I was continuing to read Two Girls, Fat and Thin—it’s excellent—and I was inspired to do some googling and wikipedia reading of one thing after another and I came to the wikipedia page of the science fiction writer Larry Niven, which had a reference to this news article by Stew Magnuson from 2008, “Science Fiction Mavens Offer Far Out Homeland Security Advice,” with this amazing bit:
Now a fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences, SIGMA is a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation.
The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking. . . .
Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as “Ringworld” and “Lucifer’s Hammer,” which he co-wrote with SIGMA member Jerry Pournelle.
Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.
“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.
Wow. Truly in the John W. Campbell tradition, but I gotta say that Niven’s plan seems creepier than the straight-up racism of the old days. Believing that other races are inferior, sure, that’s caused lots of problems, but cold-bloodedly trying to trick sick and injured people into not going to the E.R. . . . that’s really creepy. It just seems so smug, somehow worse than old-school racism, which I associate with more with some combination of ignorance and political allegiance.
In any case, it seems that the DHS did not follow Niven’s suggestion, but what about Fox News, which has spread conspiracy theories by telling its viewers that “Maybe [the covid vaccine] doesn’t work, and they’re simply not telling you that,” saying that Anthony Fauci “created” covid, and comparing vaccination to “sterilization or frontal lobotomies”? This seems a lot like Niven’s advice, except that they’re doing in English rather than Spanish. The other difference is that Niven’s plan was to con people into not getting emergency care in order to free up hospital space for people like . . . himself, I guess, whereas Fox’s plan seems to be to con people into spreading covid so as to cause political trouble. It seems similar, though, in the sense that they’re politically-connected people who want to spread lies and who have contempt for their audiences. These Alex Jones types are different from nudgelords, who we can assume actually believe the messages they’re spreading. It’s the difference between Pizzagate and Pizzagate.
The good news is that I guess this sort of “unconventional thinking” (i.e., trying to manipulate people by promoting ridiculous conspiracy theories) is no longer being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security. The former DHS guy is a retired admiral and now works at a consulting group, with one of his areas of expertise being “Risk informed decision making.” All right, then.
There are plenty of conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories (e.g. QAnon) being PsyOps. Plenty of times, someone in a CT group who deviated too much from the established dogma was decried as an agent of the CIA/DHS/Freemasons and ostracized. But there’s evidence, too, that foreign interests help spread misinformation on social media [1]. Take your pick.
[1] “Weapons of Mass Distraction: Foreign State-Sponsored Disinformation in the Digital Age” by C.Nemr and W.Gangware, Park Advisors (2019)
There must be many incidents of state actors spreading false conspiracy theories.
Here’s an account of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
See also. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/computational-propaganda/.
Bob76
Bob:
Yes, there are some famous examples of disinformation being spread in wartime. One thing that’s striking about the two examples in the above post (Niven proposing to spread a conspiracy theory to deter people from being treated in the hospital, and Fox news spreading conspiracy theories to deter people from taking the covid vaccine) is that these are not occurring in wartime settings. I mean, yeah, sure, maybe people were saying we were “being invaded” by immigrants, or that there’s a “culture war,” but these aren’t actual wars! It somehow seems worse to be trying to get people killed when there’s not a war on.
Andrew –
>… but these aren’t actual wars!..
Ah. But what about the war on Christmas?
I hope you wouldn’t try to say THAT’S not an actual war?
The examples I linked to, Soviet Union spreading a rumor that the US developed AIDS to kill blacks and the Oxford group’s study on digital propaganda, are not (mostly) examples from a shooting war.
A reasonable question is “Was Nivin lounge in cheek?” He may be racist scum but, if so, it’s an interesting fact that his sometimes co-author, Steve Barnes, is Black.
Bob76
“his sometimes co-author, Steve Barnes, is Black.”
But not an undocumented latino, which Niven’s comment refers to.
“Lounge in cheek” . . . that’s a great typo!
All communication is an attempt to nudge you somewhere, even if it’s just a benign mental state. If you go where they’re taking you, you’re following their incentives, whatever they are, Now you just have to decide whether their incentives are congruent with your incentives. To do that, I guess you need to read more about *their* incentives. Unfortunately, to do that, you need to read someone else’s take on their incentives, whose congruence with your desire to learn about the original incentives depends on *their* incentives. The only way to break the infinite regress is to trust *somebody*. All these problems stem from misplacing your trust. Then you learn from being misled and learn to TRUST NO ONE, which is no improvement because it puts you back in the infinite regress. It’s nudges all the way down.
