Speaking of political polarization . . .
Around this time every year we get these news articles of the form, “I’m dreading going home to Thanksgiving this year because of my uncle, who used to be a normal guy who spent his time playing with his kids, mowing the lawn, and watching sports on TV, but has become a Fox News zombie, muttering about baby drag shows and saying that Alex Jones was right about those school shootings being false-flag operations.”
This all sounds horrible but, hey, that’s just other people, right? OK, actually I did have an uncle who started out normal and got weirder and weirder, starting in the late 1970s with those buy-gold-because-the-world-is-coming-to-an-end newsletters and then getting worse from there, with different aspects of his life falling apart as his beliefs got more and more extreme. Back in 1999 he was convinced that the year 2K bug (remember that?) would destroy society. After January 1 came and nothing happened, we asked him if he wanted to reassess. His reply: the year 2K bug would indeed take civilization down, but it would be gradual, over a period of months. And, yeah, he’d always had issues, but it did get worse and worse.
Anyway, reading about poll results is one thing; having it happen to people you know is another. Recently a friend told me about another friend, someone I hadn’t seen in awhile. Last I spoke with that guy, a few years back, he was pushing JFK conspiracy theories. I don’t believe any of these JFK conspiracy theories (please don’t get into that in the comments here; just read this book instead), but lots of people believe JFK conspiracy theories, indeed they’re not as wacky as the ever-popular UFOs-as-space-aliens thing. I didn’t think much about it; he was otherwise a normal guy. Anyway, the news was that in the meantime he’d become a full-bore, all-in vaccine denier.
What happened? I have no idea, as I never knew this guy that well. He was a friend, or I guess in recent years an acquaintance. I don’t really have a take on whether he was always unhinged, or maybe the JFK thing started him on a path that spiraled out of control, or maybe he just spent too much time on the internet.
I was kinda curious how he’d justify his positions, though, so I sent him an email:
I hope all is well with you. I saw about your political activities online. I was surprised to see you endorse the statement that the covid vaccine is “the biggest crime ever committed on humanity.” Can you explain how you think that a vaccine that’s saved hundreds of thousands of lives is more of a crime committed on humanity than, say, Hitler and Stalin starting WW2?
I had no idea how he’d respond to this, maybe he’d send me a bunch of Qanon links, the electronic equivalent of a manila folder full of mimeographed screeds. It’s not like I was expecting to have any useful discussion with him—once you start with the position that a vaccine is a worse crime than invading countries and starting a world war, there’s really no place to turn. He did not respond to me, which I guess is fine. What was striking to me was how he didn’t just take a provocative view that was not supported by the evidence (JFK conspiracy theories, election denial, O.J. is innocent, etc.); instead he staked out a position that was well beyond the edge of sanity, almost as if the commitment to extremism was part of the appeal. Kind of like the people who go with Alex Jones on the school shootings.
Anyway, this sort of thing is always sad, but especially when it happens to someone you know, and then it doesn’t help that there are lots of unscrupulous operators out there who will do their best to further unmoor these people from reality and take their money.
From a political science perspective, the natural questions are: (1) How does this all happen?, and (2) Is this all worse than before, or do modern modes of communication just make us more aware of these extreme attitudes? After all, back in the 1960s there were many prominent Americans with ridiculous extreme-right and extreme-left views, and they had a lot of followers too. The polarization of American institutions has allowed some of these extreme views to get more political prominence, so that the likes of Alex Jones and Al Sharpton can get treated with respect by the leaders of the major political parties. Political leaders always would accept the support of extremists—a vote’s a vote, after all—but I have the feeling that in the past they were more at arms length.
This post is not meant to be a careful study of these questions, indeed I’m sure there’s a big literature on the topic. What happened is that my friend told me about our other friend going off the deep end, and that all got me thinking, in the way that a personal connection can make a statistical phenomenon feel so much more real.
P.S. Related is this post from last year on Seth Roberts and political polarization. Unlike my friend discussed above, Seth never got sucked into conspiracy theories, but he had this dangerous mix of over-skepticism and over-credulity, and I could well imagine that he could’ve ended up in some delusional spaces.
P.P.S. It’s been a couple years. My friend did not reply to my email. I’m kinda disappointed as I was curious how he’d justify his claim that a successful vaccine was a worse crime than starting World War 2. It’s possible the email never reached him: my friend’s a wealthy man and might well have an assistant who screens his inbox.
1. How does all this happen?
Answer: ? I don’t know, but I believe once you realize that you have little first hand knowledge of truth (for example, the current Israeli-Hamas war is full of false news, and I have no way of knowing what is true), it is easier to convince your self of “some” truth than to admit that you really have no idea.
