lives can be saved from the long-term negative effects of lockdowns".
Videos are Inherently Annoying because, for example, they are not searchable and they almost never contain hyperlinks (because for some reason the person who produces the video thinks it's OK to offload that work onto thousands of non-expert viewers rather than doing it once while they have all the context).
Many youtube videos now do provide hyperlinks to both positions in the video as well as external content. I find that quickly checking the video description for these is a good indicator of quality.
I don't. I always seek the least possible noise in my communications channels, and video presents a giant amount of irrelevant sensory information relative to the critical info. For the record, I also hate scientific papers that start with an introduction in which they summarize the structure of the paper, and I despise talks that begin with 5 minutes of reminiscence and dad jokes.
"But I don’t really know how to do that, and any speculation would be too political even for a section titled “The Political Takeaway”. I would instantly kick in an extra month's subscription fee to read this.
fully agree. I think we have kind of a trust crisis. What you name are ingredients to build trust. But many people underestimate what a sensible plant trust is, how easily it is destroyed and how hard it is to build up. Especially all kind of elites should learn this if they want to stay were they are without fear.
As one of those people (presumably plural) that think there's too much politics on ACX as it is, I'll have to respectfully disagree.
In general, I'm worried about the comment section's potential degree of control over the topics and perspectives that get covered by Scott. It's partly inevitable, I guess, but I think at least we should make an effort to minimize this effect. I would hate to see ACX become more echo chamber-y. (this is also why Substack displaying the number of likes and comments under a post is a bad thing.)
So, 85-80% confidence of less than 30% mortality reduction does in fact represent a major crime against humanity in your estimation, I would think? Expected loss of lives is well into the hundreds of thousands.
I have a vague plan for another post which is something like "should we just give everyone any drug that might possibly work, because Pascal's Wager?", but I'm not entirely sure of the answer!
Ivermectin is pretty low side effect. I think HCQ might have been worse and could have done some real damage. But if it took ten drugs that didn't work to make sure people got fluvoxamine (which did work), maybe it would have been worth it even if HCQ could be bad? I'm genuinely not sure here.
Economic cost + value-of-information means it's far better to do large scale RCTs, rather than tell everyone to take things and never be able to figure out what is working.
I also think that the "trust in science" thing is valuable, and as I told Kelsey - https://twitter.com/davidmanheim/status/1458153900553510915 - in the wake of HCQ + Ivermectin, I've updated towards experts shouldn't tell people to take a drug based on moderately clear preliminary information, because it turns out that they won't listen later if you find out it doesn't work. In general, updating once you publicly commit to something being worthwhile is really, really hard. And then they refuse the vaccine.
2. You can't as easily do RCTs once a drug is being used widely, because you get selection bias issues for who is willing to participate.
3. You can allow widespread access + randomization fairly easily, if it's planned for. And in a medical system less messed up than the US, it's straightforward to do this, which is exactly how the UK's RECOVERY trial was set up in April 2020.
And no, this wouldn't have ruled out trying lockdowns, especially because 1) we had incredibly clear evidence of effectiveness, and 2) it's not a medical intervention, so the way RCTs are done is very different.
And honestly, we probably would have gotten masks used more quickly in the US if we had done trials immeidately, compared what actually happened - which was listening to the surgeon general and CDC which delayed until the evidence was incontrovertible anyways - and for some insane reason, still won't require HEPA filters, etc. (Compare this to the Japanese government experts, who got both of these right on day 1 based on actually looking at the initial outbreaks.)
Community masking (assuming non-N95) against respiratory virus is incontrovertibly demonstrated to be effective? Am I understanding your comment correctly?
The problem is that you aren't actually helping people. We only produce about as much of these drugs as we actually need to treat the actual medical conditions that those drugs are needed to treat.
Thus, if a ton of people suddenly start buying a lot of these drugs, you end up with massive shortages and people dying who actually need the drugs.
In real life, almost none of these drugs are actually helpful, and almost all drugs have side effects, and the idea that ivermectin was even going to be helpful in humans was dubious just looking at the in vitro studies because the most likely path of function was impairing cell function, which is probably going to kill people.
Speaking as someone who has worked in manufacturing - the religious belief in RAPID supply and demand is completely wrong. Generally speaking, factories operate near or at capacity, and ramping up is a slow, laggy process. That's why we STILL have chip shortages, even though we produce enormous, enormous amounts of them.
It's not possible to ramp up without building another factory oftentimes.
Ivermectin has a large supply because we use a lot of it on livestock. That's not true of a lot of other drugs.
I've read something from a person with scabies who needed ivermectin, and it became barely available because of a sudden increase of demand-- they were sharing their ivermectin with a friend who was having trouble getting it.
It takes time for manufacturers to ramp up production, and they'd be gambling on what people will want.
Have you looked at the in vitro studies? Because the ones I've looked at showed that they reduced virus numbers... Scott completely ignores all the evidence on mechanisms of action
I have. It would take more than 35x the standard dose of ivermectin to achieve 50% inhibition according to the in vitro studies.
More than 10x the standard dose is toxic in humans.
The probable mechanism of action is disruption of cellular processes, which is why it is unsurprising that ivermectin is not useful for treating COVID in humans.
Bleach kills COVID in vitro, too. The problem is, it will kill YOU, too.
Oh. So if you give someone a medicine, and they get better, that means that it works? And if you give it and they get worse, that means that it doesn't work?
"experts shouldn't tell people to take a drug based on moderately clear preliminary information, because it turns out that they won't listen later if you find out it doesn't work."
I think this is a deadly attitude and a big part of why there's so much mistrust. You have to respect the minds of others.
That would be easier if so many of them weren't so keen to believe obvious bollox and clinicians still have a duty of care to those same people who will cheerfully drink fish tank cleaner.
"experts shouldn't tell people to take a drug based on moderately clear preliminary information, because it turns out that they won't listen later if you find out it doesn't work. "
Does not equal "lying to people"
A lot of experts are very very wary of saying untrue things. "Here! Take these 10 pills, they'll help!" may be an untrue thing when you have no idea if any of those 10 actually work. And if you turn around 6 months later and say they don't work then people will declare you a liar.
unfortunately there are a lot of deeply deeply dishonest people, the sort of people who there's no point even trying to get through to who will intentionally distort that and still call you a liar because they read a crappy news article or tweet summarising the refusal to endorse those 10 drugs as a claim in the opposite direction.
> same people who will cheerfully drink fish tank cleaner.
"Then some human scientists suggest vaccinating against the plague. The aliens say this is idiotic, vaccines originally come from cowpox, even the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccus meaning “cow”, are you saying you want cow medicine instead of actual brain implants which alien Science has proven will work? They make lots of cartoons displaying humans who want vaccines as having cow heads, or rolling around in cow poop. Meanwhile, the first few dozen studies show vaccines work great. Many top human leaders, including war heroes from the struggle against the aliens, get vaccines and are seen going out in public, looking healthy and happy."
For people who aren't in the RCTs, it seems better to give them an experimental drug cocktail of all the drugs which have promising initial results & are readily available & don't have significant side effects. (Where "give" means that this is the default recommendation from doctors or in medical kits.)
That seems better in terms of straightforward direct results (health & cost), ignoring what it does to the information environment.
And for navigating the information environment, there's an advantage to playing it straight (giving people the drugs that are +EV) and finding ways to have clear messaging about it (to avoid informational side effects). If you're withholding a drug that might work, that opens the door to stories about the authorities suppressing a miracle cure. If you're including the drug in the experimental drug cocktail, then you just need to find a find a way to convey "experimental drug cocktail". Here are some things that might help, studies are underway to figure out which of them really help, we can at least be pretty sure that they don't do much harm. We've improved the covid-fighting cocktail, HCQ is out and fluvoxamine is in.
There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason we can't allow RCTs like this to be near-universal, and let anyone who wants to join be randomized, ideally with adaptive A/B assignments, so that later participants benefit from what we know - if a setup for doing this is put in place. Of course, clinical trials are broken, as is the US healthcare system, so this probably isn't happening in the US, at least this decade.
But for "navigating the information environment," there's a huge difference between telling people we have unclear preliminary indications and recommending or prescribing medicines. (But again, US healthcare is broken, the FDA is broken, etc. as Scott has discussed in the past, so this gets screwed up.) And as I said below, telling people "this probably works" has some massive downsides in practice, as we see from the fact that there are still people taking HCQ instead of getting vaccinated.
First off, almost all "safe" drugs are only safe in isolation. We don't generally test most drugs for drug combinations unless we expect them to be used in conjunction with each other. Many drugs are not safe to take with other drugs, but we don't know that because we don't typically mix them.
Secondly, combined drugs don't necessarily have linear effects with each other; sometimes they will counteract each other, sometimes they will multiply each others' effects. So you can't even be sure that the drugs will work at all.
Thirdly, taking more drugs greatly increases the probability of organ failure (mostly kidney and liver failure).
Fourth, almost all of these drugs are ineffective, meaning you are wasting vast amounts of resources when there are better things to do.
Fifth, most of these drugs are only produced in limited quantities and cannot be rapidly scaled up. So you will create shortages for things that they are actually important for.
Sixth, almost all drugs have side effects. The more drugs are taking, the more likely you are to experience side effects, and this actually is even worse with mixing drugs.
Seventh, most of the population is completely incapable of making educated decisions about their health like this, because they can't do the proper risk/benefit analysis.
While it might be "better" to do large scale rct, in practice it's either not being done at all or not being done fast enough, so that option doesn't exist
or they could communicate better. What if instead of recommending it you just label it as our recommended guess work at the time. Couldn’t they just improve by giving their opinion in language that people understand
The thing is, early on in any epidemic, the doctors are going to be throwing absolutely anything they think might work at the thing, trying to save their patients. ISTR that many hospitals were giving zinc, HQC, azithromycin, vitamin D, etc. Which makes sense, because they weren't trying to run studies, they were trying to figure out some way to keep a few of their patients from dying on them.
Once that's happening, people who want it are going to be able to see the discussion among experts. I've been trying to listen to the Covid Clinical Update on TWIV as often as possible, for example--that's available to anyone but it's mostly a top tier ID doctor who's been treating covid patients for the last 18 months talking about what treatments seem to work, how they're used, what the promising stuff coming down the pike is, what the research looks like, etc.
And that leaves the possibility that people are going to misunderstand it, or misinterpret it, or whatever. The only way to prevent that is to keep anyone but certified experts from being allowed to see any of that information, which fails the "let the medical student debunk the fraudulent study" test, as well as the "let the Turkish sociologist make much better recommendations than the national health authorities" test.
According to tests of adult reading ability, only about 1 in 6 adults is fully literate - that is to say, capable of understanding statistical analysis and scientific papers. They might not know specific terminology but they are capable of reading and successfully understanding top-level stuff.
They also are the only people capable of actually usefully comparing and contrasting points from multiple articles, like, say, two opinion columns or whatever, and looking at evidence, etc.
The problem is that those people make up 50%+ of the high-end professional community. So the idea of "Well, we can try something, and if it doesn't work, we can try something else" works fine for them.
It is absolutely horrible advice for almost the entire rest of the population because they aren't capable of really understanding this unless you explain it to them carefully, and they will have to lower their level of trust in "experts" because, as it turns out, explaining this stuff to them will make them CORRECTLY stop trusting the media and experts and whatnot nearly as much as they did.
Like, you can't explain the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to someone and have them trust the press anymore. They *shouldn't* trust the press. And yet, if you completely don't trust the press, you'll tune out important information.
Right - they won't listen later. And halo effect means that once people are convinced that the positives slightly outweigh the negatives, their brains immediately jump to "there is no downside, and this is the best thing ever."
I honestly believe that if people were given the correct information, as known at the time, they would have been open to changing their minds (in general, obviously not all people are going to act responsibly).
If doctors told people that there was some positive early but speculative results from taking a common, cheap, and harmless drug, lots of people would want to take that drug. But if there were no concerted effort to shut down discussion of that drug, further results would have shown 1) side effects or other issues, 2) lack of efficacy, or 3) hey this thing really works! Option 1 gets communicated to patients by their doctor, and the doctor steers patients away, especially if 2 is proven or seems likely. Option 2 the doctors simply stop offering it as an option. Option 3 sounds like a best case scenario, not an apocalyptic harm.
If it really works, then I think people should be able to go ahead and skip the vaccine or whatever else you're worried about. If it doesn't work, but conversations are allowed to happen about it like normal, then the incentive to take it instead of the vaccine goes away.
Doesn't this apply to the vaccine as well, particularly how it doesn't stop spread? If 80% of people who have taken the vaccine see that as a reason to now return to life as normal and go to gyms, bars, etc as they did before, isn't their brain "there is no downside, this is the best thing ever" and they become spreaders (aka a mutating breeding ground for the virus until it becomes something like Delta)
I know more people who are unvaccinated who take less risk than vaccinated people. I'd love to see a study of who really spread the virus more and are a responsible party for the mutants.
But vaccines ACTUALLY work, we are 100% sure on this one.
Ivermectin MIGHT decrease severity for SOME patients (and cure worms.)
I've taken Ivermectin before and it's not the worst, but I've seen some people shit themselves inside out after taking it, so ??? on side effects also.
We don't have the 100% confidence though that vaccines are enough to stop the spread of the virus. My belief is that from the scientific evidence, since the vaccines don't stop spread, even if 100% of the world population by some scant luck had taken the vaccine, it can still spread and mutate and would eventually develop into a more infectious strain such as how we have Delta today.
Vaccines that don't prevent vaccines, i.e. leaky vaccines are that by their inherent nature, not able to completely eliminate a virus. Eventually, since the virus still exists in a COVID-19 vaccinated environment, it would have mutated and spread into a more infectious strain.
The only difference is today we blame the unvaccinated as speeding up that spread and responsible for the Delta variant.
It's worse than that. Even if 100% of the world population had taken the vaccine, and 100% of humans were vaccine free, due to animal reservoirs of the virus it would escape into the wild again. COVID is here to stay.
Yes, There is a lot of talk about how the Virus will very likely become endemic. All the more reason to get vaccinated if you have access. This pandemic is new to humanity, there are other vaccines being developed that may turn out to work better than the ones we have now. We may be able to eradicate it in 10 years instead of the 80 that it has taken for Polio.
Vaccines do prevent infections. But they don't prevent *all* infections.
The problem with COVID-19 is that it is ridiculously infectious. For most viruses, reducing the R0 by a factor of 6 will put it well below 1. COVID-19 has an R0 of something like 8-12, so even a vaccine that cuts infection by 6x will only reduce it to 1.2-2, which is still not low enough.
The reality is that you have to have full measures going on - masks, vaccines, no indoor dining, social distancing, no in-person school, work from home where possible, etc.
Just because vaccines work doesn't mean the 'vaccine' works! The logical definition of working would be, the risk of the virus is greater than the risk of the vaccine, and that depends on many things. The most important under an EUA is tracking and analyzing adverse events. And the most important for convincing skeptics is open discussion about those events. The lack of candor about risks and benefits, and the outright suppression of reports of adverse events has exposed, yet again, the evil of authoritarianism.
The TOGETHER platform trial is really interesting. A few comments:
* First I don't think that it is correct that they used non-contemporaneous controls for the ivermectin TOGETHER study. This is a well-known problem in adaptive trials where new arms can enter and leave the platform. The controls that they will have used are only those who could have been randomised to ivermectin. See for example their write up of fluvoxamine (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext)
* Regarding fluvoxamine: interesting that your assessment is that it "works". From a Bayesian perspective, a priori it's highly unlikely to do anything (some random doc decided to test because why not; no known mechanism of action); and there is a real problem of post-randomisation bias. See this article for more detail https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-closer-look-at-the-new-fluvoxamine-trial-data-69369
I guess, but from my perspective if a bunch of doctors are excited about a drug I want good studies done immediately. A-priori it seems unlikely that we got really good at saving people at the point of practically choking on their own fluids with existing meds (steroids, etc), but apparently there was nothing whatsoever that could be done preventitively to help. Not only that, but we were absolutely certain of this beyond any shadow of any conceivable doubt. We were certain that the physiological profile of covid-19 was PERFECTLY disjoint from the sum total of existing medical practice.
It's simply unforgivable that our elites ignored the attack on therapeutics.
The thrust of your claim that "this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time" just doesn't hold water. It's been two years and you're still not sure if it might be moderately helpful (nvm Vit D. and all the others). In no universe can we call this a functioning medical science establishment.
The fact of the matter is a bunch of elites decided that their reputation was far more important to them than the off chance of saving many lives. Can't risk being associated with those crazies pushing their "remedies".
"The thrust of your claim that "this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time" just doesn't hold water. It's been two years and you're still not sure if it might be moderately helpful (nvm Vit D. and all the others). In no universe can we call this a functioning medical science establishment."
The emerging claim I'm seeing now is that vitamins, generic medicine (IVM, HCQ etc) and anything homeopathic is pseudoscience and dangerous misinformation, and must be shut down.
Sorry I wasn't clear and wasn't reasonable in my timeframe to respond to you.
My argument was that we use the label pseudoscience and misinformation synonymously, and then set the bar for what qualifies as science as very high and to standards where basically only elite stakeholders can do the "sciencing".
We disregard the science done by small people, small studies, we look for science done by highly prestigious research bodies and published in highly prestigious journals. We use a lot of Ad Hominem to disqualify science over the arguments behind the science.
If someone like Scott Alexander had simply shown up on News media to share this analysis to talk about ivermectin versus all the current "elitist" style reporting of "All these quacks are taking horse dewormer and look at how one guy who thinks he's smarter than the CDC tried to treat COVID by himself"
The reality is that pretty much no pre-existing drug would be expected to work. Most things don't work against viruses in concentrations that won't kill the host, which is why viruses are a PITA to deal with.
The people who try and push anti-parasitic drugs as cure-alls can be safely dismissed out of hand because they try and push their favorite drug at everything. We don't have infinite bandwidth, it is best to focus on things that we have a good reason to believe might actually work.
Right, we have the bandwidth to shut the economy down and stop school but we can't run a few trials. Give me a break.
We have existing drugs that work very well against covid--steroids.
You better be really, really, really freaking sure that you're right. We'll be looking very carefully at patient outcome variability in the medical records over the next couple years, very carefully indeed.
I don't know the proper statistical terminology for this, but I feel like there's an issue where you have to ask "why are we asking this question in the first?" e.g why did invermectin become something that people were talking about and was it for a good reason. Because of you were to give people a bunch of random substances you might by chance get good results for some of them. Similar to with homeopathy trials, my prior against them working is sufficiently high that I would be unwilling to take an otherwise good study as evidence. If there's no particular reason to think something will work, then the burden of evidence should be high
I don't think this has a clear name, though it's related to curse of dimensionality, but I'll quote Yudkowsky discussing exactly the issue you're noting:
"On problems with large answer spaces, the greatest difficulty is not verifying the correct answer but simply locating it in answer space to begin with. If someone starts out by asking [is X true], they’re jumping to a 100-bit proposition, without a corresponding 98 bits of evidence to locate it in the answer space as a possibility worthy of explicit consideration. It would only take a handful more evidence after the first 98 bits to promote that possibility to near-certainty, which tells you something about where nearly all the work gets done."
"Privileging the hypothesis." IIRC the example given was the police saying "We have no idea who the murderer is, so have we considered the possibility that Mortimer Snodgrass did it?" Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but what evidence led you to investigate that man to begin with?
Isn't there usually some low-confidence hypothesis though?
For the murder, let's look at all the "usual suspects" - criminals that commit crimes at a higher rate than the population as a whole.
For ivermectin, it might be something like, "this is medicine known to work with other diseases." The casual nature of chemistry and biology doesn't enter into the reasoning. And on that level, given the "worm impact," it appears even to have been right for those cases!
Of course, in the latter case, you need to ask why this medicine and not others. But I think the response is something like, "docters all over the world have been trying everything they can think of, and this one stuck." Also it wasn't the only one, there are others that have some (maybe low) evidence that are now being followed up.
The problem for me, isn't that, it is going from low confidence priors, to high confidence. I don't understand that, even in the faces of Scott's Australia conquering aliens. Wouldn't you just distrust everything? Why does low-confidence evidence from alternatives sources get trusted?
Ivermectin was shown to have anti viral properties in vitro. Theory states it enables zinc to enter the cell and stop replication of viruses and it prevents inflamation. So a doctor tried it and had good results. Soon other doctors were using it and found it to be effective keeping people out of the hospital. Good RTCs are very expensive and there is zero profit in doing one for a generic drug, but a very big incentive to do a fake study to prove the generic doesn't work, If the author didn't point this out in his evaluation, it undermines his credability to the point his opinion is useless. We don't need more blind people to follow.
My wife has some insight into medicine, and her judgment on Ivermectin was something like: "The prior probability of this type of thing being a cure for this type of disease is extremely low. There is some evidence in favor of Ivermectin, but it is too weak to overcome the priors." I guess she passed this rationality test with flying colors.
But the quality of one's priors depends on their knowledge. As an extreme example, if you have no idea what "ivermectin" or "covid" mean, you could go with: "well, you asked me a yes/no question, so the prior probability of yes is 50%".
A better model would be that ivermectin is a "cure" and covid is a "virus", and it is generally known that you can use a "cure" against a "virus", although not every "cure" against every "virus", but still the chances of ivermectin are way better than... the chances of a random object you would pick up in a shop...
A yet better model is that killing a virus is not the hard part (an atomic bomb surely destroys covid, too), the problem is to find a cure that succeeds to kill the virus without hurting the human too much, which is quite difficult.
And then, people like my wife can have even better model of how ivermectin works, how covid works, so their priors can be even more precise.
Problem is, better priors are often built from more background knowledge, which makes them more difficult to communicate to other people. For that reason, I did not try to argue with my wife, I just asked how certain she feels about what she said, and I trusted her judgment.
This again required me to have priors about the quality of her judgment, which are quite high. And that again is because I have a lot of data about her. So I wouldn't expect her reasoning to be equally convincing to other people. Therefore, I didn't try to convince other people by saying "because my wife said so, and I trust her"; that obviously wouldn't work.
There are people who believe that anti-parasitic drugs are cure-alls and try them against everything. Tonic water is a great example of this - the active ingredient is actually effective against Malaria, but people promote it as a health drink against everything, which it isn't.
That's why these anti-parasitic drugs got pushed in the first place.
It's really bad.
Also just throwing a lot of random drugs at the wall and seeing what sticks is often a bad strategy.
"no reason" you know of, but when there's a coordinated effort to suppress information, that is to be expected. As Mark Twain 'said', it's far easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled. You are right about finding things that work. It's very difficult and requires the free expression of ideas, and referees without a conflict of interest. Big Pharma, Big Government and Big Tech's response to the pandemic has been exactly the opposite, authoritarian, draconian, closed minded and illogical.
The more drugs you throw at the wall, the more likely some will appear to work by chance.
It's the M&M problem, writ large.
It's better to focus your efforts on things that you have good reason to believe will work.
Worse, some of these probably killed people. Dexamethasone probably harmed non-respiratory COVID patients who took it. And several killed people for no benefit at all.
No, both ivermectin and HCQ got suggested as promising candidates for trials because people observed significant correlations between parts of the world where large portions of the population take those drugs routinely, and low COVID cases and severity. There was no "throwing a lot of random drugs at the wall" involved. It is not surprising that you don't know why ivermectin was suggested as a candidate, given that it is virtually impossible to find anything other than "evil trump nazi terrorist klansman are filling emergency rooms after poisoning themselves with horse medicine!" using google. Isn't it weird how hard it is to find any English copy or reference of Haruo Ozaki's press briefing about this?
These areas of the world had worse *COVID TESTING*. They didn't have lower mortality rates. In fact, their excess mortality rates were *higher* - probably by 2-4x.
You could argue that people were incorrect in their interpretation of the data, leading them to test HCQ and IVM for no reason. But that is not the same as "its all lies". The reason people tested in the first place absolutely is the epidemiological evidence. This is not something any of those people are hiding from you, it is only something google et al are hiding from you.
My contention, and those of *all* of my friends who think deeply on this one, is basically "IVM is so incredibly safe why wouldn't I roll the dice on it being 10% effective? What's the drawback? There's no drawback. Why do we think there's a drawback?"
And I haven't yet heard a counter to this argument. If you can cook up a counter to this argument I'd love to read it.
HWFO Slack hangs on your word on topics like these, so I would be very interested to see if you could convince them otherwise.
Are you and your friends also vaccinated? If so, I have no problem with that.
The danger of the pro-ivermectin crowd isn't that they're putting themselves in danger (aside from perhaps the people who take massive doses of horse medicine and get sick), or that they're draining the world's supply of deworming pills, the danger is that people think it's a miracle cure so they don't need to get vaccinated.
Some are, some aren't. I'm double Pfizer personally but I'm not going to get a booster. Some of my peers don't consider Covid-19 to be a big deal for their age bracket and health, which is a legitimate perspective especially for those under 30 for whom Covid is less deadly than ordinary influenza. Covid-19 is extremely recoverable for a very large number of people, especially younger with no comorbidities.
Young people not considering Covid a big deal is an illegitimate and deeply selfish perspective, since they can still be carriers, even if their personal outcomes are likely to be good.
Those who are vaccinated can still catch covid and infect others too even if their personal outcomes are likely to be good, so what's your argument here?
What those who exhibit blind trust in what the heads of institutions say need to consider is: What if they're corrupted. What if their ability to think rationally is compromised, like Biden, and the vaccine mandates turn out worse than his surrender to the Taliban.
If someone is not vaccinated because they think the virus is no risk to them personally, well, first of all, as Matthew points out, that's a very selfish view that ignores public health. And second of all, that applies even *more* to ivermectin, since it's less likely to benefit you than the vaccine.
Vaccine-only makes sense, ivermectin and vaccine is probably pointless but probably no worse, but ivermectin and no vaccine is deliberately ignoring the most effective tool in the toolbox.
There risk reduction for transmitting COVID by getting vaccinated is quite small. What absolute risk reduction needs to occur for you to deem some behaviour morally required? There are lots of things we could demand people do that would slightly lower transmission. We do not demand people do them, why is the vaccine so special?
Your analysis of ivermectin vs vaccine is only looking at the positives, and ignoring the negatives. Ivermectin has a long history of safety. The known risk of harm is incredibly low, and the odds of an unknown risk are also incredibly low. MRNA vaccines have a long history of being unsafe, and of scientists declaring that they will never be able to be approved because of inherent safety problems. The known risk of harm from the vaccines is much higher than ivermectin, and the potential for unknown harm is even higher still. When you consider both the benefits and the harms, it becomes much more understandable that someone would choose not to be vaccinated, and then choose to take ivermectin if they get COVID (and know they got it).
And now I'm stuck on how to understand people who don't think COVID is a big deal, and therefore doesn't get vaccinated, but does take ivermectin to protect against COVID.
You are not responding to what was said. They said the risk for people under 30. SARS-COV-2 is more fatal than influenza in the entire population as a whole. It is substantially LESS fatal than the flu in young people with no co-morbidities. The age cut-off where COVID becomes more deadly than influenze also substantially increases if you restrict yourself to only those who have adequate serum vitamin D levels. This matters, because you can choose to make yourself part of the population that has adequate serum vitamin D levels.
Exactly. In this comparison, person 1 is far more likely to infect others. (All that is sufficient to generate this is regular testing - assuming person 2 would isolate if they test positive). Same applies if someone isn't getting tested but has recovered from a previous infection - they're also less likely to get infected than a vaccinated person.
Statistically, for all of the US, Currently, Six times as many unvaccianted people are getting sick and 12 times as many are dying. So - in the immortal words of Dirty Harry - Do you feel lucky?
In the US 59% of the entire population is fully vaccinated, 69% (nice) 12+ or 86% 65+
Cases are climbing again and although deaths are falling, the trend follows the cases and will start rising again in about a week.
You might be able to avoid a covid infection if you keep your head down. Again, Do you feel lucky?
Don't forget these numbers are highly susceptible to selection bias and a climate that was designed to make the vaccinated look better in every way. And this is in fact what happened when the CDC said not to confirm covid with tests for patients who have been vaccinated while holding that requirement in place for unvaccinated. This created a highly artificial environment which reports "look at all the unvaccinated testing positive for COVID!" whereas the truth is they stopped testing vaccinated people.
I feel very lucky, because most statistics are made up and the reality is this vaccine only provides an ARR of 1% to anyone under age 65. You can look up Peter McCullough's analyses on this topic.
Why is the danger of people taking massive doses of "horse medicine" (it is a human medicine, like many human medicines, it is also used in many other animals) constantly presented, despite no evidence that anyone has ever actually done this? Why aren't you attaching a completely unnecessary caveat like that to other things, like say the vaccines? Where is the (aside from perhaps people getting dozens of doses of vaccines) when you mention vaccines? People do not think ivermectin is the reason they don't need to get vaccinated, they think the incredibly low risk posed by COVID is the reason they don't need to get vaccinated. A healthy 25 year old has absolutely no reason to get vaccinated other than "the TV told me to".
Seems like a case of privileging the hypothesis. Homeopathy has no harms so i might as well take it. Painting myself blue has no harms and might work so might as well. You can make the same argument for an infinite number of things equally well.
Homeopathy also has no benefits, where ivermectin clearly does.
Painting yourself blue could actually have some harms. Maybe it reduces your visibility when crossing the street for example. At the very least, people wouldn't take you seriously and will have trouble getting a job.
If painting myself blue had a 90% chance of doing nothing against Covid-19 (and therefore a 10% chance of reducing my Covid-19 infection) I would see no harm in painting myself blue.
I will grant that these sorts of arguments are often used badly, such as "IF IT SAVES ONE CHILD'S LIFE ITS WORTH IT" etc. The appropriate way to respond to these sorts of bad faith applications of the argument are to dig out the trolley problem math. But in the case of IVM, it's so incredibly cheap and there's basically nobody dead on the other side of the trolley tracks no matter what, I can't see how the anti-IVM crowd can fully form the argument, other than crafting a "false hope" narrative. And I hate those because they must start with the presumption that humans are stupid cattle and their behavior must be manipulated for their own good. Banning IVM as behavioral manipulation will backfire, arguably already has backfired, due to Streisand Effect.
The problem is that the argument relies on "believing the science" that the drug is safe and has a possibility of working, but then not "believing the science" when it shows the drug actually doesn't work that well.
If you don't believe that scientific studies give useful evidence, the same argument applies to using HCQ, healing crystals and huffing gasoline to treat COVID.
That said, while I am no fan of Marinos (who I blocked on Twitter after one of his conspiracy-theory-laden rants), he's completely correct that if Ivermectin functions as a safe placebo that might do something more, we should let people take it.
Seems very specious. Bullet one also applies to vaccines now that they're only 40% (?) effective vs Delta. Money diverted towards eating at McDonalds kills more people than non-vaccination does. 80% of Covid wards are obese.
I encourage everyone over age 40 to get the vax. I got it. It's better than nothing. I think conflating IVM with not being vaccinated is a failure to account for counterfactuals. Folks who don't want the vax are not going to get the vax whether IVM exists or not.
Also, opposition to IVM because less people will get vaxxed should, by rights, extend to all other treatments of Covid-19, even ones that are proven to work much better in the future. I've already seen that sort of sentiment on social media with regard to the new Pfivermectin stuff.
Vaccines appear to be ~90% effective against Delta, when considering serious outcomes such as death. And there's evidence that additional boosters may increase this.
That's relevant to my decision to get vaccinated in order not to die. But the figure for effectiveness against infection (and transmission) is what is relevant for someone's decision to get vaccinated in order not to infect other people, which is what is relevant to the argument for vaccine mandates. We don't know what that effectiveness is but it is much lower than against death, may be low enough to be outweighed by people taking fewer precautions after they are vaccinated.
* If there is a limited quantity of ivermectin because of a sudden surge in interest, and certain people definitely need it to stay alive, then you taking a dose denies it to someone who needs it to live.
I think this is a pretty reasonable perspective. I think it would result in you also taking HCQ, doxycycline, Vitamin D, and a few other things, but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker.
In my deep dive, the numbers on HCQ are largely conflated with the rest of the HCQ protocols which included Zinc and Vitamin D. I think you touched on that in earlier writings. I've been popping Zinc and D since the early HCQ days, writing most of the HCQ effect off to simply having better vitamins. I haven't bothered with IVM but whenever I do finally catch Covid (I think everyone is going to catch it sooner or later given the reinfection happening among the vaxxed) I plan on taking IVM unless there's better stuff out there by that point.
$700 a pop "Pfivermectin" might work. I'm on record saying I think the thing that got Joe Rogan through, outside of his probably very robust immune system in general, was probably monoclonal antibodies. If anything is a true scandal, it should be the general suppression of monoclonal antibodies as a treatment.
One thing you'll notice in the responses to my post (scan up) is a lot of folks saying the bad thing about IVM is that it disincentivizes vaccination. That's a super common theme among the IVM Culture War. The problem is that such a position should also suppress the distribution of other treatments that do work better than IVM. The pro vax crowd is so hung up on vaxxes that they'd suppress a perfectly safe and perfect Covid-19 treatment because it would suppress vax rates. This is more of a culture war issue than a medical issue, tied up with your "I can tolerate anyone except the outgroup," and similar writings on my wall.
Not the OP, but my hit is it hasn't been talked about much at all, and that if you approach the average person they probably wouldn't have heard of it or believe in much towards its efficacy. I've even observed the similar skepticism when I talk about it with people that is received when anti-tax or "alternative treatments exist" type topics are brought up.
If you mean what's the drawback on taking it personally, it would be the universal drawback that absence of evidence isn't the same as evidence of absence. People have studied ivermectin in the context of curing river blindness, a very nasty disease, so below a certain level they're not even looking for side effects. It's like (at a much lower level) if you've got a drug that can postpone death from Stage IV lung cancer by 6 months, you're not even going to bother asking whether people throw up more or less on it, or it gives them heart murmurs, or even causes leukemia 20 years later.
Does it happen that this ignorance is tragic? Maybe. Sometimes. In the 19th century, I believe physicians recommended smoking tobacco for various mild maladies on similar grounds: might help, couldn't hurt, seems totally safe, because nobody had died suddenly and abruptly from smoking. Now, it turns out smoking gives you lung cancer after a few decades, which is pretty horrible, and totally not worth whatever benefit it might have to losing weight or reducing anxiety -- but nobody knew about that, because nobody looked for it.
That's the problem. When you interfere randomly in your biochemical machinery, it's always the unknown unknowns that will nail you. So that's the important and unfortunately essentially impossible to quantify risk you need to weigh against the odds of a benefit. Doesn't mean you don't decide to go for it, but it does mean it's not the case that there is ever zero drawback.
There's an ugly flipside to this thinking as well. Tobacco (nicotine specifically) is one of the only confirmed drugs that ameliorates Parkinson's Disease, but the researchers who have identified this (the evidence is solid) aren't even allowed to give presentations on their findings at conferences because of the stigma against smoking.
And I think the "yes but unknown long term effects" thing is also pretty prominent among the IVM crowd who wants to avoid vaccination. One of the most important reasons to keep Covid vaccination from being mandatory is so there's a control group to compare long term outcomes against. It seems likely to me based on my reading that Covid-19 results in long term damage to the body because of these spike proteins. I'm not convinced that a smaller version (yet in some cases significant) of that damage is invoked by vaccination. I still got vaxxed, but I'm very uneasy about having a six month spike protein booster for this reason.
That seems obviously related to either Covid-19 or the Covid-19 vaccinations. Or both. I don't think an analysis like they did could differentiate between the two without a lot more research, but I'm alarmed that this research isn't even being done.
Well but come on. There's a gigantic difference between being vaccinated and being infected, because the vaccine doesn't replicate. In the time gap between the initial onslaught and when you're immune system has spun up, the vaccine is doing *nothing at all* while the infection is running wild, damaging and destroying millions of cells.
Let's not get hung up on the fact that the *initial behavior* of the vaccine and infection is identical (which is they both produce an immune response). The behavior *after* the initial attack is very different. The vaccine can't replicate, so nothing at all happens, while the real virus goes wild and replicates like crazy in the time it has before the T and B cells get properly up to speed. It's a huge difference! So it would be very, very strange to have long-term effects from actual COVID infection be replicated in COVID vaccine.
It would be less strange to see long term damage from Covid vaccines if you got 150 boosters full of spike proteins during your life. I got the vax but I don't intend to get the booster. I'm going to roll the dice on my first vax granting enough protection that whenever I do catch Covid the symptoms are as mild as most of the other people I know who caught it and got over it easily.
If I was fat and over 65 then I would probably get boosters though, and I recommend boosters for them.
Nicotine actually is a useful drug for a few conditions, COVID even appears to be one of them. Smoking is probably not the ideal way to take it, but their advice wasn't that misguided. In the 19th century, smoking probably was actually harmless or very close to it. The health problems associated with smoking were not noticed until cheap, machine produced cigarettes were introduced. Many deadly substances are only deadly in large enough doses. Nobody smoked a pipe 20+ times a day. Modern studies don't appear to show any negative health effects for pipe smokers. It could very well be purely due to the dose, there's still no 2 pack a day equivalent pipe smokers.
Point of order - I vape and am pro nicotine so I followed the science pretty closely on "nicotine for Covid." There was promise early but I do not currently think the science falls in favor or against nicotine as a Covid preventative. I think some of the early promise may have been hidden in selection bias and hospitalized people not giving a true depiction of whether they were smokers or not, in the early French and Chinese studies.
No, there is nothing definitive. That is why I said "appears to be". But as far as I can see, the evidence has not changed. There is a reduction in infection rate for people who smoke. The downsides of smoking cigarettes certainly outweigh this, and people who smoke and do get COVID have worse outcomes which probably outweighs it too. But if nicotine is the reason smokers are less likely to be infected (this has not been demonstrated that I am aware of), then taking nicotine in a less dumb form than cigarettes would be beneficial.
If you get covid, I think there are better choices of medicines now (the newish antivirals and the monoclonal antibodies early, the steroids later), but obviously that's not something you want to be trying to do-it-yourself on while you're deathly ill--that's why we have doctors.
But AFAIK, there's not some huge reason *not* to take ivermectin or vitamin D or zinc or whatever, assuming there's not some reason they're going to interact badly with drugs you're on or something.
IVM isn't actually "incredibly safe" in the doses necessary to impair viral replication in vitro; it actually is fatal at that dosage.
That was always the problem; the suspected mechanism for disruption of viral replication in vitro was disruption of cellular processes, which is often fatal in people.
There's no reason to believe it is any better than injecting bleach, in other words. Bleach is definitely effective at killing SARS-CoV-2 - it just kills you, too.
There was never any reason to believe it was actually effective, but there are conmen who push anti-parasitic drugs as cure-alls.
In vitro concentrations aren't always directly translatable to clinical results. Ivermectin also has anti-inflammatory effects, and inflammation is a serious issue with COVID, therefore the direct anti-viral behaviour could have been merely a secondary effect to why IVM might have worked against COVID.
There is a difference between "there was never any reason to believe it was actually effective" and "I do not know of any reason to believe it was actually effective". There was a reason, tens of thousands of doctors didn't all randomly decide to try the same random drug for no reason. The COVID death rate in countries where people routinely take ivermectin is substantially lower than in other countries. This correlation is an obvious thing to investigate to see if it is causative or not.
>India is the only country where parasites are common
Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for the info, I will let the dozens of other countries know. I am sure they will be happy to learn they no longer have endemic parasites because you refuse to admit that you're a liar.
> The concentration resulting in 50% inhibition (IC50 ; 2 µM) was > 35× higher than the maximum plasma concentration (Cmax ) after oral administration of the approved dose of ivermectin when given fasted.
Note that above 10x the standard dose is considered toxic.
It's unlikely that low concentrations of ivermectin have any effect whatsoever. The most likely cause of the reduction is disruption of cellular processes, which are obviously undesirable as that's another way to say "a toxic dose".
I think you have to consider the ethical ramifications for future studies. Suppose you do a half-assed study and it suggests drug X kinda-sort works for condition Y *and then it becomes the standard of care*. How do you ethically go back and do the study right? What's your moral argument for the existence of the control arm? Informed consent is not going to cut it, not when the lawsuits flow.
I think this is part of the sotto voce rationalization for the FDA's reluctance to approve things that maybe kinda sorta work but where the evidence is thin -- and you cited this yourself when it came to the aducanumab approval, and perhaps it's worth noting that AD kills at a rate that isn't *that* far behind COVID. Once you sort of let the cat out of the bag, and a big constituency starts to exist for a therapy regimen, it becomes extremely difficult to go back and study it critically and precisely. Even when it's ethical to do the study per se, meaning you can talk yourself (and others) into the ethical propriety of the control arm, there are political and sociological barriers that may be difficult to surmount.
There aren't any easy peasy solutions to this, I'm just pointing out that when we consider the interests, costs and benefits, of things like drug approval, I think as an enlightened society we are obliged to consider the interests, costs and benefits, that will apply to future human beings because of what we do today. It's not *just* about making our lives better, we need to consider whether a cost to us today will produce a significant benefit to those who come later (cf. global warming, right?) and take that into account also. Information is not free: sometimes we have to pay for it in current lives, or misery, in order that the future has it and can trust it.
Or people could get the fucking vaccines (some of which aren't even mRNA or in any way experimental), which are absolutely without a doubt effective way beyond this nonsense. The options are not ivermectin or nothing, except that a bunch of dumbasses are out there spreading BS about the vaccines.
That someday is coming soon, Bill Gates is already warning that he is going to release smallpox and blame it on "bioterrorism". A new smallpox vaccine has just co-incidentally been approved, and now smallpox vials have magically been found at a merck facility, even though they have no way to have access to smallpox.
Nitpick: The prediction in Scott's post is that effect size as measured by Cohen's d is less than 0.3. This is not the same thing as a relative risk reduction.
Cohen's d is the difference in means between the group that received ivermectin and the group that did not, divided by the pooled standard deviation.
Scott, long-time lurker here. My antivax, anti-public health elite uncle is currently taking ivermectin for his long COVID, at the behest of his nutty physician's assistant (he fired his doctors, who wouldn't prescribe him things like ivermectin when he had an active infection back in December 2020). I asked him to explain how ivermectin could possibly treat both an active viral infection *and* the damage to his organs he's experiencing in the medium-term aftermath. He was flummoxed.
He later came back and said that the PA's theory is that parasites "acted up" while his body was fending off the virus, and that parasites are causing his respiratory and digestive issues. Mind you, he lives in a wealthy part of Southern California, not Bangladesh. Has anyone ever made the case that long COVID = parasites? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Reminds me of the classic rebuttal to medical woo, which is to ask as much detail as possible about what they think they're cleansing from your body with their juices and tonics-- species and subspecies if possible.
One of my parents bosses has been vaccinated for every previously vaccination she's been offered but doesn't like the covid vaccine because she says that RNA vaccines cause the virus to stay in your system. Of course if anything it's traditional vaccines that work that way, while RNA vaccines avoid it.
The more I read smart people strategizing how we might mollify the antivax, the more cynical I get. I'm not sure that these are people who will change their minds over anything, no matter how dumb dumb belief is. Of course I might be cherrypicking and we might as well try to reach more people.
If you "follow the science," you know that as a vaxxed person, other people being vaxxed doesn't affect you (maybe there are edge cases but the debate is not centered on those). So I can't understand why vaxxed people care if other people get the vaccine or not. (If I'm wrong on the science, please let me know.) *Especially* when, as it appears to me, the people trying to do the convincing often view the non-vaxxed as having "dumb" beliefs and hold them in contempt. If you think someone is stupid and you hold them in contempt, you are not likely to want them vaxxed because you want what's best for them.
So as far as I can tell, there are two plausible interpretations here: Charitably, the people who want to force or convince everyone to become vaxxed don't understand the science. Uncharitably, the people who want to force or convince everyone to become vaxxed (or to treat unvaxxed as second-class) solely want to exercise power.
- People that want everyone vaxxed worry about the healthcare system being blocked by a lot of unnecessary covid cases. This could hurt anyone including themselves if they need to go to hospital.
- They are sorry for the overworked healthcare workers that have stress because of unnecessary cases. More general it is a waste of resources.
So i see plausible reasons why someone can have a strong opinion that everybody should be vaxxed. But people being missionary or even want to force everyone to be vaxxed are stupid on an other level: If you exercise pressure on people, expecially at such intimate things regarding the own body, will always earn resistance. If you want to convince someone you have to can present all your arguments but than you have to respect their free will.
I feel like these days, global eradication of smallpox would be an impossible task. Too many people in first-world countries would fight hard against it.
Thanks to antivaxers, the cases of tuberculosis have been growing at some regions during the last decades. But it is a slow process that affects far fewer people than covid, so most people do not notice.
