This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Seems like it’s been a while since we had a COVID report. I am seeing reports of excess deaths continue in western countries especially mRNA vaxxed countries. Theoretically after a pandemic that targeted people with a high risks of death we should see a period of below trend deaths. Usually I use Berenson when something feels off on the vaccine; always thought he misrepresented data but I knew he would have the vaccine skepticism data and seemed to do Scott’s line of the official media (he was NYTimes) will always present you true data just misrepresent it.
So he’s showing 1 million excess deaths in the last 12 months in MRNA countries which is a lot
https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1622623915775336448?s=46&t=5lPC0Ua_zfSaFWePIhVHfg
And a few counties I believe parts of UK and Germany are at peak excess deaths.
Then you had the Hamlin incident which doesn’t look like the initial story sold to me.
A few rationalist made mea culpas lately for being too pro lockdown etc. I’m now questioning whether my pro-vaccine position was correct. Scott Adams gave a mea culpa he was wrong on vaccines.
https://youtube.com/embed/C41GCgyG4mI
Of course on death counts. Overdoses seem to be at a new base rate adding some excess deaths. Maybe explains 150k. Murders up too but that’s like 30k tops. And some more suicides. And COVID still exists. But we also thinned the herd of near death people which should pressure excess deaths down. Did everyone get fat sheltering in place and/or didn’t stimulate their immune system enough with all sorts of pathogens plus other health care (cancer etc) went undetected?
I think the long term mRNA vaccine bear case rests on it training your body wrong for long term immunity by flooding your system with just the spike protein. Plus the Pfizer project Veritas guy said they don’t have a good explanation for menstrual changes that shouldn’t be occuring but could indicate it’s doing something with hormones unexpected.
Now I was never pro-mandate. Got COVID before vaccination confirmed and without symptoms. Eventually got 1 jab of mRNA as a booster and it knocked me out for 36 hrs so I swore off taking more shots. But I still recommended it to older family members.
Which leads to the discussion - what is causing the excess deaths? Will the mRNA vaccines end up being viewed as a huge failure and Berenson moves from quack to Seer who saw everything everyone else was blind to. And Kyrie Irving moves from fool to semi-normal. Currently I am in the confused stage where the data seems to be not fitting with my prior beliefs and trying to figure out what is going on. Is there a more rational explanation for excess deaths than mRNA vaccines are bad.
The excess deaths are probably caused by the after effects of Corona. Myocarditis and other heart issues are moderately common in people who didn't even have severe cases. Most of the people who have these issues probably don't know they have them. Then there are the severe cases, of which there were a lot, where people were stuck on ventilators and likely had all sorts of complications. Those people often aren't long for this world. There's also a case to be made that isolation caused by the pandemic has increased all cause mortality, bit that's pretty foggy and may not be true. It's also possible that the data is just off.
If the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there. Also, hiding a health issue caused by a drug is so outside of the FDAs historical behavioral pattern that it's really ridiculous to lean into some conspiratorial coverup. Remember, when 2 J&J vaccine patients had heart issues out if millions (a rate which is far less than the rate in the random population) the FDA pulled the vaccine immediately. Yet they're covering up mass sickness from other vaccines?
This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported.
What would you say if a positive correlation seemed to exist between number of vaccine doses and likelihood of contracting Omicron?
See page 21
That double blind trial data is a lot better and very clear that this isn't the case. We don't have to do guessing games with outside factors (such as risk taking when you know you're vaccinated), so why would we?
What double-blind trial is studying booster performance against Omicron?
Anyways, you said "correlation" -- one seems to exist, what now?
They have trials for all the boosters.
Double blind ones looking at probability of infection as compared with zero, one, two (or more) previous doses?
I don't think they do, please link.
Being boosters, they are inherently looking at the effect vs the previous dose.
Its a bit ridiculous to ask for something so easily accessible on google as moderna vaccine trials.
It's a bit ridiculous to try changing the subject when
called on your own bullshitasked for data to back up your unsourced assertions.You said that if vaccines caused increased chance of health problems, there would be an obvious correlation -- and asserted that it wasn't there.
When I provided a large survey (in a young and pretty homogeneous population, btw) by a bunch of infectious disease PhDs showing... an obvious correlation between # of vaccine doses and likelihood of contracting coronavirus, instead of re-evaluating your position, you bring up different studies studying different things. (most notably conducted ~2 years ago, against a significantly different variant than the one currently circulating)
Have you considered that your position in this matter may not depend on what's true at all?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's definitely hard to separate negative effects of COVID from negative effects of vaccination, but here's an Israeli study on 200,000 unvaccinated people who had COVID that didn't find any increase in myocarditis in unvaccinated subjects post-COVID: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219
So it seems likely that myocarditis is primarily vaccine-related.