2. Is this all worse than before, or do modern modes of communication just make us more aware of these extreme attitudes?
Answer: Yes.
1. This should give you an idea of who/what is running the show and who/what controls what you are allowed to know, but you already knew that:
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/05/2023/satellite-companies-are-restricting-gaza-images
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/16/1212889717/satellite-images-us-israel-gaza
2. The means of communication have changed slightly, but the essence of its purpose has not. Channeling, manipulating and restricting communication is as old as it gets.
I don’t understand your references in #1. To me, they underscore the fact that I don’t know what is true. It sounds like you have found it convincing evidence of something, but I don’t know what. It is a fact that information is being manipulated by all concerned. That leaves me agnostic and bewildered, not at all certain of anything.
I still don’t get it. Please point out the effect of vaccines in these charts: https://www.usmortality.com/
Shouldn’t overall mortality have gone down, rather than rise, if anything? Then in the RCTs there were more overall deaths in the vaccinated group as well.
The only data showing some benefit on mortality depends on dubious assumptions like baseline mortality is same in both groups and vaccinated vs not were treated the same by the healthcare system. It is the same standard NHST junk that is behind the flat/declining life expectancy since 2014.
In some ways I do get it though, it took me a few years to really accept how bad this NHST/EBM bizarro science problem is. The mind recoils at the horror of it.
Anon:
There are some links regarding vaccine effectiveness here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/index.html
Covid does not have a huge effect on population average life expectancy because it mostly has killed old people.
If for some reason my friend does not agree with the CDC etc about vaccine effectiveness, it’s still nuts for him to think that it’s a worse crime than Hitler and Stalin starting WW2, or various other notorious crimes committed on humanity.
I’d encourage you to take the time to actually read one of those CDC papers carefully. I did early on, so can click a new paper and immediately see “oh its another test-negative design one”.* It is all the same bad assumptions over and over.
Once again, if these vaccines were so obviously effective it should show up in RCT and all cause mortality data. But there is no clear benefit there, in fact its the opposite if anything. This supposed benefit only shows up when dubious assumptions get made.
I don’t think there was anything particularly egregious about the quality of the vaccine research though. It followed standard medical research procedure.
On the other hand, the authoritarianism surrounding it was exceptional.
* I can find my own comments on here about these specifically if you want.
What do you mean by “show up in the RCT and all cause mortality”? Please be as specific as possible, otherwise your claim is groundless.
Hopefully you have not forgotten that the presence of a novel disease in a population should increase all cause mortality and so the counterfactual is not whatever the baseline ratewas, but what the rate would have been without a vaccine (hint: much higher in most places).
I think we have the perfect case in point right here on the blog. We were able to watch the deterioration in real time.
Once Anoneuoid decided this:
“On the other hand, the authoritarianism surrounding it was exceptional.”
…he (and all the others) knew something had to be wrong. It was just a question of finding and magnifying any doubts on the supportive side and uncritically swallowing everything on the skeptical side. His intelligence was of no use from then on. Facts like 4/5s of the deaths were in the unvaccinated just couldn’t be that simple, there had to be “dubious assumptions” (like that those people REALLY died of Covid, always a reliable one).
Meanwhile, if you objectively dig into the Covid numbers, they make plenty of sense now that we understand the disease better. Anoneuoid’s credibility requires that you don’t dig.
In my experience, all the vaccine skeptics started the same way, casting the issue as one of virtue signaling and authoritarianism, not epidemiology. Since genuine virtue does not exist, why would Fauci even care whether you are alive or dead? He must be profiting somehow. Then you just fill in the facts that fit and reject the ones that don’t.
Sara and Matt:
If you aren’t aware of the all cause mortality numbers from the RCTs it is because *you* failed to do your due diligence. I was posting about it on here as soon as they were published, as more deaths trickled into later reports, and have many times since.
If you honestly do want the sources I will go find them on the FDA site.
IIRC, the final numbers for combined pfizer/moderna was something like 37 deaths in vaccinated and 33 deaths in unvaccinated with approximately equal sample sizes. This is *not* what you expect to see for an intervention that has huge net benefit on mortality.
Of course, the RCTs excluded anyone likely to die so didn’t really tell us anything about the vulnerable anyway. All cause mortality is dominated by the vulnerable, where we once again see little possible vaccine benefit (again, if anything mortality went up).
And that is hardly the only issue with the standard junk science surrounding that whole fiasco.
