ericn
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Posts: 16,086 
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Post by ericn on May 15, 2021 14:58:46 GMT -6
As far as evidence go you can’t really ask for evidence of ineffectiveness. The baseline is no masks, so the test is do masks make an improvement. But this is a very very difficult thing to test with any kind of rigor. The only thing I saw that showed any benefit was a large scale study of county by county case growth rates in the US before and after statewide mask mandates. Even then there’s so much potential to confound because travel could import cases from state to state and county to county. But they found that it reduced the daily growth rate by maybe a percent. Compounded, that’s a significant effect. However we should consider a mask mandate does more than encourage people to wear masks - it can act as a reminder or a behavior modifier in general. So it’s hard to say it’s masks per se. Logically they can’t hurt. They obviously reduce the amount of spittle and droplets flying around from coughing and sneezing and talking, but we don’t really know which scale the virus moves at. We don’t even know that very well for flu, and we’ve been studying that for a long time. My guess, and it is no more than a guess, is that masks probably are a marginal benefit to reduce spread in aggregate, but not likely to do much for any particular case. However they probably have knock-on benefits as a behavioral tool, which is as much a real effect as any. The effectiveness of a properly worn mask against corona viruses and viruses in general has been well established for years. At the beginning of this most major medical institutions (think university hospitals) did their own internal studies for their own use not publicication. the monkey wrench here is “the properly worn” for instance the gold standard for most is the n95, well unless the person who is wearing it has been fit tested for the exact model it’s no more useful than a level one surgical mask. For those who buy them from wholesalers who have no direct relationship with a manufacturer , they have often been paying a premium for a product that unbeknownst to them has been changed and is no more effective than a cloth mask. The double mask suggestion had little to do with 2 being better than 1, it just makes the primary a tighter fit. If you ever read the recommended use guidelines for surgical masks they are designed to be single use only, if you touch it you need to change it, sneeze or it gets damp change it. Why is this important? If you were to do a study of effectiveness of the general public your going to find all the manufacturers lined up saying “ hey show us your proof that they were being used correctly!” You want proof masks work, how about this my wife has not gotten the virus after multiple times spending 3 plus hours less than 3 feet from patients who test results show was positive at the time, both masked. |
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Post by matt@IAA on May 15, 2021 15:06:05 GMT -6
Right on all counts. So when I'm talking about "masks mandates" the question is - does asking the general public to wear masks of indeterminate quality really help? The answer is... maybe! hahah
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ericn
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Posts: 16,086
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Post by ericn on May 15, 2021 21:02:30 GMT -6
Right on all counts. So when I'm talking about "masks mandates" the question is - does asking the general public to wear masks of indeterminate quality really help? The answer is... maybe! hahah The interesting thing will be if employers will decide to make mask mandatory long term after seeing lower flue and colds. Really masks would make sense for food workers. |
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ericn
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Balance Engineer
Posts: 16,086
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Post by ericn on May 16, 2021 16:41:59 GMT -6
OK this was a local report but it shows the stupidity of the reporting on this “ Children’s Mercy reports an increase in appointments for 12-16 to be vaccinated against Covid.” Well duh a week ago you couldn’t give the vaccine to 12-16 year olds so 1 would be an increase 🤔
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Post by Ward on May 17, 2021 5:34:41 GMT -6
I'm so glad THE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AGREES on mask mandates. In unrelated news, they're going to put up chain link fences along both sides of the Mississippi to keep mosquitoes contained. |
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Post by svart on May 17, 2021 7:20:11 GMT -6
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Post by svart on May 17, 2021 7:25:12 GMT -6
But aside from that, here's something interesting. Back when I took multiple courses of microbiology in college when I thought I wanted to be pre-med, my professor was a former virologist and he used to love to try to scare us. He used to love pointing out that somewhere between 10 and 40% of our genome is foreign, and possible from viral origins. it's well known that virus infections alter our DNA. Generally our immune system kills off the cells that are altered, but some survive and continue to reproduce and we have no idea what those splices are doing. We know that some, like HPV can cause cancer though.. For some reason people have been denying that this would be the case with SARS-COV2, but it seems that it's starting to be accepted: www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/further-evidence-offered-claim-genes-pandemic-coronavirus-can-integrate-human-dna |
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Post by drbill on May 17, 2021 7:54:53 GMT -6
Fun Monday morning stuff svart!! Haha. Ran across this.... Seems like one thing is certain - disease is with us, and we will try to fight it. Sometimes for the better - sometimes for the worse... Eerie similarities going on here. Some of us can vaguely remember the Swine Flu.... |
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Post by matt@IAA on May 17, 2021 8:13:41 GMT -6
So that video says 4,000 Americans had symptoms out of 46 million shots. That's 0.008%. If we take the claim that all 4,000 of those are directly caused by the shot at face value and apply that to the current situation with the COVID vaccine the vaccine vs do-nothing would save something like 900,000 lives.