Jonathan (ao) –
> The only way to break the infinite regress is to trust *somebody*.
I don’t agree. I think there is no compelling reason to trust anyone. Instead, yuu look at as many angles as you can, and try to weigh probabilities (and you try to control for the jjnxkjence of your own biases when doing so).
Influence of your own biases.
First, I’m going to be using jjnxkjence a lot. It’s the Joshua version of “covfefe.”
But your answer breaks the infinite regress by trusting *yourself* and your own ability to surmount your own biases and adjust for everyone else’s. But while treating yourself as a truth-detection machine (with random error) might work for you (or not! exercise in self-delusion left to the reader) it obviously doesn’t work well enough in aggregate or no one would ever be systematically misled.
Jonathan (ao) –
> But your answer breaks the infinite regress by trusting *yourself* and your own ability to surmount your own biases and adjust for everyone else’s.
That’s not how I look at it.
I know that biases will remain and my control will inevitably be imperfect.
I certainly am not “trusting” myself. I’m just going on the possibility that I might be able to gain some measure on the probabilities, to narrow the window somewhat. I know that someone like Kahneman thinks that can’t be done. He might be right. On the other hand, those like Tetlok disagree. I’m going to go with that. I don’t see reason to trust there’s greater harm in doing so.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re referring to today when you want me to reply, because I don’t see much to reply to here. OK. You don’t think of this as trusting yourself, but as trusting yourself to use a method that you trust which involves your assessing how much you trust the work of others. You’ve put a probabilistic gloss on the mechanism of trusting sources outside yourself. And you trust that mechanism. Got it.
Jonathan –
Thanks for the response.
No, I don’t think I’m “trusting” sources, or “trusting” myself to use a method that I trust which involves assessing how much I trust the work of others.
IOW, my beliefs about the reliability of that process are far from strong. They are tentative, at best. That doesn’t seem to me to be consistent with “trust.”
But now I understand that I’m not getting anywhere in trying to convey what I think the difference is.
Jonathan (ao} –
> it obviously doesn’t work well enough in aggregate or no one would ever be systematically misled.
Depends on “well enough), I think there may be a less sub-optimal standard.
The hope is that the number of people misled is reduced by some amount.
I agree!
wins thread
But whom: Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? , …
Check the name of the person who said “I agree!”
I know what you are getting at — but “somebody” might be Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny! ;~)
Regarding trust etc.:
This was one of the criticisms that Kaiser Fung and I had of Freakonomics and System 3: the “chain of trust.” Dubner trusted Levitt and wrote a book about Levitt’s research. Then they needed new material so they started trusting Levitt’s friends and pretty much anybody who sent them press releases. Trust is unavoidable, and one useful first step is to recognize when it is that you’re exercising trust. It turns out that some people who send you press releases, and even some of your friends, are not always to be trusted when they make research claims!
To make the obvious joke: I guess it wasn’t just Ringworld that was unstable after all!
But getting to the quote, were hospitals actually in particular danger of “going broke” in 2008? I don’t remember that being any kind of issue, but maybe it depended on where you lived.
The rationale for Niven’s suggestion is interesting because it seems that racists and other bigots often invent or at least exaggerate problems as ways of justifying harm toward the groups they don’t like. “They’re taking your jobs”, “they’re corrupting your kids”, etc. etc.
Tucker Carlson: Getting COVID “does feminize people. No one ever says that but it’s true”
https://mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson
No one ever says it, but it’s true…
Was Niven serious when he said that? It’s so over-the-top that it comes off to me as sarcasm, or parody.
I guess this is Poe’s Law at work.
That was my question as well. He may have been serious or really sarcastic. Possibly sarcastic in response to some one else’s nutty idea. From the very little I know of Niven the first and last both seem possible.
Jkrideau:
Here’s the description from the linked news article:
As I wrote elsewhere in the thread, it sounds to me like the sort of witticism you might hear at your local country club: kind of a joke, kind of serious.
Pournelle was lobbing a softball to Niven, his writing partner for many years.
Pournelle is himself very right-wing, and a climate change denialist.
I was going to say I would have given more credence to it being an at least half serious proposal if it had been Pournelle.
OTOH who was the US economist who proposed something along the lines of shipping polluting US industries to Africa as Afcrcan lives cost less than US lives in compensation cases?
@ Andrew
kind of a joke, kind of serious.
Yes, or a good sub-plot for the next book. So serious in a way.