We can deal with them like we dealt with the Klan - completely destroy them economically, deny them the ability to exist in mainstream society, make them figures of derision and scorn, and generally marginalize them and hurt them.
Most people will knuckle under under such conditions.
I wouldn't be so sure. Covid kills under 1% overall. If a virus kills somebody's brother, a cousin and a friend, maybe they start to wonder if Steve Kirsch is right about the vaccine being worse than the disease. Sure, Kirsch has the Right tribal attitudes, but gee maybe I should actually do some careful research on this instead of just mindlessly nodding when an antivaxxer says "do your own research to verify what I'm saying!"
Third option: People want relief from all the stress and fear and disruption that this COVID/pandemic thing has caused on their lives, and they've been marketed to that this vaccination is the only way for that.
The only way to return to normal, is to vaccinate the population. Say the politicians and even some medical experts.
Anything otherwise, is an uncomfortable, cognitive dissonance driven, untruth.
I think you're probably right in general -- it's become a tribal/political issue, so for both sides the major motivation now is "stuff this bitter conclusion down the throat of my enemies so they totally choke on it ha ha."
But that said, there are indeed some legitimate reasons for vaccinated to want to impose vaccination on the un. The most obvious is, for the sake of those who cannot take, or are not as well protected by, vaccines, including the very old, the very young, immunocompromised people like cancer patients, transplant patients, or those being treated for autoimmune disorders. These people totally rely on "herd immunity" because they can't defend against the virus themselves, and can't use a vaccine to help them do so.
The second reason would be to reduce the social costs of the disease. If the cost of ICU stays and very expensive interventions to try to save the life of a COVID patient were *only* borne by that patient, we could be fairly indifferent to whether he had himself taken steps to reduce the probability of him getting (very) sick. But this is not the case, much of those costs are socialized, so that willy nilly means the preventative care decision necessarily gets socialized a bit, too. You can't really have it both ways, you can't ask to make all your own health-care decisions because privacy *but* ask other people to pay for (a big part of) your health-care costs because humanity.
Is there a good reason to believe that "herd immunity" can actually be achieved with vaccination? The latest data from UK shows that vaccinated have recently been more likely to be infected than unvaccinated (possibly because they take more risks).
"The social costs of the disease" argument might make sense if it was directed only to the elderly. But trying to enforce it on young people, let alone on those who already had the disease, suggests that a different real motive.
Sure, there's a good reason. Because it's worked before with other diseases. Doesn't mean this is a *sufficient* reason -- maybe it's *not* going to work with COVID and its vaccines. But if you have to bet, it's more reasonable to bet that COVID is like all the other viruses we know, and widespread use of an effective vaccine will result in herd immunity and a dramatically reduced risk to the immunocompromised.
With respect to the second, I've already agreed the most likely real motive for most of the actual current passionate advocates, either way, is tribal loyalty signaling and a desire to stick it to the other guys. I'm just arguing that simply because this is the most likely actual motive doesn't necessarily prove that it's the only motive for anybody, or that there aren't any legitimate motives at all.
But I'm also not sure what you mean by the distinction between young and old. Young people certainly do visit grandma after her lung cancer surgery, or work as respiratory therapists in hospitals treating immunocompromised patients (or socialize with other people who do).
One of the nasty consequences of a disease as readily transmissable as COVID is that it's really hard to erect sturdy barriers to transmission based on behavior and identity. We were very lucky with other viruses in this camp, e.g. SARS-CoV-1 was much deadlier *but* wasn't very transmissable before symptoms, so you could just isolate the people who were obviously sick. There were people who hoped that would work for SARS-CoV-2, i.e. just quarantine the sick and all will be well, but that turned out to be completely useless because it's so transmissable *before* symptoms appear. Boo.
I live in the UK, and imo in the jurisdictions that have vaccine mandates (Wales and Scotland) it's basically just so that they can claim that they're doing something about COVID and draw a distinction between themselves and England, while not actually doing anything that costs money or affects the majority of people.
Both Wales and Scotland are governed by left-wingers who have tried to present themselves as more cautious than the English conservatives all the way through COVID. But they also recognise that most people have moved on from COVID, so they've lifted almost all restrictions while keeping a few symbolic measures in place (e.g. in Wales you have to wear a mask on public transport but not in nightclubs or pubs). They also face a lot of pressure from the public health lobby (unions and NHS-related organisations). Masks, vaccine passports, and constantly reminding people that 'we're still in a global pandemic' placates these people while not costing much money.
IMO England's Plan B and the indoor mask mandates/vaccine passports around Europe are basically the same thing, they're a signal that the government is doing something, placates public health bodies, and don't cost much money or annoy most people. I doubt many of these governments think these actually work that well.
My main "third option" is that a virus's number of opportunities to evolve (to be more contagious) is proportional to the number of infections. More unvaccinated people means more variants arriving faster, which means higher probability that a variant will evade your immune defenses. (arguably this doesn't matter so much until there is enough vaccine production capacity for the whole world, though I heard that unclaimed doses tended to be thrown away instead of e.g. being sent to developing countries)
In addition, vaccines are what, 90% effective with delta or less, (I never got a firm number), and probably less effective still with omicron? So more unvaccinated people means more chances you (as a vaccinated person) will get sick.
And then there's people with weak/missing immune systems for whom the vaccine is ineffective. One can reasonably want to try to protect such people via "herd immunity" if possible (I'm now leaning toward "it's not possible" but most people, including me, have not seen enough evidence to be sure)
I believe that 90% effective is relative effectiveness, not absolute effectiveness. The COVID-19 vaccine's absolute effectiveness appears to be incredibly low, especially for newer variants. In fact, it is so ineffective (on an absolute scale) that there is no negative correlation (what one would expect for an effective vaccine) between vaccination rate in a region and all cause mortality (or any other metric, though most metrics people use are pretty terrible).
With the current vaccines at least, there is essentially no chance at reaching herd immunity, as seen by countries with a near 100% fully vaccinated population who continue to have "outbreaks".
Gibraltar, population 33691, has a vaccination rate between 97% and 140% depending on which source you look at (vaccine tourism?)... hard to say what the real vaccination rate is. Aside from that, the only countries with rates above 85% are Singapore, UAE, and Portugal.
UAE's case/death numbers dropped so low it's like the pandemic is over.
Singapore and Portugal not so much, but at least their case/death counts are better than the US, UK or Germany. Reportedly: "Singapore’s health ministry said that fully vaccinated people were admitted to hospital over the past week at a rate of 0.5 per 100 000 and that deaths in this group were 0.1 per 100 000. But unvaccinated people were admitted at a rate of 5.2 per 100 000, and deaths were 0.9 per 100 000." Cumulative total Covid cases in Singapore and Portugal are about 50,000 and 75,000 per million, so if they're easing restrictions due to their high vaccination rates, there could be significant numbers of never-infected-never-vaccinated people left. It sure would be nice if there were a global survey of infection and vaccination rates to go on, rather than every country having its own separate tracking system that will be more or less accurate from country to country... these "unknown unknown" bureaucratic/contextual differences makes it hard for amateur sleuths to reach any firm conclusions.
As for whether herd immunity is possible, I lean toward "no" if officials continue to refuse challenge trials for vaccines for new variants. Even with challenge trials, I expect it'll be necessary to produce new vaccines occasionally (or so) because SARS-CoV-2 is a generalist virus with animal reservoirs. There's uncertainty here, as it depends on complex, fine details of how our immune systems work and how well future mutations can evade those systems.
TL;DR: We agree that differences in testing/reporting strategies between countries make it difficult to draw any good conclusions. I don't think this is a Simpson's Paradox problem but rather it is a problem with the metrics that are commonly used to support the pro-vaccine narrative. We also agree that herd immunity is probably off the table (from your wording, I think I believe that more strongly than you do).
----
I'm incredibly opposed to using COVID-19 "case" rates for anything because they are primarily a function of testing volume (when looked at absolutely) and tested demographic. Neither of these are standardized at all around the world, and in almost all regions they aren't even consistent over time. They also are incredibly manipulable (or at least confounded if you want to assume ineptitude over malice) by testing particular sub-populations. For example, in many regions vaccinated individuals are tested *far* less frequently than vaccinated individuals (orders of magnitude less in some jurisdictions).
As for "COVID-19 deaths", most jurisdictions report "died with COVID-19" and very few report "died from COVID-19". This is marginally better than case rates, but still suffers from the same biases, confounders, etc. since not all jurisdictions report the same and vaccinated people are less likely to be tested for COVID-19 during a hospital stay in some jurisdictions which results in a decrease in test rate over time (thus confounding results of "died with COVID-19").
Beyond that, there are problems with PCR with high cycle counts vs other forms of testing (which are far more reliable) but this is usually not standardized even within a region. As an example, a hospital in Australia I believe just came out acknowledging that they do 45 cycle PCR tests for COVID-19.
All of the above IMO is really just a minor point though compared to the point that what *matters* is net benefit/harm. I personally find all cause mortality to be just about the best proxy for this because counting deaths is pretty easy and aside from blatant lying, there is basically no room for ineptitude to screw up the results. It doesn't capture things like long-covid, time off work, physical pain, etc. but all of those things are incredibly hard to gauge accurately in today's society and are subject to a whole lot of statistics munging and disagreement between otherwise reasonable people. Also, I would argue that loss of life should be one of the primary things we care about and mostly trumps everything else.
Using all cause mortality, rather than COVID-19 cases or deaths, we can see that regions with stringent COVID-19 mitigations, mandates, regulations, vaccine requirements, etc. are not seeing a decrease in all cause mortality, we are instead seeing an increase in many (most? from my spot checking, but my work was very non-exhaustive) regions. If COVID-19 is very deadly (not lost in the noise of background death rate), and vaccines are effective at preventing death, and the vaccines are safe (they don't cause death themselves), then we should seen (in aggregate) a noticeable decrease in all cause mortality correlated with the vaccine rollouts in various countries. Unfortunately, we see no such thing.
Of course, there *could* be reasons to not see vaccine efficacy. For example, lockdowns could be causing an increase in death rate the longer they go for and that is fully offsetting the benefits of the vaccines. Or there could be something else totally unrelated to COVID-19 that happens to be killing people everywhere on the planet in increasing numbers and that offsets the vaccine lives saved. The problem is that we don't have that strong signal for (COVID-19 is deadly) & (Vaccines are Effective) & (Vaccines are Safe) that I would want to see prior to mandating or otherwise requiring vaccinations. What we have is people on both sides who can draft models that support their position but no way to evaluate which model is correct.
To further muddy the waters, the all cause mortality data for at least the Pfizer vaccine safety trial shows that more people in the vaccine arm died than in the placebo arm (not statistically significant). At best, this means the trial that was supposed to show efficacy of that vaccine didn't actually show efficacy on the most important (IMO) measure, which is total lives saved. Of course, one can easily and very reasonably make the argument that the study was way too underpoweerd to show vaccine efficacy at preventing death (and I would agree), but this just further supports the claim that we simply don't have evidence that the vaccine is a net benefit.
FWIW, I think it is quite reasonable to believe that the vaccine *might* be net positive. I think the technology underlying it is quite reasonable and the mechanism of action is similarly reasonable. In a parallel universe where the vaccine was completel optional/personal choice (like the annual flu vaccine) I would likely advise it to my at-risk friendse and may even get it myself as it would allow me to better control for *when* I get a strong immune response (e.g., plan for a weekend or vacation, not right before an important deadline). My only argument is that we simply do not have **good** data backing up the claim that (COVID-19 is deadly) & (Vaccines are Effective) & (Vaccines are Safe) so we shouldn't be requiring/mandating or even strongly advocating giving them to everyone regardless of personal situation.
I read the link you gave after writing up that reply and wanted to respond to it more directly. I agree with the author of that article in general, and I am *not* making the argument that vaccinated all cause mortality in the UK is higher than the unvaccinated all cause mortality in the UK (for the exact reasons mentioned in that article). I'm arguing that population-wide all-cause mortality should be decreasing for every country as the vaccines rolled out if covid is deadly and vaccines are safe and effective.
My dad didn't respond to my reply so ... I'll necro this thread instead.
I said to my dad: The very first major claim in the video is that the absolute risk reduction is 0.84%....
So what do they mean by that? They are talking about the difference in the number of infections, divided by the number of trial participants.
As the video states, the trial lasted only two months in 2020. The video doesn't say *which* months in 2020, nor does it state where the trial was done. But if you make use of your brain for just a few seconds, you would realize that the number of Covid infections that occur in a two-month period
1. Would be much different than a four-month period or a one-month period
2. Could be much different in different time windows
3. Could be much different in different locations
Clearly, the number of infections in the control group is not related to the vaccine at all, since the control group did not receive a vaccine. In fact it is mostly a function of things like the length of the trial, the contagiousness of the disease, the amount of social distancing people are using, and other coincidental factors.
Hypothetically, imagine that Pfizer's vaccine actually provided perfect protection. Clearly, this perfect vaccine would have had the same number of infections in the control group, about 0.88% (162 divided by 18325). And so this video would have labeled this perfect vaccine as providing an absolute risk reduction of 0.88%. Never mind that the number 0.88% has nothing whatsoever to do with the vaccine and everything to do with the environment in which the trial was conducted.
0.88% doesn't even tell you very much about the disease itself, since, again, the number depends on the duration of the trial, measures to reduce spread in the local area, the base level and distribution of infections in that particular area, etc., none of which are attributes of the disease per se.
The thing is... this is all obvious if you think about it. No rocket science, no fancy stats, just basic using your head.
And yet the video literally says that "your risk reduction" from taking the Pfizer vaccine is 0.84% and that the vaccines offer "less than 1% benefit". These statements are clearly incorrect. A correct statement would have been "the absolute risk reduction in a two month time window from (start date) to (end date) in (location of trial) was approximately 0.88%." But the correct statement doesn't send the "right" message, does it?
I see two possible interpretations: either the people who made the video weren't using their brains... or they are soldiers in the fight against Covid vaccines.
The purpose of absolute effectiveness is so that you can compare the benefits of the vaccine against its costs. Commonly in this case it is compared against vaccine injury risks. As an example, anaphylaxis is a very easy thing to compare against because there is an incredibly strong causal relationship between a vaccine and an allergic reaction (due to the very tight temporal connection). If you want to do a risk benefit analysis of the vaccine, you need to compare its absolute risk reduction against the absolute risk of the treatment, you wouldn't want to compare it against the relative risk reduction.
You are correct that the absolute risk *is* a function of exposure, which is a huge confounder! Ideally, we would do challenge trials to remove this confounder but for whatever reason the world has decided that good science shouldn't be done. 🤷 However, even without challenge trials, we should be able to get a very rough estimate on absolute risk reduction so we can compare against the risks associated with the vaccines (of course, this would require actually tracking/documenting vaccine risks in a reasonable way which is something else society seems unwilling to do).
You are also correct that absolute risk reduction is a function of time as well. For a vaccine that gives infinitely lasting immunity against a virus and all of its variants you would need to look at the annualized risk, factor in life expectancy of the individual, and then use that as the "absolute risk" (probably normalized to quality of life years or something) and compare that against a similarly normalized risk of the vaccine itself. Things get *way* more complicated when you have a vaccine that *appears* to have very limited long term effectiveness, and against a virus that appears to be very capable of mutating away from the vaccine.
To complicate matters even more, there are many unknowns in all of this, like at the time we didn't know how easy it would be for Sars-Cov-2 to mutate away from the single-protein immunity produced by the vaccines, nor did we not have good data on how lasting vaccine immunity would be.
You are correct. I've been interested in antimisinformation for years. People who are vocal about their belief will easily find excuses that enable them to ignore all evidence. You cannot change their mind. (I do think there are fence-sitters you might convince with a public conversation, but only if you are good at debate and ready to handle the contrarian's arguments.)
Writing this while about 1/3 of the way through reading...
A) Thank you so much for doing the yeoman's work to read through these carefully. This is what we pay you for (/s, lol)
B) Regarding Babaloba et al, I tentatively think I may have found the solution:
(This is the context)
"I think his point is that if you have 21 people, it’s impossible to have 50% of them have headache, because that would be 10.5. If 10 people have a headache, it would be 47.6%; if 11, 52%. So something is clearly wrong here. Seems like a relatively minor mistake, and Meyerowitz-Katz stops short of calling fraud, but it’s not a good look."
We have four columns - 1 for treatment A, B and control each, plus an overall. This allows us to triangulate to see what has happened with the data.
Column A is the mystery - how do you get 50% of 21 people, and so forth? Easy, have K people who have missing data for this outcome. Happens all the time. (In my research, I deal with much larger samples, but there's always missing values for some trivial % of the data). Technically you can have different numbers of missing by variable, but the easiest solution to make (at least a few) of these numbers work is to allow 1 person with missing data in Column A.
Then we have 6/20 with fever, 10/20 = 50% with headache, and so forth. Columns B and C look fine. Ok, the question then is does my "fix" give the correct totals in the "overall" column? Turns out that (as far as I checked, it does)
Details:
Headache: 10/20 in col A, 12/21 in col B, 5/20 in col C. This would give 27/61 overall, which is 44.26%, which matches their 44.3% exactly.
Fever: 6/20 in col A, 9/21 in col B, 4/20 in col C. This would give 19/61 overall, which is 31.147%. They report 31.2%. This *doesn't quite match*. But if you round to 2 dp, you get 31.15%. And then if someone later rounds to 1 dp, you get (incorrectly) 31.2%. I bet errors like this happen all the time - you have your software print the result to 2 dp, and then as you write your table, you decide to do 1 dp and every time you have something end with "5" you don't go and check which way the raw data should round. (I bet I make this mistake in my research all the time when rounding coefficients and so forth manually in text, because who always remembers to stop and check?).
Haven't checked the other variables, but getting these sufficiently close matches for the first two I checked for the most simple "non-fraud" explanation of "1 data point missing" seems too much of a fluke otherwise.
The problem is then that the study does not report why they excluded and how many of the patients. This could be removing a patient that would skew the results in ways that they do not like, and so it is a problem still, not guaranteeing a fraud, but hinting at some data tampering.
Studies almost never report anything beyond "missing data are dropped" (which doesn't tell you anything that isn't completely obvious). It's not like you can choose whether to keep missing data or not - of course it automatically gets dropped!
Look, I'm not disproving data tampering but this is by no means the simplest or most likely explanation here. You'll find missing data being dropped for specific outcomes in 99% of studies.
The alien / vaccine hypothetical is compelling, but what's missing is that IRL all humans would have 7-12 different alien chips already in them and are objecting to getting another.*
*Yes yes mRNA is a new tech but you don't see anti-vaxx people being willing to get non-mRNA vaccines.
Oops, this is what I get for skimming Google results. In my defense, the mRNA tech developed a particular notoriety for being "brand-new" and "untested," but I guess that was not a defensible position based on how long each type of vaccine has been in use.
AstraZeneca was withdrawn for being unsafe and is now basically the scapecoat for the embarrassing high vax with high corona incidence areas. Idk what kind of pro vax point can be wrought from bringing it up.
While J&J is unlike most other vaccines Americans would have received, and it does contain DNA, "DNA vaccine" refers to something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccine
The only approved DNA vaccine is an Indian vaccine for covid, approved in August 2021.
J&J is a nonreplicating viral-vector vaccine; the first vaccines of that type approved for general use were for Ebola.
I do know several people who say they will take the Novovax vaccine if it's approved (we shall see, but come on FDA) but are refusing to take the adenovirus and mRNA based vaccines. They have (imho irrational) negative response to anything 'genetic' (e.g. super seriously avoid GMO foods etc.).
I said this upthread, but the one person I know (secondhand) who fits this description says she is worried that mRNA vaccines are less safe than other vaccines because they put part of the virus into you. Of course this is the opposite of what's really true-- there's a very small risk of modern vaccines causing infections, but if they did it would be from older vaccines that use live viruses, or vaccines that use dead or deactivated virus, whereas RNA and DNA vaccines basically carry an instruction manual to the virus rather than the real thing.
Any vaccine you make is somehow going to have to put something from the virus into you in a way that gets presented to your immune system. The mRNA and viral vector vaccines do that by making your cells make some spike protein. (I don't think anyone's done a DNA vaccine for covid, but that's how it would work, too.) Subunit vaccines just inject a chunk of protein that appears on the virus (Novavax is doing this), plus something to make your immune system pay attention. Inactivated virus vaccines inject a virus that's been "killed" by heat or formaldehyde or something. Attenuated live virus vaccines inject a form of the virus that has been adapted not to make you sick, so you get a mild asymptomatic infection and your immune system learns how to fight the real virus off.
J&J and AZ and Sputnik are all viral vector vaccines, using adenovirus (a DNA virus). There are also vaccines (I think almost all experimental) that just shoot DNA into you using some kind of air gun (or sometimes just injecting them, but they they need to do something to damage the cells to get the DNA inside). I gather this works because the DNA makes it into some cells and its genes get expressed, but I don't really understand the mechanism very well. Here's the Wikipedia article on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccine
The mRNA part of the mRNA vaccines only contains instructions for building the S protein part of the virus coat. There are no instructors for building the viral DNA itself, nor for the other parts of the viral coat. Furthermore, it's not the actual genuine S protein, but a modified version of it that is stable *without* being incorporated into a complete virus. In other words, it isn't even a part of the virus that could be assembled with other parts to make a complete virus.
Well unfortunately, even existing vaccines (like the flu shot) have now become politicized. I expect to see the lowest child vaccination rates in decades over the next few years.
The medical establishment, the media, the internet, government, and many churches, were taken over by an authoritarian political group of billionares years ago, What's hapening now is necessary to expose it so people will get off their asses and change it before the whole human race is in a grave. Imagine if Hitler or one of the other evil dictators of the past came to power today, took control of genetics, started manufacturing chimeras, releasing sterility viruses and deceiving people to take sterility vaccines.
What are the most prominent examples of the medical establishment taking political sides, as opposed to medical sides that happen to be supported by one party?
The medical establishment was taken over by a political side, authoritarian socialists, along with a majority of government departments and large corporations. When medical mistakes are the forth cause of death, you know something is wrong. The takeover began in earnest 70 years ago with a 93% tax on capitol growth by doctors and huge subsidies to large corporations to establish health care collectives. It's been all down hill ever since. Health care costs went from 5% of GNP to 20%, while quality went down. Constant hype about breakthroughs convinces people it's getting better but it's not.
The pathetic response to the pandemic made it very clear. The billions of dollars taken from workers and given to bureaucrats to prevent pandemics were wasted, and even worse diverted to labs creating pathogens like the one that caused the pandemic.
I think also missing is the behavior of conservative political and media elites, who are actually in a social class where they might have immunologist relatives but who kept up anti-blue tribe COVID skepticism. Trump is vaccinated, Fox News has an internal vaccine passport system, these are the people best positioned to persuade skeptics motivated by 'hostile aliens' and they refuse to do it because maximal ongoing culture war serves their interests.
Tribalism makes people stupid. There are plenty of utterly amoral people in media and politics who will happily play along with the stupidity to increase their money/power/audience. But also, there's a genuine danger of getting caught up in a feedback loop of your bubble + your confirmation bias. I'm pretty sure Bret Weinstein isn't dishonest about ivermectin, and he's certainly not dumb, but the whole ivermectin controversy / big pharma conspiracy theory thing seems to have broken his brain in a rather depressing way.
I think even very smart and sophisticated people are susceptible to getting high on their own supply.
Yes, I think Bret Weinstein is hooked on the idea that he's right when a lot of other people are wrong.
He could have just had (reasonable?) doubts about the mRNA vaccines, but no, he had to go on from that to the idea that there's an extremely effective drug that's being suppressed.
Trump has been shilling the vaccines since he was still president, he is shilling them now. The qboomers you want to pretend are representative of everyone who isn't hysterical about COVID can't be swayed by Trump, so Fox can do absolutely nothing to convince them either. They have less than no influence over the rest of us, who think fox is just as worthless as CNN. The CDC's statistics are why I am not taking a dangerous vaccine for a harmless cold. Not because only 99.8% of empty headed media puppets are devoting all their time to lying and fear mongering about COVID instead of 100% of them.
It would be great to see analysis of why a deworming medicine is thought by some medical professionals to be an effective treatment for a respiratory disease.
What could possibly motivate the folks at ivmmeta.com to spend so much effort in creating and maintaining such an impressive site? I see only two candidates - sincere belief in the effectiveness of Ivermectin or a profit motive. I don't believe trolls or nihilistic fraudsters would have that much motivation. Since the drug is already a generic drug, it would seem the profit motive is less likely than a sincere belief that it is an effective treatment for COVID19.
I don't understand the intensity of the establishment backlash against Ivermectin. I have not seen evidence that vaccination rates would be higher if people did not believe ivermectin worked. Nor do I think that it's intuitively clear that this would be the case. People who distrust the establishment don't trust them on vaccines or on whether or not ivermectin works. Even if they were somehow convinced that ivermectin didn't work, they wouldn't trust the vaccines unless the public health establishment suddenly became more trustworthy overall. Add to this the fact that if taken in human sized doses, ivermectin is safe and I don't really see the reason for the virulent mainstream backlash. In fact, the backlash probably cost some lives by causing people to take crazy dosages.
More generally, I don't understand the establishment messaging of vaccines (+masks) or you're the worst. There are plenty of other ways to reduce risk including doing things to maintain or improve overall health (exercise and sunlight). And these activities are not mutually exclusive with taking vaccines. The messaging should not have been anti vaccine alternative - that just spreads distrust. It should have been vaccines are good and here's a bunch of other positive steps you might take to reduce your COVID19 risk. And the evidence for ivermectin is mixed, but if your doctor wants to give you some, whatever its harmless. Again, I think the vaccine or bust messaging was really counterproductive.
How about pointing the anger at the FDA for forbidding the use of tests early on other than the one they had approved — and later discovering that that one didn't work? Also for delaying the unblinding of the vaccine data until election day.
I would go further, and blame those responsible for making it take nine or ten months from a vaccine being created to its being approved for use, in part by not permitting challenge trials.
While Zvi has criticized the FDA, he himself has been wrong about a number of things. So while the FDA screwup rate is not 0, his is not 0, either.
In particular, everyone who was eager to get the masks off was wrong. My personal opinion has been (and will continue to be) that everyone should continue to mask up until COVID is gone, and that maybe wearing masks on public transportation like planes and trains and buses should be *permanent* - that is to say, even *after* COVID is gone, we keep doing it.
Anti-COVID measures had an enormous effect on flu season last year - we had approximately 1% of the normal fatalities due to influenza. That's crazy.
It shows just how ridiculously infectious COVID is by comparison - measures inadequate to fully control COVID were sufficient to lower flu deaths by 99%.
>Like it's crazy to me that we figured out a way to basically stop flu transmission forever
Not testing is very different from stopping transmission. An unknown portion of those "COVID" cases were flu cases. Nobody was tested for flu, everyone was tested for COVID, and here in Canada 100% of the COVID tests done last year were completely worthless PCR tests with insanely high cycle counts. A test with a 97% false positive rate is worse than no test. And it forms the foundation of this entire mass hysteria.
>really beat it, in the way Japan, South Korea, and Australia beat covid
You mean, not "beat it" at all and have no statistically significant difference from any other developed country? Whatever country "we" is, managed that just fine.
>We blew it because people refused to come together as a society and work on the problem - refused to wear masks, refused to self-isolate, refused to social distance, refused to endorse policies we knew could reduce the spread of the disease.
But we know all of that is complete BS. The anger is floating around precisely because so many people live in the TV fabricated alternate reality where that nonsense is true. They somehow forget that at the beginning, when we had no concrete information to go on, republicans were the ones taking COVID seriously, and dems were insisting it is "just the flu" and organizing "hug a random asian person because the imaginary racism we just made up is the real disease" events. Dems were the ones insisting masks don't work and you are an evil panic spreading fear monger if you wear one. And then as we got real information from countries with slightly more trustworthy governments than China's, and we determined that it really is just the flu and there is no need to do anything, everything suddenly reversed and we had always been at war with Eastasia.
We knew from the time of the great reversal, once efforts to restrict travel to prevent spread had been successfully shut down by "racism" accusations, that it had become endemic and it was going to be a permanent disease like the flu. This was openly explained to all of you, when you were told that we needed temporary 2 week measures to "flatten the curve" and not overwhelm our health care systems with too many cases at once, since there was nothing we could do to change the number of cases that would happen overall. And yet, on week 89 of 2 weeks to flatten the curve, people are somehow able to delude themselves into blocking all of this out of their head, while simultaneously remaining completely convinced of their own superior, skeptical mind.
You have to look at all the variables, not just the one you like. The US has more deaths from everything all the time than Japan does. The US has far more people with serious health problems than Japan does. We know age and co-morbidities are the most important factors in COVID deaths by several orders of magnitude. And denying the lack of seriousness of COVID is just silly. Look up the average age of COVID death victims yourself. It is higher than the average life expectancy. Look at the survival rate for people below 80 without co-morbidities. COVID is killing people 3 weeks sooner than they would have died anyways from something else. Many COVID deaths are admittedly not even COVID deaths, they are deaths within a selected time window of having a positive PCR test for COVID.
To clarify, in case it seems like I'm being too glib, good and evil both exist and it isn't all that terribly hard to tell the difference. Certain morally valent policy recommendations are sufficiently morally incorrect as to constitute evil behavior. Censoring the net is evil. Convincing depressed teens and twentysomethings to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their genitals mutilated and rendered permanently nonorgasmic, in an intervention that is sold as preventing suicide but is ineffective even at that, is evil. Advocating for the normalization of sexual relationships between mature adults and people too young to give informed consent, and the concomitant power imbalance, is evil. Advocating for the legalization of the murder of viable fetuses is evil. All of these are mainstream positions within the Democratic party and the broader academic left from which the Democratic party draws its social policy recommendations. When I claim the Democratic party is evil, I am not dunking on the outgroup. I have specific and grave moral concerns about their specific and openly held social policy recommendations.
I don't think there's a lot of worthwhile engagement to be had here, but for the record, Democrats are not advocating for the normalization of pedophilia. We're also not convincing - or even trying to convince - trans kids of anything, we're just trying to support them.
"That's not us, that's just those weirdos on university campuses / in the media" is not particularly reassuring. Some of us have seen that movie play out before, over the last 30 years or so.
I'm going to have to ask for a citation on the advocating for pedophilia thing and that sex reassignment surgery renders people permanently nonorgasmic...
And you're right to do so. I'm perfectly happy to do so, since people who make controversial claims and then say "it's not my job to educate you" are just the worst, but if you could preregister in advance the sorts of websites you would immediately discard as right wing propaganda, "fake news", or otherwise epistemologically disqualifying, it'll save us both some time.
There is an extensive and well documented thread in TheMotte's culture war megathread this week- hundreds of comments worth, of people far more informed and articulate than I am, documenting discussing the obvious existence of the normalization of pedophilia in modern left culture, including federal politics, in extreme levels of detail. Enjoy. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/quapxg/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_15/
Since you seem like a nice fellow, I'd like to tell you (as someone with absolutely no affection for the Democratic Party) that you are not doing yourself or your tribe any favors with this post.
If you want to make the case that "the Democratic partry is evil" because of its "openly held social policy recommendations" , that's a fine place to start. (You happen to be wrong, but it's defensible.).
It makes some sense to go after them for the genital stuff next. There's at least something in there about "medically necessary care for gender transition" that you could attempt to hang your hat on. It's going to be a real stretch to get to "objectively evil" but I would at least read your attempt.
When you bring up net censorship, I have no idea what you're talking about. I am going to charitably assume you aren't talking about twitter and facebook banning Trump. When I ctrl-f for "internet" I find "an open internet, including net neutrality". I'm quite willing to believe there's something dumb about the internet in there, because everyone says dumb things about the internet, but you'll have to call it out specifically, and then make a case for why it's evil instead of just dumb.
But you completely tank your credibility with the pedophilia. What even? When I search https://www.govtrack.us/misconduct for "underage" I find Matt Gaetz, Dennis Hastert, Mark Foley, and Donald Lukens--all four Republicans.
You seem to have a very warped view of Democrat policies and positions.
On Abortion: I understand that Conservatives feel that abortion is murder and I can respect your feelings about that. However, the issue is not that simple. One might argue that any fetus that can't survive outside the womb without extraordinary measures is not actually viable.
I do believe the standard is based on brain activity, so that most places don't allow abortions past the 2nd trimester. The majority of your country men are ok with that compromise.
Strongly agreed. Parts of the medical profession actively worked with social media and mainstream media to block any discussion of a potential treatment of a major pandemic. What about that wouldn't cause great concern and lead to groups of people trying to create an honest discussion of the merits of the treatment? For a normal response, most of us would never have heard of ivermectin and the medical profession would have worked through the studies and made recommendations to doctors. Individual people would have heard positives or negatives about the drug from their doctor, and made up their own mind. Nothing special, no big deal.
I don't want to be too uncharitable, but I get annoyed by the double standard sometimes here. If ivermectin boosters are acting unreasonable-- and most are getting out ahead of their skis even on a charitable interpretation-- then anything they get above mockery is gravy.
Yes, we should be trying to get through to people about vaccines, and yes, if you're a blue check physician health communicator type you shouldn't be making fun of random people on twitter. But still, if you're ignoring a working vaccine to take snake oil, you're being silly and I'm not going to feel bad that people make fun of you.
Of course you're right that we should be exercising more, eating better, etc., to prevent covid, but we should also be wearing surgical masks and ventilating indoor spaces. We don't need to choose between air bags and seat belts.
The vaccine might justify taking fewer cautions since it's simply way more effective than any NPI, but there's nothing else that compares. I might even trade in all our messaging on NPIs for messaging that boosts vaccinations, given that the marginal value of an additional vaccination is so much higher.
It's not representative, but there have been a few celebrities including Joe Rogan and other celebrities who apparently get their health advice from Joe Rogan taking ivermectin but not getting the vaccine. Rogan has maybe the largest platform on health matters in the world in terms of the listenership regularly tuning in for health content, so he's not a marginal player.
Why would you say he "became an anti-vaxxer". Do you feel like this sort of clear dishonesty helps your cause? Do you think the people who believe that have been constantly lied to and mislead for the last 2 years are going to change their mind and suddenly rush out and get vaccinated if you can just pile some more lies on?
Rogan did not just take ivermectin, he also took monoclonal antibodies which have excellent evidential basis, and he was very transparent about everything he took. He also routinely, literally says not to listen to him for medical advice because he's a moron, and that you should talk to your doctor. All in all, very reasonable messaging.
I don't have anything against Joe Rogan, and it doesn't seem like his approach to this is terrible. It's just that he should've plugged both vaccination and monoclonals and held back on ivermectin without evidence. Ultimately, I think you have a certain responsibility when your platform is so large, and he knows very well that people will imitate what he does for the virus. If he didn't want that, he could just tell fans that that is all private.
I was also speaking on the more specific point that the pro-IVM anti-vax view seems reasonably widespread.
He has repeatedly recommended vaccines for at-risk populations, he likely just didn't want to take it himself because he knows quite a few doctors and researchers, some of which are openly skeptical of the vaccine's long-term safety. What reasonable person would plug vaccines for everyone when most of the advice he's heard raise such concerns? Rogan isn't analyzing the evidence for IVM, he's just listening to advice from medical professionals that he trusts, and since his whole shtick is openness and honesty, that's what he shares with the public.
The problem here really is with poor science journalism (or really, poor journalism in general), and poor science messaging which has eroded public trust in these institutions. If this hadn't happened, then Rogan would probably just trust the CDC's advice.
You might want to stop and consider (charitably!) why people might want to listen to Joe Rogan on a matter that he emphatically says is not his expertise.
It's a mixture of experts/elites/establishment people actively lying to them about COVID treatments and preventions, including lying about both masks and the vaccines, and Joe Rogan laying out his thought process pretty clearly in a way that invites people to make up their own minds. That may lay out a better approach out medical establishment should take in the future.
Transparency can be helpful. But my concern more than anything is just that both Rogan and the FDA/CDC/WHO/etc. have gotten things badly wrong at various points of the pandemic and no one seems to care. What I honestly have a hard time steelmanning is people who are rightfully critical of institutions that they used to trust and then listen credulously to anti-establishment figures who aren't necessarily more reliable without applying that same cynicism.
Humility? Are you more willing to listen to someone who admits their faults, but puts their understanding out there to review, or someone who claims to be right and doubles down on the incorrectness before hurriedly trying to memory hole it?
Probably the biggest reason I read ACX is that Scott is willing to consider opposing views and admit when he's wrong. Joe Rogan does that much better than the CDC. I still care more what the CDC says than what Rogan says, but it's close enough that I can understand people who go the other way.
"What I honestly have a hard time steelmanning is people who are rightfully critical of institutions that they used to trust and then listen credulously to anti-establishment figures who aren't necessarily more reliable without applying that same cynicism."
I am one of those people who are critical of both the institutions that I used to trust, and the anti-establishment figures who aren't necessarily more reliable.
What makes you think there's a large amount of people who only critically think when instutitions are concerned, but then stop critically thinking when anti-establishment figures are concerned? I'm an example of cynicism at all stages of life, and I feel there are more people like me in the anti-vax circle than in the vax circle.
I think it's easier to be forgiving toward a guy who gives bad advice after saying "I really don't know what I'm talking about here, don't take my advice, ask your doctor" than it is toward a person/institution that gives bad advice after saying "We are experts, this is the scientifically correct advice, and anyone who disagrees is some kind of anti-science loon." Especially when (as with Faucci's early messaging on masks) it appears to have been intentionally bad advice done to accomplish some other good (keeping the good masks available for medical personnel during the crisis).
Someone can correct me if I am wrong. But my understanding of what happened with Rogan was that he was not vaccinated because he felt that he was healthy and did not need it. Then he contracted COVID. Then he contacted a doctor that he had had on the show who supposedly had a bunch of treatments for folks who had COVID. He paid that doctor a lot of money to recommend/proscribe him a bunch of stuff of which Ivermectin was one thing along with monoclonal antibodies. Once he recovered he mentioned on his show the laundry list of stuff he took. Then the media jumped on the fact that he took Ivermectin and said he took horse dewormer.
I don't think Rogan was actively promoting Ivermectin as an alternate to vaccination before or after he got COVID
That's my understanding as well, and that appears to be part of the reason so many people are following his [non]-advice. He's just a guy who went through an experience, talked about it with medical professionals, and shared it with other people. When the experts in the field are unreliable, people WILL find alternate ways to get information, including ones that they should not use, such as a radio personality with no medical experience.
"When the experts in the field are unreliable, people WILL find alternate ways to get information, including ones that they should not use, such as a radio personality with no medical experience."
When the experts in the field are unreliable, who else do you have left to go to (BESIDES the non-experts who are left)?
One of the cases of non-vaxxers I know at second hand is in this boat. As in, has specifically said, "I don't need to get the jab. It's not safe in the first place, and in the second place if I do get it I'll just take ivermectin."
There was also a nurse on this board who discussed doing this in a previous thread, though if memory serves they were in fact taking the ivermectin prophylactically.
I don't know if there's been a survey, but these people are, at least anecdotally, around.
What if you replace IVM in this case with monoclonal antibodies, or the Merck pill? Isn't that a reasonable stance, if that person decides to take the risk of getting Covid and then treating it if it gets bad?
There is a n% chance that you get Covid, an n% chance that it is symptomatic and an n% chance that it is serious. Depending on who you are, getting all the way to it getting bad is pretty slim. A vaccine helps you in the case that all of these are true, whereas if there is an effective therapy, which there is, then I think people should be able to take the risk of getting Covid and then treating it.
I don't really think so. I don't know how to do the comment linking, but if you search Benjamin North he's got a great breakdown of this in these comments.
I can understand your frustration, and if making fun of silly people helps you, you can do this. But i don't see any other reason and the cause not to mock but to respect them is not mainly because you feel bad for them. People that don't don't feel a minimum respect from you, just won't listen to you, even if you have the arguments that would otherwise convince them.
Small-molecule drugs often change multiple things in both the highly complex systems of both the human body and disease-causing organisms; we don't really understand these systems in anything like the detail necessary to predict the effects in advance.
A fairly standard approach when screening an existing drug for potential use against a new disease is roughly "Well, one of the systems we know drug X affects is system Y, and system Y seems to be active in disease Z, so maybe it'll have a positive effect". So, ivermectin (which seems to have fizzed out) made sense as something to test for the same reason fluvoxamine (which seems to work) did; well-tolerated in-production drugs with effects on inflammation systems (since inflamation is a factor in COVID).
A whole bunch of other drugs that fit that general description have been tested, too, without making the news; that's because they failed (unlike fluvoxamine) without any faked studies declaring them a major success (unlike ivermectin).
As far as the psychology on the pro- side, it looks like the usual confirmation bias. People saw the studies where it had a major effect and were convinced, and have held to that regardless.
And on the anti- side, the invective is the usual tribalist animosity signaling. The vaccine hesitancy arguments are not the reason for the venom spewed at the Other, they're the excuse for the venom spewed at the Other.
>I don't understand the intensity of the establishment backlash against Ivermectin.
The US is extremely polarised right now and like a lot of ambiguous things COVID mitigation wound up getting pattern-matched to Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe. A lot of scientists are fairly apolitical, but establishment messaging is very definitely Blue.
This put a lot of emotional loading into an ideally-quite-dry question, and so the tiniest shred of a "lives are at stake" suddenly becomes front¢re (let us be clear; in a country of hundreds of millions a lot of things have lives at stake) and the deplatformers start reaching for their toolbox.
I disagree with Darin; I think most of the establishment messaging is honest, if foolish.
There are lots people who are scared of both COVID and COVID vaccines and aren't sure which is more dangerous. Evidence:
- Old people are much more likely to get the vaccine than young people, which indicates people are making a cost benefit calculation but overestimating the "cost" of the vaccine.
- You have people like Nicki Manaj encourage mask wearing but will not get the vaccine.
- My hairdresser was scared of both, and says a lot her friends are too. She did ultimately decide she was more scared of COVID and got the vaccine.
Now if you are scared of COVID and vaccine, and Team Ivermectin tells you not to be worried about COVID because their pill will protect you, that should make you less likely to get the vaccine. I'm not a huge fan of "risk-compensation" arguments against imperfect interventions because it's rare people risk compensate more than the benefits of the imperfect intervention, but here the benefit is probably zero so any risk compensation is harmful.
These were shared by a lady at my workplace, a few days after work announced that the vaccines would be mandatory, and the day before she abruptly left. No idea if she was terminated or stormed out. They were sent to the dept mailing list, then followed by a sorry disregard email. I think they're illustrative of what a lot of us think of the anti-covid-vax / pro-invermectin crowd, and of what that crowd thinks of us. I don't know what there is to do, or where we go from here.
"In the US, the Supreme Court has ruled that vaccinated people worldwide are products, patented goods, according to US law, no longer human. Through a modified DNA or RNA vaccination, the mRNA vaccination, the person ceases to be human and becomes the OWNER of the holder of the modified GEN vaccination patent, because they have their own genome and are no longer "human" (without natural people), but "trans-human", so a category that does not exist in Human Rights. The quality of a natural person and all related rights are lost. This applies worldwide and patents are subject to US law. Since 2013, all people vaccinated with GM-modified mRNAs are legally trans-human and legally identified as trans-human and do not enjoy any human or other rights of a state, and this applies worldwide, because GEN-POINT technology patents are under US jurisdiction and law, where they were registered. SOURCE of the decision of the US SUPREME COURT PDF HERE (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_1b7d.pdf) To follow how / if it applies to others, outside the US."
