From my observations, the best lens for understanding vaccine denial (or other related forms of Covid denial) is religious belief. Articles like these are medium-quality grains of opinion supporting that belief. Outside Covid, such things are obviously not in scope for HN, but the virus has captured our attention.
If I were the mod, I'd have an explicit policy that Covid stories need to come from high quality sources. Dissenting or unusual perspectives are fine, but these "just asking questions" pieces with confusing (at best) statistics aren't. And I'd honestly consider most mainstream press pieces not to clear the bar either. There are some excellent science journalists and bloggers out there (Derek Lowe is one of my favorites of the latter). We should be listening to them, I think.
I think these subjects that require a lot of care and can have a lot of impact based solely on rhetoric are really not what blogs and rapid response commentary excels at.
I'm happy at least there is enough detachment here for it to be realized, in most other places this would be drowned out in the echo of bickering.
How about the popular opinion that "vaccines are always good and should never be questioned no matter what"? Do you treat that as religious belief as well?
And to further support my point, I wouldn't recommend anyone get CureVac - from the data we have now, that looks like a dud, even though it is an mRNA vaccine with some similarities to the others.
My guess is that that there is a deeper underlying question: should we trust the scientists and institutions who do these trials. And on that my personal belief is that yes we should, but we should also be skeptical and hold them accountable. They make mistakes - the recent aducanumab decision looks like a big one - so I am definitely not arguing we should uncritically accept everything they do and say. But when they do it right, as has happened with vaccines in the US, we should celebrate, not undermine, that.
I do appreciate that trust in people and institutions is a personal thing and there are reasons for it to vary.
Let others decide, whatever fills your curiosity is different than mine and that's a good thing. You are not the arbiter of knowledge.
Graph of daily vs weekly deaths look completely differently, numbers are present in absence of any context (how are vaccine rates measured? Does it only count it after the two week build up period?), and the article cited for proof of spike protein levels doesn't actually cite spike protein levels, but lipid levels.
The result is that the decline in the death rate starts at about where you'd expect it to start if the vaccine did what it is supposed to do. And the people dying when the vaccine rollout started are people who caught it before the vaccine was available and only then reached the point where the disease killed them.
In a world filled with garbage analyses, this one is exceptionally bad. I flagged it because this isn't the kind of weird garbage that I come to HN to see.
1) The weekly excess death tend to always largely fluctuate as far as I know.
2) If there really is a causation between excess death and vaccination, shouldn't the number of weekly excess death increase when the relative in crease in the amount of vaccinated people is higher (e.g. the steps between the measurement points is larger)?
3) The drop at the end is also easily explainable, it's a statistics over the first vaccination and vaccination takes some time to take effect and increasingly more people over the same time got vaccinated and once a large amount of people are vaccinated the excess death due COVID will notable fall. So not really that surprising.
Did I miss something?
The US year-on-year excess death charts are much smoother than those for a small country like Belgium for example for this reason.
So yes, Scotland has too few people for you to see much in this data due to all the noise, humans easily see patterns where there aren't any.
2) This sort of nonsense generally posits some vague association between vaccination and negative outcomes and isn't too interested in trying to imagine an actual mechanism that would inevitably be debunked.
3) It's also noteworthy that over this same period the case rates subsided in the UK considerably. Whether I'm vaccinated against the disease or not, if nobody I meet has the infectious disease I'm not going to catch it from them.
IMNSHO a much more significant effect, which I measured over the whole UK since that's the data I had, was that the ratio between those dying aged 90+ and those dying at my age fell dramatically a few weeks after they were vaccinated - exactly as you'd expect if vaccinations work.
Before the uptick due to the Delta variant, the best overall week for UK COVID deaths seemed to be at the end of May, but if you were a young adult, say age 25, death rates were actually still higher than last summer - the overall rate was low because rates were now far better for the elderly. Because of course they'd been vaccinated. Next week vaccination will be offered to all English adults who have not previously qualified (e.g. because they were too young and had no other vulnerability) so by August the proof will be in whether that arrests further transmission or not.
Countries that pursued elimination (e.g. New Zealand) are still doing better, because, vaccine or no vaccine, if nobody has the virus then nobody can die from it.
The people that volunteered for the clinical trials took the real risk and this article is a disservice to their altruism
https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.statwolf.com/does-eating-c...
What happens if we, say, include people who died of covid despite getting the vaccine? Would this still stand?
Edit: read spadez other links. This is basically monty python witch scene plus some graphs and citations to make it look legit.
Wouldn't you need to compute the correlation coefficient or at least plot a scatter graph?
https://drowningindatadotblog.wordpress.com/2021/05/27/linki...
And there is also one from CDC data..
1) The chart shown mixes up lipid concentrations for protein spikes from the original cited paper and data
2) R00-R99 coded deaths will always be higher for "new" data. Over time, these are revised and coded differently. So if you look backwards from today, it will always seem like this number has gone way up the last month or so. The author notes this in his post (good), but leaves the original one in its place (also fine, but just be aware).
The author's hypothesis is not supported by data, and the arguments put forth are based on misunderstanding or misinterpreting things.
Also if the fear here is the mRNA vaccines are dangerous, there's always the more traditional Janssen (J&J) vaccine which does not use mRNA.
The OP also seems to be the submitter - that explains it. People are downvoting because they don't like the article ( and you can't just downvote a submission, strangely.)
If we were seeing that it would seem logical to attribute this effect to the vaccination.