4000/46,000,000 = .000087
Using COVID IFR roughly 0.4% and estimating 70% of people would get it out of 330 million Americans.
330,000,000 * 0.004 * 0.7 = 924,000 fatalities
330,000,000 * 0.000087 = 28,696 vaccine side effects (all of which aren't fatal)
Also, my college roommate who is a doc now had a Guillain-Barre case (a person who had COVID) the other day. He told me that initially he figured it was caused by COVID, but the neurologist said no way to know. Guillain-Barre happens at a rate of around 1.5 per 100,000. That means in that same group of 46 million Americans you'd expect 690 cases of Guillain-Barre with or without the vaccine. In a casual internet search it looks like in a retrospective study the swine flu vaccine in 1973 might have raised the rate of Guillain-Barre by 1 extra case per million. In other words, since there were 212 million Americans in 1973, you'd expect 3180 cases per year, so in 1973 you'd see 3226 (one per million doses).
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Post by drbill on May 17, 2021 8:33:39 GMT -6
Don't focus on your hypothetical numbers Matt. Focus on the guy from the CDC - his honesty, his forthcoming attitudes, his...well, you know.  . Fun guy. |
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Post by seawell on May 17, 2021 13:06:06 GMT -6
Fun Monday morning stuff svart!! Haha. Ran across this.... Seems like one thing is certain - disease is with us, and we will try to fight it. Sometimes for the better - sometimes for the worse... Eerie similarities going on here. Some of us can vaguely remember the Swine Flu.... Wow…I forgot what actual investigative journalism looks like, that was awesome! A few observations… The swine flu vaccine campaign was halted after 53 deaths occurred. It looks like we’re already past that with COVID vaccine related deaths even by the most conservative estimates. I would love to see a journalist have the courage to take a good honest look at this whole situation when we’re a few years out. Considering every other ad during news broadcasts are pharmaceutical related I’m not too hopeful on that though. Lastly…anyone that is injured by COVID vaccines are likely going to have a much more difficult time receiving any compensation than the lady in this video did.(https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html) |
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Post by matt@IAA on May 17, 2021 13:49:54 GMT -6
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Post by drbill on May 17, 2021 14:14:01 GMT -6
I was told there would be no math. @johnkenn promised. So screw all the statistical analysis. You can make numbers say pretty much anything you want them to. I'm with seawell . I was amazed to see that kind of real investigative journalism again. I guess I forgot what that was all about with a steady diet of the internet at this point in time. I'm not sure we'll ever see that kind of journalism again in this country as the media seems to be set to follow a pre-prescribed narrative instead of looking for "truth". The other thing that totally amazed me was the slimy and lying head of the CDC. There's very little doubt to me that big Pharma is in bed with the CDC at this stage of the game. And big Pharma are unscrupulous at best, felonious at worst. Follow the money..... Is the CDC on the side of the people, the government or big business in 2021? I truly wish I could believe they are for the people. For me, the jury is still out on all of this.....especially with 9 (and counting?) members of the NY Yankees coming down with Covid after being fully vaccinated. |
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Post by matt@IAA on May 17, 2021 14:41:31 GMT -6
It doesn’t make sense to throw numbers out, then say screw it when the numbers are examined.
53 people died from those vaccines. So far zero people have died from these vaccines. The same organizations who were monitoring those and stopped it when problems came up are monitoring these vaccines. We’ve administered six times as many doses as then, over a much longer period. The situations are not comparable other than both are vaccines. And even if they were, compared to that, this vaccine is way safer!
If you want to say - I have my opinions and beliefs, and I’m not changing my mind - great. Don’t expect people to agree with you or be on board, and why bother having discussions? The whole point of discussions is to rationalize your beliefs with others for mutual benefit, not simply to state them.
And for what it’s worth the vaccine doesn’t absolutely prevent you from testing positive. It reduces your chance of getting sick, and it prevents you from getting a severe illness because your body can mount an immune response. I genuinely have no idea how anyone can look at what is going on in every country with significant vaccination rates and stick to the idea that the vaccines don’t work.