As for health risks from vaccination, there's plenty of data on a clear corellation. Here's some highlights:
A Danish study on the original clinical trials that were performed to authorize the vaccines found higher overall mortality among those vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines than in the the unvaccinated control group (study linked in article): https://brownstone.org/articles/have-people-been-given-the-wrong-vaccine/
Mind you, this is very early on when the circulating strain of COVID actually matched the one in the vaccines, and they offered the best protection against COVID, but vaccination STILL had a negative effect on overall mortality. Vaccination=higher mortality, indeed.
Here's a study finding a 16% increase in serious adverse events after COVID vaccination, also based on the original trials: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283
If you look at the VAERS database (the official US database for tracking vaccine adverse events), 75% of total reported vaccine-related deaths in the last 30 years have been in 2021 and 2022 - in other words, more vaccine deaths have been reported since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all other vaccines over the last 30 years. Go to https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html, and request data on death from all vaccines by year.
Now VAERS reports are far from fully reliable, but they are submitted by physicians, and the comparison with previous vaccine data is extremely negative for COVID vaccines. More vaccine deaths in the last two years than in the last 30 years combined, in the best vaccine adverse effect tracking database in the world. Wow.
As for the FDA, here's an article in BMJ (top medical journal) basically begging the FDA to relase vaccine safety data on COVID vaccine safety, which they haven't done: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527?fbclid=IwAR3e8Rv7UdOUjx60Vf7CnrtZAcM7rCVxl5IRpT76ngyTokkALHVCbiO3Naw
Again, these are just the highlights - seems pretty clear to me that there is a "noticable health risk" from the vaccines.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/research/publications/index.html
There is another study in there as well with the same conclusion. This is just non-covid mortality risk, obviously the risk for COVID itself is much lower for people who took the vaccine, and that data is in there as well IIRC.
Thank you for the response, but it doesn't really address what I was saying. You claimed that "if the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there." and that "This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported."
I showed you that clinical trials (the best kind of data!) found a significant increase in serious adverse events after vaccination (health risk!) and increased deaths in the vaccinated group compared with controls (vaccination=higher mortality).
Your response that cites a study with different results may indicate that the situation is complex, with contradictory studies supporting different positions, but it does not show that the "correlation isn't there" - it's there in the randomized clinical trials (RCTs), which represent the best type of evidence. Your initial claim was very very strong, and it is what I'm contesting. You did not just say that there are contradictory studies on COVID vaccine health risk, you said that the claim of health risk is so thinly supported it's hard not to be condescending about that claim, when in fact the clinical trials that were used to approve the vaccines show both a serious health risk and that vaccination=higher mortality.
The study you quoted here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm) is not a RCT and thus immediately weaker evidence than the clinical trials, but let's look at it more closely. The study has a very surprising result, namely that vaccine recipients had lower non-COVID mortality than the unvaccinated. Unless you want to claim that the COVID vaccine magically protects against all forms of death, the study has missed something or introduced some kind of bias in their study design that skewed the results.
One explanation that immediately springs to mind when reading the study stems from this decision in the study design:
"To ensure comparable health care–seeking behavior among persons who received a COVID-19 vaccine and those who did not (unvaccinated persons), eligible unvaccinated persons were selected from among those who received ≥1 dose of influenza vaccine in the last 2 years."
So they only included unvaccinated persons who were vaccinated against the flu but were not vaccinated against COVID. The majority of the healthy population does not vaccinate against the flu - some healthy people do, of course, but it's primarily given to older or sick and thus vulnerable people. Among the people who were vaccinated against the flu due to being sick, but did not vaccinate against COVID, some proportion did not receive COVID vaccination because they had gotten sicker in the meantime, and thus COVID vaccination was deemed too risky. It is possible that this group was large enough (you don't need that many such people to skew the results) to lead to the result that unvaccinated people died from non-COVID causes more often more than the vaccinated - because a proportion of the sample was unvaccinated due to being too sick to receive the vaccine, thus resulting in more deaths among the unvaccinated group.
Of course, this explanation is not a certainty, but the decision to only include flu vaccine recipients in the unvaccinated group, without controlling for initial health status and with no mention of ensuring that the vaccinated were also flu vaccine recipients, was very questionable. It may have skewed the results of this study, leading to the result that COVID vaccines seem to magically protect from non-COVID death. Even if this is not the explanation of this weird result, the results of this study just make no sense - something is happening that the study doesn't account for, even if the result were to be correct. I therefore rate the reliability of this study a fairly low - definitely lower than the reliability of RCTs that show vaccination=higher mortality.
To summarize, the study you quoted here has a weird result that indicates some unknown factor at play that is skewing the results, and they made a questionable decision in study design that they did not match in both samples.
In any case, randomized controlled trials are stronger evidence, and they do indeed show vaccination=higher mortality and that there's a health risk from vaccination (16% increase in serious adverse events).