I don’t know what particular economist suggested exporting pollution damage to poor countries, but it is only a standard application of neoclassical economic theory. Most economists these days are careful enough to not generally say such things in public, but it is a natural implication of their theories. You can surround it with a bunch of caveats to obscure how ridiculous it makes some economic methodology appear, but it is the reality of what those theories imply.
“it is only a standard application of neoclassical economic theory. ”
In other words, it’s true. It upsets people to have the sticker price on the item I guess, but taking the sticker price off the item doesn’t change the price. On average, a person in any third world country produces far less value per unit of effort, and thus their lives are economically worth less. Fact. Cue moral outrage.
“You can surround it with a bunch of caveats to obscure how ridiculous it makes some economic methodology appear”
Quite the contrary, this “methodology” sound. In fact, to call it a “methodology” overstates its complexity doesn’t it? It’s not a “theory” or “hypothesis”. It’s really just a simple tabulation of the value of output. Just a sum. It’s the moral outrage over a simple fact that’s unsound and problematic. The problem with the moral outrage is that in the end the moral outrage is what is actually harmful, because it prevents the disadvantaged people from increasing their relative value.
In the end, we exported our polluting industries to China instead of Africa, and China and its people are massively better off for it, having substantially increased the value of their output by starting with work that was suitable for the value they could produce, then adding higher value work as people gained experience, education – and dramatically grew their wealth.
You can’t start a race from the middle or the end. You have to start from the start.
jim
I’m afraid you are hopeless. You can’t seem to recognize when you are making a value judgement vs stating “facts.” Yes, it is “true” that lives of people in poor countries are “worth” less than those in rich countries, according to neoclassical economic theory (at least without significant departures via strained assumptions). But, for me, that is an indictment against that theory – you seem to take it as evidence of truth. You are entitled to that opinion – but can’t you even recognize that you are making value judgements, and that those judgements are not shared by all? Further, for those of us that don’t share your values, it is not due to ignorance but due to us having different values than you.
Perhaps the most devastating critique of neoclassical economics is the question: what are you willing to pay for your values to prevail? (The Economy of the Earth, by Mark Sagoff, articulated this very well).
Jkrideau:
I think that was Lawrence Summers, a smart guy who might not be quite as smart as other economists think he is.
Dale, you’re playing right into jim’s trolling. He’s right that the life of an average African is “economically worth less” than that of an American. The key word here is “economically.” The question is, is jim really a True Believer: does he believe that the moral value of a thing (or a person) is equal to its economic value? I think he does, which is of course obscene, but THAT is the place to disagree with him, not the “economic value” claim.
Yes, the late Dr. Pournelle was very influential at spreading hard right ideas and connecting fellow travellers within the US science fiction community. He felt that since he was an established writer, it was his duty to travel actively to conventions and present, introduce panels, and so on.
I think this specific kind of awfulness is typical of a certain kind of credentialed Anglo Californian.
Is this problem largely restricted to countries such as the US and a few outliers or is it common across many countries and cultures? (France, for instance, has a popular far-right leader who is Jewish, defends the treatment of Jews under the Vichy regime and wants to ethnically cleanse all Muslims and Africans from France). Today, the governor of Florida has said that he wants to jail Dr. Fauci:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/republican-ron-desantis-trump-lock-up-fauci-gain-of-function-testimony-nih.html
What’s the solution? This type of a transparency is important. But, there should be a way of either legally controlling or regulating this type of hatred and propaganda. Right? Or is it a type of harm that becomes so commonplace, it’s simply ignored — and therefore this becomes a type of implicit control?
Sam:
I dunno. The Niven story sounds like standard “the peasants are revolting”-style cleverness of the sort that you’d could’ve heard at your local country club any time during the past hundred years. The stuff with Fox news and the governor of Florida is disturbing in that it seemed to come out of nowhere. Before last year, vaccine denial was a fringe belief with no real political association; now it’s a core belief for a big chunk of partisans around the country. Endorsement by political elites does seem like a big part of the story.
Andrew:
I also don’t know.
Andrew –
I thought this article on the history of vaccine hesitancy was interesting (even if I thought it did kind of miss on the size of the relatively recent spike in the political signal).
Behind Low Vaccination Rates Lurks a More Profound Social Weakness https://nyti.ms/3dhotgm
What country clubs have you belonged to?
Dzhaughn,
None at all! But I did see Caddyshack.