But fine — dont get one. It’s your decision. Don’t crap on me for trying to share objective fact based sources.
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Post by ragan on May 17, 2021 14:59:42 GMT -6
So screw all the statistical analysis. You can make numbers say pretty much anything you want them to. You can't really though. You can misunderstand numbers or you can believe bad faith actors who are misrepresenting numbers but you can't change the underlying reality that the numbers are describing. Good data exists. And bad data can be shown to be bad, not by ideology but by good analysis. The "well I throw my hands up...you can't trust anything" malaise is a strategically-curated attitude in our culture and in my opinion it's one of the most destructively weaponized things going right now. |
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Post by seawell on May 17, 2021 15:00:25 GMT -6
Ok, but if we’re going to make the distinction between people who got the vaccine, then died as opposed to the vaccine causing the death then the actual covid death totals need to be reported the same way. There is a huge discrepancy between the number of people that died from covid only and those that died with covid. As far as I know there is no financial incentive to report an adverse reaction or death from the vaccine. The same can’t be said for classifying a death as covid. In other words there is potential for some bad reporting on both sides but I don’t think that means either of those numbers goes to zero. I’m aware that someone could report a bogus vaccine death through the VAERS system but all 4,000 of them? I don’t think you should so matter of factly state that there are zero covid vax deaths because there’s no way you could know that. I’ll have to go back and review where I got the 53 number from and if I was wrong I’ll be glad to correct it. |
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Post by ragan on May 17, 2021 15:10:45 GMT -6
I’m aware that someone could report a bogus vaccine death through the VAERS system but all 4,000 of them? I don’t think you should so matter of factly state that there are zero covid vax deaths because there’s no way you could know that. I think you might be misunderstanding that 4,000 figure. You could just as easily say, "look, 4,000 people died this year after taking Viagra. I'm not saying Viagra caused all of those deaths, but wouldn't it be crazy to think it didn't cause any of them?" Causation and correlation and coincidence are wildly different things that often get rhetorically tangled. Someone having taken Viagra and then, sometime later, having died, doesn't really tell us anything other than that those two events occurred in that order (it would be pretty weird if it were in the other order....). |
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Post by ragan on May 17, 2021 15:17:44 GMT -6
Or, put another way, you'll often hear stories say things like "among people who regularly eat kale, rates of cancer were 23% lower than the national average". That doesn't mean kale has anything to do with preventing cancer. People who regularly eat kale probably also do a lot of other things, like eat healthy in general, or maybe they're less likely to smoke or maybe they skew younger. Just noting that "this thing and also that thing happened to this person" doesn't provide evidence of any causal link.
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Post by seawell on May 17, 2021 15:26:18 GMT -6
Or, put another way, you'll often hear stories say things like "among people who regularly eat kale, rates of cancer were 23% lower than the national average". That doesn't mean kale has anything to do with preventing cancer. People who regularly eat kale probably do a lot of other things also, like eat healthy in general, or maybe they're less likely to smoke or maybe they skew younger. Just noting that "this thing and also that thing happened to this person" doesn't provide evidence of any causal link. I totally get what you're saying. My observation from the video was that I was surprised they stopped the whole vaccination campaign in 1976 due to such a low number of deaths and Guillain–Barré cases. I agree that VAERS isn't perfect but do we have any other way of reporting/tracking vaccine related deaths? |
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Post by ragan on May 17, 2021 15:30:25 GMT -6
Or, put another way, you'll often hear stories say things like "among people who regularly eat kale, rates of cancer were 23% lower than the national average". That doesn't mean kale has anything to do with preventing cancer. People who regularly eat kale probably do a lot of other things also, like eat healthy in general, or maybe they're less likely to smoke or maybe they skew younger. Just noting that "this thing and also that thing happened to this person" doesn't provide evidence of any causal link. I totally get what you're saying. My observation from the video was that I was surprised they stopped the whole vaccination campaign in 1976 due to such a low number of deaths and Guillain–Barré cases. I agree that VAERS isn't perfect but do we have any other way of reporting vaccine related deaths? But those deaths were actually affirmatively linked to the vaccine, weren't they? I'm sorry I don't have time to watch the thing right now but I'm pretty sure that's the case. Of the ~4,000 deaths you're talking about after having gotten the current vaccines, zero of them have been actually linked to the vaccine itself. That's a really big difference. They look at every death of someone who's had a vaccine precisely because they want to see if there's any link. The J&J and AZ vaccines may have an astronomically rare link to those blood clots. If that proves true, that's an actual link, not just a random co-happening and even the whiff of that made EU pause AZ and the US pause J&J. If there started being an actual link between the vaccine and deaths, that would be a big, big deal and the vaccination campaign would be halted (like it was back then). All that the current data is showing us is the 'Viagra then also died at some later date' kind of thing in 0.000017 of cases, which is to say nothing. But they're of course correct to still do all those autopsies and have scientists peaking under every rock for links. It's a part of the monitoring process. |