And
"Reasons why the jab cannot be mandatory and why not to take it This is 100% ILLEGAL. 1) there was to be a full experiments done on testing animals FIRST. When ALL the animals DIED, they stopped the experiments ! ***They are REQUIRED to explore all options to see if there already is an approved therapy on the market BEFORE even making jabs... Ivermectin and HQC were two that were acceptable. But they demonized doctors who used those safer therapies and banned their use, thus many lives were lost in the process !!! Also, Fauci had a contract with Moderna back in 2015 I think. Mass amounts of PCR tests were also sent world wide between 2017 and 2019... Event 201was held in October 2019 simulating a corona virus pandemic... Boom - then we have one ! Not coincidental or suspicious at all ??!!! Fauci had also written a paper how the two therapies above were great in treating the SARS virus as a treatment and cure .... 2) This is NOT FDA approved. It is under the Emergency Authorization Act as an "Experimental GENE THERAPY Injection... It is NOT even a vaccine ! 3) By not going through ALL the protocols set by the Nuremberg Trials, they are breaking the Nuremberg Laws !!! 4) A drug CANNOT be mandated that has NOT been approved by the FDA. And that is not saying it is safe even then - look at all the commercials for lawsuits against FDA treatments all night long on your tv... 5) Why would anyone want to take a product where the manufacturers are NOT LIABLE for any deaths or injury ? If they are not willing to stand behind it, it is defective at best and nefarious at worst. 6) The clinical trials are not even done until 2023... We are the lab rats ! They won't even list all the bad stuff until the trials are finished !!! But we see all the deaths, injuries and diseases that these jabs are giving people, and they still line up for it AND make their CHILDREN get it !! Children have not been tested for this yet ! 7) If your employer makes this mandatory for you or anyone else, they too could be subject to breaking the Nuremberg Laws. One of the penalties is EXECUTION for breaking any one of these Laws. The employers also are 100% liable for any injury or death you may have ...not the manufacturers. Remind them of this when they want you to take the jab....especially the execution part. NOTE - If you or anyone knows of someone injured or died, contact PJI.Org On their site they have a PDF about your rights with this whole hot mess, and they can represent you for free. If you die or get injured, your insurance may refuse to pay ANY BENEFITS due to you knowingly got involved in what they term as Risky Behavior... Like some one jumping out of a plane without a parachute .. So say goodbye to all that money you paid into your burial and health insurance... 9) These jabs do NOT prevent you from getting the virus in fact, more people get the virus directly after the jab . They also then shed the virus onto non vaxxed people. Unvaxxed are exposed to vaxxed are experiencing miscarriages, changes in their menstrual cycles for the women, and other things are popping up. The vaxxed are dying from the Delta varient in more numbers than the unvaxxed... 10) During the Senate Committee Corona Virus hearings, they had various doctors that were highly educated speaking about how dangerous these are and that there has been more deaths and injuries from these jabs than with all the other approved vaccines in history COMBINED, that they should have been pulled with just the first couple of deaths and injuries... LINKS to the brave doctors testifying https://youtu.be/mIPb0AtEvAEhttps://youtu.be/MGboD4KAgbM 11) The CDC was recently caught removing a large amount of jab injuries and deaths on their VAERS website. It has been estimated that 150 THOUSAND people have died from the jabs. So I have given just some of the facts as to why people may not choose to get this. It isn't that they are anti-vaxxers, They are just Pro Life !!! KNOW YOUR RIGHTS ! I made that so people have a defense when getting attacked by people or employer This was created by Brenda Purvis https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0auna1tA?share_id=eyJ1c2VyaWQiOjQ5MTUyMDIxLCJkb2NfaWQiOiIwYXVuYTF0QSIsInRpbWVzdGFtcCI6MTYyNjI4MTE3MTIyN30=&s=a7&pd=03KEgXnK&hl=en_US&lp=v2"
There's a rational mode of thinking where you are weighing evidence and making tradeoffs. Living there is hard work, you're constantly having to read papers and try to remember how some weird ass statistical tool or clinical trial design is supposed to work, there aren't any easy answers, and even when you've done your best you know you might just turn out to be wrong. Most people are pretty bad at this, probably journalists and politicians are mostly very bad at this, and to be honest, almost nobody is really good at it.
There's also a moralistic/tribal mode of thinking, where you are following norms yourself, enforcing norms on others, denouncing shirkers and wreckers, etc. This is easy--our brains are evolved for this kind of game, it's fun, it's accessible to the dumbest and least educated people. Probably journalists and politicians are extra good at this game.
Almost from the beginning of covid, most mainstream people with prominent voices/platforms were playing the moralistic/tribal game. Racism is the real virus. Get a load of these weird aspie racist techbros wearing masks and using hand sanitizer. Sanitize surfaces and wash your hands! Masks are only for medical personnel. The lab leak hypothesis is racist and must be suppressed. Joe Rogan's taking horse dewormer.
A few people were playing the rational game, but they were mostly not the people with the biggest megaphones. And one reason they didn't have the biggest megaphones is that most people don't want to play that game, and to be honest most of them probably can't do it very well and couldn't even if anyone had ever bothered trying to teach them how.
They are "much less" likely to spread COVID according to Fauci. The exact opposite of what you claimed.
Why are you spreading misinformation?
Every single study has found that it reduces transmisssion.
We are boosting because immunity wanes over time and because antivaxxers continue to spread the disease. To actually reach herd immunity we'd need to vaccinate about 95% of the population due to the infectiousness of the virus.
Sadly antivaxxers lie about this because they don't want to come to grips with the fact that they're killing people.
You don't understand how vaccines work at all, on even the most basic of levels.
It's time for you to realize you are a complete non-expert and all of your opinions are wrong. Delete EVERYTHING you believe. EVERYTHING. Scrap it ALL.
Vaccines do not - and NEVER HAVE - prevented all infections. Ever.
What they do is greatly lower transmission.
For a disease to proliferate in the population, it needs to infect at least one person per person it infects. A disease that fails to do so will gradually die out.
A vaccine that lowers transmission rates by an order of magnitude will cripple the spread of a disease, and result in it declining in the population.
Your FALSE belief that vaccines provide 100% immunity is causing you to create an alternate universe where you are creating nonsense and inserting it into things.
Yes, immunity wanes - but the word "rapidly" appears nowhere in what he said. That was something you hallucinated, you inserted it in because you NEED it to be true.
Breakthroughs are not about preventing transmission to other people per se, but actually getting sick if you are vaccinated. And, again, everyone knew that there were going to be breakthrough infections - no vaccine is ever 100% effective against illness.
Vaccines can and do require boosters. Many do, in fact. We had no idea whether or not we would require them for COVID. We know we do now, and are getting them, and they boost immunity and reduce infection rates.
Your belief is that vaccines do not prevent all infections and are therefore worthless. But that is wrong. Vaccines have never prevented all infections. What they do is greatly reduce the risk of infection.
This has been pointed out time and again and again.
You don't understand the basics, and get very upset and start raging out when you are confronted on them.
You don't want to admit you are wrong, and have such a bad case of confirmation bias you are making up things and inserting them into things.
What do you count as "greatly"? Current evidence is that they lower the chance of infection, but by a good deal less than one order of magnitude. Different sources give different estimates for how contagious someone who has been vaccinated but is infected is, with some finding that there is no significant difference.
Elsewhere in your comments you use "Fauci says" as if it were a strong argument. Fauci is on record, in a NYT interview, saying that what he says is changed by what he expects people to believe, that he is raising his estimate of the requirement for herd immunity in response to polling evidence on people's willingness to get vaccinated. That is an admission that his public statements are sometimes lies — from his standpoint, virtuous lies. You can find a discussion and a link at:
> Vaccines do not - and NEVER HAVE - prevented all infections. Ever.
Reality:
The polio vaccine is 99% to 100% effective[1]. This is why there isn't any polio anymore. People expected a similar effect for COVID vaccine and they certainly weren't shy about advocating it in those terms. Three times back to back cognitive fitness champ Joe Biden:
"You're OK, you're not going to – you're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.
"If you're vaccinated, you're not going to be hospitalized, you're not going to be in the IC unit, and you're not going to die."
Blue team fantasy:
> What they do is greatly lower transmission.
Reality:
Gibraltar Vaccination Rate 140% (it's close to 100%, the rest are visitors). New cases 1341 / 100k [2]
PHE England: “In individuals aged 40 to 79, the rate of a positive COVID-19 test is higher in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated." [3]
Blue team fantasy:
> Yes, immunity wanes - but [not] "rapidly"
Reality: AZ effectiveness against transmission turns negative at four months (4! months!) [4]. Tell me that is not rapid. Just say it once and then everyone can move one since you clearly don't show a single ounce of good faith
Blue team goal post shifting:
> Your FALSE belief that vaccines provide 100% immunity is causing you to create an alternate universe where you are creating nonsense and inserting it into things.
These goal posts are shifted far and fast, the logistics are amazing. Just yesterday everyone was saying "we can end this pandemic if only everyone got the jab".
> And, again, everyone knew that there were going to be breakthrough infections
are you actually this deep into the kool aid or are you trying to gaslight us?
A simple google search is a fictional reality which does not match actual reality. I find it hard to believe that you are not aware of google's "helpful" suppression of inconvenient facts. Citing "Fauci says" is just absurd, he has lied over and over again, even under oath in front of congress. He has even openly admitted to some of the lies. Cite studies, not celebrities.
Have you looked at Fauci's Resume? He may be a celebrity now, but he is very well respected in his field based on research he did for the past 40 years on AIDS.
But if you don't like him, you can go elsewhere for your data. I quite like my BC Provincial health officer Dr Bonnie Henry, She earned a name fighting SARs in Ontario.
Go look at New Zealand's public health web page - They have handled the pandemic better than anyone.
Australia has also had good pandemic response despite having a conservative government.
Google has been doing a reasonably good job in filtering out misinformation. You may call that censorship, but bad actors have their own agenda and have managed to pollute every search engine out there. Regardless of the search engine you use, try to use neutral terms with your queries so that you are not returned biased results.
Someone who has proven to consistently lie about a subject does not become credible simply because they used to do something other than lie to the public. Choosing alternative celebrities does not meet the request to cite studies, not celebrities.
This is not a question of "neutral terms", it is clear and blatant censorship. Compare google's results to other search engines for the same searches. Claiming "oh we're censoring facts we don't like because we know better than you what you should read" does not make it some benevolent act. If I use google, I can not find Dr. Ozaki explaining his recommendation for doctors to conduct clinical trials on ivermectin. If I use a search engine that does not censor facts for the US government, I can find both written articles quoting him, as well as the video of him originally giving the press release. The only reason for this discrepancy is the government/media complex's disinfo campaign about ivermectin. They simply do not want people to see the truth, that real doctors have genuinely recommended standard, safe, properly conducted, clinical trials for ivermectin. Real recommendations have been "we should do clinical trials on this, because the epidemiological data suggests it could have a benefit". This contradicts their narrative that ivermectin is unsafe livestock medication baselessly recommended solely by evil far right russian trump nazi terrorist klansmen radio hosts.
I'm pretty sure I know which group is involved with ivmmeta, though I don't know which members run it.
I think the motivation is that the authors' self-image involves them "solving covid". They need to have found & promoted a cure by the end of the pandemic. They've made a bunch of websites for different potential drugs and hyped the most promising ones. They believe that ivermectin works, but it's not something they are unbiased about.
This group has also decided that covid vaccines are net bad for most of the population, and are hyping ivm as an alternative to vaccines, along with accusations against establishments re: why they promote vaccines but not ivm. I'm betting if the messaging was "establishments are too slow" and "vaccines and ivm together" there would be far less backlash.
This is the single best article written on ivermectin throughout the whole pandemic. Thank you.
I've been looking at ivermectin since the early months of the pandemic. I had heard of the I-MASK+ protocol when people were still using ventilators on COVID patients (with an 85% death rate in NYC), and it sounded really promising to me. So I've been really open-minded as to whether or not it actually worked.
But over the next several months, and now 18+ months later, it never really succeeded in having a home run in terms of proving that it worked. I don't think we need medication that decreases viral load 3 days faster, we need medication that keeps people out of the hospital and from dying. It was pretty clear anecdotally that ivermectin wasn't doing that.
I think basically it comes down to the fact that when you have a disease where 85% of people suffering no or only mild symptoms and 0.5% death, it's going to be a very hard disease to determine if a treatment worked or not.
I think the science we have been doing over the course of the pandemic has been largely garbage because we haven't learned anything to help us whatsoever since March 2020. If I remember correctly, the mRNA vaccine was designed within days of the virus being sequenced in January. The rest of the time on the vaccine was spent making sure it was safe, but you can argue that nothing new was learned after the vaccine was created. Since then, we haven't really learned anything about the virus, about the transmission, how to fight it, etc. Our best bet is to wear masks and stay outdoors, which we already knew.
What we as a species really need is a global mobilization of scientists, where a single global committee designs a thousands of different experiments that would help us narrow down how the virus works and how to fight it, and divvy up the work globally. We could have worked in parallel doing thousands of experiments to help us figure out what exactly we need to do to beat COVID, but instead the millions of scientists around the world were trying to determine if SARS-CoV-2 was found in vaginal fluid or semen.
The parallel rapid response trials idea been proposed before COVID-19, and is thankfully being more actively pursued now. It's is a big part of both the UK 100-day proposal for response and the White House's $65bn proposal, championed by Eric Lander and OSTP, which unfortunately wasn't a high-enough priority for congress in the just-passed infrastructure bill, so it was mostly eliminated.
I was a bit hyperbolic in terms of my choice of words, and I couldn't edit my words after posting. But practically we haven't found anything real. Yes, in the last couple of weeks there have been pills that came out that cut the risk by 85% which is finally what we need. But aside from finding those drugs, we don't know why it causes severe symptoms in some people, and almost no symptoms in most people. Is it genetic? We have no idea, but it's been 2 years and we don't know. We don't know why many people lose their sense of smell. We don't fully understand the mechanism of transmission. The only definitive thing we know is that as the age of the person increases, the chance of severe symptoms and death rises exponentially, but we don't know why. We don't know why kids are largely immune to COVID. We don't know why some people are dying of blood clots, although there was a recent study saying that the spike protein may interfere with some parts of the clotting process.
There's so much we don't know. The medications like fluvoxamine give a percentage improvement but it's not a home run like the Pfizer drug. I would classify that as a statistical modifier rather than a real medical treatment. We need something akin to penicillin that effective solves bacterial infection, we don't need things that only provide statistical significance to moderately improving symptoms over a large number of people.
Read the whole Vox article, it's not just about "the last couple of weeks", but also says, for example that "In the nearly two years since this coronavirus started spreading, we’ve learned a lot about how to care for patients who are sick enough to require hospital care. Cheap, widely available drugs such as dexamethasone have substantially reduced the hospital mortality rate for severe Covid-19." And there have been tons of other research findings about the virus, transmission, etc. since March 2020.
"What we as a species really need is a global mobilization of scientists, where a single global committee designs a thousands of different experiments that would help us narrow down how the virus works and how to fight it, and divvy up the work globally."
And if that committee ends up committed to a mistake, as committees not uncommonly do, there is nobody outside it to point out the error. Centralization is dangerous.
Great read, Scott. You moved me from the “IVM probably works a little” basket to the “IVM probably doesn’t work” basket.
I do think there’s a few points you could add to your analogy that seem fairly important to the more educated and knowledgeable vaccine hesitant people I know:
- Previous brain implants have gone through long trial periods to ensure they don’t cause adverse effects. However, the aliens believe the quantum memetic plague constitutes an emergency and there isn’t time for such a process. Plus they say the early trial results look great.
- The first implants start getting inserted and some rare side effects are noticed. In the worst cases, some of the implanted die as a result. The aliens insist there’s nothing to worry about, as it’s a very rare occurrence. But you can’t help wondering if they’re investigating the problem in good faith.
- A few months into the program the implants stop working as well as promised. The memetic plague has mutated, and found new ways around the implants. The aliens acknowledge this but maintain it changes nothing of practical importance. Herd immunity to the memes may no longer be possible.
- Anyone promoting vaccines in public is censored. On some platforms, even non-promotional discussion of vaccine efficacy is targeted.
- A few more months pass and the aliens decide that implants will be mandatory, and refusal will mean you cannot use any alien technology! Alien tech has already permeated all of earth life. They’re also implanting children, who were supposed to be almost unaffected by the memetic plague. The brief explanations are difficult to parse, and seem somewhat circular to the human mind.
I'd love to know the answer to these questions too, because they primarily go ignored and unanswered by anyone knowledgable I know who's in the camp "I've taken the vaccine and it's safe, and you should too".
Probably some mix of cognitive dissonance and not wanting to think any longer about a problem they think they solved with the solution that these questions bring into doubt.
Yes, it's important to address the reasonable concerns people have, but also to be clear about the facts, and these analogies break down.
To be clear, the COVID vaccines went through the same trials other vaccines did, just in parallel and with much less delay, and regardless of the reasonableness of early hesitancy, we do have really good data on levels of side effects now that over half of earth is vaccinated - and they are far lower than what we see from COVID-19. And there is strong evidence that the vaccines work very well for active immune response, but that only kicks in after a couple days, so people get mild COVID once the neutralizing antibodies are no longer circulating.
(And the "memetic plague" analogy breaks down once we can see people dying from the plague en masse.)
> To be clear, the COVID vaccines went through the same trials other vaccines did
Thats false. Scott makes a big story about aliens but it's completely unecessary. I just don't trust you (you speaking for the establishment here) because you keep lying to me. You don't even feel bad and when I point ot out you'll just slander me.
The establishment would've been much better off with "Trump got that idiot FDA out of the way, so these vaccines could be tested at better than the snail's pace those silly safety officers wanted to do it at."
But that would've involved saying something nice about Trump.
why did vaccines have higher all cause mortality than placebo in pfizer's six month follow up? 21 vs 17? with much of the mortality coming from cardiac issue? I believe moderna had similar all cause mortality iirc?
Which study do you mean? I only know DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2110345 being referenced as "pfizer's six month follow up", there the mortalities are 15 vs. 14.
I maintain that the real conspiracy is the FDA keeping a helpful vaccine out of our hands for so long, which makes the metaphor even more fun. Imagine that a group of human bureaucrats had studied the alien biochips, approved some after a long process and refused to approve others, but all the material evidence was that the biochips worked better than expected. The only bumps in the administrative processes are when the bureaucrats blame one biochip for an unrelated problem and make it illegal to use for a brief period. We get evidence even months later than breaking the chips in half confers the same level of protection, even though the bureaucratic process made that difficult to study. Have I totally killed this metaphor yet?
Also the part where the bad orange alien said the brain implant would be ready soon, and a bunch of human leaders said not to trust the bad orange alien's brain implants. And the alien brain implant manufacturers probably delayed releasing the brain implants because they didn't like the bad orange alien. Then a couple of months later all the people who said not to trust the bad orange alien's brain implants, after getting the brain implants themselves, said you absolutely must get the brain implants.
There is one quote to this effect, and you’re leaving out the literally very next thing that person said. “If Dr. Fauci, the doctors, tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it."
In other words, she sensibly discounted what someone trying to win and election said — someone who also was claiming 20 million doses would be distributed by the end of October 2020 even as the pharma companies were saying that was impossible. No one ever mentions that context.
It was still a stupid comment, because the vaccine wasn’t being cooked up at Trump campaign headquarters. The “doctors” were already hard at work overseeing the development process of a vaccine based on a new but well-studied technology following an abbreviated but extensive testing program. All of this was well known and well publicized - the vaccine rolling out on Trump’s word without the doctors signing off was never an option on the table.
It was a stupid comment, true, that was made in response to a flat out lie, one of many lies the orange man had been saying from the very beginning of the pandemic. Those lies had already led to a lot of confusion and social unrest, so the alternative was, what, allow him to just keep lying? No pushback whatsoever?
Could they have called out his lie on the timing without questioning the vaccines themselves? That's a bit of an issue, I suppose, because it turns out that his timeline (near the election) was far more accurate that his detractors, who consistently said 2021.
That leaves his opponents with two options - say that the vaccine was in fact rushed for the election and therefore potentially unsafe, or agree that the vaccines were good and Trump was closer to correct on timelines.
I see the Democrats dilemma on that question being significantly self-inflicted.
Certainly there was some way to say “look, Trump is being way too optimistic on the timeline, and is taking too much personal credit for the vaccine, but the process and technology is sound and we’re going to get a good vaccine out of it pretty soon”?
If we’re going to get into an argument over lies, exaggerations, and honest errors justifying lies and stupid comments in response - there are plenty to go around on all sides.
I would hope the side claiming the mantle of “Trust the Experts” would not indulge in “well my lies are okay, because HE started it”.
There are multiple statements to that effect. How does Trump lying about how many doses would be ready by what date make any of the statements made by Harris, Biden or Cuomo acceptable? There is no context that makes these statements responsible or honest unless their current position is irresponsible and dishonest. The same vaccines made and approved by the same people through the same processes do not become dangerous or safe based on political whims. Either we should be wary and skeptical of the rushed vaccines then and now, or we should "trust the science", shutup and take them then and now.
Interviewer: "Let's just say there's a vaccine that is approved and even distributed before the election, would you get it?"
Harris: "Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump."
Biden: "If and when a vaccine comes, its not likely to go through all the tests that needs to be and the trials that are needed to be done."
Biden: "Who's going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?"
Cuomo: "You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences.’ I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”
Cuomo: “Frankly, I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion, and I wouldn’t recommend [it] to New Yorkers, based on the federal government’s opinion.”
All three of them knowingly and deliberately made it seem like there was something wrong with the vaccines before they knew anything about them and that people should avoid them simply because Trump exists. And looking at old twitter posts from before the election, it certainly worked. Thousands of dems tweeted about how they would never take the unsafe, rushed, "so-called" vaccine that Trump was dangerously and irresponsibly pushing.
Honestly, the most important difference is that previous mind implants weren’t being pushed hard by aliens.
People who took other vaccines but refuse THIS one, are doing so because they think (not without reason) that the people telling them “take it or else” are untrustworthy assholes who hate them. Everything else is post hoc rationalization by people who aren’t quite ready to admit that their real reason is basically “you can’t make me, nah nah nah”.
It’s unfortunate that the vaccine didn’t hit about 3 months earlier, to become well-established prior to Biden taking over and “get the vaccine” being therefore slotted as a Blue coded behavior.
What's weird is that I think we already require tons of vaccinations to work, travel, and get educated, so why is this mandate suddenly more coercive?
The woman I'm talking about also made a big deal about how even though everyone else was wearing a mask she could get away with not wearing it in stores, elevators, etc. because no one is going to stop her. There's a certain type of vice signalling that I really don't think I'll ever understand.
See, all of my priors tend to point the other way. It seems obvious to me that the worst and most coercive government practices are things probably passed bureaucratically with the support of both parties and which have existed for decades already. I mean, I get that people move on headlines, but there's something frustrating about the "only the government coercion that existed before last Sunday" libertarian types.
For some jobs you do have to present certain vaccination records, particularly if you work in health care. (And they mean it: when I couldn't find some of mine, I had to get re-vaccinated to keep my job! This was back in 1980!) And in some jurisdictions you have to annually prove you got a flu shot to work in health care.
As for travel--you haven't lived through a raging respiratory pandemic before, so no, nobody ever asked for proof of immunizations for routine travel. That said, when my daughter went to school in France before the pandemic broke out, she had to present immunization records in order to get a student visa. And foreign students who come to the US for college also must present proof of several immunizations--a practice that substantially predates this pandemic.
>And not once you have *already had the job*, often for years!
Flu vaccines were declared annually mandatory at my work a few years back, after I'd had my job for years. There was no grandfathering in of older workers. It was get the jab or get out. I knew a couple of people who groused about it, but no one who posted histrionic screeds on facebook before dramatically insisting on being fired.
It's standard for a country to screen people entering it for disease. Your right to enter a foreign country is only whatever right that foreign country gave you.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone traveling to a country that hasn't eliminated polio has to have their polio vaccine. I'd consider it malpractice for a country to not enforce that.
But that's at borders, and I expect to have less rights at borders. (See above re: only the rights the foreign country gives me.)
>I think we already require tons of vaccinations to work, travel, and get educated
No. We require a few vaccinations dangerous childhood diseases if we want to put our children in a public school. You do not need to attend a public school to get educated, and there is a strong argument that doing so will in fact seriously hinder you from getting educated. You do not need to be vaccinated for typical work or travel. Since COVID is not a dangerous disease, and the people trying to mandate vaccination against it openly say that they hate me and want me dead, and are also trying to mandate all sorts of idiotic things that are clearly not for health reasons, it is pretty rational to be skeptical of such vaccine mandates.
How sure are you that if vaccination had gotten underway three months earlier it wouldn't have gotten slotted as Red coded behavior? That could have been even worse, given that the Blues have much bigger megaphones. Imagine a skepticism campaign in the NYT quoting Harvard professors on why the dangers of the vaccine were being hidden to make Trump look good.
I don’t think that was ever likely, because the Blues were never that wedded to anti-vaccine, and were always pro-intervention in COVID. The anti-Trump vaccine handwringing was just cheap partisan refusal to give Trump credit for anything positive.
The Blues of Europe were clamoring for a vaccine too, so I don’t think the democrats could have maintained that dissonance post-Trump.
You have a selective memory. Dems were initially 100% hostile to doing ANYTHING about COVID. It was "just a flu" and you were anti-science if you suggested otherwise. Wearing masks made you an immoral fear monger, and the most basic common sense action of "restrict travel from the country experiencing the outbreak of some unknown new contagious disease" made you an evil racist. It was only once it was too late to do anything and the virus was securely endemic in North America and Europe that they were willing to flip the script and start the "two weeks to flatten the curve" psyop. Boy, it has been a long two weeks...
- Many people get the memetic plague, and recover. Presumably this confers some manner of immunity, yet the aliens keep insisting that these people need the brain chip and indeed act as though having the plague and recovering confers zero protection against future plague infection. No discussion of the value of brain chips addresses this; the benefits are always in terms of never infected/recovered humans with or without chips.
I will try and write up some more on this issue on my own blog this evening... traveling for work keeping me busy all day.
Jordan Peterson has entered the chat. He loves the way that linguistic alignments reveal previously unseen connections. Frequently correct in that analysis.
Great read... you must have a nuclear reactor mod for your brain, I can't imagine having the energy, time and focus to write these pieces, but I'm grateful that you do. You're probably the only person I trust at this point to do a fair analysis.
I suspect a lot of this is that it is one of the 10 required beliefs of Red Tribe membership, and you can't pick and choose, or God forbid, take some from the 10 required beliefs of Blue Tribe membership. I seem to remember an old SSC about this
"For more evidence that the number of true young-earthers is fairly small, consider another question from the survey run by the National Science Board since the early ’80s. In that survey, about 80% consistently agree “The continents on which we live have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.” Ten percent say they don’t know, leaving only about 10% rejecting continental drift over millions of years. Though young-earth creationists often latch onto continental drift as a sudden process during Noah’s flood (as a way to explain how animals could get from the Ark to separate continents), they certainly don’t think the continents moved over millions of years. This question puts a cap of about 10% on the number of committed young-earth creationists, lower even than what Bishop found. More people in the NSB science literacy survey didn’t know that the father’s genes determine the sex of a baby, thought all radioactivity came from human activities, or disagreed that the earth goes around the sun.
In short, then, the hard core of young-earth creationists represents at most one in ten Americans—maybe about 31 million people—with another quarter favoring creationism but not necessarily committed to a young earth. One or two in ten seem firmly committed to evolution, and another third leans heavily toward evolution. About a third of the public in the middle are open to evolution, but feel strongly that a god or gods must have been involved somehow, and wind up in different camps depending how a given poll is worded."
I think all of these surveys and analyses ignore cognitive dissonance and framing.
I know plenty of religious people who will agree with both "God created the earth and humans less than 6,000 years ago" *and* "The earth is billions of years old, and humans evolved over millions of years" - many would say they agree with both on the same survey, and even more would agree to either of them if asked separately.
Are these people young earth creationists? Depends on what you mean.
Also, almost all Christians say that the bible is true, and might say the account of creation is "true," but only biblical literalism says that it's "*literally* true", and even then, what literally means in this context is a bit fuzzy. And despite all of that, I strongly suspect that even most people who would say that the bible is literally true would also say that the earth is billions of years old if asked the question on a survey that was clearly not about religion, because framing.
I'd say that those people are consistently "irrational". They don't particularly care about truth-values of factual claims which have no bearing on their daily lives, and when asked, they answer whatever they guess to be socially appropriate. Probably the majority of humanity has this kind of mindset, an yet it's unfathomable to a certain kind of intellectual, who frequents spaces like this one, and is often baffled by aliens-fearing normies.
No, I think that they do see "the earth was created 6000 years ago" and "the earth is billions of years old" as being two different categories of knowledge.
Were I taking a survey that asked "was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple?" and it was a plain "yes/no" answer with no room for development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit, and furthermore my impression of the entire survey was "ha ha let's laugh at the knuckle-draggers who believe in gods", then I'd be "Eff you, I'm one of those knuckle-draggers and not alone was it an apple, we know for a fact it was a Cox's Orange Pippin".
Numbers have falling a little recently. However, when you include people who accept that the age of the earth is older, but also (wrongly) believe that because evolutionary theory does account for some aspect of biodiversity, design is a reasonable inference - creationism in other words - the number balloons up to 60-80% of Americans being creationists depending on how you ask the question.
I wonder if this is the type of thing that you might cover in an epistemology/philosophy of statistics class. Every time I see something like this I just end up more and more confused about what kinds of reasoning is legitimate, and when does statistical evidence actually point to the conclusions that it naively says it does.
Great article, thank you! But I really wish you got the worm hypothesis advanced enough, in your view, to feel more than 50% confident that worms are a significant confounder.
Before your months late entrance into this, I recall looking up who maintained this site. Since I did that, I have associated it with the FLCCC Alliance.
Tonight, when I went to icann whois, the first auto text suggestion was for ivmmeta.com. I recall finding that it either shared a server or owner with FLCCC.
Caution, my memory may not be serving correctly:
I may have looked up information about FLCCC the same night, but I am quite sure my inquiries were at different times.
I may have connected them, because the "meta" and "C19" sites link to FLCCC.
I don't remember enough detail to give to say definitively what it was I saw that made me sure of a connection.
With the caveats out of the way, I will say I have high confidence that this site is indeed related to the Alliance.
But most alarming in my view is that there are identical sites for HCQ and Vitamin D. And the analyses appear to show similar levels of effectiveness as IVM.
I've been called both a BigPharma apologist/corporate shill and a pinko by anti-vaxers since the pandemic started. I'm certainly much closer to the latter, but it illustrates how generic heuristics can override judgement by otherwise rational people.
I have some speculations here, but a friend quite correctly pointed out it was hypocritical for me to get upset about NYT doxing me and also add useful information to the debate about who runs ivmmeta, so I'm not going to.
Fair enough. I wouldn't expect you to opine on it, nor criticize you for refraining.
I didn't want to wildly speculate, so I added the cautionary notes. I just wish I would have taken a screenshot. At the very least, I could (dis)confirm my memory with one. Then again, it's interesting trying to figure out ways I may have formed a mistaken impression.
Buried under all that is my real issue with those sites--the mirrors, the identical formats, shared servers, and anonymity all purporting to show three different treatments with similar effectiveness as an alternative to vaccines.
It screams ulterior motive or motivated reasoning to me.
Err, it's not doxxing to say that sites X and Y are run by the same person(s)? But I'm not sure how you or Kurtz would know: WHOIS does not reveal the owner of IVMMETA.COM and its About page gives no names.
This whole thing was really excellent, but it does give me an opportunity to ride one of my hobby horses:
Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote was not an explanation for why the poor did not join the communist movement, but rather a sorta self-deprecating description of those who did. In other words, he was complaining about the champagne socialists who were in the movement, rather than aspirational workers who were not. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed
Read up on "luxury beliefs" — fashionable beliefs that confer social status upon the elites who hold them, but lead to damaging consequences to those in the lower economic strata.
Scott, I really appreciate this careful review of the data on ivermectin. While it mostly matches what I already thought about the subject, it presents it much more clearly and carefully than anywhere else I have seen.
Which is why I'm so baffled that you are so confident that the covid vaccines are safe and effective that you don't even feel the need to present an analysis of the studies on the subject, and instead went with this analogy about aliens. Even though the Pfizer study to get FDA approval was just shown to be partially based on falsified data, and the all cause mortality was higher in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm. Even though the trial for children 5-11 did not show any clinical benefit at all (because no one had any serious outcomes in either arm). Even though no one has demonstrated any population level association between vaccination rate in a state or country and covid rate.
I really, truly wish I was as convinced as you seem to be that the vaccines are safe and effective. But it doesn't match my personal experience, and what I'm seeing in the world around me. I know that one shouldn't base one's epistemology on personal anecdotes, but I haven't found the studies on this subject nearly as reassuring as I would have hoped. I see everyone dismissing the sudden spike in VAERS reports because causation can't be proven--but why would the rate of reports suddenly increase so much compared to previous vaccines? All the papers I've seen about VAERS prior to covid suggest that it almost certainly underreports the true rate of adverse events from vaccines rather than overreporting them.
I know it's a huge, probably impossible ask, but if you could find the time to try to dig into this subject, I would be truly, deeply grateful. I want to be convinced, and I believe that I can be convinced that the vaccines are safe and effective (I actually am vaccinated, but based on the research I have done since then, I regret it and don't want to get the booster). I see vaccine denialists making obvious errors and exaggerations, but I also see them pointing out what seem to me to be serious flaws and shortcomings in the studies supporting vaccination. I'm not saying I think the vaccines are definitely unsafe/ineffective, but especially for young healthy people who are at low risk for covid, I'm not seeing the convincing case that getting vaccinated is statically a good idea that I would like to see, especially considering the many places that are now mandating them.
This is the ask I am also looking for, and hundreds (if not thousands) of Scott's readers and those influenced by him would also benefit from.
I have yet to find anyone willing to do this type of analysis once they've taken the shot. In my experience, it is the level of cognitive dissonance, being excluded from society, and the strong affect that being labeled "conspiracist" or "anti-vax" has that stops them from doing this work. I hope Scott would not be susceptible to that and willing to dig deeper.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that we should vaccinate children to protect them; I'd presume we'd vaccinate children to protect their parents and grandparents. So the only relevant criterion would seem to be infectiousness.
How about polio vaccines? Children are still routinely immunized against polio, and last year there were about 150 cases of polio worldwide, all of them in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I would say the odds that a random American kid will get polio are far lower than the odds that he'll get a serious (life-threatening) case of COVID.
Those vaccines are still mandated. Are you arguing that it's OK because 70 years ago there *was* a clear clinical benefit and...dunno, inertia or something? Or that requiring polio vaccines in 2021 is just as evil as requiring COVID vaccines?
Children are not routinely immunized against polio because of speculative benefit for others, they are routinely immunized against polio because of a known benefit to the children themselves. Children can die from polio, and the vaccine does lower the chances of that happening. Known and proven benefit, to the child being vaccinated. The fact that the odds of that benefit proving useful are very small does not mean it is speculative, or that it is intended to benefit someone else.
That hasn't been true for decades. As polio became much rarer the goal was to establish "firewalls" between vulnerable populations so that the virus could be contained (and eventually eradicated).
It really is very similar to the current arguments for COVID vaccination. And why would it not be? It's not like public health people are just making everything up for the first time, they've thought similarly about these things for decades and are just doing what they've always done.
What's different this time is (1) it's happening on a much wider and faster time scale than ever before -- way, way more people are affected, and very promptly, this isn't happening over 5-10 years so we have time to get used to various realities, and (2) we have about 2-3 generations that have grown to adulthood without essentially no experience of serious pandemic disease. They're far too young to remember polio, and generally too young to remember AIDS.
So as I said elsewhere the Overton window on the balance of individual rights versus public health has shifted while nobody was looking, and measures that would've been uncontroversial in the 1950s[1] are subject to violent debate now. Mind you, I'm not saying the debate shouldn't be happening. In fact, in some sense, it's a remarkable testament to our near-complete victory over infectious disease that we can *afford* to have this debate.
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[1] When the polio vaccines first came out, it was well known that due to limitations in quality control, it would without doubt *give* polio to some children. But the numbers were run, and it was estimated more kids would be saved from polio than given polio, so campaigns went ahead, money was set aside for the inevitable victims, *and people accepted this*. Imagine if you will the same thing happening with COVID -- imagine Pfizer saying well, this vaccine has a 98% chance of saving your life but also a 2% chance of giving you a fatal disease (or paralyzing you for life). Can you imagine modern American just sort of accepting that, because the odds were decent? I can't. That's how we have changed, and that, I think, is a major part of why public health people -- who have NOT changed -- have been caught flat-footed and fumbled.
Repeating the premise does not change it. Again, I could get polio. Me, personally. I could become ill from it. The odds are low, not zero. Getting a polio vaccine lowers those odds significantly. There was a known, proven benefit, to ME PERSONALLY, for me to receive a polio vaccine. The existence of other benefits to other people does not erase this fact. It does not matter why you think a broad recommendation is or should be made, it matters if the factual claim that there is ONLY SPECULATIVE BENEFIT TO OTHERS is true. And it is clearly and objectively false. There is specific, proven benefit to the individual receiving the polio vaccine.
The difference in attitude is obvious. Polio is a serious disease, covid is not. And the polio vaccine is not mandated, it is recommended. Both of these facts make your attempt to conflate resistance to polio vaccination in the 50s to resistance to covid vaccines now an apples to oranges comparison.
I've heard lots of people claim the risk of COVID being "unknown" is a lot worse and scary than the risk of the vaccine, so the children's health was better off with this Uber-safe vaccine (which we supposedly have oodles of safety data for children on).
This reminds me of Scott's posts about masking. If we didn't have any data on this question, which risk is more plausibly concerning? It seems like we have almost no cases of modern vaccines endangering a child who is not immunocompromised, whereas you can probably find case studies for most infectious diseases in which they created serious comorbidities when striking young children.
Sure that’s a reasonable prior if you or your child is deciding whether to a get a new and insufficiently tested vaccine that might or might not help you avoid getting covid. It’s not a reasonable foundation from which you should try to force literally every person in the world to get the vaccine. I agreed with your prior. I got vaccinated. Since then pretty much all the data that has come out has caused me to update away from the vaccines being safe and effective. I don’t think the VAERS reports can or should be handwaved away. And even if the adverse reactions aren’t as bad as I think, the complete lack of evidence that the vaccines reduce transmission on a population level would be enough to make me think mass vaccination is not a good idea.
I’m not wedded to these beliefs. There is some evidence that vaccination is helpful, such as reduced rates of death from covid in the vaccinated. But the results on all cause mortality, which is what we really care about, are much more mixed. And more importantly, I haven’t seen anyone on the pro-vaccine side engage in good faith with what seem to me like pretty important criticisms of the vaccines. That’s why I would so much like to see a post on this by Scott, because I know that whatever his conclusion, it would be an honest effort to synthesize all the evidence, something I can’t find literally anywhere else.
I don't really get your point about scale. I'm not that special; if the cost benefit calculation points to me getting the vaccine, it seems like it would for everyone, and so then we should vaccinate everyone.
I don't think I'm special either, and I think the cost benefit calculation points marginally against me getting the vaccine (I used to think it pointed marginally towards me getting the vaccine, but that changed as more data came out). I don't find the study you link compelling; note that it ended in May before Delta was prevalent, and I think it is probably confounded by seasonality. But I concede that it's a data point in favor of the vaccines. Here's a paper that shows no benefit to vaccination: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
I'm sure this paper has problems too. Although I think the case against vaccination of young and healthy people is slightly stronger, I don't think this issue is clear-cut either way. Which is exactly why I want Scott to do a meta-analysis to help clear up some of the confusion.
I like this example, however I think it breaks down in the analogy of comparing this COVID-19 vaccine(s) to a modern vaccine. This vaccine does not have a comparable profile nor the decades of safety data of modern vaccines. I see this analogy made quite often, as thought its common belief ("comeone everyone knows vaccines are the safest thing in the world don't you know!") but where did this belief come from? What makes this vaccine comparable to modern vaccines besides the label that people use (call it a vaccine) and that you inject it into your arm?
This also why we vaccinate for chickenpox. Mostly harmless in children but much riskier for adults. We’ve never had more than 600 deaths from chickenpox in a year, but nonetheless it’s required in all 50 states. Measles, too, has never killed more than 1,000 per year in the states.
I never got chicken pox as a kid, now each year I ask myself: "do I get the vaccine this year, or do I hold out another year for a dead-virus version."
"In 1912, measles became a nationally notifiable disease in the United States, requiring U.S. healthcare providers and laboratories to report all diagnosed cases. In the first decade of reporting, an average of 6,000 measles-related deaths were reported each year." (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html)
This would be a much more compelling argument if there was any evidence that mass vaccination reduced covid transmission. While it seems like intuitively it must do something, studies have mostly shown no correlation between a location’s vaccination rate and covid cases, and some have even shown a slight positive association.
There’s tons of evidence that vaccination dramatically lowers risk of ending up in the hospital. I live in an area with low vaccination rates and our ICUs were overwhelmed with Delta, so much that they had to hire hundreds of temporary health workers from out of state. Those same hospitals were actually loaning people to New York and NEw Jersey when the first wave hit.
How does that relate to vaccinating children, who overwhelmingly do not suffer significant consequences of COVID and almost never end up in the hospital, vaccinated or not?
It lowers risk of hospitalization...for adults. It doesn't lower it for children because they were already not at risk of hospitalization for covid. And it doesn't prevent children from transmitting covid to adults because it doesn't prevent transmission.
Unrelated tangent, I'm still confused why I've spent so much time trying to engage people about this reasoning (that vaccinating children which doesn't stop transmission doesn't prevent getting it to adults) but they can't understand.
I thought it was well known that the vaccines reduce transmission, even if it's less effective against Delta? I don't see why "prevent transmission", which implies 100% effectiveness, would be relevant, the question is how high is the effectiveness (in reducing transmission) and it seems obvious it's not 0%. Of course, this by itself isn't a good reason to give it to kids since we would want to make sure it benefits kids individually rather than just being a benefit to society.
I think the evidence is that vaccination substantially reduces the probability of getting the disease, with current estimates of effectiveness against infection around 50%, some higher or lower and depending on time since vaccination. It isn't clear if it reduces the chance of transmission from a vaccinated person who is infected or not. So vaccinating children probably provides some reduction of risk for adults.
I would claim that. I vaccinate my kids against the flu, and that's a much less effective vaccine and a much less dangerous disease. What's the case for getting your kids a flu shot not a covid shot?
Besides, covid is both not particularly dangerous to kids and the number ten cause of child mortality, because nothing that we allow in our society is particularly dangerous to kids. This lets me remove (or at least dramatically mitigate) one risk from my kids lives. A remote risk, to be sure, but nonetheless one I'm glad to take off the board. I'd be happier to take the leaders off the board, but I can't get rid of cars or guns or cancer. Some of the other leaders I've worked pretty hard on. Drowning by making sure they can swim, and drugs and suicide by trying to raise them well and making as sure as I can that lines of communication are open between us and them. We do what we can do. This is something we can do, and it's a clear win in terms of their welfare.
I think any conscientious parent would get their kids vaccinated for their own sakes, quite aside from societal benefits. I'm not actually clear on the case against.
The case against is that there is some evidence that the vaccine increases your kids’ risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke more than it decreases their risk of dying of covid. The risk is still not high, but as you point out, it doesn’t need to be to exceed the risk from covid. Because we’re talking about such a small signal, the government would need to do very careful monitoring to detect it, monitoring that they’re not doing. The (highly imperfect) data we have suggests the covid vaccine is much more dangerous than the flu shot (and contrary to what you said, the flu is known to be much more dangerous to children than covid). Instead of trying to gather better data on the matter, health authorities have just said “Well, the data we have is imperfect, so we’ll just ignore it and keep saying it’s probably safe.”
Flu is probably more serious than COVID in younger children. But among the 5-11 age group neither is vary dangerous. That said it's unlikely the vaccine carries much of any risk either.
Also note the difference between a mandate, and an option. I don't know anyone who is against parents having the option to vaccinate their kids against COVID.
No, the flu is a much MORE dangerous disease for children than COVID is. The fact that media bullshit has become so prevalent that the majority of people think COVID is dangerous to children is both amazing and soul crushing. We are doomed.
>I'm not actually clear on the case against.
The known risk of serious side effects or death from the vaccines are higher than the risk of serious illness or death from COVID in children. This is pretty much the most basic and obvious simple probability decision one could be faced with.
You are wrong. More children have died from COVID this year than from flu. And long term negative side effects are way worse from covid. Including almost x10 chance of myocarditis compared to vaccine.
And their teachers, and school bus drivers, and neighbors, and non-parental caregivers... Now, it also seems to be the case that even when infected, children do not transmit the disease as readily as adults or (especially) adolescents, so you can still question the rationale and ethics of vaccinating little kids to protect others if the effect is small. But small children actually have pretty extensive networks of contacts, and they often include high-risk people.
Well, that's not even Medical Ethics 101. If that were true, we would never do organ transplants.
But apart from that, let me be clear that I am not a libertarian, not at all. I do not want to live in a world where people have no obligation to protect their communities unless it is in their personal interest to do so. I'm not persuaded, though my mind is open to revised information, that the community benefit from vaccinating little kids is large enough to warrant making it obligatory. But for adolescents and adults, I think it is a moral obligation to get vaccinated against Covid-19 unless you have a medical contraindication even though for the youngest among them, the personal benefit is very small.