Folks like David H. Gorski MD (keeper of a famous blog) have been sounding the alarm for decades that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories among parents are enabling local epidemics of chidhood diseases in the rich English-speaking countries. Remember Dr. Alexander Wakefield and the Lancet? This has not been a fringe belief for some time, although the political flavour of COVID conspiracies in the USA are different from the old ones.
Sean:
I know that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are not new. But they used to be a fringe belief and now they are endorsed by leading political figures, indeed pretty much an entire political party. That’s a change.
Andrew: maybe this is semantics, but as far as I am concerned, a belief which causes 10-15% of parents (in some parts of London more than 30%) to keep life-saving vaccinations from their children can never be called fringe. What makes a belief fringe is that very few people hold it, not that you can’t espouse it in the national daily newspaper or get a tenured chair at a research university to profess it.
Sean:
Was the rate of unvaccinated kids as high as 10%? I had no idea. I thought it was more like 5% or less. In any case, this is much less than the rate of unvaccinated people for covid. I guess that one lesson that we should’ve learned from childhood vaccination is that, yes, the vast majority of parents will vaccinate their kids, but it helps if it’s absolutely required.
The first article with statistics which came up was https://dx.doi.org/10.7759%2Fcureus.2919 Since the late 1990s there have been multiple been outbreaks of childhood diseases in rich countries with an anti-vaccine movement.
Where I live, on the order of 90% of people 12 and older have been vaccinated against COVID-19, which is comparable to the rate of childhood MMR vaccination before the anti-vaccine movement emerged.
Interesting; thanks.
Isn’t this whats being spread by “republicans” about covid treatments? But the news tells us the hospitals are overflowing with republican anti-vaxxers. So I guess it doesn’t work.
Anon:
The anti-vax message is being spread by leading Republicans, and we do see arguments, not just coming from Republicans, about there being too much health care spending, greedy doctors, overprescription, etc. But I don’t think the anti-vax Republicans are spreading a don’t-go-to-the-hospital message of the sort advocated by Niven.
I see. So the idea is republicans are saying not to trust the vaccine, but do trust the rest of what the healthcare system offers?
Doesn’t make much sense to me, but neither does the republican party platform (ditto for democrats).
Anon:
I don’t think there’s an official Republican party policy on vaccines. Many prominent Republicans have taken an anti-vaccine stance, which indeed doesn’t make sense except in a crude political sense of inflaming grievances. Prominent politicians of all parties have been known to take ridiculous positions.
Andrew –
> Republicans have taken an anti-vaccine stance…
It’s larger than just anti-vax. It’s also anti-Fauci, anti- the CDC, anti- the. FDA, etc.
>… which indeed doesn’t make sense except in a crude political sense of inflaming grievances.
I’m confused by that. It all makes sense from a “The big bad government is in the hands of evil librulz who are out to steal our freedoms” political frame. That doesn’t seem particularly crude to me. Nor does it seem to be some kind of esoteric logic. It’s part of the playbook since Reagan.
The typical right wing conspiracy now is not about covid treatments, but about vaccines in specific. Most of these conspiracy types think that once you have covid, it’s actually trivially easy to treat by stuff like redesmevir, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, monoclonal antibodies. Given that all these proposed treatments are still big pharma products, and the last one in particular being exorbitantly expensive, there’s not a really a coherent “avoid these evil people” in there.
somebody –
You forgot vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C and oleandrin….
And the belief in monoclonal antibodies doesn’t exactly fit the conspiracy label – as it’s efficacy is widely supported by medical research.
One of the more convoluted conspiracy theories goes as follows: Biden purposely tells the public to get vaccinated, fully knowing that Republicans will do the opposite and therefore, Republicans are more likely to die which implies that the Democrats are more likely to win elections because dead people tend not to vote.
Here is where I saw it first:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/09/10/nolte-howard-stern-proves-democrats-want-unvaccinated-trump-voters-dead/?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210927&instance_id=41408&nl=the-morning®i_id=77532059&segment_id=70000&te=1&user_id=d7e3e90dc8fbbcc2d51df749fc62495f
Here is a quote from the Breitbart September article:
“Could it be…? Could it possibly be that the left has manipulated huge swathes of Trump voters into believing they are owning the left by not taking the life-saving Trump Vaccine?”
That is partially, but not completely accurate. In reality, Trump has manipulated the left into manipulating Trump voters into not getting vaccinated. Even though Trump says to get vaccinated, in this way his true message to not get vaccinated gets through.
Anon:
That’s too much 11-dimensional chess for me.