This contradicts your original very strong claim that there is no correlation indicating a health risk from COVID vaccines and that believing that is something it's hard not to be condescending about because it's so thinly supported. That claim is what I'd be interested in hearing you defend.
More options
Context Copy link
Don't the vaccines have quickly waning immunity/resistance, wasn't natural immunity/resistance shown to be superior, and aren't we at the point where everyone probably everyone has had COVID?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you know if there is a dataset where this would be visible? Or would you need to do a controlled study? If it’s the later, do you think anyone has looked? I imagine there would be a lot of hurdles to even ask this question. Sadly the experts have lost all credibility. I personally don’t think anyone would ask that question for fear of the answer. And even if they did, I’m not sure they wouldn’t mislead us to get the proper results.
Yes, the data set was the vaccine trials.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If that was the explanation, shouldn't we see a pretty big difference between current excess deaths in mostly vaxxed vs. mostly unvaxxed countries? Do we see it?
I would bet there is no reliable data in unvaccinated countries. Every country developed enough for a vaccine campaign (except for China) has used the Western mrna vaccines. Also, if there was good data it wouldn't be comparable. Africa's mortality is not comparable to countries where half the country is over 50 (or whatever it is). Especially when you factor in all the excess mortality in Africa from other things (AIDS, untreated diseases that wouldn't matter in the developed world, etc)
Did Russia / Belarus / Ukraine use western mrna vaccines ?
They used copies of them, so basically. Not sure about Ukraine but Russia and Belarus did.
This is false, Sputnik is an adenovirus vaccine like J&J. It would still be subject to potential issues around using a small subunit of the virus (the spike) to generate immunity, but not anything to do with the mRNA approach to replication.
I think some of those countries may have used Sinovax to some extent also? (which is more like a regular flu shot)
My bad. I'm just working off memory of Russia making a big deal over it years ago.
More options
Context Copy link
Also very low vaccine uptake rates in those countries.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ukraine mostly didn’t get vaccinated, and Sputnik is sort of a hybrid between MRNA tech and more conventional vax.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We're talking about excess death statistics, not some nuanced "died after getting vaxxed" vs. "died because of the vax". There are some countries dysfunctional enough that they might routinely miss a bunch of dead bodies in their statistics, but why should that effect be more pronounced post-covid relative to during-covid?
Regarding comparing Europe to Africa, surely there are some countries with a similar age profile, with some variance in how many people got vaxxed?
More options
Context Copy link
You should have a look at Hungary -- their rate is lowish for Europe, and a significant number of those who did get it had Sinovac or Sputnik, due to Hungary opting out of the EUs Pfizer/Moderna supply in order to get quicker access.
Also I think Peru used a lot of Sinovac -- not sure they are devoloped enough for you, but clearly moreso than most places in Africa.
Those sound like the sorts of things that would increase mortality from the baseline? Anyways I'm not particularly fixated on Hungary; the fact that there are such large differences at the moment (and that many places are quite elevated) is profoundly weird.
"The monthly excess mortality indicator is expressed as the percentage rate of additional deaths in a month, compared to a baseline period. The baseline is given by average monthly deaths in the period 2016-2019."
This is a very crude methodology compared to the Euromomo approach.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Would you trust data from Peru or Hungary? I sure wouldn't. I suspect even US data is quite fuzzy.
Sure, why not? You don't need to be a technostate to count dead people.
The cause of death and data surrounding it would be more what I'm worried about.
That information is not required to calculate excess mortality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, and yes. I might be more skeptical of Ukraine, and not because I'm throwing shade at them, but because they're currently at war.
Have you ever been in either of the countries you criticize? You're acting like they're both worse than a 3rd world basket case.
I'm not criticizing anything. You don't have to be a 3rd world hell basket to have poor data. It's a pretty common problem. Detroit has poor data tracking and is not anything approaching a 3rd world hell basket, even if it's crime is pretty close. There are pretty big swathes of most countries which don't track data well. For example, its pretty well established that China probably isn't quite sure what it's exact population or GDP are. The specific problems in China are likely different (incentives for people collecting data to lie) but the problem as a whole is pretty universal.
EDIT:I'm not sure why you wouldn't just compare US vaccinated vs unvaccinated. That's basically what the trials did, and the data is public.
https://eua.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/providers/clinical-trial-data
We're talking about counting corpses. Things would have to get very bad for a given government to have significant problems with that data.
I'm skeptical of findings from controlled trials that don't show up in population level data in any way. There could be good reasons for that, but my first guesses are that the conclusions of the trial were wrong, or that the effect size is way smaller than it's made out to be.
More options
Context Copy link
As I recall total mortality did not differ significantly between the groups during the trials -- expanding this analysis to a larger population group would be great, but sadly no country that I'm aware of tags all death certificates with vax status -- and you do get into data quality/sampling bias issues whenever you start looking at a convenience sample for which you happen to be able to get the two bits is_vaxxed and is_dead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link