Being an organ donor is a medical procedure, carried out in medical facilities, by medical personnel. It is usually voluntary, although in some cases, "consent" is obtained not from the donor but from family members when the donor is brain dead, but still has cardiorespiratory function (whether natural or artificial.) While that might not be fully coerced, it isn't really voluntary either, but I think it's OK. Either way, it cannot be said to be done for the benefit of the patient--it is an act of altruism on the part of the donor, and only the recipient benefits. Doctors willingly participate in these procedures.
No, I would not approve of coerced organ donation by still sentient people.
"Whether there is a moral obligation to do X and whether the state has the right or duty to enforce that obligation are entirely different questions. You are missing a premise."
That is true, and if you read my post carefully, you will see that I opined only on the moral obligation, not on whether the government should enforce it. So, no, I am not missing a premise.
High quality evidence of almost anything about this pandemic is hard to come by. Which is why I do not find it morally obligatory for young children to be vaccinated--it is not clear to me that the public health benefits are sufficient to warrant it. I said as much in my post.
" But for adolescents and adults, I think it is a moral obligation to get vaccinated against Covid-19 "
Being vaccinated reduced the risk to me of doing things that could expose me to Covid and I altered my behavior accordingly. In my case, the chance of getting Covid was almost certainly higher after vaccination, since before we were self-quarantining quite tightly, I and my wife both being in vulnerable age groups.
Suppose that is true on average — that decreased precautions more than cancel the reduction infection probability. Does it then follow that there is a moral obligation not to get vaccinated? To get vaccinated and continue acting as if you hadn't?
I'm reminded of reading a report -- could be urban legend, alas, but I want to believe -- that in an experiment when road signs were almost entirely removed from a stretch of mountain road people drove more safely and had fewer accidents.
How about treating pregnant women who test positive for Group B strep with antibiotics during delivery? This is done solely for the benefit of the baby, since it's endemic (and harmless) in the adult.
First off, a lot of children ARE dying of COVID - more and more over time. The deadliness of the disease in children is probably higher now than it was with the original strain.
Secondly, COVID causes significant long-term side effects in an appreciable number of people.
1) That's 605 confirmed cases. The actual count is larger.
2) Far less than half of under 18s have had COVID - probably less than 20%. It's amazing how you scream at me about "lack of data" but then make up a fraudulent number as a basis for your argument.
Post-COVID syndrome is well established at this point, and seems to affect somewhere in the realm of 5-10% of people. It's quite common.
People just are in denial about it because it means that they were wrong about everything and were downplaying a very serious disease. They aren't stable geniuses after all.
The serological testing has a very high false negative rate (20%+). Studies suggest only about 5-10% of people get these persistent symptoms. A 20% false negative rate is going to completely destroy your numbers. Persistent loss of smell seems to be the most common symptom by far.
You are, sadly, suffering from a severely bad case of confirmation bias where you only hear what you want to hear and distort reality around what you desperately want to be true. You are looking for reasons why you are right instead of looking for reasons why you are wrong. The fact that you made a flat-out false claim about what Fauci said shows this - and your response was to try and weasel out of it without admitting that you were wrong.
And using UK numbers in the US is questionable. The US is not the UK, it is much more spread out.
Without numbers this is just spreading fear which itself can contribute to ill health. How many otherwise healthy children, ie children that would not be in mortal danger from any other infection, have died from COVID in total? How many would have died from the flu in the same time frame?
People just go into denial about it because they don't want to admit that they were wrong.
And somewhere around 5-10% of people who get COVID suffer long-term problems from post-COVID syndrome. It seems to be modestly lower in children, but it still shows up in them fairly frequently.
This article is truly fascinating. I wonder if you've ever read it with a critical eye? Did you notice, for instance, that besides the headline nothing in the text shows that the girl died from Coronavirus?
They tell you she had a headache and a fever. These are symptoms from most of the non-chronic diseases that exist. She didn't have specific COVID symptoms.
They tell you that a COVID test was done but never what the result was.
They say she had a clear chest X-ray and then she died the next day. That's not how people die from COVID.
They make your mind do a lot of the work here. If you are very scared of COVID then of course everything here reads like she died from it.
If you actually look at the article, though, it's hard to come to that conclusion. Her parents were vaxxed. Her siblings were vaxxed. Presumably the teachers were vaxxed. The school was masking. There wasn't a single other COVID case around here. They even did contract tracing! That's just not how COVID works. Maybe she died from it but if so they should've mentioned that this case is like a unicorn.
Also, the pediatric death figure they give. Is that COVID or total? Why be so ambiguous? Why not give a comparison to the average?
My bet would be that all the errors and omissions in this piece go exactly one way which is to increase your fear. And then they tell you about the stupid school board people that you are now free to hate because they were saying Corona was over while this poor girl lay dying.
Never trust people that appeal to your worst self.
"The next day, Teresa's positive COVID-19 test results came back to her parents and when Jeff went to check in on her in her room, he found her unconscious. Teresa was rushed to a local hospital and transferred to Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters (CHKD) Norfolk, where she died."
You are trying to be smart.
But as Yoda once said - Do, or do not. There is no try.
"They say she had a clear chest X-ray and then she died the next day. That's not how people die from COVID."
Happens all the time, actually. COVID kills people outside of hospitals quite rapidly. O2 levels crash and they just stop breathing. You go from "feeling kind of sick" to "suffocating to death" in a matter of hours in many cases, often between 5 and 10 days after you start feeling sick.
And on top of that, some people also just flat-out have a heart attack and die. The number of sudden heart attacks has gone way up under COVID-19, and it is believed to be another potential complication of the disease.
Because they're vastly lower. Only 188 in 2018-2019's flu season below the age of 18 (which was a record up to that point), and only a bit over 100 for people in the 18-29 age group.
Meanwhile for COVID, the relevant numbers would be over 300 and over 2,200 per annum amongst those age groups.
So COVID kills more than 50% more under the age of 18 and almost 2,000% more in the 18-29 age range per year.
How many 85 year olds do we need to "save" from death by COVID so they can instead die 3 weeks later from pneumonia or influenza or heart failure, in order to justify killing one 6 year old?
That is a red herring. Answer the question. If you want to justify forcing a dangerous vaccine onto children, knowing it will kill some number of them, in order to slightly prolong the life already dying elderly people, then you need to quantify the value of those lives. Unvaccinated healthy children have a zero risk. None have died. Zero. Morbid obesity is a co-morbidity. Morbidly obese children are not healthy. Those teachers and parents are welcome to vaccinate themselves if they are worried. You do not force innocent children to take dangerous vaccines because you are worried about yourself, YOU take the dangerous vaccine. It is highly effective at preventing death, remember? So why do you keep dishonestly acting like everyone else needs to get vaccinated as if your vaccine won't work to protect you? If you taking the vaccine doesn't protect you, then why would anyone else get it to protect you? That is absurd.
It's not a red herring, it's literally why we vaccinate them. It protects them from the disease, and also protects other people around them from the disease.
Hundreds of children die from COVID every year. Vaccinating every single child against COVID will greatly reduce the death rate from COVID amongst children - the number of children who die from getting COVID vaccines would be 2 orders of magnitude less than the number of children who die from COVID.
> Unvaccinated healthy children have zero risk
And yet, a number of them have died without any confounding factors. I literally linked to one elsewhere in the thread.
IRL, many children have died of COVID without confounding health risks.
I get that you need to lie about everything because you are a conspiracy theorist who wants people to die rather than admit that they caused harm by lying about this stuff and deliberately spreading misinformation.
But you need to admit to yourself that you killed innocent children through your horrible, abhorrent behavior.
Isn't VAERS self reported? If people have a lot more concern about this vaccine, AND all of that concern is unfounded, wouldn't you still expect to see a spike in self reports which misattribute random issues to vaccines? It would also be true in that case that VAERS might go from underreporting to overreporting problems.
Any future investigations into VAERS might deploy an RCT design where half of participants are given a placebo and allowed to self report their side effects regardless... mostly joking.
I'll also bring out the big gun here: even if I was convinced that the most plausible accounts of coronavax side effects were true, they seem mostly minor. For the vast majority of people, and for society at large, there's no question that the vaccines are net life and QoL preserving, even if we accepted the marginal claim about side effects. This is of course hypothetical because there doesn't seem to be either good mechanisms or solid evidence behind any side effects claims.
VAERS is doctor reportet and the CDC itself says that the main problem with it is underreporting. Dimissing the huge VAERS spike in deaths as antivaxxers trolling is steping into the realm of hermetically sealed circular reasoning. It's also literally a conspiracy theory about a global conspiracy to fake high numbers of adverse events into various reporting systems like yellow card, UK and PEI, Germany.
I didn't say it was antivaxxers trolling. The most likely cause is genuine concern and worry. It isn't hard to imagine that people could wrongly attribute health problems that would've emerged regardless to a vaccine that they have mixed feelings on. The vaccine is being rolled out at scale in an unprecedented way with a very particular media environment around it so I don't think you can take the change in reporting as anything but a several confounded measure.
Look at ivermectin or any of the other drugs we've failed to prove help covid. They get studied because a doctor gives them to patients, the patients feel better, and the doctor notices. Without blinding, randomization, and large sample sizes we can't tell if "some doctors/patients say they have a good/bad feeling about this" is signal or pure noise.
At the very least, you ought to concede that it's plausible that the change in reporting could happen without changes in the rate of actual negative vaccine reactions. I'm not saying that's definitively true, but if you can't dismiss the possibility of a null result then your evidence isn't very solid.
That's a remarkable attitude. I'm curious why you have a passionate aversion to a one-time dose of mRNA but you're quite happy dosing yourself dozens, if not a hundred or more times, with another unnatural chemical. I can totally understand Vitamind D and zinc, as you eat those things all the time, but ivermectin isn't a normal part of the human (or any animal) diet. It's not a natural compound at all, it's synthesized by bacteria and its primary effect is to kill insects and worms by frying their nerves.
It could screw up your nerves, too, if you get too much of it, and it's not even implausible that it could cause some very minor nerve or brain damage at moderate doses taken long enough. A recent survey of potential side effects:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8087035/
Nobody knows or sure what might happen with long-term moderate use, because the normal treatment for worms is a short dose, and anyway the chance of some very minor neurological side effects would be totally acceptable if your other option is river blindness, so nobody has looked for this. But it seems like an odd risk to willingly run the clinical trial on yourself if you're otherwise in perfect health.
Do you know the CDC recommended ivermectin for international travel?
A little bit of research about this reveals there are many travelers who have taken it for months at the recommended doses, with no long-term side effects. There is plenty of long term data for its safety at the doses in doctor-recommended protocols for COVID.
In the case of COVID, instead of taking it prophylactically we could even just focus on taking it for the rare cases you go home with symptoms. That would reduce the risk profile even more drastically to basically an unprecedented low-risk level.
They did so against parasitic worms; not COVID.
On the question of safety, it doesn't matter what the goal was in taking ivermectin.
But this is all sort of red herring to me: the problem isn't people taking ivermectin, the problem is people believing Steve Kirsch when he says "covid vaccines have killed over 150,000 people in America alone!" or wanting to believe that guy who claims 90% of people who took the vaccine will be dead in a year or two.
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/debunking-steve-kirschs-latest-claims-97e1c40f5d74 if URL-only conversation is your thing
You are the best! https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-narrative-replaces-the-news-9ea
They both have very good reasons for saying that, and are most likely correct. Since either conclusion is a total disaster and the probability of them being correct is high, you have to assume they are correct because of expected value. Also, many other people have come to the same conclusions using different means.
Nope. The problem is people believing that Steve Kirsch must be wrong and vaccines couldn't possibly have killed anyone.
That's the problem.
Right or wrong thinking.
Black or white.
This or that.
And ad hominem. Personal hatreds, animosities taking the place of the real discussion.
I don't know how many people vaccines have killed but I'm more than ready to believe they've killed some. So why risk them?
Risk matching is the point. Isn't it?
But vaxers believe there's literally no risk with vaxes.
Vaxers generally believe a vax is something. Some 'thing'. You take 'a vax' and you've got some 'thing' that will now protect you against a virus.
Despite the evidence and clear statements everywhere that it won't.
And in apparent total ignorance of the fact that a vaccine only ever manipulates the immune system in one other way in the hopes of bringing forth a better performance from it.
They seem to be totally, totally ignorant of this.
To where they think : no vax = no protection. Vax = 100% protection.
Where the truth is, of course: no vax: 99.x% protection. Vax ( in best case scenario) 99.(x + 0.1) % protection. Plus risks.
And so on.
The whole narrative is about Vaccines.
And I maintain that is simply perpetuating a mass ignorance.
The question is all about the fire and the fire brigade which will put it out.
The fire is the virus.
The fire brigade is the immune system.
The vax is merely the fire alarm bell is the best analogy I can think of.
That corrupt narrative obscures the facts, all the facts.
That prior good health and attention to certain 'levels' of minerals and vitamins, etc can be equally or more effective at improving the performance of your immune system come the testing.
That's the problem. Ignorance and those who seek to perpetuate it, do nothing to diminish it.
Not only all that, but the so-called vaccines do not meet the medical or legal definition of vaccines. They are called vaccines to trick people into thinking they are vaccines. Nor are they genetic therapies. They're an experimental genetic manipulation. Who knows what they really do, or what they're meant to do, or what their long-term effects are. They sure don't protect against the virus - so what do they really do? And they are being mandated with a vaccine pass?
I see no benefit at all, except the $33 billion to Pfizer last year and $36 billion this year.
The vaccines are gates we're forced to line up for that state, "Vaccines will set your free." Don't believe them. And don't believe the sign with the arrow that says, "Showers," either.
It is odd that you do not believe Kirsch and 150,000 deaths. Have you seen the death data from openvaers.com? That data is CDC and FDA data. It is vastly underreported.
Are you not aware of the 2015 Harvard-Pilgrim VAERS study that found "only 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported"? That's an Under Reporting Factor of 100. Steve Kirsch used 6 independent methods to come up with his 41 URF. Have you seen them? Dr. Jess Rose, a biostatistician, applied mathematician, immunologist, biochemist, computational biologist, and 2019 woman's surfing champion, who programs in R, the VAERs language, calculated 31. 150,000 is a reasonable number. (For perspective the US has 55,000 deaths per week from all causes)
Are you aware (google: "S1 hypercoagulability" for the study) that the vaccines create micro-blood clots? Did you know that a BC physician, Dr. Charles Hoffe, found 62% of his vaxxed patients (900) had elevated D-dimer tests, which test for blood clots (https://tinyurl.com/wnrbc3hu). He lost his practice after writing a letter of concern to the Provincial Health Officer. Micro blood-clots block the capillaries that deliver O2 and nutrients to every cell and organ - think that could be causing those thousands of vaccine deaths reported in VAERS - and many more in a few years? Haven't you seen the UK study that found those Vaxxed lost their immunity after a few months where it went drastically negative and stayed there. Do you think that might kill you when need immunity? Guessin' you've not seen pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole's presentation: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Sjl0KqNIdNO2/
He's found that cancers are up by 20 times due to the immunity degradation from the Vax. Note the slides of clumped-up blood cells.
Seems like your approach is arguing from ignorance, like the fool MD who once told me, "If it were important, I'd have heard about it."
You have no data or studies - just wishful thinking. Your head is stuck in the sand. Get some data and studies if you want to present a credible comment.
Good man. Stick it to them. :)
I follow the principle "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
I wouldn't be surprised if Kirsch claimed to have "used 6 independent methods" to come up with his under-reporting factor, but looking at his article on the subject[1], I don't see 6 methods, I see only one. Even so. point taken: Kirsch is a master Gish Galloper, so he claims to have not one, not two, not six, but 12 methods in addition to his main VAERS-based method that "found an excess death rate of 150,000 or more".
Wow! 13 methods! Now, are any of those methods even the slightest bit reasonable? I'm sure you're nodding vigorously and indignantly without really thinking much about it. So, tell you what, why don't you deeply study method #5 entitled "Poll #1" and let me know what you find. Because as far as I can tell, Kirsch doesn't say what "Poll #1" even means.
But you know what extraordinary claims require, other than extraordinary evidence? A story that fits together. So. The minimum 150,000 deaths is supposed to be in just the U.S. alone, implying that there have been over a million (maybe 2 million?) deaths worldwide. That's a hell of a lot! So why is it that excess deaths line up with Covid deaths just about everywhere, but don't tend to line up with vaccination rates anywhere?[2]
Obviously, you're not going to be the slightest bit convinced by this counter-evidence. But the interesting question is why? What anchor belief[3] makes you insist on the 150,000 figure, reject the fact that excess deaths line up with Covid rather than vaccinations, and reject the principle of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
> You have no data or studies - just wishful thinking.
I have studied this issue about as well as a guy with a full-time job can be expected to do on weekends for free, I think.[4] It doesn't take that much research to notice that he is a liar.[5]
By the way, this thing Kirsch said bothers me:
> The URF of 41 is a minimum URF; the URF for “less obvious” events (including death) is always larger than this value. So for example, if you had menstrual problems, peripheral neuropathy, or your cancer got worse after the jab, the URF for that event might be 100 or more.
Kirsch is claiming that 41 is the ordinary under-reporting factor, but that the under-reporting factor actually *increases*, not decreases, as the side-effect gets more serious. Really? He is apparently saying that, if you felt ill and had to take a day off work after getting vaccinated, there is a 2.44% chance you'd file a VAERS report for that. If, on the other hand, you *DROPPED DEAD* there would be less than a 1% chance that ANYONE would bother filing a report? Does that make sense to you?
Tell me, does Kirsch ever explain to his throng that filing a VAERS report is legally required after serious adverse events including (obviously) death? Here's an FDA FAQ[6]:
> The reporting requirements for COVID-19 vaccines are the same for those authorized under emergency use or fully approved. Healthcare providers who administer COVID-19 vaccines are required by law to report to VAERS the following after vaccination:
> ....
> Serious AEs regardless of causality. Serious AEs per FDA are defined as:
> Death
> A life-threatening AE
> Inpatient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization
> (the list goes on for awhile)
Does Kirsch ever present evidence that doctors, family members and everyone else ignores these legal requirements?
And I've got two more words for you: base rate. Have you seen Steve Kirsch ever address the all-important issue of base rates? I haven't. Base rates are the key to understanding why there are so many VAERS reports, though I think it would also help to explore the reasons why 44% of VAERS death reports since June did not bother to mention the age of the person who died. They often have descriptions like this:
#1995488 "This spontaneous report received from a consumer via a company representative concerned a patient of unspecified age, sex, race and ethnic origin. The patient's height, and weight were not reported. No past medical history or concurrent conditions were reported. ... ... On an unspecified date, the patient died from unknown cause of death. .... This event(s) is considered unassessable."
So, you know, I have this theory that there is a lot of double-counting in VAERS because, in addition to the Physician's report, there will often be a witness or family member who causes an extra report to be filed that contains almost no information. Of course, you will disagree with my theory. But how, exactly, do you know I'm wrong? And again, base rates are even more important than this. How do you know that the base rates don't matter for analysis of VAERS reports?
Well, you might say "well David YOU aren't verifying your suspicions either". That's true, but I have a day job. I work morning to evening 5 days a week. I don't have time to do a detailed investigation.
But you know who DOES have time to do a detailed investigation and chooses not to? Steve Kirsch has "thousands" of paying subscribers on his Substack alone paying $5/mo or $50/year (not counting his other earnings from TrialSiteNews). He's also a multi-millionaire. So yeah, where's his detailed investigation of base rates, and his detailed investigation that proves that virtually all doctors ignore the FDA requirement to report deaths in VAERS?
I think his behavior makes sense, because what do you think his thousands of paying customers want from him? Would they be happy if he said "hi there my dear thousands of customers, I've been investigating this and discovered that my earlier conclusions were quite wrong"? No, I think the next words out of Kirsch's mouth had better be "it's actually WORSE than I've been saying all along!" Because if he said he was GENUINELY wrong, his customers would cancel their subscriptions in droves, because (1) they're angry that he misled them or (2) they think someone "got" to him and is speaking in his place or forcing him to change his tune or (3) they very much like his style, they're paying for that style, and for Kirsch to say he was wrong in a big way would not be Kirsch's style at all.
[1] https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/how-to-verify-for-yourself-that-over
[2] https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/debunking-steve-kirschs-latest-claims-97e1c40f5d74
[3] https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/human-behavior-makes-more-sense-when-you-understand-anchor-beliefs
[4] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations
[5] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations?commentId=f97bJXwj2M5toGDvt
[6] https://vaers.hhs.gov/faq.html
I would only take ivermectin from organically raised bacteria. Same botulism toxin.
Nothing to do with civil liberties. Everything to do with preventing death and misery. Oh, I have know three people who died from Covid-19 over the last two years. So, what!
Oops. You weren't supposed to say that. You were supposed to get defensive and insecure about how you don't know anyone who died from COVID.
Preventing death is a modern day euphemism for taking away civil liberties. Some people figure that life would be a more joyful place if we did not have the freedom and power to harm ourselves or others, and that they way to achieve this is by ceding more and more power to the government.
Nope, not a euphemism. Just a fact. It is called living in a society. Stop at red lights, do not smoke in no-smoking places, get a driver’s license, vaccinate(polio, etc.), and on and on and on.
On and on until the people are enslaved to the government. Then there is eventually a rebellion or some other sort of collapse of the society and the process starts all over again.
Random note- when I think of the Fermi paradox (why we haven't heard from Aliens) and one scenario where humans hit a Great Filter (a wall we can't seem to overcome and explains why other intelligent species like us haven't reached out yet). The Great Filter is the perpetual cycle humanity has had for the last thousands of years where we just continually fight for freedom, get enslaved, fight for freedom, report.
Feels like the Ying and the Yang, the Electron and Proton, the Duality, That human nature is to perpetually be in this cycle; and that we are witnessing it yet again in our lifetimes. What if we don't break out, and this is what happens to many other intelligent species on other planets too, and this is why there's no communicate between species (none survive long enough and squabble to their deaths on their home planet).
It has nothing to do with Civil Liberties, but we will take away your Civil Liberties in the meantime.
Oh, and while I slap you in the face literally, I am not slapping your face literally.
Your doctor probably hasn’t gone through all these studies either.
Paula, you've been at this for months, I'm not sure you're a beginner any more. Don't sell yourself short!
🤣🤣🤣
This. Although, for me it's not so much Scott (I see some of that, I used to be libertarian leaning, the pandemic sure as hell cured me of that) but I definitely downrated the commenters. The whining about the vaccine sure does not give a good picture.
If the pandemic really "cured" your liberty leaning thinking, a.1) you never had a solid philosophical conviction or a.2) you're lying, and b) You lack analytical skills to realize what's real and what's a lie.
> If people pushing Ivermectin wanted to be treated seriously
I think you are confusing "the medical establish destroyed its own credibility" with "ivermectin people demand respect."
The ivermectin people (who I think were wrong, but that's not relevant here) were not trying to convince other people to take ivermectin. It is the medical establishment that wanted them to take vaccines.
If you want me to do something, I necessarily have power in that dynamic. If you cannot stomach the idea of me having any power because of how bad I suck, well, then you really didn't care that much about getting me to do that thing.
wow
Yeah right ask Gibraltar and Israel, 100% vaxed. The very word "consensus" should make anyone with a particle of science oriented brain CRINGE.
Yeah! Like what, are we just going to accept quantum mechanics because there's a "consensus"? No, it's because Juan and I have read the studies personally and understood for ourselves that hidden variable theories are incorrect. And of course, as free thinkers, we did not allow blogs or news outlets or YouTube videos to influence our opinions, no sir. Reasoned from first principles, we did, that's the Elon Musk way.
Although, I did see that Israel has a vaccination rate similar to the US and well below Canada, while 121% of the people of Gibraltar are vaccinated (https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~IND~GIB~ISR).
Strange that Juan and I have such different statistics. We shall have to get to the bottom of this discrepancy with all due scientific haste.
Even if the vaccines work (I think we do) we should still be looking for effective drugs, because the vaccines don't always work and can't always be delivered.
If you refuse to do something that helps both you and others just because you feel the need to assert your power, then you do, in fact, suck.
If you want someone else to do something, you often have to give something up to accomplish it.
If you want to feel proud and smug and laugh at your outgroup, you don't hafta give up shit!
Well, fair enough, but bear in mind Scott's willingness to engage with disparate viewpoints is why *he* will have influence and you will not. When you write off people who don't share your worldview as complete orcs and morons, you necessarily write off your ability to influence them. There's nothing wrong with that -- so long as you are comfortable with the big decisions being made by, or influenced by, the people who are more patient.
Okey doke. Seems kind of defeatist, but whatever.
If Bret Weinstein is a fair sample of people pushing Ivermectin, his intent seemed to be to encourage doubt about the vaccine, with pushing Ivermectin as a side effect of doubting the vaccine.
It was more like "the vaccines aren't proven safe, *and* they're concealing the effectiveness of Ivermectin".
If you see a popular ivermectin proponent who is not slamming vaccines harder than a drunk driver into a family of four, let me know.
I don't know which way this counts. Weinstein thought vaccines were a good idea for older people while sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines for anyone who isn't old.
That's interesting, given how Weinstein praised his guest Steve Kirsch, who claims (albeit not in the Weinstein podcast I saw) that vaccines mostly kill the elderly. This follows naturally from the observation that the distribution of deaths by age in sources like VAERS is roughly proportional to the base rate of how many natural deaths by age you would expect in the general population. Indeed, the number of VAERS deaths is well below the base rate, which by itself demonstrates underreporting in VAERS. Of course, if we look at how Kirsch has accounted for the base rate...
> Google [site:stevekirsch.substack.com "base rate" ]
>
> No results found for site:stevekirsch.substack.com "base rate".
I have no idea. I'm pretty sure I remember Bret (and possibly Heather) talking about being pleased that parents were vaccinated. It's possible that Weinstein changed his mind, or that I'm mixing him up with Rogan, or that I'm just plain wrong.
I really like this analogy!
I mean it's Scott, he's writing in the American Political context so the real take away is almost always going to be that liberals should altruistically give additional power to conservatives within liberal dominated institutions in hope that this will increase conservative trust in those institutions while ignoring the agency or interest of any conservative epistemological elites in undermining that trust.
I think there's a lot of meat to this analogy, but I do think it's a relevant real-world consideration that even the most ardent anti-vaxxers will generally concede the evidence that science has some particular power as a grand institution for generating truths or working mechanisms, given that they're having the discussion on the internet. And most of them are further prepared to concede that medical science in particular also generates working mechanisms. Rather than throwing out the whole edifice, they're looking for reasons to throw out elements piecemeal, without expertise relating to how participants in the edifice of science judge evidence.
In a symmetrical situation, you'd be challenging the orthodox church on its record on Covid, while acknowledging that orthodox miracle-powered airplanes and such are obviously real.
This might be the core of why anti-vaxxers behaviour is so hard to understand for me. There even seem to be a significant number of anti-vaxxers working in medical professions. It really puzzles me what makes people accept most of medicine/science, but not some specific other parts.
In the aliens analogy, the alien technology seems to demonstratedly work. So what about vaxination differs from other medicine so fundamentally?
What would be the thing you obviousls accept about the orthodox church? That thes have some superiour moral knowledge?
As a theoretical biophysicist (I have a Master of science in that, I dont work in the field though) who is heavily sceptical of mRNA Vaccines:
I distrust their "science", they have made too many mistakes, and emotionally speaking I really dislike getting heckled and shut down in my field of study by "journalists".
I also believe that the main problem with the m-RNA vaccine will be that Covid can escape quite quickly from an immune response only focused on a single viral protein, even if this protein is well chosen.
Furthermore, if Pfizer is unwilling to contribute to defeating the crisis by stopping to block the admission of Sinovac et. al, then I am equally unwilling to contribute by accepting escalating intrustions on my personal freedoms.
I would take Sinovac, or any other attenuated vaccine recogniced by the WHO, but to do this in the EU, I would have to:
1: first emigrate to Serbia,
2: succesfully apply for permanent residence there, then
3: get vaccinated with Sinovac (there is a EU-Serbia agreement that Vaccines used in serbia "count" as proof of vaccination, but only for serbian citizens or permanent residents) and well.
The rejection of non western vaccines in the west is just political stupidity motivated by greed, pride and stupidity on part of our ruling classes.
They need to clean up their act and be held accountable.
When you write you distrust the science behind the mRNA vaccines, do you mean that they don't work (and therefore the studies showing they do are fake), that they have short term side effects (therefore again faked studies) or that they have long term side effects?
--I believe that adverse effects from mRNA vaccines are underreported, but probably not terribly so.
--In particular, I believe that Myocardities risk could actually be smartly adressed, by adjusting mRNA (or also other vaccine) injection protocolls in a way that reduces the risks of accidental intravenous, rather then intramuscular, injection. Here I would argue that the "The vaccines are safe no matter what" crowd has essentially cost lives.
--I believe they work adequately, but less well then advertized. There is a certain range of +-15% here you can fudge/interpret the data. In particular, immunological theory would predict that a 1 protein vaccine (mRNA)would be far more susceptible to pathogen escape then a multi proteine (Vektor or conventional) vaccine. I cannot see any biological reason why Pfizer could possibly be better against Delta, which is characterized by no less then 3 mutations on the spike protein, and where you would expect a massive drop of immunity, then any of the vektor or conventional vaccines which also make use of other proteins. Now, one can make a case that Pfizer is just covering up adverse reactions, and that the real adverse reactions are far harsher then advertized and thus there is a stronger immune response.
But Pfizer essentially claims to be better against variants with mutated spike proteins, inspite of only showing the spike protein, also claiming less adverse reactions and higher efficacy against baseline covid.
Everything in immunology has tradeoffs. I call shenanigans.
Like, 1 of these is likely, 2 is possible, all 3? With a very new technology while competing against serious scientific concurrence?
In my view highly unlikely. There is also the issue that Pfizer, via their stranglehold on the EMA is blocking Sinovac, Sputnik or Indian vaccines in the EU. I am pro Vax, but also pro Vax choice.
In particular, I want to avoid a situation where the authorities or their pharma allies can force me, at pain of not having a social live anymore, to pay tribute to them.
Forcing me to pay tribute to one of their adversaries, well, they would have far less incentives to keep this up in perpetuity. I would prefer a Chinese/Russian vaccine in the west, and a western vaccine in Russia/China. Wanting to minimize control the authorities have over you is completely rational and in my logical self interest. If control is neccessary, I wish to minimize the incentives they have for keeping this control up indefinitly, and delivering resources to their adversaries would do just that.
Thank you for the detailed answer!
Leaving the political aspects aside it does not change my conclusion about the risk/benefit order of magnitudes of the vaxines, but your point about efficacy against mutations sounds pretty plausible to my (amateur) ears, so I will pay attention to what happens when the next variants appear.
If some of the aliens don't believe in the cybernetic implants, that complicates matters.
Complying with vaccine mandates within Canada requires taking one of the more dangerous vaccines. I could enter the US if I took a less dangerous vaccine, but I could not travel or live freely within Canada.
Actually, strong side effects are the *hallmark* of an effective therapy. You don't expect chemotherapy to cure cancer without making you very, very, sick, do you? Powerful therapies have powerful effects, by definition, and since it is utterly impossible to precisely target the problem -- you get powerful side effects, and the stronger and more effective the therapy, the more of them you get.
Zero side effects are the hallmark of completely impotent therapies with do nothing at all. That's the main reason you can dismiss stuff like homeopathy and crystal healing. *Because* they have zero side effects, it's an excellent rebuttal presumption that they have zero effects at all, which means they can't possibly be doing any good.
Yeah, sorry, you're just wrong on the facts. The effectiveness of a therapy within a given class does indeed scale with its bad side effects. That's kind of like basic chemistry.
Thought of this afterward: here's an easy way to prove this to yourself. Write down all the pain relievers you know, from the least to most effective, starting with acetaminophen and ending up with morphine. Now arrange them according to noxious side effects. Weird! It's the same order...
I was talking with my wife about homeopathy last night, and I realized I want someone to accuse a manufacturer of them of causing a heart attack or something. Just to see how they respond.
Well hell if homeopathic or herbal medicine or magic crystals *did* cause a heart attack or two, now and then, I'd take the proposition that they are effective a lot more seriously.
>Actually, strong side effects are the *hallmark* of an effective therapy
No they absolutely are not. Chemotherapy and radiation are extreme outliars in that they are known to be very toxic, but people generally consider cancer to be a worse option. If preventative chemotherapy were a thing, almost nobody would ever consider it. The vast majority of therapies cause absolutely no side effects in the vast majority of cases. Nobody pretends aspirin doesn't work because it didn't cause them to have uncontrollable bleeding for 8 months.
As I understand it (vague impression) cancer therapies are better targeted than they used to be and have less severe side effects. Yes? No?
Yes and no. Traditional chemotherapy still mostly uses the same agents, e.g. 5FU or cisplatin and they still have the same evil side effects. They kind of have to, since the whole goal here is trashing DNA replication, so *anything* that's fast-dividing, like your hair cells or lining of the gut, gets trashed along with the cancer cells. Nobody has yet figured out how to screw with the DNA replication of *only* cancer cells, although there are some amazing potentialities out there perhaps with micro RNAs and CRISPR-Cas9 tech:
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2020/crispr-cancer-research-treatment
But there are also a burgeoning number of biologicals which are making their way into the clinic, e.g. the justly famous CAR-T treatment, and *these* are indeed often far more targeted and do far less collateral damage. When one of these works it's like a freaking miracle cure.
I believe most other new non-chemotherapy therapies are along the lines of inhibitors -- they slow down or stop cancer growth, but they do not actually kill cancer cells (although slowing them down might allow the immune system to catch up, I would guess, and is a very worthy goal in itself). You need chemo for that (or the biologicals, or radiation), I believe, although this field is sufficiently complex I speak under correciton if anyone knows better.
Not that this has much to do with the question of the vaccines, but menstrual problems in general get short shrift. "Oh, your periods are painful/irregular/you're bleeding when you shouldn't be? Just go home and take paracetamol". Even consultant gynaecologists, in my experience, tend to glaze over when you're trying to tell them no, this is NOT normal, this is NOT how my periods go.
So yeah, even in the best of times, you're going to get the brush-off as an hysterical female when it comes to 'women's troubles'.
I don't think it is a brush-off as a hysterical female, I think it is just a lack of anything productive to offer and an unwillingness to admit they don't really know much about what they are doing. It seems a bit far fetched to assume female gynecologists just dismiss women as being hysterical because they are women, yet they anecdotally seem more likely to do it and are more casual about it than males. "Why am I bleeding immediately following a "routine procedure" you did not warn me could cause bleeding?" "Its just your period." "No, my period just ended a week ago this is not normal." "Yeah it is you are just irregular quit worrying about nothing". At least men tend to act sympathetic before dismissing you.
I can't speak to your second point, but as to your first, I'll just say that my second dose was about equivalent to the worst day of my smallpox vaccine. If I can rate it as about the same as a vaccine we've been using for over a century without much issue, I think I can call it safe (if admittedly very unpleasant).
And yeah, you probably don't want to go partying on the day you're getting your second shot. Then again, you probably also don't want to go partying on the day you're donating blood, but I would also consider that pretty safe.
Vaccines can make you feel sick even though you're not sick, and it's well known why.
A little know fact is the fever and general sick feeling we get when infected come from the immune system response, not the infection itself.
Vaccines work by putting virus like particles in your body, tricking the immune system to think you've been infected. It then launches a fight against the intruder, which will leave behind antibodies etc for if you really get infected.
If this a big enough effort for the immune system you'll feel it as a fever. But that does NOT mean the vaccine is toxic or that you've been injured.
The mRNA vaccines do put virus like particles in your body. They do so with an extra step, but that is the end result, and why they work.
Just to spell out what I'm saying:
The mRNA vaccines don't contain the Covid-19 Spike Protein.
But they do contain mRNA that makes our human cells to produce the Covid-19 Spike Protein. That's the "extra step".
The immune system doesn't know or care where the Spike Protein came from, and reacts the same way as if they had been directly injected. That's the theory, and the experience of billions of given doses confirm it.
First of all, the mRNA vaccines *do* cause the synthesis of viral components, that's the whole point. Secondly, it's not clear the presence of *any* viral particles (or components) is necessary for an inflammatory reponse. The body does that all the time in response to a wide range of insult or injury, only some of which are viral infections, and sometimes for no reason at all (alas). We don't know how exactly inflammation gets started, but it's reasonable to assume cells have some way of noticing when abnormal things are going on and they send out cytokines annnouncing that fact -- which is what inflammation is. What are they noticing? How are they noticing it? This we don't really know in great detail. I mean, it would be great if we did, since inflammation in general contributes mightily to all kinds of poor outcomes.
No insight into the second part (menstrual symptoms) but to the first, I don’t get the impression at all that knowledge of those types of side effects (fatigue, fever) are being suppressed. Far from it - that you should be prepared for such symptoms, especially from the second shot, seems to be widely acknowledged (indeed signing off that you were aware of such potential side effects was part of getting the vaccine).
But 1) it doesn’t seem like “most” people are having significant immediate side effects (in my circles, “most” people had very mild effects, with maybe 1 in 10 having anything worse than arm soreness and mild fatigue).
And 2), these seem like common side effects for all vaccines, not unique to the COVID shot. I get the same side effects warnings for the flu shot. It makes sense - most of the side effects are due to your own immune response, and the whole point of vaccines is to provoke an immune repose.
There’s also a degree of confirmation bias - fatigue and muscle soreness aren’t exactly unheard of for the average adult, and are normally written off. But if you’re tired the day after a shot - well, must have been the shot right?
You mostly took the words out of my mouth, but you forgot the relatively recent high profile cases when the process "worked" (i.e. years of trials) and still the end result wasn't safe: Vioxx anyone? Or the more salient Dengvaxia controversy?
Medical science is HARD. Does doing something hard at Warp Speed make it more or less error prone?
Wow, those sound like some severe reactions indeed. I can share my anecdotes:
Of the 50 or so odd people I've had conversations with in person and know well in real life (through work, social clubs, sports, etc) I can report:
1. Those who received Moderna had strong reactions and were generally sick the day after. A few reported fever, a few nausea, etc. All recovered quickly and all really only reported the severe reaction to one of the shots not both.
2. Those who received any of the other shots generally reported little to no effect. My wife and I (30s) received Pfizer. She had no effect really and continues to menstruate healthily. I was groggy headed the next day and was fine after that.
So my anecdotal world is extremely different than yours. I'm from the US if it matters and the age range of folks I'm interacting with is 30 - 50.
Either way, VAERS offers an objective way to look into this information. I searched for all incidents of menstruation reported issues in the database resulting from COVID 19. There were 697 reported cases of menstruation issues in VAERS.
697 out of 201,922 women in the US 18-49 who have reported to VAERS after receiving the COVID-19 shot. 0.3% incidence.
The literature I can find reports 5% - 35% incidence of menstruation irregularity in this age range depending on a range of factors, including stress.
While I appreciate the anecdotes you shared, when I include them in with the 201,922 other anecdotes shared in VAERS it appears you just happened to have some very unlucky or stressed female friends and have not uncovered a hidden side effect plaguing the hundreds of millions of women who have received mRNA vaccines. Thankfully.
To each their own. To me VAERS is more trustworthy then anecdotes for various reasons (all the same reasons as review biases + to your own point the general hysteria around COVID on BOTH sides).
When I received my COVID vaccine I was handed a slip of paper that informed me about VAERs and how to participate. I signed up and since then I receive text messages every couple days in the beginning, then weekly, now only monthly.
One time I reported having an infection that for all intents and purposes I could see no reason why it would be related to my covid vaccine months ago. I received a phone call from VAERs within 2 days of submitting the report. They gathered more information about my infection and how I treated it, and then we moved on.
This is an audited, public database. I certainly agree that participation is fairly low (way more than 220k women 18-49 have been vaccinated, including my wife who did not participate in VAERs), but it is also certainly statistically significant.
I guess you refer to the "confounding" role of worm infections? Yeah, same for me. One of these moments I felt like an absolute beginner again.
Pardon me for being a smug bitch, but this is what I have been maintaining all along in the ivermectin discussions - it probably gives good results where people have, or are prone to, parasitic infections. In places where there is less to no risk of these, the results are not going to be as good.
Did you say this *publicly* anywhere you can reference?
(I will admit that I put down my phone and said "Oh My God" when I got to the reveal, but in retrospect feel dumb for not seeing it.)
Only in comments on here whenever we were discussing Covid, ivermectin, etc. So I haven't a record written down anywhere, unless anyone wants to go plough through the million words we're all thrashed out on this.
But yeah, I felt all along that "parts of the world showing good results = parts of the world with lots of poor, rural populations pretty likely to have worm infestations" was the major explanation for ivermectin success, if any.
You definitely get credit for figuring it out in advance. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three/comment/2799553 (Google is better at reading through millions of words to find things than I am.)
Oh, believe me, I am basking in the warm glow of smuggery, basking I tell you! 🤣 The advantages of being a rural person!
Yes, impressive Deiseach!
Okay, found it! Way back in September, under the post "Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts":
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three
"Deiseach Sep 6
I think people are seeing positive results (and that Cochrane meta-study has links to a lot of studies that are "no result/slight result" rather than "wowzers, this is a miracle cure!") is because (a) many of the studies, as listed above, are done in countries where I'd expect a lot of poor/rural communities with bad/poor health outcomes, including worm and other parasite infestations and (b) everyone is looking for the new silver bullet.
So you're a peasant farmer in Bangladesh and you picked up a worm infestation. You also picked up a dose of Covid. Treating you with an anti-parasitic drug in combination with other therapies is going to show a better result than leaving your system to fight off both at once."
I also dived into some of the Cochrane meta-study on the Ivermectin studies to see where all the countries were located:
"Deiseach Sep 7
Well, I could be totally wrong and ivermectin turns out to be an amazing anti-viral on top of everything else. But I'm going to stick to "it does what it says on the tin and if you're suffering from sarcoptic mange mites, go right ahead, but otherwise cool it unless a doctor prescribes the human version to you".
People are so anxious for "definite sure-cures!" that they'll swallow (ha!) any story about "this showed up in clinical trials as IT REALLY WORKS". I'm just surprised to see otherwise reasonable people jumping at "Doctors hate this ONE WEIRD TRICK" kind of story, but hey, we're all only human!"
Also got into some arguing with another commenter, but sure, that's me for ya!
"
Deiseach Sep 7
"One even needs zero studies when looking at the raw figures which came out of India where a ‘natural’ experiment happened with their big covid wave a few months ago. These are extremely positive results and we should be trying whatever we can in a pandemic as long as it is safe. There is even passive evidence from lower covid rates in some parts of Africa, quite possibly matching up well with existing use of ivermectin for its well known and longstanding use against parasites which can cause blindness."
Ivermectin is well-known and longstanding use *against parasites*, which you mention in your comment, but seem not to have understood. You are saying "this is a safe and effective drug!" and yes it is - *when used as intended*.
What you are extrapolating from "it's used to treat parasitic infections in humans" is "therefore it should be used for covid", with a side of "what can it hurt, it won't kill you" and unexamined anecdotes about "and they used it in India and they're getting fabulous results!"
I'm not so convinced about those fabulous results, I imagine that any benefits may come from the anti-parasitic treatment. If you have two patients, A and B, both in hospital undergoing treatment for Covid, and both have roundworm infestations as well, and A gets treated with Ivermectin which kills off the roundworms but B does not - I am going to guess that A will do better than B. But I don't think you can conclude from that "Ivermectin cures Covid!"
And the problem with this sunny assumption of "what harm can it do?" is that some people are refusing to get vaccinated, which is our best preventative at present, and along with others are all rushing off to buy veterinary products containing ivermectin, which are graduated for animals much larger than humans; believing this will save them; overdosing then because they're taking dosages calibrated for horses and cows; then ending up in the hospital with the side-effects of same."
Any credit is purely down to the agricultural ads on the national television and radio broadcaster of my nation and my youth; that so firmly fixed ivermectin in my brain as cattle drench and for sarcoptic mange mites, I had incredulity built up about "it'll cure Covid".
Congratulations!
Well done Deiseach yaas queen 👸 you deserve all the smug you can muster 😅
That is impressive.
I remember you writing that. That was freaking brilliant, honestly. Your talents are wasted on whatever you're doing, unless it actually is teaching empirical skepticism to young people so they need not repeat endlessly the mistakes of their forefathers.
Oh gosh, my vanity is getting stroked here! 😁 Really, it came down to nothing better than years of "what the hell are sarcoptic mange mites?" listening to ads for cattle drench, then along comes the ivermectin recommendation and my sluggish rural roots bestir themselves with "who the hell is thinking dosing yourself with fluke cure is a good idea?"
It has nothing to do with superior ratiocination, I regret to say!
Same, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I feel even worse for not getting it because I think/talk about worms *really frequently* in relation to effective altruism causes, including the immunological impacts. One for the humility box!
