England mortality data suggest systematic mis-categorisation of vaccine status | Hacker News Reader

England mortality data suggest systematic mis-categorisation of vaccine status

researchgate.net

20 pointswalterbell7 comments

Notwithstanding the main thrust I wanted to comment on something in the abstract:

"The risk/benefit of Covid vaccines is arguably most accurately measured by an all-cause mortality rate comparison of vaccinated against unvaccinated, since it not only avoids most confounders relating to case definition but also fulfils the WHO/CDC definition of "vaccine effectiveness" for mortality"

But has the obvious confounder of assuming the two populations are equal in all other ways other than being vaccinated. This is probably false.

There was a US dataset where it was shown the mortality from a variety of diseases was lower among the vaccinated. This isn't because the vaccine is protective against those diseases!

Measuring via all-cause mortality is not advisable unless your population dataset is very large (a whole country is certainly enough though).

The scale they have, so I think that's a fair line of argument. And they do discuss some of these factors, e.g. people with pre-existing illnesses were in many places prioritized. On the other hand, policy of prioritization vs it actually happening is an issue, and can be mixed with other things again - e.g. my impression is that in many places people in care homes had it a lot easier to get vaccinated than similarly ill people cared for at home.

But I think the "systematic mis-categorization" is more "not the correct categorization for what we want to do with the data", unless I missed something?

Data collection around all this is something where most countries seem to not be doing a great job, which is frustrating when looking at data. (On the other hand not too surprising, many health care systems are intentionally designed to not track everything centrally, people fall through gaps, ...)

The media portrays the vaccine-hesitant as stereotypical anarchist militant anti-vax. But all the ones I actually know have pre-existing illnesses which are not being adequately treated by their medical care system, and which they are fearful will get worse post-vaccine.

Sounds like selection bias. Do you live in a region with high vaccination rates overall?

I certainly also don't know any unvaccinated-by-choice people personally either in my bubble. My city is up to 82% one dose, 71% fully vaccinated and I expect it to keep going up.

There’s a whole wide world of folks out there who won’t get a vaccine but are happy to take a horse de-wormer instead.

^ should be flagged for misinformation

I know a number of anti-vaxxers who are more on the 'lentil' side of the spectrum. For them it's a fear of 'unnatural' things in their bodies, they're antivax in general.

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