Wheels within wheels, my friend. Wheels within wheels.
Trump within Trumps, my friend. Trumps within Trumps.
For me too
> Republicans are more likely to die
Is this even true though? The highest proportional death tolls seem pretty split across red/blue states and will likely shift bluer as the northeast goes through their winter wave. I’ve never seen specifics but we’re also repeatedly told “minorities” are dying disproportionately who presumably lean blue. Republicans are also older on average which further confounds this.
D:
See discussion here.
There’s a seasonality to this genre of “analysis”. First, cases/deaths spike in the south/southeast in summer: endless commentary blaming republicans. Then, cases/deaths spike in the northeast in the winter and the virus is blamed. This exact cycle has played out in both 2020 and 2021.
This article only covers June 30th to October — exactly 2021’s southeast wave — and of course finds red counties fared worse after (kinda) controlling for age. Do we expect the author will rerun the analysis for Nov-Feb and write a correction in the NYT that actually blue states are now faring worse?
d –
> There’s a seasonality to this genre of “analysis”. First, cases/deaths spike in the south/southeast in summer: endless commentary blaming republicans. Then, cases/deaths spike in the northeast in the winter and the virus is blamed. This exact cycle has played out in both 2020 and 2021.
Whoa. Perhaps not shockingly, you’re leaving out pieces of the overall cycle.
For example, Republicans are pointing to the low death rate in Florida now, and attributing it to DeSantis’ policies and genius, whereas they were silent on the impact of DeSantis’ policy and genius when Florida’s rate was through the roof and it was climbing up the charts of per capita death rate by state.
> This article only covers June 30th to October…
This was linked, and referenced explicitly:
https://gregoryt.substack.com/p/jeremy-beckhams-understanding-of?r=ot69g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=
Obviously, the most relevant time period is after vaccination became widespread, as any signal of impact of vaccination by partisan orientation might only then become apparent.
Personally, I think that comparing across states is largely a bad idea. There are many confounding variables that need a sophisticated control before you can draw much in the way of conclusions, and yes, that kind of analysis and understanding of causality needs to be done within a long-term longitudinal framework.
That said, it IS important to assess the effect of vaccination and the effect of partisan orientation on vaccination rates, and whether there is a real world impact of partisan orientation with vaccination rates as a mediator. That isn’t merely tribalism.
Lol. I should reverse that. Whether there is a real world impact of vaccination rates with partisan orientation as a MODERATOR….
> Republicans are pointing to the low death rate in Florida now, and attributing it to DeSantis’ policies and genius
These views don’t get the same mainstream (i.e. NYTs) play but I agree they are equally misleading.
For what it’s worth I DO think partisan affiliation impacts vaccination rates and that vaccination rates may impact overall mortality. And knowing both with clarity is very important! But that doesn’t excuse clearly cherry-picked analysis drive by political dunking. One needs to actually do the hard work which as you say is complex, long-term and will have more nuanced conclusions.
Andrew:
> We just have to accept that some large minority of people believe in vaccine denial …
To preface: I appreciate the space for open discussion here and am myself fully vaccinated. Nonetheless, I find the lack of rigor broadly on this subject extremely problematic for a variety of reasons and am fearing the damage it will do long-term to the field I’ve dedicated my life to. So hopefully you see “vaccine denial” is not a fair label my for views. I also agree this discussion has reached saturation.
3 weeks later, this post looks clairvoyant: case rates are all time highs in the north east, flat across the south and the chattering class’ narrative has shifted from dunking on red states to “we need to learn to live with the virus”.
Interestingly Andrew’s source did post an update [1] though it now discusses only “vaccination rates” and no longer “case rates” by partisan lean. How odd!
[1] https://acasignups.net/21/12/26/weekly-update-us-covid19-vaccination-levels-county-partisan-lean
You are a true nostradamus. If one leaves out half of what you said, it does look clairvoyant.
“cases/deaths” spike in the northeast.
https://imgur.com/a/Uh40LAp
Deaths typically lag cases by a few weeks. The hospitalization trends under “How cases, hospitalizations and deaths are trending” on https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html should give you a good idea of where the NE is heading. Check back in mid Jan. If deaths stay flat across the region because omicron is less severe than obviously I’d be happy to be wrong.
This feels tangential to the central point about differing media narratives to large case spikes in the SE vs NE though.
Then you aren’t prophetic yet, are you?