I bet you didn't see a list of locations where the ivermectin studies were done tho?
I had the same reaction, but then I felt sort of manipulated — why go through the tedious exercise of winnowing the good studies from the bad ones, if even the good ones are trumped by the helminth observation?
Sure, the narrative structure was compelling, but it rang a little false after he had dumped on so many studies for inadequate preregistration.
Still, I did enjoy the read and it did shift my priors.
Agreed. Scott analyzing lockdowns, cloth masks, surgical masks, voluntary social distancing (estimated from cell phone activity) etc would be a very interesting post.
The massive RCT from Bangladesh essentially found no impact on increased masking (no statistical significance for cloth masks, possibly maybe some statistical significance for surgical masks but for a bizarrely small infection rate)
and masks
a/s/l
He did masks on March 23, 2020, when there was no COVID-specific data yet.
Do you think the case has changed since then? My impression is that the analysis then still holds. Masks probably work, but only a little.
I don't know, that's why I'd like to see an analysis based on empirical evidence for COVID.
Masks actually work very well according to the data. The issue is more that a lot of people just don't wear masks consistently/properly. When you look at people who *actually* wore masks correctly, and did so consistently, their infection rates are very significantly lower (though not zero, either).
So it's actually good advice to encourage people to mask up, even if all the incompetent people will get only mild benefits, because the competent people will get large benefits, and we actually care more about the competent people anyway because they end up contributing more per capita to society.
That's my interpretation of looking at the body of evidence going back to 1920 in both community and hospital settings. Of course, those studies were for influenza, but seeing that a coronavirus is smaller in size, it's logical to conclude the masks (ie breathing barriers - or dare I say amulets) are ineffective against it too. it's interesting to note actual PPE experts and industrial hygienists, at least the ones I've come across, don't think mass mask wearing do a thing. Not sure we should be conditioning people via mandates to wear them based on the evidence.
They work in the same manner that coughing into your sleeve works. Perhaps they provide a little personal protection but nowhere near enough to make an observable impact on the progression of the pandemic.
There is a recent overview of cloth mask studies from Cato at https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-paper-64.pdf
Alas, like most of us, they are not Scott.
Scott = I'm always right. RIGHT?
Dude, what are you even doing here? Obviously people are going to think highly of the guy in the comments section of his blog. RIGHT?
Come on.
I’d add vaccines to your list as well. It’s misleading to assert that vaccines are an effective treatment without performing a similar meta analysis on their studies. Without such an analysis, the author is no different than the “proponents of pseudoscientific medicine” mentioned in the article; he is just as guilty of blindly trusting papers because they sound good and come from an authoritative place.
Note that the reports of fraud focused on an area involved with only around 1,000 (2.5%) of the around 40,000 total participants of that phase.
Furthermore, after billions of people vaccinated (with a broad set of different vaccines) and effects seen in the field, the phase 3 studies have long been amended by much better data. We know things the phase 3 studies haven't even asked (like “does it prevent transmission, and if, to what extent” or “how about variants of concern?” and ”is the immunity fading, and if, at what pace, and when do we need a third shot?”).
I'm not an immunologist. But the really important basics of immunology like antibodies are middle school biology stuff, at least here in Germany, just like evolution. I have no idea why the German speaking world has such a large minority believing the same bullshit as in the USA, where anti-scientific sentiments for lack of education are much more widespread. This must be the quantum memetic plague mentioned above, a disinfodemics spreading memes through entangled brain cells.
Do not underestimate the political identity aspect. Academia and the Press are, to a large extent, at least as hostile towards the 10-15% percent citizens who consider themselves conservative but do not support centrist parties as it is in the US. And their voting pattern and CoVid denialism in all its forms show some significant geographic overlap.
The idea that the US has worse science education than Germany is actually false. It actually has *better* science education than Germany does.
This is obscured by poor statistical methodology. The US has far more disadvantaged minorities than Germany does (roughly a third of our population is disadvantaged minorities).
If you just compare white Americans to Europeans, white Americans outscore every country in Europe on standardized science tests. (The same applies to Asian Americans)
The US's "poor education" is a statistical artifact. If you look at comparable demographics, the US actually has one of the best educational systems in the world.
Ah, so this is the "galaxy rotation curves can be explained by MOND!" of vaccine objections then.
Ii would hazard a guess that Russia has a lot to do with German vaccine hesitancy. The GRU has been actively spreading anti vax propaganda throughout the western world as a part of a campaign to destabilise their rival nations. Add to that the legacy of East Germany where the politics lean right and (I imagine) that the educators are not as sharp as their colleagues that were educated in the western side, and you have a recipe for ignorance and division.
"The fraud was small" is a strange argument. It suggests one of two possibilities:
1) The small fraud was nevertheless meaningful to the overall outcome of the study, or they wouldn't have bothered.
OR
2) If they perpetrated a small fraud with little effect on the overall results, it suggests their SOP is simply to commit fraud wherever and whenever it's convenient, and in that case how could one reasonably assume this one 'insignificant' fraud that we happened to discover is the extent of the total fraud?
I mean, is this one team doing fraud only in one area, or are there separate teams per area? I agree with your 2) take, but the consequences for the study probably differ between the two cases.
The issue is the most obvious motivation behind the fraud there was not to change the conclusions of the entire trial. It was a subcontractor trying to cover up sloppy data gathering practices and cutting corners about meeting followup deadlines. Backdating results doesn't do much to change the analysis but it does do a lot to save your ass from awkward questions about why you didn't follow the plan you were given. In that case the fraud can be both inconsequential to the overall conclusion and rationally motivated.
That is what we know of. There are probably more mistakes that were covered and hidden from the public. I can understand that they were rushing to get the vaccine approved and people being people and companies being companies with their tendency to cut corners and cover mistakes. I don't think it changes the outcomes substantially but it might be that the vaccine effectiveness is actually slightly less than originally thought.
My issue is that when Astra Zeneca found some irregularities with their studies due to very bizarre circumstances with product testing and they were completely open and forthcoming, they were completely vilified by the media and politicians. It doesn't provide any incentives for companies to be open at all. Pfizer's incident shows that it is better to deny or cover up everything and when they are finally exposed then say that it is not a big deal.
Not to mention the cutting short of the long term study by way of vaxxing the control group. Oh but sCiUncee!
Yes
No, it's not the same thing at all. Unlike the ivermectin studies the vaccines were developed in HUGE randomized controlled trials, and have been administered billions of times with careful monitoring of safety signals by teams across the world. This is not even in the same ballpark as the small ivermectin studies analyzed here. You could still do a meta analysis, but the results are not murky - we already know they work amazingly well. Your comment reeks of conspiratorial motivations.
"careful monitoring of safety signals" Imma need some evidence here, because we have real examples of missed safety signals. Also, there is still disagreement in safety. There are several European countries not using mRNA on large cohorts due to safety concerns.
The studies were not powered to detect the safety signals that have emerged in real world tests - they were powered to detect relatively common (1% - 0.01%) side effects that occurred in the general population within the time frame of the trial.
The safety signals that have emerged in real world tests (VITT with adenoviral vaccines in young-to-middle age women, myocarditis with mRNA vaccines in young men) have a frequency more on the order of magnitude of 0.001% in the specific subpopulation. And they can easily be circumvented by just using a different vaccine technology in those subpopulations: mRNA for young-to-middle aged women, single shot mRNA + 1 dose J&J with young men (or 2 dose J&J if you prefer).
A trial powered to detect those kinds of effects would have had to enroll hundreds of thousands of people, and would have delayed roll out of the vaccine by months, costing thousands - if not tens of thousands - of lives.
How do the Myocarditis concerns apply to booster shots? I am a man in my 20s vaxxed with Pfizer, but I've been avoiding booster shots because from what I've seen it I think the risk of vaccine complications from a booster outweighs the risk of getting covid once already vaccinated with the original dosing. But in the case that I am forced to get a booster, should I be seeking out J&J?
I'm not even confident that myocarditis is caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. Myocarditis is a known side effect of COVID itself. It's basically impossible to control for myocarditis rates at this point because there's a disease going around that increases risk of myocarditis by about 20x. Myocarditis is rare, but you only need a few infections that lead to it to screw up your numbers precisely because the numbers are so small.
"we already know they work amazingly well"
Really? They work for 6 months and they don't stop infection or transmission. To call that "amazingly well" seems disingenuous. Compared with traditional vaccines that stop infection and transmission and last for decades or longer, I would have to say the COVID vaccines work very poorly.
"careful monitoring of safety signals by teams across the world"
Sounds good, the experts are looking out for us! Unfortunately the experts have failed us so many times that I now want to review their work, and I've yet to see them actually publish their work in this area. Hmm... are they actually doing the work?
They worked better than initially expected and REDUCE infection, transmission, severe illness and death a great deal.
I have read of a vax under development that will be administered as a nasal spray and promises to provide the "sterilising immunity" that is more in line with your unreasonably high expectations.
Most vaccines do not work perfectly - they work by reducing community transmission to the point where the virus runs out of hosts and goes extinct.
Are you a shill? This is absolutely not an accurate recounting of events. The COVID vaccines were initially expected to confer immunity and to allow us to build herd immunity. It is now known that they do neither. We have literally broadened the idea of what a vaccine is because the COVID vaccine was unable to achieve what used to be expected of vaccines.
So goes the theory.
I've read they're effective for anywhere between 2 - 8 months. It's especially does lower hospitalizations and deaths inside three months. But they do wane - hence the boosters. The interesting thing is the vaccinated have become asymptomatic silent spreaders and the vaccines - or experimental gene therapy - don't halt transmission nor protect people. They were designed to lower symptoms. Basically it's a flu vaccine in drag. Whatever, it certainly doesn't justify mandates or passports on any grounds as it will not lead to herd. Have we ever really reached herd with influenza? We rely on natural immunity to get by. These are not diseases we can possibly control and 'defeat' with vaccines. I don't see how.
The vaccines were designed to give human immune systems a chance to prepare to fight a covid infection. They are only as good as the immune system that they are assisting. While effectiveness does wane disappointingly fast, that does not mean that the vaccines are not beneficial. What is apparently beneficial is a longer period between doses. This will make the 3rd dose that much more effective. Your argument that the Covid vaccines are not as effective as purported is counter to your overall point that they are not justified. Rather, It suggests that higher vaccination rates are needed to control the virus.
Ultimately it is always about the hospitalizations.
Not to mention situations like Marek's disease in chickens, where vaccination results in strains adapting to be resistant to the vaccine and the very specific immunization provided by it. In the case of Marek's this resulted in a disease so deadly and virulent ONLY vaccinated chickens have a chance. Alternatively, a resistant strain could be more dangerous to the vaccinated than those who have a more varied and complete immune adaptation from natural immunity alone, as opposed to a high alert but highly specialized immunity driven by a vaccine.
Ultimately the biggest problem is not the vaccine itself though, anyone should be able to get one if they want it. The problem is the bribery and ultimately coercion being enacted to try to force it on people.
Careful monitoring?
Can you give documentation Without an appeal to authority?
You’ll have to go to Pfizer for their vaccine and they only want to release their information Over 55 years.
Akoluthic - At one time, perhaps before you came of age on the internet, many arguments ended by one party resorting to acccusing the other of being Hitler. That phenomena became known as Godwin's Law. Fast forward to today, Hitler doesn't come up so often. Now, the adversary, especially if they hold views critical of the government, is a conspiracy theorist. As if conspiracy itself is a fantasy; Pharma cannot/does not have deep and wide influence on the government and media. Of course "conspiracies" exist and are pervasive in modern society. A person unwilling to contemplate the existence of conspiracies should ask them self a hard question: am I authoritarian; one who irrationally defers to authority?
Wrong. There are big RCT's that show efficacy and safety. A meta-analysis would be fine, but isn't necessary when you have well-done, large RCTs with sensible and meaningful endpoints.
I have done such an analysis on my substack; I hope you'll consider it: https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/deep-dive-should-naturally-immune
Here's one: https://idpjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40249-021-00915-3
1 vaccine-related death per 100,000 on this one (within 7 days)?
Yes, I don't like that we're not allowed to question or debate vaccines. How can this help anyone? How can we improve the vaccines if we can't be open and honest about adverse reactions? I'm not comfortable with vaccines being used as a means to a medical end. I gotta say. It has an element of quackery to me vaccines. There. i said it. Reading up on Jenner and Pasteur and the vaccine roll outs for mumps, rubella, measles, diphtheria, pertussis opened my eyes. It's not conspiratorial or unreasonable this is a huge money maker from the beginning and they probably believed the harms were low enough to justify continuing profiting off it.
Why do you say that we are not allowed to question or debate vaccines Paul? There is a lot of that going on here and on forums elsewhere.
Do you acknowledge that laypersons are not equipped to evaluate the safety or efficacy of vaccines? You need to do massive population studies of people who have received the vaccine to tease out if there are a significant number of adverse reactions that can be associated with vaccine.
Vaccine are developed in an entirely different fashion today than they were in the days of Jenner and Pasteur. It is disingenuous to try to make a comparison.
Vaccines are not big money makers for anybody. This is why there are so few companies that make them. Covid vaccines are the exception because of the urgent need for them. One could make the argument that we should not rely on for profit institutions to develop and manufacture drugs, but that is the system we have chosen. It is a false argument to suggest that you should avoid getting a covid-19 vaccination because some pharma company will profit from it.
Agreed. Didn't RFK jr & Children's Health Defense win a landmark case asserting no vaccines could ever be mandated/forced due to the fact not one safety study could be produced for any of the ridiculous amount of "school/travel required" vaccines from time of inception to date? I trust my own biology, physics, chemistry & lab skills over any doctor, paper, government. We need to ho back to the days of using basic skills & analysis, with a foundation in natural scientific observation.
For the record, if this is the GiveWell study, I believe that they found a significant result for cloth masks in their infection-based endpoint while for their hospitalization-based endpoint only surgical masks showed a significant difference.
The effect size was low, but it's not like they were comparing 100% masked villages to 0% masked villages. Encouraging mask use in a village like their study did had a real effect on mask wearing but it was modest and dissipated over the period of the study. So it's hard to get much from the RCT except "some increase in surgical mask wearing caused some decrease in infection as measured by seropositivity". Hard to know what the effect size is.
Yeah, it sure seems like most of the evidence for normal (non-N95/KN95) masks being helpful is basically along the lines of "this seems like it probably helps some." For good masks, if you're getting a good seal (you can't smell smoke through the mask), then it sure seems like you ought to be getting good protection there, since 95%+ of virus-bearing droplets should not be making it into your nose/throat/lungs.
That Bangladesh study showed that a 30% increase in cloth masks led to a 5% decrease in infections, and a 30% increase in surgical masks led to a 10% decrease in infections. Both of these were statistically significant.
Restricting to seroprevalence-verified cases is a serious restriction that drastically cuts the power of the study, given the difficulty of getting these tests. It's not surprising that it gets some of the important results outside the significance level.
Worrying about confounds like distancing is more reasonable.
I still wouldn't think it's appropriate to summarize this as "essentially no effect".
In general there's always an effect (positive or negative) and you want a powerful enough study to detect the effect so that you can understand its magnitude, to know whether it matters or not (and whether it's positive or negative). Even if the individual data points are noisier, having a lot more of them can be helpful in confirming trends that are only suggestive with a small number of data points.
A simple cloth mask doesn't protect wearer, it protects others.
So basically CRT is useless is these people breathing infected air from mask defectors, who are not part of the trial.
No significant impact of cloth masks in a vaccinated population. Surgical masks in an unvaccinated one probably worked better, because more to affect, better tools to affect it. Which is why I was fervently pro mask until widespread rollout of vaccines, and now I find most of it total theater.
I think it failed by the experts' own standards, I think there were better options than "nothing" and "everything", but I've taken it out since it wasn't as strong an example.
I remember a few years ago reading about how Southeast Asian mask use was basically superstition. It's bizarre to me to see that turned completely on its head.
Do we have a good explanation for why Asian countries generally seemed to do so much better with covid? Is it likely to be widespread mask use? Prior exposure to similar coronaviruses? Something else?
Like, all of the above?
They'd had prior experience, which gave them literal T-cells as well as society-wide immunity because they knew how to react and take it seriously.
I'd say it's this. We saw SARS in the name of the virus and anyone reasonable immediately started prepping like this will be a second SARS epidemic.
Lower rates of obesity
May have played a role.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-rate-intl/index.html
That can't explain low *infection* numbers.
Good question. Apart from lower rates of obesity and a generally healthier diet and lifestyle, in Asian countries there tends to be a near universal compliance with social distancing, contact tracing and mask-wearing mandates.
John Campbell just mentioned in a video that a lot of Asians produce an enzyme which protects against covid. If you search his channel on youtube for a video called 'the japanese miracle' you'll find it.
Interesting. Here’s the link
https://youtu.be/E1GF0H9V_1g
And also a link to an article about the research from Japan Times for anyone in a hurry:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/11/18/national/delta-variant-self-destruction-theory/
It would have to be a sequel to the one he wrote in March 2020. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
I'm sure there's more info now.
I wrote on the prior OT that someone should be doing the RCTs on masks, at least for influenza. Even if expensive, they'll pay off with knowledge that billions of people can use in the short-term.
How would you carry out an RCT on masks for influenza?
Put a bunch of people in a dorm. Everyone wears masks, but you can't easily tell how good the mask is -- some don't keep out anything, some are N95 or better, and lots in-between.
Deliberately infect several people with the flu (like we do for challenge testing) and then test everyone daily.
The very very first tests might just have 2 people in a hotel suite for a week (repeated a few dozen times).
You don't even have to deliberately infect people - presumably in any study like this you want some number of known positives and some number of known negatives going into the study, so you want to recruit a lot of people and testing them all. But if you recruit enough people, and the disease is spreading quickly, you'll surely find a reasonable number of positives without having to infect anyone. It's only the negatives being used to test the masks that run the risk of getting infected by the study.
The UK's plan involved minimal attempts to prevent or slow transmission, and 210,000 - 315,000 deaths in a fifteen week period. It rested on the assumption that the population of the UK would allow the government to do almost nothing while 210,000 - 315,000 people died over a short period. Whether or not it was a good plan is irrelevant. The assumption was obviously insane, and the plan was worthless.
The document setting out the plan is an interesting example of a well-written, coherent and convincing 70 page strategy document being worse than useless. It's not perfect, but you can tell that a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable people have put a lot of work into it, and you can see why the UK got such good marks for pandemic preparedness from international assessors. Ignore the "Influenza Pandemic Strategy" title, the plan specifically states that it can be applied to a SARS virus, and Covid falls within its assumptions as to possible transmissibility and case fatality rate.
It's worse than useless because it hides the reality of the situation it's planning for. The first sentences of the introduction should have been "This plan is based on 200,000 to 300,000 people dying from the infection in a three month period. We aren't going to try to stop that happening." But over seventy pages, and no doubt hundreds of other documents stemming from those seventy pages, the ludicrous assumption at its heart is swathed in layer after layer of reassuring competence, and utter nonsense was transformed into a gold standard public policy strategy.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/213717/dh_131040.pdf
What would "the population of the UK not allowing it" have consisted of? The next election is in 2024.
Public support for lockdowns in March 2020 in the UK was 93%, with 76% of those 'strongly' supporting it (YouGov). Politicians don't tend to survive ignoring their voters in such situations.
It's not impossible that the House of Commons could have triggered a snap election anyway, with a loss of confidence in the Govt, or the governing party could have replaced the PM who serves at the pleasure of his/her party only. 'First among equals'.
Things aren't as set in stone here as in the US.
If 93% of people supported taking ivermectin instead of vaccines, should the government just roll over and say "well, I guess the people have spoken"? Not try and all to change people's minds?
As we've seen, people get sick of lockdowns, so they can only be done in limited amounts. The UK officials knew this and said this beforehand, directly to the people: "you think this is fun now, but you'll hate it in 8-12 weeks."
But, just like ivermectin, there was media hostile to following the recommended scientific plan, telling people that the government's plan was evil and stupid and going to kill them.
I'm not sure I agree that lockdowns are as limited as you claim.
The population of the UK has by and large been pretty happy about government measures to protect them from the pandemic. They have supported essentially every lockdown, even in Jan-March 2021, almost a year on from the start of the pandemic restrictions. Yes there's absolutely a vocal minority who don't support them, but the majority consistently did as we know from all polling data.
The first lockdown was almost inarguably a good idea, and that's the one we're referring to, as it allowed breathing space to create a massive expansion of govt and medical capacity, as well as the space to do large-scale trials that revealed dexamethasone by June 2020, which dramatically improved the survival chances going forward. There would have been a far higher death rate without this discovery.
Much of the media hostility revolved around the fact that the likely death rate for an un-checked pandemic at that time, without proper medical treatments, was going to be more than half a million people.
Lockdowns are a terrible idea with catastrophic consequences. They were never rooted in facts or science. And even the way the lockdowns were applied were unjust and illogical. 'Essential v. non-essential' is dumb. The local small grocery guy had to close but Wal-Mart could stay open? Please. Foolish and the fact it's still being considered is madness. All part of the moral panic I guess. America is definitely wise to not be discussing this.
> If 93% of people supported taking ivermectin instead of vaccines, should the government just roll over and say "well, I guess the people have spoken"?
Don't try to stop people from taking ivermectin if it's not dangerous. Do encourage them to take vaccines because they're safe and effective.
But if the government says "it's safe and effective" and 93% don't believe it, a coup is probably imminent.
The UK govt. had successfully sold financial austerity with majority support for years prior to this. There's at least one reason for them to believe they could indeed convince the UK populace to accept the argument "210,00 - 315,000 people will die in the short term, so that >>315,000 lives can be saved from the long-term negative effects of lockdowns".
"I know I’m two months late here. Everyone’s already made up their mind and moved on to other things."
Fastest click I ever clicked on one of these posts.
YES. The culture war needs more replication studies, or AARs, or etc. Scott - you're doing yeoman's work. Thanks.
Right off the bat I learned pored is spelled differently from poured, so strong start to this post.
"I'm not going to watch it, because it is a video..."
You don't watch videos?
Sorry Paula, we only consume text-based content here.
lmao
Come on Paula, send us an ascii picture of your nudity.
You can always tell the guys who grew up with 300 bps modems.....
(.)(.)
top banter
Excellent.
I sure don’t! Why would I deliberately subject myself to someone’s meandering slow rambling that I can’t do a textual search in?
I could just go read something someone who cared enough to write it down said.
Some browser addons that let you watch videos at any speed. Speeding up by x3 or x4 makes most videos of people talking tolerable.
Videos are Inherently Annoying because, for example, they are not searchable and they almost never contain hyperlinks (because for some reason the person who produces the video thinks it's OK to offload that work onto thousands of non-expert viewers rather than doing it once while they have all the context).
Many youtube videos now do provide hyperlinks to both positions in the video as well as external content. I find that quickly checking the video description for these is a good indicator of quality.
I wasn't actually aware that Scott is a follower of the Always Bet On Text philosophy - https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html - but it doesn't surprise me at all.
No, videos are several times slower, unsearchable, ad blocking is worse there, much lower quality than text on average and I read better than hear.
Video is acceptable for video, not for spoken text.
I don't. I always seek the least possible noise in my communications channels, and video presents a giant amount of irrelevant sensory information relative to the critical info. For the record, I also hate scientific papers that start with an introduction in which they summarize the structure of the paper, and I despise talks that begin with 5 minutes of reminiscence and dad jokes.
"But I don’t really know how to do that, and any speculation would be too political even for a section titled “The Political Takeaway”. I would instantly kick in an extra month's subscription fee to read this.
Me too. I really want to hear about that.
You can have it for free from me: honesty, transparency, humility, good faith.
fully agree. I think we have kind of a trust crisis. What you name are ingredients to build trust. But many people underestimate what a sensible plant trust is, how easily it is destroyed and how hard it is to build up. Especially all kind of elites should learn this if they want to stay were they are without fear.
As one of those people (presumably plural) that think there's too much politics on ACX as it is, I'll have to respectfully disagree.
In general, I'm worried about the comment section's potential degree of control over the topics and perspectives that get covered by Scott. It's partly inevitable, I guess, but I think at least we should make an effort to minimize this effect. I would hate to see ACX become more echo chamber-y. (this is also why Substack displaying the number of likes and comments under a post is a bad thing.)
So, 85-80% confidence of less than 30% mortality reduction does in fact represent a major crime against humanity in your estimation, I would think? Expected loss of lives is well into the hundreds of thousands.
I have a vague plan for another post which is something like "should we just give everyone any drug that might possibly work, because Pascal's Wager?", but I'm not entirely sure of the answer!
Ivermectin is pretty low side effect. I think HCQ might have been worse and could have done some real damage. But if it took ten drugs that didn't work to make sure people got fluvoxamine (which did work), maybe it would have been worth it even if HCQ could be bad? I'm genuinely not sure here.
Economic cost + value-of-information means it's far better to do large scale RCTs, rather than tell everyone to take things and never be able to figure out what is working.
I also think that the "trust in science" thing is valuable, and as I told Kelsey - https://twitter.com/davidmanheim/status/1458153900553510915 - in the wake of HCQ + Ivermectin, I've updated towards experts shouldn't tell people to take a drug based on moderately clear preliminary information, because it turns out that they won't listen later if you find out it doesn't work. In general, updating once you publicly commit to something being worthwhile is really, really hard. And then they refuse the vaccine.
1. I didn't suggest banning anything.
2. You can't as easily do RCTs once a drug is being used widely, because you get selection bias issues for who is willing to participate.
3. You can allow widespread access + randomization fairly easily, if it's planned for. And in a medical system less messed up than the US, it's straightforward to do this, which is exactly how the UK's RECOVERY trial was set up in April 2020.
And no, this wouldn't have ruled out trying lockdowns, especially because 1) we had incredibly clear evidence of effectiveness, and 2) it's not a medical intervention, so the way RCTs are done is very different.
And honestly, we probably would have gotten masks used more quickly in the US if we had done trials immeidately, compared what actually happened - which was listening to the surgeon general and CDC which delayed until the evidence was incontrovertible anyways - and for some insane reason, still won't require HEPA filters, etc. (Compare this to the Japanese government experts, who got both of these right on day 1 based on actually looking at the initial outbreaks.)
Community masking (assuming non-N95) against respiratory virus is incontrovertibly demonstrated to be effective? Am I understanding your comment correctly?
I mean, yes - https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf - but that wasn't the claim. I claimed that if we did good enough larger scale RCTs rapidly, we would have found that there was an effect much more quickly.
The problem is that you aren't actually helping people. We only produce about as much of these drugs as we actually need to treat the actual medical conditions that those drugs are needed to treat.
Thus, if a ton of people suddenly start buying a lot of these drugs, you end up with massive shortages and people dying who actually need the drugs.
In real life, almost none of these drugs are actually helpful, and almost all drugs have side effects, and the idea that ivermectin was even going to be helpful in humans was dubious just looking at the in vitro studies because the most likely path of function was impairing cell function, which is probably going to kill people.
Speaking as someone who has worked in manufacturing - the religious belief in RAPID supply and demand is completely wrong. Generally speaking, factories operate near or at capacity, and ramping up is a slow, laggy process. That's why we STILL have chip shortages, even though we produce enormous, enormous amounts of them.
It's not possible to ramp up without building another factory oftentimes.
Ivermectin has a large supply because we use a lot of it on livestock. That's not true of a lot of other drugs.
I've read something from a person with scabies who needed ivermectin, and it became barely available because of a sudden increase of demand-- they were sharing their ivermectin with a friend who was having trouble getting it.
It takes time for manufacturers to ramp up production, and they'd be gambling on what people will want.
Have you looked at the in vitro studies? Because the ones I've looked at showed that they reduced virus numbers... Scott completely ignores all the evidence on mechanisms of action
I have. It would take more than 35x the standard dose of ivermectin to achieve 50% inhibition according to the in vitro studies.
More than 10x the standard dose is toxic in humans.
The probable mechanism of action is disruption of cellular processes, which is why it is unsurprising that ivermectin is not useful for treating COVID in humans.
Bleach kills COVID in vitro, too. The problem is, it will kill YOU, too.
How do you know if the things that you're trying are working? How do you know if they're making things worse?
Oh. So if you give someone a medicine, and they get better, that means that it works? And if you give it and they get worse, that means that it doesn't work?
"experts shouldn't tell people to take a drug based on moderately clear preliminary information, because it turns out that they won't listen later if you find out it doesn't work."
I think this is a deadly attitude and a big part of why there's so much mistrust. You have to respect the minds of others.
That would be easier if so many of them weren't so keen to believe obvious bollox and clinicians still have a duty of care to those same people who will cheerfully drink fish tank cleaner.
"experts shouldn't tell people to take a drug based on moderately clear preliminary information, because it turns out that they won't listen later if you find out it doesn't work. "
Does not equal "lying to people"
A lot of experts are very very wary of saying untrue things. "Here! Take these 10 pills, they'll help!" may be an untrue thing when you have no idea if any of those 10 actually work. And if you turn around 6 months later and say they don't work then people will declare you a liar.
unfortunately there are a lot of deeply deeply dishonest people, the sort of people who there's no point even trying to get through to who will intentionally distort that and still call you a liar because they read a crappy news article or tweet summarising the refusal to endorse those 10 drugs as a claim in the opposite direction.
> same people who will cheerfully drink fish tank cleaner.
"Then some human scientists suggest vaccinating against the plague. The aliens say this is idiotic, vaccines originally come from cowpox, even the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccus meaning “cow”, are you saying you want cow medicine instead of actual brain implants which alien Science has proven will work? They make lots of cartoons displaying humans who want vaccines as having cow heads, or rolling around in cow poop. Meanwhile, the first few dozen studies show vaccines work great. Many top human leaders, including war heroes from the struggle against the aliens, get vaccines and are seen going out in public, looking healthy and happy."
Large-scale RCTs sound great.
For people who aren't in the RCTs, it seems better to give them an experimental drug cocktail of all the drugs which have promising initial results & are readily available & don't have significant side effects. (Where "give" means that this is the default recommendation from doctors or in medical kits.)
That seems better in terms of straightforward direct results (health & cost), ignoring what it does to the information environment.
And for navigating the information environment, there's an advantage to playing it straight (giving people the drugs that are +EV) and finding ways to have clear messaging about it (to avoid informational side effects). If you're withholding a drug that might work, that opens the door to stories about the authorities suppressing a miracle cure. If you're including the drug in the experimental drug cocktail, then you just need to find a find a way to convey "experimental drug cocktail". Here are some things that might help, studies are underway to figure out which of them really help, we can at least be pretty sure that they don't do much harm. We've improved the covid-fighting cocktail, HCQ is out and fluvoxamine is in.
There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason we can't allow RCTs like this to be near-universal, and let anyone who wants to join be randomized, ideally with adaptive A/B assignments, so that later participants benefit from what we know - if a setup for doing this is put in place. Of course, clinical trials are broken, as is the US healthcare system, so this probably isn't happening in the US, at least this decade.
But for "navigating the information environment," there's a huge difference between telling people we have unclear preliminary indications and recommending or prescribing medicines. (But again, US healthcare is broken, the FDA is broken, etc. as Scott has discussed in the past, so this gets screwed up.) And as I said below, telling people "this probably works" has some massive downsides in practice, as we see from the fact that there are still people taking HCQ instead of getting vaccinated.
Vinay Prasad proposed a "randomization by default" approach to important clinical questions in "Ending Medical Reversal". It's a great idea.
We wouldn't need meta-analysis aggregating a bunch of questionable small studies if we had a few big well-done simple RCts
This is bad policy for several reasons.
First off, almost all "safe" drugs are only safe in isolation. We don't generally test most drugs for drug combinations unless we expect them to be used in conjunction with each other. Many drugs are not safe to take with other drugs, but we don't know that because we don't typically mix them.
Secondly, combined drugs don't necessarily have linear effects with each other; sometimes they will counteract each other, sometimes they will multiply each others' effects. So you can't even be sure that the drugs will work at all.
Thirdly, taking more drugs greatly increases the probability of organ failure (mostly kidney and liver failure).
Fourth, almost all of these drugs are ineffective, meaning you are wasting vast amounts of resources when there are better things to do.
Fifth, most of these drugs are only produced in limited quantities and cannot be rapidly scaled up. So you will create shortages for things that they are actually important for.
Sixth, almost all drugs have side effects. The more drugs are taking, the more likely you are to experience side effects, and this actually is even worse with mixing drugs.
Seventh, most of the population is completely incapable of making educated decisions about their health like this, because they can't do the proper risk/benefit analysis.
While it might be "better" to do large scale rct, in practice it's either not being done at all or not being done fast enough, so that option doesn't exist
or they could communicate better. What if instead of recommending it you just label it as our recommended guess work at the time. Couldn’t they just improve by giving their opinion in language that people understand
The thing is, early on in any epidemic, the doctors are going to be throwing absolutely anything they think might work at the thing, trying to save their patients. ISTR that many hospitals were giving zinc, HQC, azithromycin, vitamin D, etc. Which makes sense, because they weren't trying to run studies, they were trying to figure out some way to keep a few of their patients from dying on them.
Once that's happening, people who want it are going to be able to see the discussion among experts. I've been trying to listen to the Covid Clinical Update on TWIV as often as possible, for example--that's available to anyone but it's mostly a top tier ID doctor who's been treating covid patients for the last 18 months talking about what treatments seem to work, how they're used, what the promising stuff coming down the pike is, what the research looks like, etc.
And that leaves the possibility that people are going to misunderstand it, or misinterpret it, or whatever. The only way to prevent that is to keep anyone but certified experts from being allowed to see any of that information, which fails the "let the medical student debunk the fraudulent study" test, as well as the "let the Turkish sociologist make much better recommendations than the national health authorities" test.
According to tests of adult reading ability, only about 1 in 6 adults is fully literate - that is to say, capable of understanding statistical analysis and scientific papers. They might not know specific terminology but they are capable of reading and successfully understanding top-level stuff.
They also are the only people capable of actually usefully comparing and contrasting points from multiple articles, like, say, two opinion columns or whatever, and looking at evidence, etc.
The problem is that those people make up 50%+ of the high-end professional community. So the idea of "Well, we can try something, and if it doesn't work, we can try something else" works fine for them.
It is absolutely horrible advice for almost the entire rest of the population because they aren't capable of really understanding this unless you explain it to them carefully, and they will have to lower their level of trust in "experts" because, as it turns out, explaining this stuff to them will make them CORRECTLY stop trusting the media and experts and whatnot nearly as much as they did.
Like, you can't explain the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to someone and have them trust the press anymore. They *shouldn't* trust the press. And yet, if you completely don't trust the press, you'll tune out important information.
Obviously not, given how many people guzzle down such misinformation. It leads to all sorts of trouble.
If people made decisions based on statistical analysis, they'd make better decisions.
I don't think it's about the side effects of IVM. It's about the consequences of the false confidence that you're immune if you take it.
Right - they won't listen later. And halo effect means that once people are convinced that the positives slightly outweigh the negatives, their brains immediately jump to "there is no downside, and this is the best thing ever."
Quarantines work.
I honestly believe that if people were given the correct information, as known at the time, they would have been open to changing their minds (in general, obviously not all people are going to act responsibly).
If doctors told people that there was some positive early but speculative results from taking a common, cheap, and harmless drug, lots of people would want to take that drug. But if there were no concerted effort to shut down discussion of that drug, further results would have shown 1) side effects or other issues, 2) lack of efficacy, or 3) hey this thing really works! Option 1 gets communicated to patients by their doctor, and the doctor steers patients away, especially if 2 is proven or seems likely. Option 2 the doctors simply stop offering it as an option. Option 3 sounds like a best case scenario, not an apocalyptic harm.
If it really works, then I think people should be able to go ahead and skip the vaccine or whatever else you're worried about. If it doesn't work, but conversations are allowed to happen about it like normal, then the incentive to take it instead of the vaccine goes away.
Doesn't this apply to the vaccine as well, particularly how it doesn't stop spread? If 80% of people who have taken the vaccine see that as a reason to now return to life as normal and go to gyms, bars, etc as they did before, isn't their brain "there is no downside, this is the best thing ever" and they become spreaders (aka a mutating breeding ground for the virus until it becomes something like Delta)
I know more people who are unvaccinated who take less risk than vaccinated people. I'd love to see a study of who really spread the virus more and are a responsible party for the mutants.
Doesn't the same logic apply to the 'vaccine'?
But vaccines ACTUALLY work, we are 100% sure on this one.
Ivermectin MIGHT decrease severity for SOME patients (and cure worms.)
I've taken Ivermectin before and it's not the worst, but I've seen some people shit themselves inside out after taking it, so ??? on side effects also.
We don't have the 100% confidence though that vaccines are enough to stop the spread of the virus. My belief is that from the scientific evidence, since the vaccines don't stop spread, even if 100% of the world population by some scant luck had taken the vaccine, it can still spread and mutate and would eventually develop into a more infectious strain such as how we have Delta today.
Vaccines that don't prevent vaccines, i.e. leaky vaccines are that by their inherent nature, not able to completely eliminate a virus. Eventually, since the virus still exists in a COVID-19 vaccinated environment, it would have mutated and spread into a more infectious strain.
The only difference is today we blame the unvaccinated as speeding up that spread and responsible for the Delta variant.
It's worse than that. Even if 100% of the world population had taken the vaccine, and 100% of humans were vaccine free, due to animal reservoirs of the virus it would escape into the wild again. COVID is here to stay.
Vaccines greatly reduce spread.
Yes, There is a lot of talk about how the Virus will very likely become endemic. All the more reason to get vaccinated if you have access. This pandemic is new to humanity, there are other vaccines being developed that may turn out to work better than the ones we have now. We may be able to eradicate it in 10 years instead of the 80 that it has taken for Polio.
Vaccines do prevent infections. But they don't prevent *all* infections.
The problem with COVID-19 is that it is ridiculously infectious. For most viruses, reducing the R0 by a factor of 6 will put it well below 1. COVID-19 has an R0 of something like 8-12, so even a vaccine that cuts infection by 6x will only reduce it to 1.2-2, which is still not low enough.
The reality is that you have to have full measures going on - masks, vaccines, no indoor dining, social distancing, no in-person school, work from home where possible, etc.
Just because vaccines work doesn't mean the 'vaccine' works! The logical definition of working would be, the risk of the virus is greater than the risk of the vaccine, and that depends on many things. The most important under an EUA is tracking and analyzing adverse events. And the most important for convincing skeptics is open discussion about those events. The lack of candor about risks and benefits, and the outright suppression of reports of adverse events has exposed, yet again, the evil of authoritarianism.
The TOGETHER platform trial is really interesting. A few comments:
* First I don't think that it is correct that they used non-contemporaneous controls for the ivermectin TOGETHER study. This is a well-known problem in adaptive trials where new arms can enter and leave the platform. The controls that they will have used are only those who could have been randomised to ivermectin. See for example their write up of fluvoxamine (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext)
* Regarding fluvoxamine: interesting that your assessment is that it "works". From a Bayesian perspective, a priori it's highly unlikely to do anything (some random doc decided to test because why not; no known mechanism of action); and there is a real problem of post-randomisation bias. See this article for more detail https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-closer-look-at-the-new-fluvoxamine-trial-data-69369
I guess, but from my perspective if a bunch of doctors are excited about a drug I want good studies done immediately. A-priori it seems unlikely that we got really good at saving people at the point of practically choking on their own fluids with existing meds (steroids, etc), but apparently there was nothing whatsoever that could be done preventitively to help. Not only that, but we were absolutely certain of this beyond any shadow of any conceivable doubt. We were certain that the physiological profile of covid-19 was PERFECTLY disjoint from the sum total of existing medical practice.
It's simply unforgivable that our elites ignored the attack on therapeutics.
The thrust of your claim that "this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time" just doesn't hold water. It's been two years and you're still not sure if it might be moderately helpful (nvm Vit D. and all the others). In no universe can we call this a functioning medical science establishment.
The fact of the matter is a bunch of elites decided that their reputation was far more important to them than the off chance of saving many lives. Can't risk being associated with those crazies pushing their "remedies".
"The thrust of your claim that "this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time" just doesn't hold water. It's been two years and you're still not sure if it might be moderately helpful (nvm Vit D. and all the others). In no universe can we call this a functioning medical science establishment."
Yes. Agreed.
The emerging claim I'm seeing now is that vitamins, generic medicine (IVM, HCQ etc) and anything homeopathic is pseudoscience and dangerous misinformation, and must be shut down.
This is an elitist hostile environment.
Just to clarify, because it does affect how I contextualize your other comments, are you arguing for homeopathy NOT being pseudoscience?
You can easily establish that homeopathy is false, but you might have a tougher time establishing that it's dangerous.
It is dangerous if you are advertising as protection against a dangerous condition to children(or Republicans). \s
Sorry I wasn't clear and wasn't reasonable in my timeframe to respond to you.
My argument was that we use the label pseudoscience and misinformation synonymously, and then set the bar for what qualifies as science as very high and to standards where basically only elite stakeholders can do the "sciencing".
We disregard the science done by small people, small studies, we look for science done by highly prestigious research bodies and published in highly prestigious journals. We use a lot of Ad Hominem to disqualify science over the arguments behind the science.
If someone like Scott Alexander had simply shown up on News media to share this analysis to talk about ivermectin versus all the current "elitist" style reporting of "All these quacks are taking horse dewormer and look at how one guy who thinks he's smarter than the CDC tried to treat COVID by himself"
The reality is that pretty much no pre-existing drug would be expected to work. Most things don't work against viruses in concentrations that won't kill the host, which is why viruses are a PITA to deal with.
The people who try and push anti-parasitic drugs as cure-alls can be safely dismissed out of hand because they try and push their favorite drug at everything. We don't have infinite bandwidth, it is best to focus on things that we have a good reason to believe might actually work.
Right, we have the bandwidth to shut the economy down and stop school but we can't run a few trials. Give me a break.
We have existing drugs that work very well against covid--steroids.
You better be really, really, really freaking sure that you're right. We'll be looking very carefully at patient outcome variability in the medical records over the next couple years, very carefully indeed.
Shutting stuff down is easier than doing stuff.
I'm not sure why this is a hard concept.
And we ran a bunch of trials on all sorts of stuff.
I don't know the proper statistical terminology for this, but I feel like there's an issue where you have to ask "why are we asking this question in the first?" e.g why did invermectin become something that people were talking about and was it for a good reason. Because of you were to give people a bunch of random substances you might by chance get good results for some of them. Similar to with homeopathy trials, my prior against them working is sufficiently high that I would be unwilling to take an otherwise good study as evidence. If there's no particular reason to think something will work, then the burden of evidence should be high
I don't think this has a clear name, though it's related to curse of dimensionality, but I'll quote Yudkowsky discussing exactly the issue you're noting:
"On problems with large answer spaces, the greatest difficulty is not verifying the correct answer but simply locating it in answer space to begin with. If someone starts out by asking [is X true], they’re jumping to a 100-bit proposition, without a corresponding 98 bits of evidence to locate it in the answer space as a possibility worthy of explicit consideration. It would only take a handful more evidence after the first 98 bits to promote that possibility to near-certainty, which tells you something about where nearly all the work gets done."
"Privileging the hypothesis." IIRC the example given was the police saying "We have no idea who the murderer is, so have we considered the possibility that Mortimer Snodgrass did it?" Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but what evidence led you to investigate that man to begin with?
Isn't there usually some low-confidence hypothesis though?
For the murder, let's look at all the "usual suspects" - criminals that commit crimes at a higher rate than the population as a whole.
For ivermectin, it might be something like, "this is medicine known to work with other diseases." The casual nature of chemistry and biology doesn't enter into the reasoning. And on that level, given the "worm impact," it appears even to have been right for those cases!
Of course, in the latter case, you need to ask why this medicine and not others. But I think the response is something like, "docters all over the world have been trying everything they can think of, and this one stuck." Also it wasn't the only one, there are others that have some (maybe low) evidence that are now being followed up.
The problem for me, isn't that, it is going from low confidence priors, to high confidence. I don't understand that, even in the faces of Scott's Australia conquering aliens. Wouldn't you just distrust everything? Why does low-confidence evidence from alternatives sources get trusted?
Ivermectin was shown to have anti viral properties in vitro. Theory states it enables zinc to enter the cell and stop replication of viruses and it prevents inflamation. So a doctor tried it and had good results. Soon other doctors were using it and found it to be effective keeping people out of the hospital. Good RTCs are very expensive and there is zero profit in doing one for a generic drug, but a very big incentive to do a fake study to prove the generic doesn't work, If the author didn't point this out in his evaluation, it undermines his credability to the point his opinion is useless. We don't need more blind people to follow.