I never said I didn’t know about RCTs or the excess death numbers. I wanted to know specifically what you meant by your vague statements, so we could actually discuss evidence and papers.
Since you’re now on record saying you’re not interested or able to support your claims, I guess we can all move on from your silliness.
Click to the earlier post to get the links (I added brackets to avoid the spam filter):
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/08/23/i-agree-with-dean-eckles-that-this-study-effects-of-political-versus-expert-messaging-on-vaccination-intentions-of-trump-voters-is-too-noisy-to-be-useful-when-will-we-reach-the-point-where-res/#comment-2074130
And all cause mortality was already linked above. Anyway, I can tell no rational response is forthcoming so I will stop.
> Anyway, I can tell no rational response is forthcoming so I will stop.
I applaud your introspection here.
Anoneuoid: the answer is that RCTs aren’t done with people who baseline have a high risk of mortality from COVID. The only way to look at mortality effect of COVID would be to look in population data involving people who are say over 60 and/or have mortality related issues like high bloodpressure as baseline risk factors.
On the other hand, hospitalization is also a bad outcome, and you can certainly find information on hospitalization rates among vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Do you have any data at all that suggests unvaccinated had lower hospital admissions and especially lower ICU admissions than vaccinated? I find that hard to believe. Back when this data was commonly collected and published, typically hospitalization and ICU rates among unvaccinated were multiple times higher than vaccinated. CA used to have separate graphs for vaccinated vs unvaccinated and I don’t remember exactly but it seemed like unvaccinated were at a minimum at least 2x and maybe as high as 5-10x higher rate of hospitalization.
It’s not an RCT, but the data Nate Silver discusses has enough old & unhealthy people in it for the effect of vaccines to show up:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis
Do you have an alternative explanation for why such a difference would emerge after the vaccines became available?
Daniel,
I think you’re confusing Phase 1 trials with Phase 2/3 trials.
“Anoneuoid: the answer is that RCTs aren’t done with people who baseline have a high risk of mortality from COVID. The only way to look at mortality effect of COVID would be to look in population data involving people who are say over 60 and/or have mortality related issues like high bloodpressure as baseline risk factors.”
From the Biotech trial document Anoneuoid posted above about 25 percent of the participants in the phase 2/3 trial where 65 and older and, “The study population for Phase 2/3 includes participants at higher risk for acquiring COVID-19 and at higher risk of severe COVID-19, such as participants working in the healthcare field, participants with autoimmune disease, and participants with chronic but stable medical conditions such as hypertension, asthma, diabetes, and infection with HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C.”
So I will say that without further study, I do find it a little surprising that all cause morality between the groups are similar. I suppose this is just a small sample issue since death–and especially death caused by Covid–is a very rare event? Of course, on this blog, issues with comparisons without sufficient power should not be surprising.
To return to Andrew’s question, though, I think Daniel’s response is a good example of how difficult it is to think clearly about things and difficult it is to avoid motivated reasoning.
Daniel believes vaccines are quite effective (as do I) and he presents some evidence to support this belief. However, when he’s confronted with evidence that might point in the other direction (similarities in all cause mortality in treatment and control arms) he quickly explains it away. From what I could tell from five minutes of reading, his explanation is off the mark. (If I’m wrong, I’m happy to be corrected.)
I think this sort of thing can happen with radicalization. People end up with a few unusual beliefs. Their friends try to talk them out of these beliefs but it’s more of an argument than a conversation and people don’t like to lose arguments. So they dig in, engage in motivated reasoning where they start with what they “know” to be true and then try to explain everything else from that standpoint.
I mean the actual all cause mortality probabilities aren’t necessarily that similar, it just takes a lot more data to resolve probabilities that low, even if the actual probabilities are apart by a factor of 2.
I think the issue being pointed out here is that in 2020, excess YoY mortality had an unprecedented sudden YoY surge that was typically ascribed to covid deaths. A naive interpretation would say that if the vaccines fixed covid deaths for a large fraction of the population, there should be a YoY step down as things return to normal.
I personally don’t get as much specifically directed doubt out of the weirdly sticky death rate, but it’s definitely weird.
Maybe, but it becomes unsurprising if we add back the key information omitted from Anoneouid’s posts – i.e. that the control and vaccine groups contained over 21,000 individuals.
So 21 deaths/21,926 in the vaccine group and 17/21,921 in the control. You can pretend that seems a large difference by saying that the vaccine deaths (in the two combined studies as Anon has done) are 15% greater (absolute numbers) than control. But 21/21,926 cf 17/21,921 doesn’t even make statistical significance at the p < 0.5 level.
