This is rather weird. Mortality in immediate connection with the vaccine (index time) would not have been captured here. I would hesitate to draw any conclusion from this paper.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
Another factor that may play a role: the people who chose not to take the vaccine may be prone to taking bad decisions more broadly, leading to a higher mortality rate.
Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.
I wouldn't bother critiquing methodology without current, masters-level experience in the domain. I make incorrect assumptions when I'm even narrowly outside my own lane, and end up asking questions that clearly demonstrate e.g. my inability to parse fig. 4a.
I wouldn't bother commenting if I were hallucinating figures. There is no figure 4a.
If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.
Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.
OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?
That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.
I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.
I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.
I interpret this as the comment saying "we won't know how this affected things until decades from now." Which can likely be attributed to existing vaccine skepticism and is unlikely to result in them changing their opinion in the next ever.
What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID. They feel like they're being asked something risky in a vacuum, when in fact, they're being asked for something with (as best as we can tell) limited risk against a backdrop of a dangerous virus that killed millions and caused a global pandemic.
Even if they could demonstrably prove the vaccine created a higher risk of outcomes for people who took it, the risk compared to getting COVID is de minimus, and the likelihood of getting COVID is high. I would be surprised if there was a significant population of people who had avoided it at this point.
You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.
mRNA can't cause wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that actually lives inside cells and gets transmitted through eggs to offspring. it's a persistent organism that reproduces. There's not a way for mRNA to grow bacteria.
mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.
The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.
And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.
I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.
I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?
Yes, but imagine how much money hospitals can make if they can convince idiots to skip affordable preventable medicine and instead pay tens of thousands for hospital stays.
Hospitals were paid much more for the Covid patients that died than those who lived. There’s some very strong circumstantial evidence about this driving treatment protocols.
I too despise the existence of a profit motive in public health, the sane (not perfect) alternative is to nationalize medicine, not to ban it because the profit motive makes it suspect.
I'd like to bring to your attention that many people on the internet have made claims which were later retracted, thus your comment is unreliable.
Obviously there are confounding variables besides vaccination status, but I find it pretty compelling that the decrease in COVID mortality among the vaccinated group was significantly larger than the decrease in all-cause mortality of that group. This suggests whatever the difference was between the two groups, besides vaccination, either had a much larger impact on COVID than other causes of death or that the vaccine had some positive impact.
One example of the former explanation I could imagine is that people who got vaccinated against COVID were probably also more likely to take other preventative measures, like wearing a mask or avoiding larger crowds of people. Those precautions would be more likely to be effective against a contagious disease like COVID but less likely to protect them against some other causes of death like heart disease.
I'm not sure how likely I find that as an explanation compared to the alternative that the vaccines provide at least some level of protection. My observation was that widespread measures specifically meant to defend against COVID, like masking and social distancing, largely went away well before the end of the time period covered by this study, at least in the US.
Amusingly, I suspect the anti-vax contingent would likely be bothered by data suggesting anything the COVID vaccinated group was doing differently protected against COVID, since their position seems to largely be that not only is the COVID vaccine useless, but so are any other measures meant to reduce the spread.
> but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious
That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,
“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”
It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.
(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)
The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.
There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
I like to ask people who talk about a 1% mortality rate if they'd go to a football game in a stadium with 100k seats if 1k of those seats randomly had a small bomb attached.
I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.
Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.
What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
People who are poorer and have worse health are predisposed to live in cheaper dwellings, many of which are closer to roads and thus more noisy and with more air pollution.
People who are poorer and have worse health, also have an increased incidence of dementia, seemingly independently of the number of particles in their dwellings.
I’m not sure this is a completely valid statement. Take Ontario - the most expensive places to live are in Toronto with the most traffic, the cheapest places are more rural without that heavy traffic and thus less pollution.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
> Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Yes, and yes. Property is theft. Monopoly on objects which have virtually zero cost to be duplicated can't be justified by any moral ground, so it's basically only possible with corrupted mind enforcing this as social policy using psychological manipulation since garden, and every brutal means that can impose them in the obey or suffer dichotomy mindset.
You believing all property is theft is very avant-garde of you, but at the same time it is not a stance the vast majority of the world agrees with (including Germany), so it hardly seems relevant to a constructive conversation centered around the behavior of German ISPs.
It's not avant-garde, the expression in this form for what I know was coined by the 19th century German philosopher Max Stirner.
The nub of the issue though is not really if something is theft on a legal definitional level. Laws themselves are extremely rarely enacted by direct decisions of those who are commanded to follow them. so they don't reflect what the vast majority of people would consider moral, which often include reciprocity, fairness, and staying beneficial to the society as a whole rather than benefit a tiny minority with highly detrimental consequences for the rest of people.
Not sure I follow. Weapons don't protect the military-industrial complex in the same way. Guns do protect random individuals in the same way they protect military soldiers though.
Which of these definitions do you think supports your case?
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
Well, physical interoperable things are done by committees. You need the industry players involved if you want new interoperable standard to be widely spread. Unless it is one of the first movers.
Say how would you improve speed of copper based ethernet. Using nearly same cables and connectors? Every party making the chips must agree on very specific details.
Did you interpret the calls for the end of censoring and cancellations that all government agencies must continue to exist forever?
And if so is there any resemblance of logic behind that interpretation?