My wife has some insight into medicine, and her judgment on Ivermectin was something like: "The prior probability of this type of thing being a cure for this type of disease is extremely low. There is some evidence in favor of Ivermectin, but it is too weak to overcome the priors." I guess she passed this rationality test with flying colors.
But the quality of one's priors depends on their knowledge. As an extreme example, if you have no idea what "ivermectin" or "covid" mean, you could go with: "well, you asked me a yes/no question, so the prior probability of yes is 50%".
A better model would be that ivermectin is a "cure" and covid is a "virus", and it is generally known that you can use a "cure" against a "virus", although not every "cure" against every "virus", but still the chances of ivermectin are way better than... the chances of a random object you would pick up in a shop...
A yet better model is that killing a virus is not the hard part (an atomic bomb surely destroys covid, too), the problem is to find a cure that succeeds to kill the virus without hurting the human too much, which is quite difficult.
And then, people like my wife can have even better model of how ivermectin works, how covid works, so their priors can be even more precise.
Problem is, better priors are often built from more background knowledge, which makes them more difficult to communicate to other people. For that reason, I did not try to argue with my wife, I just asked how certain she feels about what she said, and I trusted her judgment.
This again required me to have priors about the quality of her judgment, which are quite high. And that again is because I have a lot of data about her. So I wouldn't expect her reasoning to be equally convincing to other people. Therefore, I didn't try to convince other people by saying "because my wife said so, and I trust her"; that obviously wouldn't work.
In particle physics, a similar issue is called the "look-elsewhere effect".
It's was tried because it showed promise in vitro as a protease inhibitor and because it has long been studied as an anti-viral medication.
Well put!
There are people who believe that anti-parasitic drugs are cure-alls and try them against everything. Tonic water is a great example of this - the active ingredient is actually effective against Malaria, but people promote it as a health drink against everything, which it isn't.
That's why these anti-parasitic drugs got pushed in the first place.
It's really bad.
Also just throwing a lot of random drugs at the wall and seeing what sticks is often a bad strategy.
"no reason" you know of, but when there's a coordinated effort to suppress information, that is to be expected. As Mark Twain 'said', it's far easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled. You are right about finding things that work. It's very difficult and requires the free expression of ideas, and referees without a conflict of interest. Big Pharma, Big Government and Big Tech's response to the pandemic has been exactly the opposite, authoritarian, draconian, closed minded and illogical.
>Also just throwing a lot of random drugs at the wall and seeing what sticks is often a bad strategy.
I thought that was an accepted good strategy when we didn't have anything else. Isn't it how we found out that fluvoxamine and dexamethasone work?
The more drugs you throw at the wall, the more likely some will appear to work by chance.
It's the M&M problem, writ large.
It's better to focus your efforts on things that you have good reason to believe will work.
Worse, some of these probably killed people. Dexamethasone probably harmed non-respiratory COVID patients who took it. And several killed people for no benefit at all.
No, both ivermectin and HCQ got suggested as promising candidates for trials because people observed significant correlations between parts of the world where large portions of the population take those drugs routinely, and low COVID cases and severity. There was no "throwing a lot of random drugs at the wall" involved. It is not surprising that you don't know why ivermectin was suggested as a candidate, given that it is virtually impossible to find anything other than "evil trump nazi terrorist klansman are filling emergency rooms after poisoning themselves with horse medicine!" using google. Isn't it weird how hard it is to find any English copy or reference of Haruo Ozaki's press briefing about this?
Except it's all lies.
These areas of the world had worse *COVID TESTING*. They didn't have lower mortality rates. In fact, their excess mortality rates were *higher* - probably by 2-4x.
You could argue that people were incorrect in their interpretation of the data, leading them to test HCQ and IVM for no reason. But that is not the same as "its all lies". The reason people tested in the first place absolutely is the epidemiological evidence. This is not something any of those people are hiding from you, it is only something google et al are hiding from you.
Do you have a list of the countries?
My contention, and those of *all* of my friends who think deeply on this one, is basically "IVM is so incredibly safe why wouldn't I roll the dice on it being 10% effective? What's the drawback? There's no drawback. Why do we think there's a drawback?"
And I haven't yet heard a counter to this argument. If you can cook up a counter to this argument I'd love to read it.
HWFO Slack hangs on your word on topics like these, so I would be very interested to see if you could convince them otherwise.
Are you and your friends also vaccinated? If so, I have no problem with that.
The danger of the pro-ivermectin crowd isn't that they're putting themselves in danger (aside from perhaps the people who take massive doses of horse medicine and get sick), or that they're draining the world's supply of deworming pills, the danger is that people think it's a miracle cure so they don't need to get vaccinated.
Some are, some aren't. I'm double Pfizer personally but I'm not going to get a booster. Some of my peers don't consider Covid-19 to be a big deal for their age bracket and health, which is a legitimate perspective especially for those under 30 for whom Covid is less deadly than ordinary influenza. Covid-19 is extremely recoverable for a very large number of people, especially younger with no comorbidities.
Young people not considering Covid a big deal is an illegitimate and deeply selfish perspective, since they can still be carriers, even if their personal outcomes are likely to be good.
Those who are vaccinated can still catch covid and infect others too even if their personal outcomes are likely to be good, so what's your argument here?
What those who exhibit blind trust in what the heads of institutions say need to consider is: What if they're corrupted. What if their ability to think rationally is compromised, like Biden, and the vaccine mandates turn out worse than his surrender to the Taliban.
Love how you disappeared after receiving responses to your false argument. Still believe the same thing as before?
If someone is not vaccinated because they think the virus is no risk to them personally, well, first of all, as Matthew points out, that's a very selfish view that ignores public health. And second of all, that applies even *more* to ivermectin, since it's less likely to benefit you than the vaccine.
Vaccine-only makes sense, ivermectin and vaccine is probably pointless but probably no worse, but ivermectin and no vaccine is deliberately ignoring the most effective tool in the toolbox.
There risk reduction for transmitting COVID by getting vaccinated is quite small. What absolute risk reduction needs to occur for you to deem some behaviour morally required? There are lots of things we could demand people do that would slightly lower transmission. We do not demand people do them, why is the vaccine so special?
Your analysis of ivermectin vs vaccine is only looking at the positives, and ignoring the negatives. Ivermectin has a long history of safety. The known risk of harm is incredibly low, and the odds of an unknown risk are also incredibly low. MRNA vaccines have a long history of being unsafe, and of scientists declaring that they will never be able to be approved because of inherent safety problems. The known risk of harm from the vaccines is much higher than ivermectin, and the potential for unknown harm is even higher still. When you consider both the benefits and the harms, it becomes much more understandable that someone would choose not to be vaccinated, and then choose to take ivermectin if they get COVID (and know they got it).
And now I'm stuck on how to understand people who don't think COVID is a big deal, and therefore doesn't get vaccinated, but does take ivermectin to protect against COVID.
This is completely false in every way.
1) SARS-CoV-2 is roughly 30x more fatal than influenza.
2) COVID-19 has a roughly 5-10% rate of long-term side effects; many people are suffering from lasting disability from the disease.
You are not responding to what was said. They said the risk for people under 30. SARS-COV-2 is more fatal than influenza in the entire population as a whole. It is substantially LESS fatal than the flu in young people with no co-morbidities. The age cut-off where COVID becomes more deadly than influenze also substantially increases if you restrict yourself to only those who have adequate serum vitamin D levels. This matters, because you can choose to make yourself part of the population that has adequate serum vitamin D levels.
How does this argument hold in the scenario of:
1) Someone vaccinated, but going out living life as normal, taking no precaution, and potentially transmitting the virus.
vs
2) Someone unvaccinated, but getting tested regularly, masking, taking precaution, and potentially transmitting the virus.
Exactly. In this comparison, person 1 is far more likely to infect others. (All that is sufficient to generate this is regular testing - assuming person 2 would isolate if they test positive). Same applies if someone isn't getting tested but has recovered from a previous infection - they're also less likely to get infected than a vaccinated person.
Statistically, for all of the US, Currently, Six times as many unvaccianted people are getting sick and 12 times as many are dying. So - in the immortal words of Dirty Harry - Do you feel lucky?
In the US 59% of the entire population is fully vaccinated, 69% (nice) 12+ or 86% 65+
Cases are climbing again and although deaths are falling, the trend follows the cases and will start rising again in about a week.
You might be able to avoid a covid infection if you keep your head down. Again, Do you feel lucky?
A) Where are you getting these numbers from, I thought the CDC had stopped providing data about breakthrough infections.
B) How does this in any way answer the question posed?
Don't forget these numbers are highly susceptible to selection bias and a climate that was designed to make the vaccinated look better in every way. And this is in fact what happened when the CDC said not to confirm covid with tests for patients who have been vaccinated while holding that requirement in place for unvaccinated. This created a highly artificial environment which reports "look at all the unvaccinated testing positive for COVID!" whereas the truth is they stopped testing vaccinated people.
I feel very lucky, because most statistics are made up and the reality is this vaccine only provides an ARR of 1% to anyone under age 65. You can look up Peter McCullough's analyses on this topic.
Why is the danger of people taking massive doses of "horse medicine" (it is a human medicine, like many human medicines, it is also used in many other animals) constantly presented, despite no evidence that anyone has ever actually done this? Why aren't you attaching a completely unnecessary caveat like that to other things, like say the vaccines? Where is the (aside from perhaps people getting dozens of doses of vaccines) when you mention vaccines? People do not think ivermectin is the reason they don't need to get vaccinated, they think the incredibly low risk posed by COVID is the reason they don't need to get vaccinated. A healthy 25 year old has absolutely no reason to get vaccinated other than "the TV told me to".
Seems like a case of privileging the hypothesis. Homeopathy has no harms so i might as well take it. Painting myself blue has no harms and might work so might as well. You can make the same argument for an infinite number of things equally well.
Homeopathy also has no benefits, where ivermectin clearly does.
Painting yourself blue could actually have some harms. Maybe it reduces your visibility when crossing the street for example. At the very least, people wouldn't take you seriously and will have trouble getting a job.
You obviously did not read the article. Each study propping up the dewormer was faulty to the point of being useless.
And you obviously need to read and think twice before responding, because I never said ivermectin had benefits for COVID.
If painting myself blue had a 90% chance of doing nothing against Covid-19 (and therefore a 10% chance of reducing my Covid-19 infection) I would see no harm in painting myself blue.
Some people use Colloidal silver as a home remedy - which turns them blue. Hilarious and Sad.
Here's a game theory matrix of the argument. I can't find anyone who can argue with Omura's Wager on this. I'd like to see Scott's take.
https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1432247947601661952
I will grant that these sorts of arguments are often used badly, such as "IF IT SAVES ONE CHILD'S LIFE ITS WORTH IT" etc. The appropriate way to respond to these sorts of bad faith applications of the argument are to dig out the trolley problem math. But in the case of IVM, it's so incredibly cheap and there's basically nobody dead on the other side of the trolley tracks no matter what, I can't see how the anti-IVM crowd can fully form the argument, other than crafting a "false hope" narrative. And I hate those because they must start with the presumption that humans are stupid cattle and their behavior must be manipulated for their own good. Banning IVM as behavioral manipulation will backfire, arguably already has backfired, due to Streisand Effect.
The problem is that the argument relies on "believing the science" that the drug is safe and has a possibility of working, but then not "believing the science" when it shows the drug actually doesn't work that well.
If you don't believe that scientific studies give useful evidence, the same argument applies to using HCQ, healing crystals and huffing gasoline to treat COVID.
That said, while I am no fan of Marinos (who I blocked on Twitter after one of his conspiracy-theory-laden rants), he's completely correct that if Ivermectin functions as a safe placebo that might do something more, we should let people take it.
You have invalidated two arguments falsely:
1) Drug is safe
2) Has possibility of working
You said "when it [ivermectin] shows the drug actually doesn't work that well"
However that does not invalidate 1) Drug is safe.
You then made a straw man argument that the OG poster said "scientific studies [do not] give useful evidence" however this is not an argument he made.
The argument doesn't rely on not believing "the science".
> If you can cook up a counter to this argument I'd love to read it.
The ones people have given me are:
* if someone is taking ivm, they're more likely to think they're protected and so won't get the vaccine
* money diverted to ivm is money diverted away from vaccines
Seems very specious. Bullet one also applies to vaccines now that they're only 40% (?) effective vs Delta. Money diverted towards eating at McDonalds kills more people than non-vaccination does. 80% of Covid wards are obese.
40% effective is still much more effective than the alternative.
McDonald's isn't competing for the same government funding.
I encourage everyone over age 40 to get the vax. I got it. It's better than nothing. I think conflating IVM with not being vaccinated is a failure to account for counterfactuals. Folks who don't want the vax are not going to get the vax whether IVM exists or not.
Also, opposition to IVM because less people will get vaxxed should, by rights, extend to all other treatments of Covid-19, even ones that are proven to work much better in the future. I've already seen that sort of sentiment on social media with regard to the new Pfivermectin stuff.
Vaccines appear to be ~90% effective against Delta, when considering serious outcomes such as death. And there's evidence that additional boosters may increase this.
That's relevant to my decision to get vaccinated in order not to die. But the figure for effectiveness against infection (and transmission) is what is relevant for someone's decision to get vaccinated in order not to infect other people, which is what is relevant to the argument for vaccine mandates. We don't know what that effectiveness is but it is much lower than against death, may be low enough to be outweighed by people taking fewer precautions after they are vaccinated.
* If there is a limited quantity of ivermectin because of a sudden surge in interest, and certain people definitely need it to stay alive, then you taking a dose denies it to someone who needs it to live.
I think this is a pretty reasonable perspective. I think it would result in you also taking HCQ, doxycycline, Vitamin D, and a few other things, but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker.
In my deep dive, the numbers on HCQ are largely conflated with the rest of the HCQ protocols which included Zinc and Vitamin D. I think you touched on that in earlier writings. I've been popping Zinc and D since the early HCQ days, writing most of the HCQ effect off to simply having better vitamins. I haven't bothered with IVM but whenever I do finally catch Covid (I think everyone is going to catch it sooner or later given the reinfection happening among the vaxxed) I plan on taking IVM unless there's better stuff out there by that point.
$700 a pop "Pfivermectin" might work. I'm on record saying I think the thing that got Joe Rogan through, outside of his probably very robust immune system in general, was probably monoclonal antibodies. If anything is a true scandal, it should be the general suppression of monoclonal antibodies as a treatment.
One thing you'll notice in the responses to my post (scan up) is a lot of folks saying the bad thing about IVM is that it disincentivizes vaccination. That's a super common theme among the IVM Culture War. The problem is that such a position should also suppress the distribution of other treatments that do work better than IVM. The pro vax crowd is so hung up on vaxxes that they'd suppress a perfectly safe and perfect Covid-19 treatment because it would suppress vax rates. This is more of a culture war issue than a medical issue, tied up with your "I can tolerate anyone except the outgroup," and similar writings on my wall.
Could you say more about suppression of monoclonal antibodies? I thought the issue was that they're very expensive.
Not the OP, but my hit is it hasn't been talked about much at all, and that if you approach the average person they probably wouldn't have heard of it or believe in much towards its efficacy. I've even observed the similar skepticism when I talk about it with people that is received when anti-tax or "alternative treatments exist" type topics are brought up.
If you mean what's the drawback on taking it personally, it would be the universal drawback that absence of evidence isn't the same as evidence of absence. People have studied ivermectin in the context of curing river blindness, a very nasty disease, so below a certain level they're not even looking for side effects. It's like (at a much lower level) if you've got a drug that can postpone death from Stage IV lung cancer by 6 months, you're not even going to bother asking whether people throw up more or less on it, or it gives them heart murmurs, or even causes leukemia 20 years later.
Does it happen that this ignorance is tragic? Maybe. Sometimes. In the 19th century, I believe physicians recommended smoking tobacco for various mild maladies on similar grounds: might help, couldn't hurt, seems totally safe, because nobody had died suddenly and abruptly from smoking. Now, it turns out smoking gives you lung cancer after a few decades, which is pretty horrible, and totally not worth whatever benefit it might have to losing weight or reducing anxiety -- but nobody knew about that, because nobody looked for it.
That's the problem. When you interfere randomly in your biochemical machinery, it's always the unknown unknowns that will nail you. So that's the important and unfortunately essentially impossible to quantify risk you need to weigh against the odds of a benefit. Doesn't mean you don't decide to go for it, but it does mean it's not the case that there is ever zero drawback.
There's an ugly flipside to this thinking as well. Tobacco (nicotine specifically) is one of the only confirmed drugs that ameliorates Parkinson's Disease, but the researchers who have identified this (the evidence is solid) aren't even allowed to give presentations on their findings at conferences because of the stigma against smoking.
And I think the "yes but unknown long term effects" thing is also pretty prominent among the IVM crowd who wants to avoid vaccination. One of the most important reasons to keep Covid vaccination from being mandatory is so there's a control group to compare long term outcomes against. It seems likely to me based on my reading that Covid-19 results in long term damage to the body because of these spike proteins. I'm not convinced that a smaller version (yet in some cases significant) of that damage is invoked by vaccination. I still got vaxxed, but I'm very uneasy about having a six month spike protein booster for this reason.
I find stuff like this to be alarming:
https://stephenc.substack.com/p/5-fold-increase-in-sudden-cardiac
That seems obviously related to either Covid-19 or the Covid-19 vaccinations. Or both. I don't think an analysis like they did could differentiate between the two without a lot more research, but I'm alarmed that this research isn't even being done.
Well but come on. There's a gigantic difference between being vaccinated and being infected, because the vaccine doesn't replicate. In the time gap between the initial onslaught and when you're immune system has spun up, the vaccine is doing *nothing at all* while the infection is running wild, damaging and destroying millions of cells.
Let's not get hung up on the fact that the *initial behavior* of the vaccine and infection is identical (which is they both produce an immune response). The behavior *after* the initial attack is very different. The vaccine can't replicate, so nothing at all happens, while the real virus goes wild and replicates like crazy in the time it has before the T and B cells get properly up to speed. It's a huge difference! So it would be very, very strange to have long-term effects from actual COVID infection be replicated in COVID vaccine.
It would be less strange to see long term damage from Covid vaccines if you got 150 boosters full of spike proteins during your life. I got the vax but I don't intend to get the booster. I'm going to roll the dice on my first vax granting enough protection that whenever I do catch Covid the symptoms are as mild as most of the other people I know who caught it and got over it easily.
If I was fat and over 65 then I would probably get boosters though, and I recommend boosters for them.
Nicotine actually is a useful drug for a few conditions, COVID even appears to be one of them. Smoking is probably not the ideal way to take it, but their advice wasn't that misguided. In the 19th century, smoking probably was actually harmless or very close to it. The health problems associated with smoking were not noticed until cheap, machine produced cigarettes were introduced. Many deadly substances are only deadly in large enough doses. Nobody smoked a pipe 20+ times a day. Modern studies don't appear to show any negative health effects for pipe smokers. It could very well be purely due to the dose, there's still no 2 pack a day equivalent pipe smokers.
Point of order - I vape and am pro nicotine so I followed the science pretty closely on "nicotine for Covid." There was promise early but I do not currently think the science falls in favor or against nicotine as a Covid preventative. I think some of the early promise may have been hidden in selection bias and hospitalized people not giving a true depiction of whether they were smokers or not, in the early French and Chinese studies.
No, there is nothing definitive. That is why I said "appears to be". But as far as I can see, the evidence has not changed. There is a reduction in infection rate for people who smoke. The downsides of smoking cigarettes certainly outweigh this, and people who smoke and do get COVID have worse outcomes which probably outweighs it too. But if nicotine is the reason smokers are less likely to be infected (this has not been demonstrated that I am aware of), then taking nicotine in a less dumb form than cigarettes would be beneficial.
If you get covid, I think there are better choices of medicines now (the newish antivirals and the monoclonal antibodies early, the steroids later), but obviously that's not something you want to be trying to do-it-yourself on while you're deathly ill--that's why we have doctors.
But AFAIK, there's not some huge reason *not* to take ivermectin or vitamin D or zinc or whatever, assuming there's not some reason they're going to interact badly with drugs you're on or something.
IVM isn't actually "incredibly safe" in the doses necessary to impair viral replication in vitro; it actually is fatal at that dosage.
That was always the problem; the suspected mechanism for disruption of viral replication in vitro was disruption of cellular processes, which is often fatal in people.
There's no reason to believe it is any better than injecting bleach, in other words. Bleach is definitely effective at killing SARS-CoV-2 - it just kills you, too.
There was never any reason to believe it was actually effective, but there are conmen who push anti-parasitic drugs as cure-alls.
In vitro concentrations aren't always directly translatable to clinical results. Ivermectin also has anti-inflammatory effects, and inflammation is a serious issue with COVID, therefore the direct anti-viral behaviour could have been merely a secondary effect to why IVM might have worked against COVID.
There is a difference between "there was never any reason to believe it was actually effective" and "I do not know of any reason to believe it was actually effective". There was a reason, tens of thousands of doctors didn't all randomly decide to try the same random drug for no reason. The COVID death rate in countries where people routinely take ivermectin is substantially lower than in other countries. This correlation is an obvious thing to investigate to see if it is causative or not.
The COVID death rate is higher in those countries, not lower. Present estimates for India put them at about 2-3x the COVID death rate of the US.
>India is the only country where parasites are common
Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for the info, I will let the dozens of other countries know. I am sure they will be happy to learn they no longer have endemic parasites because you refuse to admit that you're a liar.
Here is a link to recommended prescription from the FLCC doctors website, 0.6mg/kg (40mg/daily for my 150lb weight);
https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/FLCCC-Alliance-MATHplus-Protocol-ENGLISH.pdf
I was unable to find the study for the amount used in vitro, however I'd be very unsurprised if that amount was 10x or more this.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32378737/
> The concentration resulting in 50% inhibition (IC50 ; 2 µM) was > 35× higher than the maximum plasma concentration (Cmax ) after oral administration of the approved dose of ivermectin when given fasted.
Note that above 10x the standard dose is considered toxic.
It's unlikely that low concentrations of ivermectin have any effect whatsoever. The most likely cause of the reduction is disruption of cellular processes, which are obviously undesirable as that's another way to say "a toxic dose".
The anti-vax video I saw said the point of IVM is not to impair viral replication but to reduce excessive inflammation that can cause death.
But now that I think about it, even if true, the same video touted it as a prophylactic which makes no sense if its purpose is anti-inflammatory. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations
> "should we just give everyone any drug that might possibly work, because Pascal's Wager?"
Just in case you needed any encouragement on that front: I'd be interested in reading your meditations on the question.
I think you have to consider the ethical ramifications for future studies. Suppose you do a half-assed study and it suggests drug X kinda-sort works for condition Y *and then it becomes the standard of care*. How do you ethically go back and do the study right? What's your moral argument for the existence of the control arm? Informed consent is not going to cut it, not when the lawsuits flow.
I think this is part of the sotto voce rationalization for the FDA's reluctance to approve things that maybe kinda sorta work but where the evidence is thin -- and you cited this yourself when it came to the aducanumab approval, and perhaps it's worth noting that AD kills at a rate that isn't *that* far behind COVID. Once you sort of let the cat out of the bag, and a big constituency starts to exist for a therapy regimen, it becomes extremely difficult to go back and study it critically and precisely. Even when it's ethical to do the study per se, meaning you can talk yourself (and others) into the ethical propriety of the control arm, there are political and sociological barriers that may be difficult to surmount.
There aren't any easy peasy solutions to this, I'm just pointing out that when we consider the interests, costs and benefits, of things like drug approval, I think as an enlightened society we are obliged to consider the interests, costs and benefits, that will apply to future human beings because of what we do today. It's not *just* about making our lives better, we need to consider whether a cost to us today will produce a significant benefit to those who come later (cf. global warming, right?) and take that into account also. Information is not free: sometimes we have to pay for it in current lives, or misery, in order that the future has it and can trust it.
Or people could get the fucking vaccines (some of which aren't even mRNA or in any way experimental), which are absolutely without a doubt effective way beyond this nonsense. The options are not ivermectin or nothing, except that a bunch of dumbasses are out there spreading BS about the vaccines.
That someday is coming soon, Bill Gates is already warning that he is going to release smallpox and blame it on "bioterrorism". A new smallpox vaccine has just co-incidentally been approved, and now smallpox vials have magically been found at a merck facility, even though they have no way to have access to smallpox.
IVM was ready to deploy safely at scale on day 1. Obviously the window of opportunity has largely passed.
3 out of the 4 COVID vaccines have been banned at some point in time in some country due to safety reasons.
I was hospitalized for high blood pressure (200/100) 2 weeks after taking my 2nd dose of Pfizer; first time I went to an emergency room in 8 years.
Suffice to say, I do *not* like people who mock others over concerns regarding these vaccines.
Nitpick: The prediction in Scott's post is that effect size as measured by Cohen's d is less than 0.3. This is not the same thing as a relative risk reduction.
Cohen's d is the difference in means between the group that received ivermectin and the group that did not, divided by the pooled standard deviation.
Good catch, thanks.
Scott, long-time lurker here. My antivax, anti-public health elite uncle is currently taking ivermectin for his long COVID, at the behest of his nutty physician's assistant (he fired his doctors, who wouldn't prescribe him things like ivermectin when he had an active infection back in December 2020). I asked him to explain how ivermectin could possibly treat both an active viral infection *and* the damage to his organs he's experiencing in the medium-term aftermath. He was flummoxed.
He later came back and said that the PA's theory is that parasites "acted up" while his body was fending off the virus, and that parasites are causing his respiratory and digestive issues. Mind you, he lives in a wealthy part of Southern California, not Bangladesh. Has anyone ever made the case that long COVID = parasites? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Reminds me of the classic rebuttal to medical woo, which is to ask as much detail as possible about what they think they're cleansing from your body with their juices and tonics-- species and subspecies if possible.
One of my parents bosses has been vaccinated for every previously vaccination she's been offered but doesn't like the covid vaccine because she says that RNA vaccines cause the virus to stay in your system. Of course if anything it's traditional vaccines that work that way, while RNA vaccines avoid it.
The more I read smart people strategizing how we might mollify the antivax, the more cynical I get. I'm not sure that these are people who will change their minds over anything, no matter how dumb dumb belief is. Of course I might be cherrypicking and we might as well try to reach more people.
If you "follow the science," you know that as a vaxxed person, other people being vaxxed doesn't affect you (maybe there are edge cases but the debate is not centered on those). So I can't understand why vaxxed people care if other people get the vaccine or not. (If I'm wrong on the science, please let me know.) *Especially* when, as it appears to me, the people trying to do the convincing often view the non-vaxxed as having "dumb" beliefs and hold them in contempt. If you think someone is stupid and you hold them in contempt, you are not likely to want them vaxxed because you want what's best for them.
So as far as I can tell, there are two plausible interpretations here: Charitably, the people who want to force or convince everyone to become vaxxed don't understand the science. Uncharitably, the people who want to force or convince everyone to become vaxxed (or to treat unvaxxed as second-class) solely want to exercise power.
Is there a third option?
Yes there is, even more than that:
- People that want everyone vaxxed worry about the healthcare system being blocked by a lot of unnecessary covid cases. This could hurt anyone including themselves if they need to go to hospital.
- They are sorry for the overworked healthcare workers that have stress because of unnecessary cases. More general it is a waste of resources.
So i see plausible reasons why someone can have a strong opinion that everybody should be vaxxed. But people being missionary or even want to force everyone to be vaxxed are stupid on an other level: If you exercise pressure on people, expecially at such intimate things regarding the own body, will always earn resistance. If you want to convince someone you have to can present all your arguments but than you have to respect their free will.
We used to mass vaccinate the population without such levels of resistance.
These people are the enemy of all of society.
I feel like these days, global eradication of smallpox would be an impossible task. Too many people in first-world countries would fight hard against it.
Thanks to antivaxers, the cases of tuberculosis have been growing at some regions during the last decades. But it is a slow process that affects far fewer people than covid, so most people do not notice.
We can deal with them like we dealt with the Klan - completely destroy them economically, deny them the ability to exist in mainstream society, make them figures of derision and scorn, and generally marginalize them and hurt them.
Most people will knuckle under under such conditions.
I wouldn't be so sure. Covid kills under 1% overall. If a virus kills somebody's brother, a cousin and a friend, maybe they start to wonder if Steve Kirsch is right about the vaccine being worse than the disease. Sure, Kirsch has the Right tribal attitudes, but gee maybe I should actually do some careful research on this instead of just mindlessly nodding when an antivaxxer says "do your own research to verify what I'm saying!"
Third option: People want relief from all the stress and fear and disruption that this COVID/pandemic thing has caused on their lives, and they've been marketed to that this vaccination is the only way for that.
The only way to return to normal, is to vaccinate the population. Say the politicians and even some medical experts.
Anything otherwise, is an uncomfortable, cognitive dissonance driven, untruth.
I think you're probably right in general -- it's become a tribal/political issue, so for both sides the major motivation now is "stuff this bitter conclusion down the throat of my enemies so they totally choke on it ha ha."
But that said, there are indeed some legitimate reasons for vaccinated to want to impose vaccination on the un. The most obvious is, for the sake of those who cannot take, or are not as well protected by, vaccines, including the very old, the very young, immunocompromised people like cancer patients, transplant patients, or those being treated for autoimmune disorders. These people totally rely on "herd immunity" because they can't defend against the virus themselves, and can't use a vaccine to help them do so.
The second reason would be to reduce the social costs of the disease. If the cost of ICU stays and very expensive interventions to try to save the life of a COVID patient were *only* borne by that patient, we could be fairly indifferent to whether he had himself taken steps to reduce the probability of him getting (very) sick. But this is not the case, much of those costs are socialized, so that willy nilly means the preventative care decision necessarily gets socialized a bit, too. You can't really have it both ways, you can't ask to make all your own health-care decisions because privacy *but* ask other people to pay for (a big part of) your health-care costs because humanity.
Is there a good reason to believe that "herd immunity" can actually be achieved with vaccination? The latest data from UK shows that vaccinated have recently been more likely to be infected than unvaccinated (possibly because they take more risks).
"The social costs of the disease" argument might make sense if it was directed only to the elderly. But trying to enforce it on young people, let alone on those who already had the disease, suggests that a different real motive.
Sure, there's a good reason. Because it's worked before with other diseases. Doesn't mean this is a *sufficient* reason -- maybe it's *not* going to work with COVID and its vaccines. But if you have to bet, it's more reasonable to bet that COVID is like all the other viruses we know, and widespread use of an effective vaccine will result in herd immunity and a dramatically reduced risk to the immunocompromised.
With respect to the second, I've already agreed the most likely real motive for most of the actual current passionate advocates, either way, is tribal loyalty signaling and a desire to stick it to the other guys. I'm just arguing that simply because this is the most likely actual motive doesn't necessarily prove that it's the only motive for anybody, or that there aren't any legitimate motives at all.
But I'm also not sure what you mean by the distinction between young and old. Young people certainly do visit grandma after her lung cancer surgery, or work as respiratory therapists in hospitals treating immunocompromised patients (or socialize with other people who do).
One of the nasty consequences of a disease as readily transmissable as COVID is that it's really hard to erect sturdy barriers to transmission based on behavior and identity. We were very lucky with other viruses in this camp, e.g. SARS-CoV-1 was much deadlier *but* wasn't very transmissable before symptoms, so you could just isolate the people who were obviously sick. There were people who hoped that would work for SARS-CoV-2, i.e. just quarantine the sick and all will be well, but that turned out to be completely useless because it's so transmissable *before* symptoms appear. Boo.
I live in the UK, and imo in the jurisdictions that have vaccine mandates (Wales and Scotland) it's basically just so that they can claim that they're doing something about COVID and draw a distinction between themselves and England, while not actually doing anything that costs money or affects the majority of people.
Both Wales and Scotland are governed by left-wingers who have tried to present themselves as more cautious than the English conservatives all the way through COVID. But they also recognise that most people have moved on from COVID, so they've lifted almost all restrictions while keeping a few symbolic measures in place (e.g. in Wales you have to wear a mask on public transport but not in nightclubs or pubs). They also face a lot of pressure from the public health lobby (unions and NHS-related organisations). Masks, vaccine passports, and constantly reminding people that 'we're still in a global pandemic' placates these people while not costing much money.
IMO England's Plan B and the indoor mask mandates/vaccine passports around Europe are basically the same thing, they're a signal that the government is doing something, placates public health bodies, and don't cost much money or annoy most people. I doubt many of these governments think these actually work that well.
My main "third option" is that a virus's number of opportunities to evolve (to be more contagious) is proportional to the number of infections. More unvaccinated people means more variants arriving faster, which means higher probability that a variant will evade your immune defenses. (arguably this doesn't matter so much until there is enough vaccine production capacity for the whole world, though I heard that unclaimed doses tended to be thrown away instead of e.g. being sent to developing countries)
In addition, vaccines are what, 90% effective with delta or less, (I never got a firm number), and probably less effective still with omicron? So more unvaccinated people means more chances you (as a vaccinated person) will get sick.
And then there's people with weak/missing immune systems for whom the vaccine is ineffective. One can reasonably want to try to protect such people via "herd immunity" if possible (I'm now leaning toward "it's not possible" but most people, including me, have not seen enough evidence to be sure)
I believe that 90% effective is relative effectiveness, not absolute effectiveness. The COVID-19 vaccine's absolute effectiveness appears to be incredibly low, especially for newer variants. In fact, it is so ineffective (on an absolute scale) that there is no negative correlation (what one would expect for an effective vaccine) between vaccination rate in a region and all cause mortality (or any other metric, though most metrics people use are pretty terrible).
With the current vaccines at least, there is essentially no chance at reaching herd immunity, as seen by countries with a near 100% fully vaccinated population who continue to have "outbreaks".
> there is no negative correlation (what one would expect for an effective vaccine) between vaccination rate in a region and all cause mortality
Ahh, Simpson's Paradox. https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/uk-data-shows-no-all-cause-mortality
Gibraltar, population 33691, has a vaccination rate between 97% and 140% depending on which source you look at (vaccine tourism?)... hard to say what the real vaccination rate is. Aside from that, the only countries with rates above 85% are Singapore, UAE, and Portugal.
UAE's case/death numbers dropped so low it's like the pandemic is over.
Singapore and Portugal not so much, but at least their case/death counts are better than the US, UK or Germany. Reportedly: "Singapore’s health ministry said that fully vaccinated people were admitted to hospital over the past week at a rate of 0.5 per 100 000 and that deaths in this group were 0.1 per 100 000. But unvaccinated people were admitted at a rate of 5.2 per 100 000, and deaths were 0.9 per 100 000." Cumulative total Covid cases in Singapore and Portugal are about 50,000 and 75,000 per million, so if they're easing restrictions due to their high vaccination rates, there could be significant numbers of never-infected-never-vaccinated people left. It sure would be nice if there were a global survey of infection and vaccination rates to go on, rather than every country having its own separate tracking system that will be more or less accurate from country to country... these "unknown unknown" bureaucratic/contextual differences makes it hard for amateur sleuths to reach any firm conclusions.
But looking at the big picture: I don't have to tell you that official estimates from countries around the world say that mRNA vaccines greatly lower the risk of hospitalization and death. But if you like graphics, higher vaccination rates are, of course, correlated with lower Covid caseloads: https://www.google.com/search?q=scatterplot+of+vaccination+rates+vs+deaths&client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=AOaemvLwmKMP33YdFzBYKwWyKHSkOZ74lQ:1638651655861&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUme6Ohcv0AhUMFzQIHaJVAx0Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=977&bih=1460&dpr=1.33
As for whether herd immunity is possible, I lean toward "no" if officials continue to refuse challenge trials for vaccines for new variants. Even with challenge trials, I expect it'll be necessary to produce new vaccines occasionally (or so) because SARS-CoV-2 is a generalist virus with animal reservoirs. There's uncertainty here, as it depends on complex, fine details of how our immune systems work and how well future mutations can evade those systems.
TL;DR: We agree that differences in testing/reporting strategies between countries make it difficult to draw any good conclusions. I don't think this is a Simpson's Paradox problem but rather it is a problem with the metrics that are commonly used to support the pro-vaccine narrative. We also agree that herd immunity is probably off the table (from your wording, I think I believe that more strongly than you do).
----
I'm incredibly opposed to using COVID-19 "case" rates for anything because they are primarily a function of testing volume (when looked at absolutely) and tested demographic. Neither of these are standardized at all around the world, and in almost all regions they aren't even consistent over time. They also are incredibly manipulable (or at least confounded if you want to assume ineptitude over malice) by testing particular sub-populations. For example, in many regions vaccinated individuals are tested *far* less frequently than vaccinated individuals (orders of magnitude less in some jurisdictions).
As for "COVID-19 deaths", most jurisdictions report "died with COVID-19" and very few report "died from COVID-19". This is marginally better than case rates, but still suffers from the same biases, confounders, etc. since not all jurisdictions report the same and vaccinated people are less likely to be tested for COVID-19 during a hospital stay in some jurisdictions which results in a decrease in test rate over time (thus confounding results of "died with COVID-19").
Beyond that, there are problems with PCR with high cycle counts vs other forms of testing (which are far more reliable) but this is usually not standardized even within a region. As an example, a hospital in Australia I believe just came out acknowledging that they do 45 cycle PCR tests for COVID-19.
All of the above IMO is really just a minor point though compared to the point that what *matters* is net benefit/harm. I personally find all cause mortality to be just about the best proxy for this because counting deaths is pretty easy and aside from blatant lying, there is basically no room for ineptitude to screw up the results. It doesn't capture things like long-covid, time off work, physical pain, etc. but all of those things are incredibly hard to gauge accurately in today's society and are subject to a whole lot of statistics munging and disagreement between otherwise reasonable people. Also, I would argue that loss of life should be one of the primary things we care about and mostly trumps everything else.
Using all cause mortality, rather than COVID-19 cases or deaths, we can see that regions with stringent COVID-19 mitigations, mandates, regulations, vaccine requirements, etc. are not seeing a decrease in all cause mortality, we are instead seeing an increase in many (most? from my spot checking, but my work was very non-exhaustive) regions. If COVID-19 is very deadly (not lost in the noise of background death rate), and vaccines are effective at preventing death, and the vaccines are safe (they don't cause death themselves), then we should seen (in aggregate) a noticeable decrease in all cause mortality correlated with the vaccine rollouts in various countries. Unfortunately, we see no such thing.
Of course, there *could* be reasons to not see vaccine efficacy. For example, lockdowns could be causing an increase in death rate the longer they go for and that is fully offsetting the benefits of the vaccines. Or there could be something else totally unrelated to COVID-19 that happens to be killing people everywhere on the planet in increasing numbers and that offsets the vaccine lives saved. The problem is that we don't have that strong signal for (COVID-19 is deadly) & (Vaccines are Effective) & (Vaccines are Safe) that I would want to see prior to mandating or otherwise requiring vaccinations. What we have is people on both sides who can draft models that support their position but no way to evaluate which model is correct.
To further muddy the waters, the all cause mortality data for at least the Pfizer vaccine safety trial shows that more people in the vaccine arm died than in the placebo arm (not statistically significant). At best, this means the trial that was supposed to show efficacy of that vaccine didn't actually show efficacy on the most important (IMO) measure, which is total lives saved. Of course, one can easily and very reasonably make the argument that the study was way too underpoweerd to show vaccine efficacy at preventing death (and I would agree), but this just further supports the claim that we simply don't have evidence that the vaccine is a net benefit.
FWIW, I think it is quite reasonable to believe that the vaccine *might* be net positive. I think the technology underlying it is quite reasonable and the mechanism of action is similarly reasonable. In a parallel universe where the vaccine was completel optional/personal choice (like the annual flu vaccine) I would likely advise it to my at-risk friendse and may even get it myself as it would allow me to better control for *when* I get a strong immune response (e.g., plan for a weekend or vacation, not right before an important deadline). My only argument is that we simply do not have **good** data backing up the claim that (COVID-19 is deadly) & (Vaccines are Effective) & (Vaccines are Safe) so we shouldn't be requiring/mandating or even strongly advocating giving them to everyone regardless of personal situation.
I read the link you gave after writing up that reply and wanted to respond to it more directly. I agree with the author of that article in general, and I am *not* making the argument that vaccinated all cause mortality in the UK is higher than the unvaccinated all cause mortality in the UK (for the exact reasons mentioned in that article). I'm arguing that population-wide all-cause mortality should be decreasing for every country as the vaccines rolled out if covid is deadly and vaccines are safe and effective.
I am now noticing the significance of your comment "absolute effectiveness appears to be incredibly low" after seeing an anti-vax video from my dad at https://rumble.com/vqx3kb-the-pfizer-inoculations-do-more-harm-than-good.html.
My dad didn't respond to my reply so ... I'll necro this thread instead.
I said to my dad: The very first major claim in the video is that the absolute risk reduction is 0.84%....
So what do they mean by that? They are talking about the difference in the number of infections, divided by the number of trial participants.
As the video states, the trial lasted only two months in 2020. The video doesn't say *which* months in 2020, nor does it state where the trial was done. But if you make use of your brain for just a few seconds, you would realize that the number of Covid infections that occur in a two-month period
1. Would be much different than a four-month period or a one-month period
2. Could be much different in different time windows
3. Could be much different in different locations
Clearly, the number of infections in the control group is not related to the vaccine at all, since the control group did not receive a vaccine. In fact it is mostly a function of things like the length of the trial, the contagiousness of the disease, the amount of social distancing people are using, and other coincidental factors.
Hypothetically, imagine that Pfizer's vaccine actually provided perfect protection. Clearly, this perfect vaccine would have had the same number of infections in the control group, about 0.88% (162 divided by 18325). And so this video would have labeled this perfect vaccine as providing an absolute risk reduction of 0.88%. Never mind that the number 0.88% has nothing whatsoever to do with the vaccine and everything to do with the environment in which the trial was conducted.
0.88% doesn't even tell you very much about the disease itself, since, again, the number depends on the duration of the trial, measures to reduce spread in the local area, the base level and distribution of infections in that particular area, etc., none of which are attributes of the disease per se.
The thing is... this is all obvious if you think about it. No rocket science, no fancy stats, just basic using your head.
And yet the video literally says that "your risk reduction" from taking the Pfizer vaccine is 0.84% and that the vaccines offer "less than 1% benefit". These statements are clearly incorrect. A correct statement would have been "the absolute risk reduction in a two month time window from (start date) to (end date) in (location of trial) was approximately 0.88%." But the correct statement doesn't send the "right" message, does it?
I see two possible interpretations: either the people who made the video weren't using their brains... or they are soldiers in the fight against Covid vaccines.
The purpose of absolute effectiveness is so that you can compare the benefits of the vaccine against its costs. Commonly in this case it is compared against vaccine injury risks. As an example, anaphylaxis is a very easy thing to compare against because there is an incredibly strong causal relationship between a vaccine and an allergic reaction (due to the very tight temporal connection). If you want to do a risk benefit analysis of the vaccine, you need to compare its absolute risk reduction against the absolute risk of the treatment, you wouldn't want to compare it against the relative risk reduction.
You are correct that the absolute risk *is* a function of exposure, which is a huge confounder! Ideally, we would do challenge trials to remove this confounder but for whatever reason the world has decided that good science shouldn't be done. 🤷 However, even without challenge trials, we should be able to get a very rough estimate on absolute risk reduction so we can compare against the risks associated with the vaccines (of course, this would require actually tracking/documenting vaccine risks in a reasonable way which is something else society seems unwilling to do).
You are also correct that absolute risk reduction is a function of time as well. For a vaccine that gives infinitely lasting immunity against a virus and all of its variants you would need to look at the annualized risk, factor in life expectancy of the individual, and then use that as the "absolute risk" (probably normalized to quality of life years or something) and compare that against a similarly normalized risk of the vaccine itself. Things get *way* more complicated when you have a vaccine that *appears* to have very limited long term effectiveness, and against a virus that appears to be very capable of mutating away from the vaccine.
To complicate matters even more, there are many unknowns in all of this, like at the time we didn't know how easy it would be for Sars-Cov-2 to mutate away from the single-protein immunity produced by the vaccines, nor did we not have good data on how lasting vaccine immunity would be.
You are correct. I've been interested in antimisinformation for years. People who are vocal about their belief will easily find excuses that enable them to ignore all evidence. You cannot change their mind. (I do think there are fence-sitters you might convince with a public conversation, but only if you are good at debate and ready to handle the contrarian's arguments.)
How is your uncle's long covid doing?
Great read, thanks
I second this comment.
Writing this while about 1/3 of the way through reading...