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Post by seawell on May 17, 2021 15:48:10 GMT -6
I totally get what you're saying. My observation from the video was that I was surprised they stopped the whole vaccination campaign in 1976 due to such a low number of deaths and Guillain–Barré cases. I agree that VAERS isn't perfect but do we have any other way of reporting vaccine related deaths? But those deaths were actually affirmatively linked to the vaccine, weren't they? I'm sorry I don't have time to watch the thing right now but I'm pretty sure that's the case. Of the ~4,000 deaths you're talking about after having gotten the current vaccines, zero of them have been linked to the vaccine itself. That's a really big difference. I don't think there has been enough time to throughly investigate all of those claims yet. The number of reports is so much higher than the typical flu vaccine reports for example that it at least has to be pretty concerning. We'll see how it all pans out. There are certainly some things(for example the virus origin) that when given enough time, are completely changing. |
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Post by drbill on May 17, 2021 15:55:52 GMT -6
Bend those numbers however you like. They are numbers and you can make em say what you want if you're smarter than the next guy, or that guy doesn't have the time to bend em back the other way. What's good for the goose is good for the gander as grandma used to say. VAERS is pretty clear at this point. Death WITH Vaccine, or Death BY Vaccine (this week)......VS......Death WITH Covid, or Death BY Covid (last year). Both sides working it pretty hard this week aren't they? But if you're honest, it works both ways doesn't it. You can't flip the rules. Well, you can if you have an agenda, then by all means, bend the $#!@ out of those numbers to suit your personal - company - political narrative!! The media certainly is. |
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Post by ragan on May 17, 2021 16:00:45 GMT -6
Bend those numbers however you like. They are numbers and you can make em say what you want if you're smarter than the next guy, or that guy doesn't have the time to bend em back the other way. What's good for the goose is good for the gander as grandma used to say. VAERS is pretty clear at this point. Death WITH Vaccine, or Death BY Vaccine (this week)......VS......Death WITH Covid, or Death BY Covid (last year). Both sides working it pretty hard this week aren't they? But if you're honest, it works both ways doesn't it. You can't flip the rules. Well, you can if you have an agenda, then by all means, bend the $#!@ out of those numbers to suit your personal - company - political narrative!! The media certainly is. What's an example of a "bent" number here? |
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Post by drbill on May 17, 2021 16:01:11 GMT -6
So screw all the statistical analysis. You can make numbers say pretty much anything you want them to. You can't really though. You can misunderstand numbers or you can believe bad faith actors who are misrepresenting numbers but you can't change the underlying reality that the numbers are describing. Good data exists. And bad data can be shown to be bad, not by ideology but by good analysis. The "well I throw my hands up...you can't trust anything" malaise is a strategically-curated attitude in our culture and in my opinion it's one of the most destructively weaponized things going right now. I agree with your analysis ragan, athough I'm not sure we would interpret the data the same. I always love the way this puts it. I can understand the cartoons , and the analysis is good : cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE3/Lie_with_Statistics.pdf |
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Post by ragan on May 17, 2021 16:07:26 GMT -6
You can't really though. You can misunderstand numbers or you can believe bad faith actors who are misrepresenting numbers but you can't change the underlying reality that the numbers are describing. Good data exists. And bad data can be shown to be bad, not by ideology but by good analysis. The "well I throw my hands up...you can't trust anything" malaise is a strategically-curated attitude in our culture and in my opinion it's one of the most destructively weaponized things going right now. I agree with your analysis ragan, athough I'm not sure we would interpret the data the same. I always love the way this puts it. I can understand the cartoons , and the analysis is good : cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE3/Lie_with_Statistics.pdfI guess that's what I mean when I say that bad analysis can be shown to be bad with good analysis. There are absolutely ways to try and misrepresent data, but they're not invincible. Hell, half the stuff posted here has been shown to be faulty (either inherently or in the interpretation being applied to it) within like 10 minutes of its posting . Good analysis is doable and is done all the time. Bad data or misinterpretation, taken as a whole, can't really survive it. |
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. Fun guy.