I will check in. But I already the enjoy scent of brain worms in the idea that “the death rate is tangential; ideally, the media narrative has nothing to do with the material impact.” Yes, the enlightened and unbiased columnist would frame nobody dying as the same tragedy as many people dying, and extract the same lessons from either case.
https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?s=20
I see this:
https://i.ibb.co/nkN8sQv/casesbyregion122521.png
Cases started rising in the south later.
@somebody
As we all (should) know by now, the deaths lag hospitalizations which lag cases. New hospital admissions are very near all time highs in NYC:
https://i.ibb.co/YQBg6Rf/nychospital.png
From here:
https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary
I know that deaths lag cases. I have no stake in whether or not they will beyond hoping that people don’t die. I am not making a statement about the accuracy of the prediction. I am *only* making fun of a premature declaration of victory.
“See everyone? I’m a genius! What I thought would happen, I still think will eventually happen.”
Good for you.
According to the news, now it sounds like hysterical vaccinated people with no symptoms are clogging up the hospitals after testing positive. We will see.
No doubt it is spreading due to sick people congregating at the testing sites as well. It seems nothing has been learned: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/11/robot-with-coronavirus-advice-hits-times-square.html
> Deaths typically lag cases by a few weeks. …
Another month later and the 7 day avg. death rate in NY has exceeded last winter’s maximum (currently 102 vs 85) and has yet to peak. Unfortunately my (not even intended as) bold prediction that deaths would spike like last year has occurred. Oddly the local trolls are now silent…
Given that cases are 10x higher this doesn’t rule out vaccine efficacy or omicron’s reduced lethality but does suggest a (naive) upper bound on something like the product of both.
@d
It is almost like people are purposefully finding things that have happened repeatedly, then denying they will happen again in order to destroy their own credibility. That has been going on since day one with the WHO.
There are about 350 million coronavirus infections each year in the US. For the vast majority of people it is a minor annoyance if they notice at all, but with a mortality rate of ~10% in nursing homes (frail populations). Eg: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2095096/
We can expect the same to happen going forward with this strain as well.
Yep, I’ve yet to see any evidence that all cause mortality is lower due to vaccination. The RCTs reported 15% higher mortality rate for pfizer + moderna (95% CI is about -30% to + 60%) and basically no one is publishing observational data on that.
There was that CDC study that reported ~66% reduced mortality for non-covid deaths after vaccination. They attributed it to “healthy vacinee effect. However, it was discussed here, and seems to be they mostly compared winter vs spring mortality rates. I’ll go find the link if you want.
And in another thread Phil brought up the J&J trial all cause mortailty, I encourage people to try to reconcile that with the rest.
If you want links to all this just request it.
D, Joshua, Anon:
Enough on this, please!
We just have to accept that some large minority of people believe in vaccine denial, and some of them will comment on this blog, and if they haven’t been convinced by the evidence that’s out there, a couple more comments here probably won’t make a difference.
Elsewhere I’ve talked about belief in ghosts, a very common belief (according to surveys) but with a lower profile—it has no major policy implications and it’s not currently being pushed by any political leaders. Anyway, if we wrote more on ghosts, then maybe the believers in ghosts would start to comment here too.
Each of us is eccentric in some way, and people can believe in ghosts or vaccine denial or whatever but still be able to contribute to useful discussion in other areas.
Actually the other day my friend was getting mad at people who believe in ghosts. He thinks if it wasn’t for the time wasted on ghosts cancer would be cured by now or similar.
Then he was asking people who walked into the bar whether they believed in ghosts and to our amusement they kept saying yes. So there are apparently lots of ghost believers out there. People just like believing in ghosts.
Anon:
Yes, according to surveys there are tons and tons of ghost believers out there.
Andrew –
> We just have to accept that some large minority of people believe in vaccine denial, and some of them will comment on this blog…
I just think it’s complicated. There’s clearly a political signal but the impact of that signal is far from obvious.
I already linked one article to that effect, here’s another.
The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think https://nyti.ms/2YP4PV8
> whereas Fox’s plan seems to be to con people into spreading covid so as to cause political trouble
This seems like a rather bad faith characterization? I’ve never actually watched Fox news so am agnostic on the specifics but…. isn’t it now clear the central claim that health institutions seriously overstated vaccine efficacy and robustness basically true?
D:
Disparaging the vaccine (see, for example, here) seems pretty much like trying to con people into spreading covid. I agree, though, that “causing political trouble” is only one rationale. It could also be some sort of brand-building exercise. People do things for lots of reasons.