A) Thank you so much for doing the yeoman's work to read through these carefully. This is what we pay you for (/s, lol)
B) Regarding Babaloba et al, I tentatively think I may have found the solution:
(This is the context)
"I think his point is that if you have 21 people, it’s impossible to have 50% of them have headache, because that would be 10.5. If 10 people have a headache, it would be 47.6%; if 11, 52%. So something is clearly wrong here. Seems like a relatively minor mistake, and Meyerowitz-Katz stops short of calling fraud, but it’s not a good look."
We have four columns - 1 for treatment A, B and control each, plus an overall. This allows us to triangulate to see what has happened with the data.
Column A is the mystery - how do you get 50% of 21 people, and so forth? Easy, have K people who have missing data for this outcome. Happens all the time. (In my research, I deal with much larger samples, but there's always missing values for some trivial % of the data). Technically you can have different numbers of missing by variable, but the easiest solution to make (at least a few) of these numbers work is to allow 1 person with missing data in Column A.
Then we have 6/20 with fever, 10/20 = 50% with headache, and so forth. Columns B and C look fine. Ok, the question then is does my "fix" give the correct totals in the "overall" column? Turns out that (as far as I checked, it does)
Details:
Headache: 10/20 in col A, 12/21 in col B, 5/20 in col C. This would give 27/61 overall, which is 44.26%, which matches their 44.3% exactly.
Fever: 6/20 in col A, 9/21 in col B, 4/20 in col C. This would give 19/61 overall, which is 31.147%. They report 31.2%. This *doesn't quite match*. But if you round to 2 dp, you get 31.15%. And then if someone later rounds to 1 dp, you get (incorrectly) 31.2%. I bet errors like this happen all the time - you have your software print the result to 2 dp, and then as you write your table, you decide to do 1 dp and every time you have something end with "5" you don't go and check which way the raw data should round. (I bet I make this mistake in my research all the time when rounding coefficients and so forth manually in text, because who always remembers to stop and check?).
Haven't checked the other variables, but getting these sufficiently close matches for the first two I checked for the most simple "non-fraud" explanation of "1 data point missing" seems too much of a fluke otherwise.
The problem is then that the study does not report why they excluded and how many of the patients. This could be removing a patient that would skew the results in ways that they do not like, and so it is a problem still, not guaranteeing a fraud, but hinting at some data tampering.
Studies almost never report anything beyond "missing data are dropped" (which doesn't tell you anything that isn't completely obvious). It's not like you can choose whether to keep missing data or not - of course it automatically gets dropped!
Look, I'm not disproving data tampering but this is by no means the simplest or most likely explanation here. You'll find missing data being dropped for specific outcomes in 99% of studies.
Or maybe the 21 was just a typo for 20 (unlikely on the top row of a QWERTY keyboard but maybe they were using a number keypad)
Possible. But then they need to make an error on the 62 vs 61 as well. I.e. every reference in the entire text about n=62 would be wrong.
They also break out the 21 as 15 men and 6 women.
Thank you for this. It was a missing piece in my analysis. One gift deserves another, so here's what Kyle Sheldrick has to say about Babalola: https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1547037869549699072?s=20&t=vL8K26wQr-S24YFDhidP2g
The alien / vaccine hypothetical is compelling, but what's missing is that IRL all humans would have 7-12 different alien chips already in them and are objecting to getting another.*
*Yes yes mRNA is a new tech but you don't see anti-vaxx people being willing to get non-mRNA vaccines.
I interpreted that as "willing to get non-mRNA COVID vaccines," e.g. Johnson & Johnson.
Oops, this is what I get for skimming Google results. In my defense, the mRNA tech developed a particular notoriety for being "brand-new" and "untested," but I guess that was not a defensible position based on how long each type of vaccine has been in use.
AstraZeneca is viral vector, old school. Mind you, it might turn you into a chimp
AstraZeneca was withdrawn for being unsafe and is now basically the scapecoat for the embarrassing high vax with high corona incidence areas. Idk what kind of pro vax point can be wrought from bringing it up.
ook!
While J&J is unlike most other vaccines Americans would have received, and it does contain DNA, "DNA vaccine" refers to something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccine
The only approved DNA vaccine is an Indian vaccine for covid, approved in August 2021.
J&J is a nonreplicating viral-vector vaccine; the first vaccines of that type approved for general use were for Ebola.
I do know several people who say they will take the Novovax vaccine if it's approved (we shall see, but come on FDA) but are refusing to take the adenovirus and mRNA based vaccines. They have (imho irrational) negative response to anything 'genetic' (e.g. super seriously avoid GMO foods etc.).
If they avoid GMOs and mRNA/adenovirus vaccines, well, at least that's a coherent worldview.
I said this upthread, but the one person I know (secondhand) who fits this description says she is worried that mRNA vaccines are less safe than other vaccines because they put part of the virus into you. Of course this is the opposite of what's really true-- there's a very small risk of modern vaccines causing infections, but if they did it would be from older vaccines that use live viruses, or vaccines that use dead or deactivated virus, whereas RNA and DNA vaccines basically carry an instruction manual to the virus rather than the real thing.
Any vaccine you make is somehow going to have to put something from the virus into you in a way that gets presented to your immune system. The mRNA and viral vector vaccines do that by making your cells make some spike protein. (I don't think anyone's done a DNA vaccine for covid, but that's how it would work, too.) Subunit vaccines just inject a chunk of protein that appears on the virus (Novavax is doing this), plus something to make your immune system pay attention. Inactivated virus vaccines inject a virus that's been "killed" by heat or formaldehyde or something. Attenuated live virus vaccines inject a form of the virus that has been adapted not to make you sick, so you get a mild asymptomatic infection and your immune system learns how to fight the real virus off.
J&J and AZ and Sputnik are all viral vector vaccines, using adenovirus (a DNA virus). There are also vaccines (I think almost all experimental) that just shoot DNA into you using some kind of air gun (or sometimes just injecting them, but they they need to do something to damage the cells to get the DNA inside). I gather this works because the DNA makes it into some cells and its genes get expressed, but I don't really understand the mechanism very well. Here's the Wikipedia article on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccine
The mRNA part of the mRNA vaccines only contains instructions for building the S protein part of the virus coat. There are no instructors for building the viral DNA itself, nor for the other parts of the viral coat. Furthermore, it's not the actual genuine S protein, but a modified version of it that is stable *without* being incorporated into a complete virus. In other words, it isn't even a part of the virus that could be assembled with other parts to make a complete virus.
You may not see them, but I assure you they exist in genuinely large numbers.
Well unfortunately, even existing vaccines (like the flu shot) have now become politicized. I expect to see the lowest child vaccination rates in decades over the next few years.
The medical establishment, the media, the internet, government, and many churches, were taken over by an authoritarian political group of billionares years ago, What's hapening now is necessary to expose it so people will get off their asses and change it before the whole human race is in a grave. Imagine if Hitler or one of the other evil dictators of the past came to power today, took control of genetics, started manufacturing chimeras, releasing sterility viruses and deceiving people to take sterility vaccines.
What are the most prominent examples of the medical establishment taking political sides, as opposed to medical sides that happen to be supported by one party?
The medical establishment was taken over by a political side, authoritarian socialists, along with a majority of government departments and large corporations. When medical mistakes are the forth cause of death, you know something is wrong. The takeover began in earnest 70 years ago with a 93% tax on capitol growth by doctors and huge subsidies to large corporations to establish health care collectives. It's been all down hill ever since. Health care costs went from 5% of GNP to 20%, while quality went down. Constant hype about breakthroughs convinces people it's getting better but it's not.
The pathetic response to the pandemic made it very clear. The billions of dollars taken from workers and given to bureaucrats to prevent pandemics were wasted, and even worse diverted to labs creating pathogens like the one that caused the pandemic.
I think also missing is the behavior of conservative political and media elites, who are actually in a social class where they might have immunologist relatives but who kept up anti-blue tribe COVID skepticism. Trump is vaccinated, Fox News has an internal vaccine passport system, these are the people best positioned to persuade skeptics motivated by 'hostile aliens' and they refuse to do it because maximal ongoing culture war serves their interests.
Tribalism makes people stupid. There are plenty of utterly amoral people in media and politics who will happily play along with the stupidity to increase their money/power/audience. But also, there's a genuine danger of getting caught up in a feedback loop of your bubble + your confirmation bias. I'm pretty sure Bret Weinstein isn't dishonest about ivermectin, and he's certainly not dumb, but the whole ivermectin controversy / big pharma conspiracy theory thing seems to have broken his brain in a rather depressing way.
I think even very smart and sophisticated people are susceptible to getting high on their own supply.
Yes, I think Bret Weinstein is hooked on the idea that he's right when a lot of other people are wrong.
He could have just had (reasonable?) doubts about the mRNA vaccines, but no, he had to go on from that to the idea that there's an extremely effective drug that's being suppressed.
Trump has been shilling the vaccines since he was still president, he is shilling them now. The qboomers you want to pretend are representative of everyone who isn't hysterical about COVID can't be swayed by Trump, so Fox can do absolutely nothing to convince them either. They have less than no influence over the rest of us, who think fox is just as worthless as CNN. The CDC's statistics are why I am not taking a dangerous vaccine for a harmless cold. Not because only 99.8% of empty headed media puppets are devoting all their time to lying and fear mongering about COVID instead of 100% of them.
A few random thoughts:
It would be great to see analysis of why a deworming medicine is thought by some medical professionals to be an effective treatment for a respiratory disease.
What could possibly motivate the folks at ivmmeta.com to spend so much effort in creating and maintaining such an impressive site? I see only two candidates - sincere belief in the effectiveness of Ivermectin or a profit motive. I don't believe trolls or nihilistic fraudsters would have that much motivation. Since the drug is already a generic drug, it would seem the profit motive is less likely than a sincere belief that it is an effective treatment for COVID19.
I don't understand the intensity of the establishment backlash against Ivermectin. I have not seen evidence that vaccination rates would be higher if people did not believe ivermectin worked. Nor do I think that it's intuitively clear that this would be the case. People who distrust the establishment don't trust them on vaccines or on whether or not ivermectin works. Even if they were somehow convinced that ivermectin didn't work, they wouldn't trust the vaccines unless the public health establishment suddenly became more trustworthy overall. Add to this the fact that if taken in human sized doses, ivermectin is safe and I don't really see the reason for the virulent mainstream backlash. In fact, the backlash probably cost some lives by causing people to take crazy dosages.
More generally, I don't understand the establishment messaging of vaccines (+masks) or you're the worst. There are plenty of other ways to reduce risk including doing things to maintain or improve overall health (exercise and sunlight). And these activities are not mutually exclusive with taking vaccines. The messaging should not have been anti vaccine alternative - that just spreads distrust. It should have been vaccines are good and here's a bunch of other positive steps you might take to reduce your COVID19 risk. And the evidence for ivermectin is mixed, but if your doctor wants to give you some, whatever its harmless. Again, I think the vaccine or bust messaging was really counterproductive.
How about pointing the anger at the FDA for forbidding the use of tests early on other than the one they had approved — and later discovering that that one didn't work? Also for delaying the unblinding of the vaccine data until election day.
I would go further, and blame those responsible for making it take nine or ten months from a vaccine being created to its being approved for use, in part by not permitting challenge trials.
While Zvi has criticized the FDA, he himself has been wrong about a number of things. So while the FDA screwup rate is not 0, his is not 0, either.
In particular, everyone who was eager to get the masks off was wrong. My personal opinion has been (and will continue to be) that everyone should continue to mask up until COVID is gone, and that maybe wearing masks on public transportation like planes and trains and buses should be *permanent* - that is to say, even *after* COVID is gone, we keep doing it.
Anti-COVID measures had an enormous effect on flu season last year - we had approximately 1% of the normal fatalities due to influenza. That's crazy.
It shows just how ridiculously infectious COVID is by comparison - measures inadequate to fully control COVID were sufficient to lower flu deaths by 99%.
>Like it's crazy to me that we figured out a way to basically stop flu transmission forever
Not testing is very different from stopping transmission. An unknown portion of those "COVID" cases were flu cases. Nobody was tested for flu, everyone was tested for COVID, and here in Canada 100% of the COVID tests done last year were completely worthless PCR tests with insanely high cycle counts. A test with a 97% false positive rate is worse than no test. And it forms the foundation of this entire mass hysteria.
>really beat it, in the way Japan, South Korea, and Australia beat covid
You mean, not "beat it" at all and have no statistically significant difference from any other developed country? Whatever country "we" is, managed that just fine.
>We blew it because people refused to come together as a society and work on the problem - refused to wear masks, refused to self-isolate, refused to social distance, refused to endorse policies we knew could reduce the spread of the disease.
But we know all of that is complete BS. The anger is floating around precisely because so many people live in the TV fabricated alternate reality where that nonsense is true. They somehow forget that at the beginning, when we had no concrete information to go on, republicans were the ones taking COVID seriously, and dems were insisting it is "just the flu" and organizing "hug a random asian person because the imaginary racism we just made up is the real disease" events. Dems were the ones insisting masks don't work and you are an evil panic spreading fear monger if you wear one. And then as we got real information from countries with slightly more trustworthy governments than China's, and we determined that it really is just the flu and there is no need to do anything, everything suddenly reversed and we had always been at war with Eastasia.
We knew from the time of the great reversal, once efforts to restrict travel to prevent spread had been successfully shut down by "racism" accusations, that it had become endemic and it was going to be a permanent disease like the flu. This was openly explained to all of you, when you were told that we needed temporary 2 week measures to "flatten the curve" and not overwhelm our health care systems with too many cases at once, since there was nothing we could do to change the number of cases that would happen overall. And yet, on week 89 of 2 weeks to flatten the curve, people are somehow able to delude themselves into blocking all of this out of their head, while simultaneously remaining completely convinced of their own superior, skeptical mind.
You have to look at all the variables, not just the one you like. The US has more deaths from everything all the time than Japan does. The US has far more people with serious health problems than Japan does. We know age and co-morbidities are the most important factors in COVID deaths by several orders of magnitude. And denying the lack of seriousness of COVID is just silly. Look up the average age of COVID death victims yourself. It is higher than the average life expectancy. Look at the survival rate for people below 80 without co-morbidities. COVID is killing people 3 weeks sooner than they would have died anyways from something else. Many COVID deaths are admittedly not even COVID deaths, they are deaths within a selected time window of having a positive PCR test for COVID.
Nothing about the establishment messaging is understandable under mistake theory.
"My outgroup is evil, not wrong."
To clarify, in case it seems like I'm being too glib, good and evil both exist and it isn't all that terribly hard to tell the difference. Certain morally valent policy recommendations are sufficiently morally incorrect as to constitute evil behavior. Censoring the net is evil. Convincing depressed teens and twentysomethings to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their genitals mutilated and rendered permanently nonorgasmic, in an intervention that is sold as preventing suicide but is ineffective even at that, is evil. Advocating for the normalization of sexual relationships between mature adults and people too young to give informed consent, and the concomitant power imbalance, is evil. Advocating for the legalization of the murder of viable fetuses is evil. All of these are mainstream positions within the Democratic party and the broader academic left from which the Democratic party draws its social policy recommendations. When I claim the Democratic party is evil, I am not dunking on the outgroup. I have specific and grave moral concerns about their specific and openly held social policy recommendations.
I don't think there's a lot of worthwhile engagement to be had here, but for the record, Democrats are not advocating for the normalization of pedophilia. We're also not convincing - or even trying to convince - trans kids of anything, we're just trying to support them.
"That's not us, that's just those weirdos on university campuses / in the media" is not particularly reassuring. Some of us have seen that movie play out before, over the last 30 years or so.
I'm going to have to ask for a citation on the advocating for pedophilia thing and that sex reassignment surgery renders people permanently nonorgasmic...
And you're right to do so. I'm perfectly happy to do so, since people who make controversial claims and then say "it's not my job to educate you" are just the worst, but if you could preregister in advance the sorts of websites you would immediately discard as right wing propaganda, "fake news", or otherwise epistemologically disqualifying, it'll save us both some time.
There is an extensive and well documented thread in TheMotte's culture war megathread this week- hundreds of comments worth, of people far more informed and articulate than I am, documenting discussing the obvious existence of the normalization of pedophilia in modern left culture, including federal politics, in extreme levels of detail. Enjoy. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/quapxg/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_15/
Since you seem like a nice fellow, I'd like to tell you (as someone with absolutely no affection for the Democratic Party) that you are not doing yourself or your tribe any favors with this post.
Look, their support for legal abortion is right there on their webpage: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/achieving-universal-affordable-quality-health-care/#:~:text=abortion
If you want to make the case that "the Democratic partry is evil" because of its "openly held social policy recommendations" , that's a fine place to start. (You happen to be wrong, but it's defensible.).
It makes some sense to go after them for the genital stuff next. There's at least something in there about "medically necessary care for gender transition" that you could attempt to hang your hat on. It's going to be a real stretch to get to "objectively evil" but I would at least read your attempt.
When you bring up net censorship, I have no idea what you're talking about. I am going to charitably assume you aren't talking about twitter and facebook banning Trump. When I ctrl-f for "internet" I find "an open internet, including net neutrality". I'm quite willing to believe there's something dumb about the internet in there, because everyone says dumb things about the internet, but you'll have to call it out specifically, and then make a case for why it's evil instead of just dumb.
But you completely tank your credibility with the pedophilia. What even? When I search https://www.govtrack.us/misconduct for "underage" I find Matt Gaetz, Dennis Hastert, Mark Foley, and Donald Lukens--all four Republicans.
The depth, breadth, and extremely high quality of the extensive discussion in this thread says otherwise. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/quapxg/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_15/
You seem to have a very warped view of Democrat policies and positions.
On Abortion: I understand that Conservatives feel that abortion is murder and I can respect your feelings about that. However, the issue is not that simple. One might argue that any fetus that can't survive outside the womb without extraordinary measures is not actually viable.
I do believe the standard is based on brain activity, so that most places don't allow abortions past the 2nd trimester. The majority of your country men are ok with that compromise.
Choosing conflict is frequently a mistake.
Establishment's censorship of discussion of ivermectin seems like the most likely motivator for the creation of ivmmeta.com.
Strongly agreed. Parts of the medical profession actively worked with social media and mainstream media to block any discussion of a potential treatment of a major pandemic. What about that wouldn't cause great concern and lead to groups of people trying to create an honest discussion of the merits of the treatment? For a normal response, most of us would never have heard of ivermectin and the medical profession would have worked through the studies and made recommendations to doctors. Individual people would have heard positives or negatives about the drug from their doctor, and made up their own mind. Nothing special, no big deal.
I don't want to be too uncharitable, but I get annoyed by the double standard sometimes here. If ivermectin boosters are acting unreasonable-- and most are getting out ahead of their skis even on a charitable interpretation-- then anything they get above mockery is gravy.
Yes, we should be trying to get through to people about vaccines, and yes, if you're a blue check physician health communicator type you shouldn't be making fun of random people on twitter. But still, if you're ignoring a working vaccine to take snake oil, you're being silly and I'm not going to feel bad that people make fun of you.
Of course you're right that we should be exercising more, eating better, etc., to prevent covid, but we should also be wearing surgical masks and ventilating indoor spaces. We don't need to choose between air bags and seat belts.
The vaccine might justify taking fewer cautions since it's simply way more effective than any NPI, but there's nothing else that compares. I might even trade in all our messaging on NPIs for messaging that boosts vaccinations, given that the marginal value of an additional vaccination is so much higher.
My point is it's not obvious they're ignoring a vaccine to take ivermectin. This is an assumption.
It's not representative, but there have been a few celebrities including Joe Rogan and other celebrities who apparently get their health advice from Joe Rogan taking ivermectin but not getting the vaccine. Rogan has maybe the largest platform on health matters in the world in terms of the listenership regularly tuning in for health content, so he's not a marginal player.
Why would you say he "became an anti-vaxxer". Do you feel like this sort of clear dishonesty helps your cause? Do you think the people who believe that have been constantly lied to and mislead for the last 2 years are going to change their mind and suddenly rush out and get vaccinated if you can just pile some more lies on?
Rogan did not just take ivermectin, he also took monoclonal antibodies which have excellent evidential basis, and he was very transparent about everything he took. He also routinely, literally says not to listen to him for medical advice because he's a moron, and that you should talk to your doctor. All in all, very reasonable messaging.
I don't have anything against Joe Rogan, and it doesn't seem like his approach to this is terrible. It's just that he should've plugged both vaccination and monoclonals and held back on ivermectin without evidence. Ultimately, I think you have a certain responsibility when your platform is so large, and he knows very well that people will imitate what he does for the virus. If he didn't want that, he could just tell fans that that is all private.
I was also speaking on the more specific point that the pro-IVM anti-vax view seems reasonably widespread.
He has repeatedly recommended vaccines for at-risk populations, he likely just didn't want to take it himself because he knows quite a few doctors and researchers, some of which are openly skeptical of the vaccine's long-term safety. What reasonable person would plug vaccines for everyone when most of the advice he's heard raise such concerns? Rogan isn't analyzing the evidence for IVM, he's just listening to advice from medical professionals that he trusts, and since his whole shtick is openness and honesty, that's what he shares with the public.
The problem here really is with poor science journalism (or really, poor journalism in general), and poor science messaging which has eroded public trust in these institutions. If this hadn't happened, then Rogan would probably just trust the CDC's advice.
You might want to stop and consider (charitably!) why people might want to listen to Joe Rogan on a matter that he emphatically says is not his expertise.
It's a mixture of experts/elites/establishment people actively lying to them about COVID treatments and preventions, including lying about both masks and the vaccines, and Joe Rogan laying out his thought process pretty clearly in a way that invites people to make up their own minds. That may lay out a better approach out medical establishment should take in the future.
Transparency can be helpful. But my concern more than anything is just that both Rogan and the FDA/CDC/WHO/etc. have gotten things badly wrong at various points of the pandemic and no one seems to care. What I honestly have a hard time steelmanning is people who are rightfully critical of institutions that they used to trust and then listen credulously to anti-establishment figures who aren't necessarily more reliable without applying that same cynicism.
Humility? Are you more willing to listen to someone who admits their faults, but puts their understanding out there to review, or someone who claims to be right and doubles down on the incorrectness before hurriedly trying to memory hole it?
Probably the biggest reason I read ACX is that Scott is willing to consider opposing views and admit when he's wrong. Joe Rogan does that much better than the CDC. I still care more what the CDC says than what Rogan says, but it's close enough that I can understand people who go the other way.
"What I honestly have a hard time steelmanning is people who are rightfully critical of institutions that they used to trust and then listen credulously to anti-establishment figures who aren't necessarily more reliable without applying that same cynicism."
I am one of those people who are critical of both the institutions that I used to trust, and the anti-establishment figures who aren't necessarily more reliable.
What makes you think there's a large amount of people who only critically think when instutitions are concerned, but then stop critically thinking when anti-establishment figures are concerned? I'm an example of cynicism at all stages of life, and I feel there are more people like me in the anti-vax circle than in the vax circle.
I think it's easier to be forgiving toward a guy who gives bad advice after saying "I really don't know what I'm talking about here, don't take my advice, ask your doctor" than it is toward a person/institution that gives bad advice after saying "We are experts, this is the scientifically correct advice, and anyone who disagrees is some kind of anti-science loon." Especially when (as with Faucci's early messaging on masks) it appears to have been intentionally bad advice done to accomplish some other good (keeping the good masks available for medical personnel during the crisis).
Someone can correct me if I am wrong. But my understanding of what happened with Rogan was that he was not vaccinated because he felt that he was healthy and did not need it. Then he contracted COVID. Then he contacted a doctor that he had had on the show who supposedly had a bunch of treatments for folks who had COVID. He paid that doctor a lot of money to recommend/proscribe him a bunch of stuff of which Ivermectin was one thing along with monoclonal antibodies. Once he recovered he mentioned on his show the laundry list of stuff he took. Then the media jumped on the fact that he took Ivermectin and said he took horse dewormer.
I don't think Rogan was actively promoting Ivermectin as an alternate to vaccination before or after he got COVID
That's my understanding as well, and that appears to be part of the reason so many people are following his [non]-advice. He's just a guy who went through an experience, talked about it with medical professionals, and shared it with other people. When the experts in the field are unreliable, people WILL find alternate ways to get information, including ones that they should not use, such as a radio personality with no medical experience.
"When the experts in the field are unreliable, people WILL find alternate ways to get information, including ones that they should not use, such as a radio personality with no medical experience."
When the experts in the field are unreliable, who else do you have left to go to (BESIDES the non-experts who are left)?
One of the cases of non-vaxxers I know at second hand is in this boat. As in, has specifically said, "I don't need to get the jab. It's not safe in the first place, and in the second place if I do get it I'll just take ivermectin."
There was also a nurse on this board who discussed doing this in a previous thread, though if memory serves they were in fact taking the ivermectin prophylactically.
I don't know if there's been a survey, but these people are, at least anecdotally, around.
At the best case and my most charitable, it's just in-tribe signaling.
I don't think so. This is my father's paralegal, and she's currently home with covid and taking ivermectin. She pretty clearly meant it.
What if you replace IVM in this case with monoclonal antibodies, or the Merck pill? Isn't that a reasonable stance, if that person decides to take the risk of getting Covid and then treating it if it gets bad?
There is a n% chance that you get Covid, an n% chance that it is symptomatic and an n% chance that it is serious. Depending on who you are, getting all the way to it getting bad is pretty slim. A vaccine helps you in the case that all of these are true, whereas if there is an effective therapy, which there is, then I think people should be able to take the risk of getting Covid and then treating it.
I don't really think so. I don't know how to do the comment linking, but if you search Benjamin North he's got a great breakdown of this in these comments.
I can understand your frustration, and if making fun of silly people helps you, you can do this. But i don't see any other reason and the cause not to mock but to respect them is not mainly because you feel bad for them. People that don't don't feel a minimum respect from you, just won't listen to you, even if you have the arguments that would otherwise convince them.
Small-molecule drugs often change multiple things in both the highly complex systems of both the human body and disease-causing organisms; we don't really understand these systems in anything like the detail necessary to predict the effects in advance.
A fairly standard approach when screening an existing drug for potential use against a new disease is roughly "Well, one of the systems we know drug X affects is system Y, and system Y seems to be active in disease Z, so maybe it'll have a positive effect". So, ivermectin (which seems to have fizzed out) made sense as something to test for the same reason fluvoxamine (which seems to work) did; well-tolerated in-production drugs with effects on inflammation systems (since inflamation is a factor in COVID).
A whole bunch of other drugs that fit that general description have been tested, too, without making the news; that's because they failed (unlike fluvoxamine) without any faked studies declaring them a major success (unlike ivermectin).
As far as the psychology on the pro- side, it looks like the usual confirmation bias. People saw the studies where it had a major effect and were convinced, and have held to that regardless.
And on the anti- side, the invective is the usual tribalist animosity signaling. The vaccine hesitancy arguments are not the reason for the venom spewed at the Other, they're the excuse for the venom spewed at the Other.
>I don't understand the intensity of the establishment backlash against Ivermectin.
The US is extremely polarised right now and like a lot of ambiguous things COVID mitigation wound up getting pattern-matched to Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe. A lot of scientists are fairly apolitical, but establishment messaging is very definitely Blue.
This put a lot of emotional loading into an ideally-quite-dry question, and so the tiniest shred of a "lives are at stake" suddenly becomes front¢re (let us be clear; in a country of hundreds of millions a lot of things have lives at stake) and the deplatformers start reaching for their toolbox.
I disagree with Darin; I think most of the establishment messaging is honest, if foolish.
There are lots people who are scared of both COVID and COVID vaccines and aren't sure which is more dangerous. Evidence:
- Old people are much more likely to get the vaccine than young people, which indicates people are making a cost benefit calculation but overestimating the "cost" of the vaccine.
- You have people like Nicki Manaj encourage mask wearing but will not get the vaccine.
- My hairdresser was scared of both, and says a lot her friends are too. She did ultimately decide she was more scared of COVID and got the vaccine.
Now if you are scared of COVID and vaccine, and Team Ivermectin tells you not to be worried about COVID because their pill will protect you, that should make you less likely to get the vaccine. I'm not a huge fan of "risk-compensation" arguments against imperfect interventions because it's rare people risk compensate more than the benefits of the imperfect intervention, but here the benefit is probably zero so any risk compensation is harmful.
These were shared by a lady at my workplace, a few days after work announced that the vaccines would be mandatory, and the day before she abruptly left. No idea if she was terminated or stormed out. They were sent to the dept mailing list, then followed by a sorry disregard email. I think they're illustrative of what a lot of us think of the anti-covid-vax / pro-invermectin crowd, and of what that crowd thinks of us. I don't know what there is to do, or where we go from here.
"In the US, the Supreme Court has ruled that vaccinated people worldwide are products, patented goods, according to US law, no longer human. Through a modified DNA or RNA vaccination, the mRNA vaccination, the person ceases to be human and becomes the OWNER of the holder of the modified GEN vaccination patent, because they have their own genome and are no longer "human" (without natural people), but "trans-human", so a category that does not exist in Human Rights. The quality of a natural person and all related rights are lost. This applies worldwide and patents are subject to US law. Since 2013, all people vaccinated with GM-modified mRNAs are legally trans-human and legally identified as trans-human and do not enjoy any human or other rights of a state, and this applies worldwide, because GEN-POINT technology patents are under US jurisdiction and law, where they were registered. SOURCE of the decision of the US SUPREME COURT PDF HERE (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_1b7d.pdf) To follow how / if it applies to others, outside the US."
And
"Reasons why the jab cannot be mandatory and why not to take it This is 100% ILLEGAL. 1) there was to be a full experiments done on testing animals FIRST. When ALL the animals DIED, they stopped the experiments ! ***They are REQUIRED to explore all options to see if there already is an approved therapy on the market BEFORE even making jabs... Ivermectin and HQC were two that were acceptable. But they demonized doctors who used those safer therapies and banned their use, thus many lives were lost in the process !!! Also, Fauci had a contract with Moderna back in 2015 I think. Mass amounts of PCR tests were also sent world wide between 2017 and 2019... Event 201was held in October 2019 simulating a corona virus pandemic... Boom - then we have one ! Not coincidental or suspicious at all ??!!! Fauci had also written a paper how the two therapies above were great in treating the SARS virus as a treatment and cure .... 2) This is NOT FDA approved. It is under the Emergency Authorization Act as an "Experimental GENE THERAPY Injection... It is NOT even a vaccine ! 3) By not going through ALL the protocols set by the Nuremberg Trials, they are breaking the Nuremberg Laws !!! 4) A drug CANNOT be mandated that has NOT been approved by the FDA. And that is not saying it is safe even then - look at all the commercials for lawsuits against FDA treatments all night long on your tv... 5) Why would anyone want to take a product where the manufacturers are NOT LIABLE for any deaths or injury ? If they are not willing to stand behind it, it is defective at best and nefarious at worst. 6) The clinical trials are not even done until 2023... We are the lab rats ! They won't even list all the bad stuff until the trials are finished !!! But we see all the deaths, injuries and diseases that these jabs are giving people, and they still line up for it AND make their CHILDREN get it !! Children have not been tested for this yet ! 7) If your employer makes this mandatory for you or anyone else, they too could be subject to breaking the Nuremberg Laws. One of the penalties is EXECUTION for breaking any one of these Laws. The employers also are 100% liable for any injury or death you may have ...not the manufacturers. Remind them of this when they want you to take the jab....especially the execution part. NOTE - If you or anyone knows of someone injured or died, contact PJI.Org On their site they have a PDF about your rights with this whole hot mess, and they can represent you for free. If you die or get injured, your insurance may refuse to pay ANY BENEFITS due to you knowingly got involved in what they term as Risky Behavior... Like some one jumping out of a plane without a parachute .. So say goodbye to all that money you paid into your burial and health insurance... 9) These jabs do NOT prevent you from getting the virus in fact, more people get the virus directly after the jab . They also then shed the virus onto non vaxxed people. Unvaxxed are exposed to vaxxed are experiencing miscarriages, changes in their menstrual cycles for the women, and other things are popping up. The vaxxed are dying from the Delta varient in more numbers than the unvaxxed... 10) During the Senate Committee Corona Virus hearings, they had various doctors that were highly educated speaking about how dangerous these are and that there has been more deaths and injuries from these jabs than with all the other approved vaccines in history COMBINED, that they should have been pulled with just the first couple of deaths and injuries... LINKS to the brave doctors testifying https://youtu.be/mIPb0AtEvAE https://youtu.be/MGboD4KAgbM 11) The CDC was recently caught removing a large amount of jab injuries and deaths on their VAERS website. It has been estimated that 150 THOUSAND people have died from the jabs. So I have given just some of the facts as to why people may not choose to get this. It isn't that they are anti-vaxxers, They are just Pro Life !!! KNOW YOUR RIGHTS ! I made that so people have a defense when getting attacked by people or employer This was created by Brenda Purvis https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0auna1tA?share_id=eyJ1c2VyaWQiOjQ5MTUyMDIxLCJkb2NfaWQiOiIwYXVuYTF0QSIsInRpbWVzdGFtcCI6MTYyNjI4MTE3MTIyN30=&s=a7&pd=03KEgXnK&hl=en_US&lp=v2"
There's a rational mode of thinking where you are weighing evidence and making tradeoffs. Living there is hard work, you're constantly having to read papers and try to remember how some weird ass statistical tool or clinical trial design is supposed to work, there aren't any easy answers, and even when you've done your best you know you might just turn out to be wrong. Most people are pretty bad at this, probably journalists and politicians are mostly very bad at this, and to be honest, almost nobody is really good at it.
There's also a moralistic/tribal mode of thinking, where you are following norms yourself, enforcing norms on others, denouncing shirkers and wreckers, etc. This is easy--our brains are evolved for this kind of game, it's fun, it's accessible to the dumbest and least educated people. Probably journalists and politicians are extra good at this game.
Almost from the beginning of covid, most mainstream people with prominent voices/platforms were playing the moralistic/tribal game. Racism is the real virus. Get a load of these weird aspie racist techbros wearing masks and using hand sanitizer. Sanitize surfaces and wash your hands! Masks are only for medical personnel. The lab leak hypothesis is racist and must be suppressed. Joe Rogan's taking horse dewormer.
A few people were playing the rational game, but they were mostly not the people with the biggest megaphones. And one reason they didn't have the biggest megaphones is that most people don't want to play that game, and to be honest most of them probably can't do it very well and couldn't even if anyone had ever bothered trying to teach them how.
Vaccines are the only thing that will ultimately work. So yeah, it makes sense to promote them, as it is literally the only way to end the pandemic.
We give far too much deference to these people. We used to mass vaccinate the public. We'd still have smallpox if these people had their way.
The reality is that vaccines + masks are really the only solution and have to be standardized.
You have created a fictional reality which does not match actual reality, which is easily confirmed with a simple google search.
https://www.google.com/search?q=vaccines+reduce+COVID+transmission&rlz=1C1CHZL_enUS701US701&oq=vaccines+reduce+COVID+transmission&aqs=chrome..69i57.5889j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
COVID vaccines do indeed greatly reduce transmission. They don't eliminate it, but they do reduce it.
This is public information and has been confirmed by the CDC and Fauci.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-vaccinated-people-less-likely-to-spread-covid-2021-7
They are "much less" likely to spread COVID according to Fauci. The exact opposite of what you claimed.
Why are you spreading misinformation?
Every single study has found that it reduces transmisssion.
We are boosting because immunity wanes over time and because antivaxxers continue to spread the disease. To actually reach herd immunity we'd need to vaccinate about 95% of the population due to the infectiousness of the virus.
Sadly antivaxxers lie about this because they don't want to come to grips with the fact that they're killing people.
You don't understand how vaccines work at all, on even the most basic of levels.
It's time for you to realize you are a complete non-expert and all of your opinions are wrong. Delete EVERYTHING you believe. EVERYTHING. Scrap it ALL.
Vaccines do not - and NEVER HAVE - prevented all infections. Ever.
What they do is greatly lower transmission.
For a disease to proliferate in the population, it needs to infect at least one person per person it infects. A disease that fails to do so will gradually die out.
A vaccine that lowers transmission rates by an order of magnitude will cripple the spread of a disease, and result in it declining in the population.
Your FALSE belief that vaccines provide 100% immunity is causing you to create an alternate universe where you are creating nonsense and inserting it into things.
Yes, immunity wanes - but the word "rapidly" appears nowhere in what he said. That was something you hallucinated, you inserted it in because you NEED it to be true.
Breakthroughs are not about preventing transmission to other people per se, but actually getting sick if you are vaccinated. And, again, everyone knew that there were going to be breakthrough infections - no vaccine is ever 100% effective against illness.
Vaccines can and do require boosters. Many do, in fact. We had no idea whether or not we would require them for COVID. We know we do now, and are getting them, and they boost immunity and reduce infection rates.
Your belief is that vaccines do not prevent all infections and are therefore worthless. But that is wrong. Vaccines have never prevented all infections. What they do is greatly reduce the risk of infection.
This has been pointed out time and again and again.
You don't understand the basics, and get very upset and start raging out when you are confronted on them.
You don't want to admit you are wrong, and have such a bad case of confirmation bias you are making up things and inserting them into things.
"What they do is greatly lower transmission."
What do you count as "greatly"? Current evidence is that they lower the chance of infection, but by a good deal less than one order of magnitude. Different sources give different estimates for how contagious someone who has been vaccinated but is infected is, with some finding that there is no significant difference.
Elsewhere in your comments you use "Fauci says" as if it were a strong argument. Fauci is on record, in a NYT interview, saying that what he says is changed by what he expects people to believe, that he is raising his estimate of the requirement for herd immunity in response to polling evidence on people's willingness to get vaccinated. That is an admission that his public statements are sometimes lies — from his standpoint, virtuous lies. You can find a discussion and a link at:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/01/fauci-lying-greyhound-racing-and-trump.html.
Blue team fantasy:
> Vaccines do not - and NEVER HAVE - prevented all infections. Ever.
Reality:
The polio vaccine is 99% to 100% effective[1]. This is why there isn't any polio anymore. People expected a similar effect for COVID vaccine and they certainly weren't shy about advocating it in those terms. Three times back to back cognitive fitness champ Joe Biden:
"You're OK, you're not going to – you're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.
"If you're vaccinated, you're not going to be hospitalized, you're not going to be in the IC unit, and you're not going to die."
Blue team fantasy:
> What they do is greatly lower transmission.
Reality:
Gibraltar Vaccination Rate 140% (it's close to 100%, the rest are visitors). New cases 1341 / 100k [2]
PHE England: “In individuals aged 40 to 79, the rate of a positive COVID-19 test is higher in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated." [3]
Blue team fantasy:
> Yes, immunity wanes - but [not] "rapidly"
Reality: AZ effectiveness against transmission turns negative at four months (4! months!) [4]. Tell me that is not rapid. Just say it once and then everyone can move one since you clearly don't show a single ounce of good faith
Blue team goal post shifting:
> Your FALSE belief that vaccines provide 100% immunity is causing you to create an alternate universe where you are creating nonsense and inserting it into things.
These goal posts are shifted far and fast, the logistics are amazing. Just yesterday everyone was saying "we can end this pandemic if only everyone got the jab".
> And, again, everyone knew that there were going to be breakthrough infections
are you actually this deep into the kool aid or are you trying to gaslight us?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-duration-protection.html
[2] https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/gibraltar/
[3] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1019992/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_38.pdf (Page 13)
[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410
A simple google search is a fictional reality which does not match actual reality. I find it hard to believe that you are not aware of google's "helpful" suppression of inconvenient facts. Citing "Fauci says" is just absurd, he has lied over and over again, even under oath in front of congress. He has even openly admitted to some of the lies. Cite studies, not celebrities.
Have you looked at Fauci's Resume? He may be a celebrity now, but he is very well respected in his field based on research he did for the past 40 years on AIDS.
But if you don't like him, you can go elsewhere for your data. I quite like my BC Provincial health officer Dr Bonnie Henry, She earned a name fighting SARs in Ontario.
Go look at New Zealand's public health web page - They have handled the pandemic better than anyone.
Australia has also had good pandemic response despite having a conservative government.
Google has been doing a reasonably good job in filtering out misinformation. You may call that censorship, but bad actors have their own agenda and have managed to pollute every search engine out there. Regardless of the search engine you use, try to use neutral terms with your queries so that you are not returned biased results.
Someone who has proven to consistently lie about a subject does not become credible simply because they used to do something other than lie to the public. Choosing alternative celebrities does not meet the request to cite studies, not celebrities.
This is not a question of "neutral terms", it is clear and blatant censorship. Compare google's results to other search engines for the same searches. Claiming "oh we're censoring facts we don't like because we know better than you what you should read" does not make it some benevolent act. If I use google, I can not find Dr. Ozaki explaining his recommendation for doctors to conduct clinical trials on ivermectin. If I use a search engine that does not censor facts for the US government, I can find both written articles quoting him, as well as the video of him originally giving the press release. The only reason for this discrepancy is the government/media complex's disinfo campaign about ivermectin. They simply do not want people to see the truth, that real doctors have genuinely recommended standard, safe, properly conducted, clinical trials for ivermectin. Real recommendations have been "we should do clinical trials on this, because the epidemiological data suggests it could have a benefit". This contradicts their narrative that ivermectin is unsafe livestock medication baselessly recommended solely by evil far right russian trump nazi terrorist klansmen radio hosts.
I'm pretty sure I know which group is involved with ivmmeta, though I don't know which members run it.
I think the motivation is that the authors' self-image involves them "solving covid". They need to have found & promoted a cure by the end of the pandemic. They've made a bunch of websites for different potential drugs and hyped the most promising ones. They believe that ivermectin works, but it's not something they are unbiased about.
This group has also decided that covid vaccines are net bad for most of the population, and are hyping ivm as an alternative to vaccines, along with accusations against establishments re: why they promote vaccines but not ivm. I'm betting if the messaging was "establishments are too slow" and "vaccines and ivm together" there would be far less backlash.
This is the single best article written on ivermectin throughout the whole pandemic. Thank you.
I've been looking at ivermectin since the early months of the pandemic. I had heard of the I-MASK+ protocol when people were still using ventilators on COVID patients (with an 85% death rate in NYC), and it sounded really promising to me. So I've been really open-minded as to whether or not it actually worked.
But over the next several months, and now 18+ months later, it never really succeeded in having a home run in terms of proving that it worked. I don't think we need medication that decreases viral load 3 days faster, we need medication that keeps people out of the hospital and from dying. It was pretty clear anecdotally that ivermectin wasn't doing that.
I think basically it comes down to the fact that when you have a disease where 85% of people suffering no or only mild symptoms and 0.5% death, it's going to be a very hard disease to determine if a treatment worked or not.
I think the science we have been doing over the course of the pandemic has been largely garbage because we haven't learned anything to help us whatsoever since March 2020. If I remember correctly, the mRNA vaccine was designed within days of the virus being sequenced in January. The rest of the time on the vaccine was spent making sure it was safe, but you can argue that nothing new was learned after the vaccine was created. Since then, we haven't really learned anything about the virus, about the transmission, how to fight it, etc. Our best bet is to wear masks and stay outdoors, which we already knew.
What we as a species really need is a global mobilization of scientists, where a single global committee designs a thousands of different experiments that would help us narrow down how the virus works and how to fight it, and divvy up the work globally. We could have worked in parallel doing thousands of experiments to help us figure out what exactly we need to do to beat COVID, but instead the millions of scientists around the world were trying to determine if SARS-CoV-2 was found in vaginal fluid or semen.
The parallel rapid response trials idea been proposed before COVID-19, and is thankfully being more actively pursued now. It's is a big part of both the UK 100-day proposal for response and the White House's $65bn proposal, championed by Eric Lander and OSTP, which unfortunately wasn't a high-enough priority for congress in the just-passed infrastructure bill, so it was mostly eliminated.
"we haven't learned anything to help us whatsoever since March 2020" - who does "we" refer to in this sentence? Certainly not the medical community, see e.g. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22772612/early-treatment-for-covid-fluvoxamine-molnupiravir-paxlovid
I was a bit hyperbolic in terms of my choice of words, and I couldn't edit my words after posting. But practically we haven't found anything real. Yes, in the last couple of weeks there have been pills that came out that cut the risk by 85% which is finally what we need. But aside from finding those drugs, we don't know why it causes severe symptoms in some people, and almost no symptoms in most people. Is it genetic? We have no idea, but it's been 2 years and we don't know. We don't know why many people lose their sense of smell. We don't fully understand the mechanism of transmission. The only definitive thing we know is that as the age of the person increases, the chance of severe symptoms and death rises exponentially, but we don't know why. We don't know why kids are largely immune to COVID. We don't know why some people are dying of blood clots, although there was a recent study saying that the spike protein may interfere with some parts of the clotting process.
There's so much we don't know. The medications like fluvoxamine give a percentage improvement but it's not a home run like the Pfizer drug. I would classify that as a statistical modifier rather than a real medical treatment. We need something akin to penicillin that effective solves bacterial infection, we don't need things that only provide statistical significance to moderately improving symptoms over a large number of people.
Read the whole Vox article, it's not just about "the last couple of weeks", but also says, for example that "In the nearly two years since this coronavirus started spreading, we’ve learned a lot about how to care for patients who are sick enough to require hospital care. Cheap, widely available drugs such as dexamethasone have substantially reduced the hospital mortality rate for severe Covid-19." And there have been tons of other research findings about the virus, transmission, etc. since March 2020.
"What we as a species really need is a global mobilization of scientists, where a single global committee designs a thousands of different experiments that would help us narrow down how the virus works and how to fight it, and divvy up the work globally."
And if that committee ends up committed to a mistake, as committees not uncommonly do, there is nobody outside it to point out the error. Centralization is dangerous.
Great read, Scott. You moved me from the “IVM probably works a little” basket to the “IVM probably doesn’t work” basket.
I do think there’s a few points you could add to your analogy that seem fairly important to the more educated and knowledgeable vaccine hesitant people I know:
- Previous brain implants have gone through long trial periods to ensure they don’t cause adverse effects. However, the aliens believe the quantum memetic plague constitutes an emergency and there isn’t time for such a process. Plus they say the early trial results look great.
- The first implants start getting inserted and some rare side effects are noticed. In the worst cases, some of the implanted die as a result. The aliens insist there’s nothing to worry about, as it’s a very rare occurrence. But you can’t help wondering if they’re investigating the problem in good faith.
- A few months into the program the implants stop working as well as promised. The memetic plague has mutated, and found new ways around the implants. The aliens acknowledge this but maintain it changes nothing of practical importance. Herd immunity to the memes may no longer be possible.
- Anyone promoting vaccines in public is censored. On some platforms, even non-promotional discussion of vaccine efficacy is targeted.
- A few more months pass and the aliens decide that implants will be mandatory, and refusal will mean you cannot use any alien technology! Alien tech has already permeated all of earth life. They’re also implanting children, who were supposed to be almost unaffected by the memetic plague. The brief explanations are difficult to parse, and seem somewhat circular to the human mind.
I'd love to know the answer to these questions too, because they primarily go ignored and unanswered by anyone knowledgable I know who's in the camp "I've taken the vaccine and it's safe, and you should too".
Probably some mix of cognitive dissonance and not wanting to think any longer about a problem they think they solved with the solution that these questions bring into doubt.
Yes, it's important to address the reasonable concerns people have, but also to be clear about the facts, and these analogies break down.
To be clear, the COVID vaccines went through the same trials other vaccines did, just in parallel and with much less delay, and regardless of the reasonableness of early hesitancy, we do have really good data on levels of side effects now that over half of earth is vaccinated - and they are far lower than what we see from COVID-19. And there is strong evidence that the vaccines work very well for active immune response, but that only kicks in after a couple days, so people get mild COVID once the neutralizing antibodies are no longer circulating.
(And the "memetic plague" analogy breaks down once we can see people dying from the plague en masse.)
> To be clear, the COVID vaccines went through the same trials other vaccines did
Thats false. Scott makes a big story about aliens but it's completely unecessary. I just don't trust you (you speaking for the establishment here) because you keep lying to me. You don't even feel bad and when I point ot out you'll just slander me.
The establishment would've been much better off with "Trump got that idiot FDA out of the way, so these vaccines could be tested at better than the snail's pace those silly safety officers wanted to do it at."
But that would've involved saying something nice about Trump.
why did vaccines have higher all cause mortality than placebo in pfizer's six month follow up? 21 vs 17? with much of the mortality coming from cardiac issue? I believe moderna had similar all cause mortality iirc?
Which study do you mean? I only know DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2110345 being referenced as "pfizer's six month follow up", there the mortalities are 15 vs. 14.
The FDA approval document has updated mortality figures, different from the article published by Pfizer previously.
I maintain that the real conspiracy is the FDA keeping a helpful vaccine out of our hands for so long, which makes the metaphor even more fun. Imagine that a group of human bureaucrats had studied the alien biochips, approved some after a long process and refused to approve others, but all the material evidence was that the biochips worked better than expected. The only bumps in the administrative processes are when the bureaucrats blame one biochip for an unrelated problem and make it illegal to use for a brief period. We get evidence even months later than breaking the chips in half confers the same level of protection, even though the bureaucratic process made that difficult to study. Have I totally killed this metaphor yet?
Also the part where the bad orange alien said the brain implant would be ready soon, and a bunch of human leaders said not to trust the bad orange alien's brain implants. And the alien brain implant manufacturers probably delayed releasing the brain implants because they didn't like the bad orange alien. Then a couple of months later all the people who said not to trust the bad orange alien's brain implants, after getting the brain implants themselves, said you absolutely must get the brain implants.
There is one quote to this effect, and you’re leaving out the literally very next thing that person said. “If Dr. Fauci, the doctors, tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it."
In other words, she sensibly discounted what someone trying to win and election said — someone who also was claiming 20 million doses would be distributed by the end of October 2020 even as the pharma companies were saying that was impossible. No one ever mentions that context.
It was still a stupid comment, because the vaccine wasn’t being cooked up at Trump campaign headquarters. The “doctors” were already hard at work overseeing the development process of a vaccine based on a new but well-studied technology following an abbreviated but extensive testing program. All of this was well known and well publicized - the vaccine rolling out on Trump’s word without the doctors signing off was never an option on the table.
It was a stupid comment, true, that was made in response to a flat out lie, one of many lies the orange man had been saying from the very beginning of the pandemic. Those lies had already led to a lot of confusion and social unrest, so the alternative was, what, allow him to just keep lying? No pushback whatsoever?
Could they have called out his lie on the timing without questioning the vaccines themselves? That's a bit of an issue, I suppose, because it turns out that his timeline (near the election) was far more accurate that his detractors, who consistently said 2021.
That leaves his opponents with two options - say that the vaccine was in fact rushed for the election and therefore potentially unsafe, or agree that the vaccines were good and Trump was closer to correct on timelines.
I see the Democrats dilemma on that question being significantly self-inflicted.
Certainly there was some way to say “look, Trump is being way too optimistic on the timeline, and is taking too much personal credit for the vaccine, but the process and technology is sound and we’re going to get a good vaccine out of it pretty soon”?
If we’re going to get into an argument over lies, exaggerations, and honest errors justifying lies and stupid comments in response - there are plenty to go around on all sides.
I would hope the side claiming the mantle of “Trust the Experts” would not indulge in “well my lies are okay, because HE started it”.
There are multiple statements to that effect. How does Trump lying about how many doses would be ready by what date make any of the statements made by Harris, Biden or Cuomo acceptable? There is no context that makes these statements responsible or honest unless their current position is irresponsible and dishonest. The same vaccines made and approved by the same people through the same processes do not become dangerous or safe based on political whims. Either we should be wary and skeptical of the rushed vaccines then and now, or we should "trust the science", shutup and take them then and now.
Interviewer: "Let's just say there's a vaccine that is approved and even distributed before the election, would you get it?"
Harris: "Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump."
Biden: "If and when a vaccine comes, its not likely to go through all the tests that needs to be and the trials that are needed to be done."
Biden: "Who's going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?"
Cuomo: "You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences.’ I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”
Cuomo: “Frankly, I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion, and I wouldn’t recommend [it] to New Yorkers, based on the federal government’s opinion.”
All three of them knowingly and deliberately made it seem like there was something wrong with the vaccines before they knew anything about them and that people should avoid them simply because Trump exists. And looking at old twitter posts from before the election, it certainly worked. Thousands of dems tweeted about how they would never take the unsafe, rushed, "so-called" vaccine that Trump was dangerously and irresponsibly pushing.
Honestly, the most important difference is that previous mind implants weren’t being pushed hard by aliens.
People who took other vaccines but refuse THIS one, are doing so because they think (not without reason) that the people telling them “take it or else” are untrustworthy assholes who hate them. Everything else is post hoc rationalization by people who aren’t quite ready to admit that their real reason is basically “you can’t make me, nah nah nah”.
It’s unfortunate that the vaccine didn’t hit about 3 months earlier, to become well-established prior to Biden taking over and “get the vaccine” being therefore slotted as a Blue coded behavior.
What's weird is that I think we already require tons of vaccinations to work, travel, and get educated, so why is this mandate suddenly more coercive?
The woman I'm talking about also made a big deal about how even though everyone else was wearing a mask she could get away with not wearing it in stores, elevators, etc. because no one is going to stop her. There's a certain type of vice signalling that I really don't think I'll ever understand.
*gestures broadly at all of the last 20 months*
Previous mandates were not rammed through on a national level in the midst of a pandemic response that was already polarized.
It’s not how coercive it is, it’s who Ian doing the coercion, and suspicion about the motives of the same.
See, all of my priors tend to point the other way. It seems obvious to me that the worst and most coercive government practices are things probably passed bureaucratically with the support of both parties and which have existed for decades already. I mean, I get that people move on headlines, but there's something frustrating about the "only the government coercion that existed before last Sunday" libertarian types.
I don’t think your priors are that common, and libertarians aren’t the types leading the charge of “only recent coercion is bad”.
Educated yes, but I have never been asked to present my vaccination records for a job or for travel.
For some jobs you do have to present certain vaccination records, particularly if you work in health care. (And they mean it: when I couldn't find some of mine, I had to get re-vaccinated to keep my job! This was back in 1980!) And in some jurisdictions you have to annually prove you got a flu shot to work in health care.
As for travel--you haven't lived through a raging respiratory pandemic before, so no, nobody ever asked for proof of immunizations for routine travel. That said, when my daughter went to school in France before the pandemic broke out, she had to present immunization records in order to get a student visa. And foreign students who come to the US for college also must present proof of several immunizations--a practice that substantially predates this pandemic.
>And not once you have *already had the job*, often for years!
Flu vaccines were declared annually mandatory at my work a few years back, after I'd had my job for years. There was no grandfathering in of older workers. It was get the jab or get out. I knew a couple of people who groused about it, but no one who posted histrionic screeds on facebook before dramatically insisting on being fired.
It's standard for a country to screen people entering it for disease. Your right to enter a foreign country is only whatever right that foreign country gave you.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone traveling to a country that hasn't eliminated polio has to have their polio vaccine. I'd consider it malpractice for a country to not enforce that.
But that's at borders, and I expect to have less rights at borders. (See above re: only the rights the foreign country gives me.)
>I think we already require tons of vaccinations to work, travel, and get educated
No. We require a few vaccinations dangerous childhood diseases if we want to put our children in a public school. You do not need to attend a public school to get educated, and there is a strong argument that doing so will in fact seriously hinder you from getting educated. You do not need to be vaccinated for typical work or travel. Since COVID is not a dangerous disease, and the people trying to mandate vaccination against it openly say that they hate me and want me dead, and are also trying to mandate all sorts of idiotic things that are clearly not for health reasons, it is pretty rational to be skeptical of such vaccine mandates.
How sure are you that if vaccination had gotten underway three months earlier it wouldn't have gotten slotted as Red coded behavior? That could have been even worse, given that the Blues have much bigger megaphones. Imagine a skepticism campaign in the NYT quoting Harvard professors on why the dangers of the vaccine were being hidden to make Trump look good.
I don’t think that was ever likely, because the Blues were never that wedded to anti-vaccine, and were always pro-intervention in COVID. The anti-Trump vaccine handwringing was just cheap partisan refusal to give Trump credit for anything positive.
The Blues of Europe were clamoring for a vaccine too, so I don’t think the democrats could have maintained that dissonance post-Trump.
>and were always pro-intervention in COVID.
You have a selective memory. Dems were initially 100% hostile to doing ANYTHING about COVID. It was "just a flu" and you were anti-science if you suggested otherwise. Wearing masks made you an immoral fear monger, and the most basic common sense action of "restrict travel from the country experiencing the outbreak of some unknown new contagious disease" made you an evil racist. It was only once it was too late to do anything and the virus was securely endemic in North America and Europe that they were willing to flip the script and start the "two weeks to flatten the curve" psyop. Boy, it has been a long two weeks...
Pfizer: Trump vaccine
Moderna: Biden vaccine
I would add:
- Many people get the memetic plague, and recover. Presumably this confers some manner of immunity, yet the aliens keep insisting that these people need the brain chip and indeed act as though having the plague and recovering confers zero protection against future plague infection. No discussion of the value of brain chips addresses this; the benefits are always in terms of never infected/recovered humans with or without chips.
I will try and write up some more on this issue on my own blog this evening... traveling for work keeping me busy all day.
This is an incredibly valuable post. Thanks for doing the work that all the people whose job it was didn’t do!
The fluke/fluke "coincidence" is the clearest proof I have ever seen that God made the babelfish.
Jordan Peterson has entered the chat. He loves the way that linguistic alignments reveal previously unseen connections. Frequently correct in that analysis.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence....
Note: the above random string of characters is coincidence.
Great read... you must have a nuclear reactor mod for your brain, I can't imagine having the energy, time and focus to write these pieces, but I'm grateful that you do. You're probably the only person I trust at this point to do a fair analysis.
This also brought to mind a well circulated Twitter thread which summarizes some of the same sentiments: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1422181544161128450.html
This is your best post in a long while!
Sorry…50% of Americans are young earth creationists? Can you provide some data on this?
Maybe more like 40% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism
I suspect a lot of this is that it is one of the 10 required beliefs of Red Tribe membership, and you can't pick and choose, or God forbid, take some from the 10 required beliefs of Blue Tribe membership. I seem to remember an old SSC about this
It may or may not be that high, see this article:
https://ncse.ngo/just-how-many-young-earth-creationists-are-there-us
"For more evidence that the number of true young-earthers is fairly small, consider another question from the survey run by the National Science Board since the early ’80s. In that survey, about 80% consistently agree “The continents on which we live have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.” Ten percent say they don’t know, leaving only about 10% rejecting continental drift over millions of years. Though young-earth creationists often latch onto continental drift as a sudden process during Noah’s flood (as a way to explain how animals could get from the Ark to separate continents), they certainly don’t think the continents moved over millions of years. This question puts a cap of about 10% on the number of committed young-earth creationists, lower even than what Bishop found. More people in the NSB science literacy survey didn’t know that the father’s genes determine the sex of a baby, thought all radioactivity came from human activities, or disagreed that the earth goes around the sun.
In short, then, the hard core of young-earth creationists represents at most one in ten Americans—maybe about 31 million people—with another quarter favoring creationism but not necessarily committed to a young earth. One or two in ten seem firmly committed to evolution, and another third leans heavily toward evolution. About a third of the public in the middle are open to evolution, but feel strongly that a god or gods must have been involved somehow, and wind up in different camps depending how a given poll is worded."
I think all of these surveys and analyses ignore cognitive dissonance and framing.
I know plenty of religious people who will agree with both "God created the earth and humans less than 6,000 years ago" *and* "The earth is billions of years old, and humans evolved over millions of years" - many would say they agree with both on the same survey, and even more would agree to either of them if asked separately.
Are these people young earth creationists? Depends on what you mean.
Also, almost all Christians say that the bible is true, and might say the account of creation is "true," but only biblical literalism says that it's "*literally* true", and even then, what literally means in this context is a bit fuzzy. And despite all of that, I strongly suspect that even most people who would say that the bible is literally true would also say that the earth is billions of years old if asked the question on a survey that was clearly not about religion, because framing.
This is Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria theory, isn't it?
Not really, since he'd say the bible isn't making factual / falsifiable claims. This is simpler human inconsistency.
I'd say that those people are consistently "irrational". They don't particularly care about truth-values of factual claims which have no bearing on their daily lives, and when asked, they answer whatever they guess to be socially appropriate. Probably the majority of humanity has this kind of mindset, an yet it's unfathomable to a certain kind of intellectual, who frequents spaces like this one, and is often baffled by aliens-fearing normies.
No, I think that they do see "the earth was created 6000 years ago" and "the earth is billions of years old" as being two different categories of knowledge.
I agree that framing is very important.
Were I taking a survey that asked "was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple?" and it was a plain "yes/no" answer with no room for development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit, and furthermore my impression of the entire survey was "ha ha let's laugh at the knuckle-draggers who believe in gods", then I'd be "Eff you, I'm one of those knuckle-draggers and not alone was it an apple, we know for a fact it was a Cox's Orange Pippin".
No, it was a red delicious. That's why God told them not to eat it.
Numbers have falling a little recently. However, when you include people who accept that the age of the earth is older, but also (wrongly) believe that because evolutionary theory does account for some aspect of biodiversity, design is a reasonable inference - creationism in other words - the number balloons up to 60-80% of Americans being creationists depending on how you ask the question.
Much more than that, woke ideology requires implicit belief in creationism to square the circle of "diversity" and "equality".
I wonder if this is the type of thing that you might cover in an epistemology/philosophy of statistics class. Every time I see something like this I just end up more and more confused about what kinds of reasoning is legitimate, and when does statistical evidence actually point to the conclusions that it naively says it does.
Great article, thank you! But I really wish you got the worm hypothesis advanced enough, in your view, to feel more than 50% confident that worms are a significant confounder.
Before your months late entrance into this, I recall looking up who maintained this site. Since I did that, I have associated it with the FLCCC Alliance.
Tonight, when I went to icann whois, the first auto text suggestion was for ivmmeta.com. I recall finding that it either shared a server or owner with FLCCC.
Caution, my memory may not be serving correctly:
I may have looked up information about FLCCC the same night, but I am quite sure my inquiries were at different times.
I may have connected them, because the "meta" and "C19" sites link to FLCCC.
I don't remember enough detail to give to say definitively what it was I saw that made me sure of a connection.
With the caveats out of the way, I will say I have high confidence that this site is indeed related to the Alliance.
But most alarming in my view is that there are identical sites for HCQ and Vitamin D. And the analyses appear to show similar levels of effectiveness as IVM.
I've been called both a BigPharma apologist/corporate shill and a pinko by anti-vaxers since the pandemic started. I'm certainly much closer to the latter, but it illustrates how generic heuristics can override judgement by otherwise rational people.
Great job, and awesome work for digging into this.
I am not vaccinated and I don't consider you any of those mean things. Thank you.
I have some speculations here, but a friend quite correctly pointed out it was hypocritical for me to get upset about NYT doxing me and also add useful information to the debate about who runs ivmmeta, so I'm not going to.
Fair enough. I wouldn't expect you to opine on it, nor criticize you for refraining.
I didn't want to wildly speculate, so I added the cautionary notes. I just wish I would have taken a screenshot. At the very least, I could (dis)confirm my memory with one. Then again, it's interesting trying to figure out ways I may have formed a mistaken impression.
Buried under all that is my real issue with those sites--the mirrors, the identical formats, shared servers, and anonymity all purporting to show three different treatments with similar effectiveness as an alternative to vaccines.
It screams ulterior motive or motivated reasoning to me.
Err, it's not doxxing to say that sites X and Y are run by the same person(s)? But I'm not sure how you or Kurtz would know: WHOIS does not reveal the owner of IVMMETA.COM and its About page gives no names.
This whole thing was really excellent, but it does give me an opportunity to ride one of my hobby horses:
Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote was not an explanation for why the poor did not join the communist movement, but rather a sorta self-deprecating description of those who did. In other words, he was complaining about the champagne socialists who were in the movement, rather than aspirational workers who were not. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed
Read up on "luxury beliefs" — fashionable beliefs that confer social status upon the elites who hold them, but lead to damaging consequences to those in the lower economic strata.
Thanks to you and to your horse for my new fact for the day.
Scott, I really appreciate this careful review of the data on ivermectin. While it mostly matches what I already thought about the subject, it presents it much more clearly and carefully than anywhere else I have seen.
Which is why I'm so baffled that you are so confident that the covid vaccines are safe and effective that you don't even feel the need to present an analysis of the studies on the subject, and instead went with this analogy about aliens. Even though the Pfizer study to get FDA approval was just shown to be partially based on falsified data, and the all cause mortality was higher in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm. Even though the trial for children 5-11 did not show any clinical benefit at all (because no one had any serious outcomes in either arm). Even though no one has demonstrated any population level association between vaccination rate in a state or country and covid rate.
I really, truly wish I was as convinced as you seem to be that the vaccines are safe and effective. But it doesn't match my personal experience, and what I'm seeing in the world around me. I know that one shouldn't base one's epistemology on personal anecdotes, but I haven't found the studies on this subject nearly as reassuring as I would have hoped. I see everyone dismissing the sudden spike in VAERS reports because causation can't be proven--but why would the rate of reports suddenly increase so much compared to previous vaccines? All the papers I've seen about VAERS prior to covid suggest that it almost certainly underreports the true rate of adverse events from vaccines rather than overreporting them.
I know it's a huge, probably impossible ask, but if you could find the time to try to dig into this subject, I would be truly, deeply grateful. I want to be convinced, and I believe that I can be convinced that the vaccines are safe and effective (I actually am vaccinated, but based on the research I have done since then, I regret it and don't want to get the booster). I see vaccine denialists making obvious errors and exaggerations, but I also see them pointing out what seem to me to be serious flaws and shortcomings in the studies supporting vaccination. I'm not saying I think the vaccines are definitely unsafe/ineffective, but especially for young healthy people who are at low risk for covid, I'm not seeing the convincing case that getting vaccinated is statically a good idea that I would like to see, especially considering the many places that are now mandating them.
This is the ask I am also looking for, and hundreds (if not thousands) of Scott's readers and those influenced by him would also benefit from.
I have yet to find anyone willing to do this type of analysis once they've taken the shot. In my experience, it is the level of cognitive dissonance, being excluded from society, and the strong affect that being labeled "conspiracist" or "anti-vax" has that stops them from doing this work. I hope Scott would not be susceptible to that and willing to dig deeper.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that we should vaccinate children to protect them; I'd presume we'd vaccinate children to protect their parents and grandparents. So the only relevant criterion would seem to be infectiousness.
How about polio vaccines? Children are still routinely immunized against polio, and last year there were about 150 cases of polio worldwide, all of them in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I would say the odds that a random American kid will get polio are far lower than the odds that he'll get a serious (life-threatening) case of COVID.
Those vaccines are still mandated. Are you arguing that it's OK because 70 years ago there *was* a clear clinical benefit and...dunno, inertia or something? Or that requiring polio vaccines in 2021 is just as evil as requiring COVID vaccines?
Children are not routinely immunized against polio because of speculative benefit for others, they are routinely immunized against polio because of a known benefit to the children themselves. Children can die from polio, and the vaccine does lower the chances of that happening. Known and proven benefit, to the child being vaccinated. The fact that the odds of that benefit proving useful are very small does not mean it is speculative, or that it is intended to benefit someone else.
That hasn't been true for decades. As polio became much rarer the goal was to establish "firewalls" between vulnerable populations so that the virus could be contained (and eventually eradicated).
It really is very similar to the current arguments for COVID vaccination. And why would it not be? It's not like public health people are just making everything up for the first time, they've thought similarly about these things for decades and are just doing what they've always done.
What's different this time is (1) it's happening on a much wider and faster time scale than ever before -- way, way more people are affected, and very promptly, this isn't happening over 5-10 years so we have time to get used to various realities, and (2) we have about 2-3 generations that have grown to adulthood without essentially no experience of serious pandemic disease. They're far too young to remember polio, and generally too young to remember AIDS.
So as I said elsewhere the Overton window on the balance of individual rights versus public health has shifted while nobody was looking, and measures that would've been uncontroversial in the 1950s[1] are subject to violent debate now. Mind you, I'm not saying the debate shouldn't be happening. In fact, in some sense, it's a remarkable testament to our near-complete victory over infectious disease that we can *afford* to have this debate.
----------------------
[1] When the polio vaccines first came out, it was well known that due to limitations in quality control, it would without doubt *give* polio to some children. But the numbers were run, and it was estimated more kids would be saved from polio than given polio, so campaigns went ahead, money was set aside for the inevitable victims, *and people accepted this*. Imagine if you will the same thing happening with COVID -- imagine Pfizer saying well, this vaccine has a 98% chance of saving your life but also a 2% chance of giving you a fatal disease (or paralyzing you for life). Can you imagine modern American just sort of accepting that, because the odds were decent? I can't. That's how we have changed, and that, I think, is a major part of why public health people -- who have NOT changed -- have been caught flat-footed and fumbled.
Repeating the premise does not change it. Again, I could get polio. Me, personally. I could become ill from it. The odds are low, not zero. Getting a polio vaccine lowers those odds significantly. There was a known, proven benefit, to ME PERSONALLY, for me to receive a polio vaccine. The existence of other benefits to other people does not erase this fact. It does not matter why you think a broad recommendation is or should be made, it matters if the factual claim that there is ONLY SPECULATIVE BENEFIT TO OTHERS is true. And it is clearly and objectively false. There is specific, proven benefit to the individual receiving the polio vaccine.
The difference in attitude is obvious. Polio is a serious disease, covid is not. And the polio vaccine is not mandated, it is recommended. Both of these facts make your attempt to conflate resistance to polio vaccination in the 50s to resistance to covid vaccines now an apples to oranges comparison.
I've heard lots of people claim the risk of COVID being "unknown" is a lot worse and scary than the risk of the vaccine, so the children's health was better off with this Uber-safe vaccine (which we supposedly have oodles of safety data for children on).
This reminds me of Scott's posts about masking. If we didn't have any data on this question, which risk is more plausibly concerning? It seems like we have almost no cases of modern vaccines endangering a child who is not immunocompromised, whereas you can probably find case studies for most infectious diseases in which they created serious comorbidities when striking young children.
Sure that’s a reasonable prior if you or your child is deciding whether to a get a new and insufficiently tested vaccine that might or might not help you avoid getting covid. It’s not a reasonable foundation from which you should try to force literally every person in the world to get the vaccine. I agreed with your prior. I got vaccinated. Since then pretty much all the data that has come out has caused me to update away from the vaccines being safe and effective. I don’t think the VAERS reports can or should be handwaved away. And even if the adverse reactions aren’t as bad as I think, the complete lack of evidence that the vaccines reduce transmission on a population level would be enough to make me think mass vaccination is not a good idea.
I’m not wedded to these beliefs. There is some evidence that vaccination is helpful, such as reduced rates of death from covid in the vaccinated. But the results on all cause mortality, which is what we really care about, are much more mixed. And more importantly, I haven’t seen anyone on the pro-vaccine side engage in good faith with what seem to me like pretty important criticisms of the vaccines. That’s why I would so much like to see a post on this by Scott, because I know that whatever his conclusion, it would be an honest effort to synthesize all the evidence, something I can’t find literally anywhere else.
I don't really get your point about scale. I'm not that special; if the cost benefit calculation points to me getting the vaccine, it seems like it would for everyone, and so then we should vaccinate everyone.
I'm not sure where the talking point about vaccination not reducing covid comes from. It seems apparent if you just eyeball cross country comparisons unscientifically. But approximately 2 second of googling delivered an HHS press release from a month ago on a study showing all major endpoints decreased by vaccination: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/10/05/new-hhs-report-vaccination-linked-to-a-reduction-of-over-a-quarter-million-covid-19-cases.html
Cool, science by press release
I don't think I'm special either, and I think the cost benefit calculation points marginally against me getting the vaccine (I used to think it pointed marginally towards me getting the vaccine, but that changed as more data came out). I don't find the study you link compelling; note that it ended in May before Delta was prevalent, and I think it is probably confounded by seasonality. But I concede that it's a data point in favor of the vaccines. Here's a paper that shows no benefit to vaccination: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
I'm sure this paper has problems too. Although I think the case against vaccination of young and healthy people is slightly stronger, I don't think this issue is clear-cut either way. Which is exactly why I want Scott to do a meta-analysis to help clear up some of the confusion.
I like this example, however I think it breaks down in the analogy of comparing this COVID-19 vaccine(s) to a modern vaccine. This vaccine does not have a comparable profile nor the decades of safety data of modern vaccines. I see this analogy made quite often, as thought its common belief ("comeone everyone knows vaccines are the safest thing in the world don't you know!") but where did this belief come from? What makes this vaccine comparable to modern vaccines besides the label that people use (call it a vaccine) and that you inject it into your arm?
This also why we vaccinate for chickenpox. Mostly harmless in children but much riskier for adults. We’ve never had more than 600 deaths from chickenpox in a year, but nonetheless it’s required in all 50 states. Measles, too, has never killed more than 1,000 per year in the states.
Tangentially, it's been speculated (with some evidence) that the chickenpox vaccine helps reduce the risk of shingles later in life
I never got chicken pox as a kid, now each year I ask myself: "do I get the vaccine this year, or do I hold out another year for a dead-virus version."
"In 1912, measles became a nationally notifiable disease in the United States, requiring U.S. healthcare providers and laboratories to report all diagnosed cases. In the first decade of reporting, an average of 6,000 measles-related deaths were reported each year." (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html)
This would be a much more compelling argument if there was any evidence that mass vaccination reduced covid transmission. While it seems like intuitively it must do something, studies have mostly shown no correlation between a location’s vaccination rate and covid cases, and some have even shown a slight positive association.
There’s tons of evidence that vaccination dramatically lowers risk of ending up in the hospital. I live in an area with low vaccination rates and our ICUs were overwhelmed with Delta, so much that they had to hire hundreds of temporary health workers from out of state. Those same hospitals were actually loaning people to New York and NEw Jersey when the first wave hit.
How does that relate to vaccinating children, who overwhelmingly do not suffer significant consequences of COVID and almost never end up in the hospital, vaccinated or not?
It lowers risk of hospitalization...for adults. It doesn't lower it for children because they were already not at risk of hospitalization for covid. And it doesn't prevent children from transmitting covid to adults because it doesn't prevent transmission.
Unrelated tangent, I'm still confused why I've spent so much time trying to engage people about this reasoning (that vaccinating children which doesn't stop transmission doesn't prevent getting it to adults) but they can't understand.
I thought it was well known that the vaccines reduce transmission, even if it's less effective against Delta? I don't see why "prevent transmission", which implies 100% effectiveness, would be relevant, the question is how high is the effectiveness (in reducing transmission) and it seems obvious it's not 0%. Of course, this by itself isn't a good reason to give it to kids since we would want to make sure it benefits kids individually rather than just being a benefit to society.
It doesn't *completely prevent transmission* but it does *reduce transmission*.
I think the evidence is that vaccination substantially reduces the probability of getting the disease, with current estimates of effectiveness against infection around 50%, some higher or lower and depending on time since vaccination. It isn't clear if it reduces the chance of transmission from a vaccinated person who is infected or not. So vaccinating children probably provides some reduction of risk for adults.
I would claim that. I vaccinate my kids against the flu, and that's a much less effective vaccine and a much less dangerous disease. What's the case for getting your kids a flu shot not a covid shot?
Besides, covid is both not particularly dangerous to kids and the number ten cause of child mortality, because nothing that we allow in our society is particularly dangerous to kids. This lets me remove (or at least dramatically mitigate) one risk from my kids lives. A remote risk, to be sure, but nonetheless one I'm glad to take off the board. I'd be happier to take the leaders off the board, but I can't get rid of cars or guns or cancer. Some of the other leaders I've worked pretty hard on. Drowning by making sure they can swim, and drugs and suicide by trying to raise them well and making as sure as I can that lines of communication are open between us and them. We do what we can do. This is something we can do, and it's a clear win in terms of their welfare.
I think any conscientious parent would get their kids vaccinated for their own sakes, quite aside from societal benefits. I'm not actually clear on the case against.
The case against is that there is some evidence that the vaccine increases your kids’ risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke more than it decreases their risk of dying of covid. The risk is still not high, but as you point out, it doesn’t need to be to exceed the risk from covid. Because we’re talking about such a small signal, the government would need to do very careful monitoring to detect it, monitoring that they’re not doing. The (highly imperfect) data we have suggests the covid vaccine is much more dangerous than the flu shot (and contrary to what you said, the flu is known to be much more dangerous to children than covid). Instead of trying to gather better data on the matter, health authorities have just said “Well, the data we have is imperfect, so we’ll just ignore it and keep saying it’s probably safe.”
Flu is probably more serious than COVID in younger children. But among the 5-11 age group neither is vary dangerous. That said it's unlikely the vaccine carries much of any risk either.
Also note the difference between a mandate, and an option. I don't know anyone who is against parents having the option to vaccinate their kids against COVID.
>and a much less dangerous disease
No, the flu is a much MORE dangerous disease for children than COVID is. The fact that media bullshit has become so prevalent that the majority of people think COVID is dangerous to children is both amazing and soul crushing. We are doomed.
>I'm not actually clear on the case against.
The known risk of serious side effects or death from the vaccines are higher than the risk of serious illness or death from COVID in children. This is pretty much the most basic and obvious simple probability decision one could be faced with.
You are wrong. More children have died from COVID this year than from flu. And long term negative side effects are way worse from covid. Including almost x10 chance of myocarditis compared to vaccine.
And their teachers, and school bus drivers, and neighbors, and non-parental caregivers... Now, it also seems to be the case that even when infected, children do not transmit the disease as readily as adults or (especially) adolescents, so you can still question the rationale and ethics of vaccinating little kids to protect others if the effect is small. But small children actually have pretty extensive networks of contacts, and they often include high-risk people.
Well, that's not even Medical Ethics 101. If that were true, we would never do organ transplants.
But apart from that, let me be clear that I am not a libertarian, not at all. I do not want to live in a world where people have no obligation to protect their communities unless it is in their personal interest to do so. I'm not persuaded, though my mind is open to revised information, that the community benefit from vaccinating little kids is large enough to warrant making it obligatory. But for adolescents and adults, I think it is a moral obligation to get vaccinated against Covid-19 unless you have a medical contraindication even though for the youngest among them, the personal benefit is very small.
Being an organ donor is a medical procedure, carried out in medical facilities, by medical personnel. It is usually voluntary, although in some cases, "consent" is obtained not from the donor but from family members when the donor is brain dead, but still has cardiorespiratory function (whether natural or artificial.) While that might not be fully coerced, it isn't really voluntary either, but I think it's OK. Either way, it cannot be said to be done for the benefit of the patient--it is an act of altruism on the part of the donor, and only the recipient benefits. Doctors willingly participate in these procedures.
No, I would not approve of coerced organ donation by still sentient people.
"Whether there is a moral obligation to do X and whether the state has the right or duty to enforce that obligation are entirely different questions. You are missing a premise."
That is true, and if you read my post carefully, you will see that I opined only on the moral obligation, not on whether the government should enforce it. So, no, I am not missing a premise.
High quality evidence of almost anything about this pandemic is hard to come by. Which is why I do not find it morally obligatory for young children to be vaccinated--it is not clear to me that the public health benefits are sufficient to warrant it. I said as much in my post.
" But for adolescents and adults, I think it is a moral obligation to get vaccinated against Covid-19 "
Being vaccinated reduced the risk to me of doing things that could expose me to Covid and I altered my behavior accordingly. In my case, the chance of getting Covid was almost certainly higher after vaccination, since before we were self-quarantining quite tightly, I and my wife both being in vulnerable age groups.
Suppose that is true on average — that decreased precautions more than cancel the reduction infection probability. Does it then follow that there is a moral obligation not to get vaccinated? To get vaccinated and continue acting as if you hadn't?
I'm reminded of reading a report -- could be urban legend, alas, but I want to believe -- that in an experiment when road signs were almost entirely removed from a stretch of mountain road people drove more safely and had fewer accidents.
How about treating pregnant women who test positive for Group B strep with antibiotics during delivery? This is done solely for the benefit of the baby, since it's endemic (and harmless) in the adult.
https://www.acog.org/womens-health/faqs/group-b-strep-and-pregnancy
Having dead parents is a significant medical detriment.
Though really, children die of COVID too, and more importantly, get disabled.
Children don't "die and are disabled" at a 5-10% rate from the COVID vaccine. In fact, I'm not aware of a single child dying from the vaccine.
So no, the rates aren't even close.
You could easily look up this data yourself.
We are literally saying this, because it is true.
First off, a lot of children ARE dying of COVID - more and more over time. The deadliness of the disease in children is probably higher now than it was with the original strain.
Secondly, COVID causes significant long-term side effects in an appreciable number of people.
1) That's 605 confirmed cases. The actual count is larger.
2) Far less than half of under 18s have had COVID - probably less than 20%. It's amazing how you scream at me about "lack of data" but then make up a fraudulent number as a basis for your argument.
3) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34719599/#:~:text=Among%20them%2C%20495%20(40.1%25),%2Donset%20of%20COVID%2D19. would be an obvious example and one of the first Google results.
Post-COVID syndrome is well established at this point, and seems to affect somewhere in the realm of 5-10% of people. It's quite common.
People just are in denial about it because it means that they were wrong about everything and were downplaying a very serious disease. They aren't stable geniuses after all.
The serological testing has a very high false negative rate (20%+). Studies suggest only about 5-10% of people get these persistent symptoms. A 20% false negative rate is going to completely destroy your numbers. Persistent loss of smell seems to be the most common symptom by far.
You are, sadly, suffering from a severely bad case of confirmation bias where you only hear what you want to hear and distort reality around what you desperately want to be true. You are looking for reasons why you are right instead of looking for reasons why you are wrong. The fact that you made a flat-out false claim about what Fauci said shows this - and your response was to try and weasel out of it without admitting that you were wrong.
And using UK numbers in the US is questionable. The US is not the UK, it is much more spread out.
Without numbers this is just spreading fear which itself can contribute to ill health. How many otherwise healthy children, ie children that would not be in mortal danger from any other infection, have died from COVID in total? How many would have died from the flu in the same time frame?
Hundreds of children without such factors have died. Here would be an example:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/us/va-child-death-covid-trnd/index.html
People just go into denial about it because they don't want to admit that they were wrong.
And somewhere around 5-10% of people who get COVID suffer long-term problems from post-COVID syndrome. It seems to be modestly lower in children, but it still shows up in them fairly frequently.
You have just shifted from "disabled" to "long-term problems."
Look up what "disabled" means.
It doesn't mean what you think it means, I'll bet.
This article is truly fascinating. I wonder if you've ever read it with a critical eye? Did you notice, for instance, that besides the headline nothing in the text shows that the girl died from Coronavirus?
They tell you she had a headache and a fever. These are symptoms from most of the non-chronic diseases that exist. She didn't have specific COVID symptoms.
They tell you that a COVID test was done but never what the result was.
They say she had a clear chest X-ray and then she died the next day. That's not how people die from COVID.
They make your mind do a lot of the work here. If you are very scared of COVID then of course everything here reads like she died from it.
If you actually look at the article, though, it's hard to come to that conclusion. Her parents were vaxxed. Her siblings were vaxxed. Presumably the teachers were vaxxed. The school was masking. There wasn't a single other COVID case around here. They even did contract tracing! That's just not how COVID works. Maybe she died from it but if so they should've mentioned that this case is like a unicorn.
Also, the pediatric death figure they give. Is that COVID or total? Why be so ambiguous? Why not give a comparison to the average?
My bet would be that all the errors and omissions in this piece go exactly one way which is to increase your fear. And then they tell you about the stupid school board people that you are now free to hate because they were saying Corona was over while this poor girl lay dying.
Never trust people that appeal to your worst self.
The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they are so convinced of their intellectual superiority they don't bother doing basic fact checks.
The CNN article doesn't mention that she tested positive... but it implies that she did. And, in fact, from another article about the case:
https://www.kmbc.com/article/nicole-sperry-daughter-teresa-covid-19-death-misinformation/37940265
"The next day, Teresa's positive COVID-19 test results came back to her parents and when Jeff went to check in on her in her room, he found her unconscious. Teresa was rushed to a local hospital and transferred to Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters (CHKD) Norfolk, where she died."
You are trying to be smart.
But as Yoda once said - Do, or do not. There is no try.
"They say she had a clear chest X-ray and then she died the next day. That's not how people die from COVID."
Happens all the time, actually. COVID kills people outside of hospitals quite rapidly. O2 levels crash and they just stop breathing. You go from "feeling kind of sick" to "suffocating to death" in a matter of hours in many cases, often between 5 and 10 days after you start feeling sick.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/second-week-crash-is-time-of-peril-for-some-covid-19-patients/2020/04/29/3940fee2-8970-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html
That's exactly what happened to her - she died alone, in her room.
It almost happened to Boris Johnson, who was rushed to the hospital.
It's not an uncommon pattern.
Worse, some of them don't realize they're suffocating until it is too late.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/they-do-not-struggle-to-breathe-but-coronavirus-starves-them-of-oxygen-cvd
And on top of that, some people also just flat-out have a heart attack and die. The number of sudden heart attacks has gone way up under COVID-19, and it is believed to be another potential complication of the disease.
Hundreds isn't a lot out of 300 million over 18 months. I see you've not gotten around to posting the flu figures. I wonder why?
Because they're vastly lower. Only 188 in 2018-2019's flu season below the age of 18 (which was a record up to that point), and only a bit over 100 for people in the 18-29 age group.
Meanwhile for COVID, the relevant numbers would be over 300 and over 2,200 per annum amongst those age groups.
So COVID kills more than 50% more under the age of 18 and almost 2,000% more in the 18-29 age range per year.
How many 85 year olds do we need to "save" from death by COVID so they can instead die 3 weeks later from pneumonia or influenza or heart failure, in order to justify killing one 6 year old?
Unvaccinated children are more likely to die, too. As are their teachers. And their parents.
That is a red herring. Answer the question. If you want to justify forcing a dangerous vaccine onto children, knowing it will kill some number of them, in order to slightly prolong the life already dying elderly people, then you need to quantify the value of those lives. Unvaccinated healthy children have a zero risk. None have died. Zero. Morbid obesity is a co-morbidity. Morbidly obese children are not healthy. Those teachers and parents are welcome to vaccinate themselves if they are worried. You do not force innocent children to take dangerous vaccines because you are worried about yourself, YOU take the dangerous vaccine. It is highly effective at preventing death, remember? So why do you keep dishonestly acting like everyone else needs to get vaccinated as if your vaccine won't work to protect you? If you taking the vaccine doesn't protect you, then why would anyone else get it to protect you? That is absurd.
It's not a red herring, it's literally why we vaccinate them. It protects them from the disease, and also protects other people around them from the disease.
Hundreds of children die from COVID every year. Vaccinating every single child against COVID will greatly reduce the death rate from COVID amongst children - the number of children who die from getting COVID vaccines would be 2 orders of magnitude less than the number of children who die from COVID.
> Unvaccinated healthy children have zero risk
And yet, a number of them have died without any confounding factors. I literally linked to one elsewhere in the thread.
IRL, many children have died of COVID without confounding health risks.
I get that you need to lie about everything because you are a conspiracy theorist who wants people to die rather than admit that they caused harm by lying about this stuff and deliberately spreading misinformation.
But you need to admit to yourself that you killed innocent children through your horrible, abhorrent behavior.
Isn't VAERS self reported? If people have a lot more concern about this vaccine, AND all of that concern is unfounded, wouldn't you still expect to see a spike in self reports which misattribute random issues to vaccines? It would also be true in that case that VAERS might go from underreporting to overreporting problems.
Any future investigations into VAERS might deploy an RCT design where half of participants are given a placebo and allowed to self report their side effects regardless... mostly joking.
I'll also bring out the big gun here: even if I was convinced that the most plausible accounts of coronavax side effects were true, they seem mostly minor. For the vast majority of people, and for society at large, there's no question that the vaccines are net life and QoL preserving, even if we accepted the marginal claim about side effects. This is of course hypothetical because there doesn't seem to be either good mechanisms or solid evidence behind any side effects claims.
VAERS is doctor reportet and the CDC itself says that the main problem with it is underreporting. Dimissing the huge VAERS spike in deaths as antivaxxers trolling is steping into the realm of hermetically sealed circular reasoning. It's also literally a conspiracy theory about a global conspiracy to fake high numbers of adverse events into various reporting systems like yellow card, UK and PEI, Germany.
I didn't say it was antivaxxers trolling. The most likely cause is genuine concern and worry. It isn't hard to imagine that people could wrongly attribute health problems that would've emerged regardless to a vaccine that they have mixed feelings on. The vaccine is being rolled out at scale in an unprecedented way with a very particular media environment around it so I don't think you can take the change in reporting as anything but a several confounded measure.
Look at ivermectin or any of the other drugs we've failed to prove help covid. They get studied because a doctor gives them to patients, the patients feel better, and the doctor notices. Without blinding, randomization, and large sample sizes we can't tell if "some doctors/patients say they have a good/bad feeling about this" is signal or pure noise.
At the very least, you ought to concede that it's plausible that the change in reporting could happen without changes in the rate of actual negative vaccine reactions. I'm not saying that's definitively true, but if you can't dismiss the possibility of a null result then your evidence isn't very solid.