If you’re going to play that game (massive misinterpretation based on very small numbers) you may as well look at each unfortunate individual’s causes of death and assert that Covid vaccination protects against pneumonia, drug overdose, liver metastases, dementia etc. (one or two deaths in control; none in vaccinated) and increases risk of sepsis, lung cancer metastases, arteriosclerosis, cardiac arrest etc. (deaths in vaccine group and not in control).
Can also do a sanity check – are 20ish deaths from 22,000ish individuals in a 6 month period a reasonable sort of background mortality rate? I would say so. The mortaility rate at the time of the RCTs was around 835/100000/yr in the US. So we'd expect 418ish per 100000 in the 6 month period of the trial or around 90 deaths in a population of 22,000. Obviously most background mortality occurs in elderly individuals and those with morbidities which were well-underepresented in the RCT. So we have a backgound mortality rate of about one-fifth of the full-population mortality rate in this selected RCT population. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Another bit of logical misreasoning that Anon does is analogous to a sort of inverse p-hacking. So a study designed to assess vaccine efficacy against symptomatic Covid is reinterpreted to give insight into vaccine protection against all-cause mortality
Thanks Chris. Your more detailed response is what I was thinking of when I said they didn’t have people who were at high risk. Sure, they had some, but not a high enough sample size to resolve the question. In the general population we had 60000 deaths a week in the RCT we had tens of deaths total over several months.
If the RCT had been 30000 people in each group *all of whom* had major risk factors for death and we had seen 5000-10000 deaths in each group or something that would have been usable for all cause mortality. 30-40 deaths total out of 30000 is just as easily noise as anything else. Compared to the rollout to 300M people it offers no real info.
I am in New Zealand – I know of so many people who have been damaged by the Pfizer vaccine. Some of them have received an official diagnosis of this. Heart damage, neurological damage. It goes on and on.
“The biggest crime ever committed on humanity”?
“From a political science perspective, the natural questions are:”
“(1) How does this all happen?”
A lot of literature on the subject, indeed, and practically from all disciplines, including political science, psychology, and computer science. All of them provide some cues but there is no consensus, as there seldom is.
There are certainly technologies that facilitate this trend, including the Internet but most of all social media and now AI, but also many other factors certainly contribute, among these things like declining education, a lack of digital literacy skills, poverty and social exclusion, people’s apathy and real or perceived lack of options to contribute to political decision-making, and eroding media systems and trust placed upon these. And as Dale hinted above, a whole array of psychological factors as well.
Then, regarding political science specifically, besides polarization, which is related, you have political elites and their demagogues who push these narratives to both domestic and foreign audiences together with extremists and who knows who else. That’s what I find especially interesting in these things. There is also the security aspect involved because of fairly solid evidence about certain foreign powers having infiltrated these (online) circles in some places.
Thus: if we frame the discussion a little; whether and how propaganda works? I recently read many of the classics on this topic, starting from the late 19th century pieces. Highly recommended! E. L. Bernays was certainly a personality!
“(2) Is this all worse than before, or do modern modes of communication just make us more aware of these extreme attitudes?”
As you cited WW2, I’d still opt for the latter explanation. But who knows? Some people forget history and others fabricate it. Nie wieder.
Regarding political elites pushing ideas, Politico has an excerpt from Brian Stelter’s book, Network of Lives, describing the way Fox News developed the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which is a pretty common belief in something that has been thoroughly debunked (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/15/big-lie-fox-news-brian-stelter-book-00127133 ). In this case, the Dominion suit developed the evidence in detail.
John:
Yes, a related case came up in the newspaper just today of a Fox News reporter who accused the network of discrimination and retaliation for firing him after he spoke out against false coverage of the 2020 U.S. election and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. These things are grass-roots and astroturf at the same time, just as my friend is both sincere (I think) in his belief about the vaccine being a worse crime than invading a country and starting a world war, and also being manipulated by moneymakers of the Alex Jones variety.
“…a provocative view that was not supported by the evidence…”
One should not dismiss a hypothesis for lack of evidentiary support if there is reason to believe that the evidence in support of it is being suppressed. I don’t subscribe to any particular theory about the JFK assassination, and I have read a fair amount about it. But as long as much of the evidence that was gathered at the time still remains classified, indeed, remains classified in contravention of a law that mandated its public disclosure a decade ago, then, as far as I am concerned, all of the non-magical hypotheses about it still have plausibility, and the official account remains suspect.
Clyde:
From what I’ve seen, I think it’s pretty clear that Oswald fired all the shots. That said, yeah, I don’t think that believing in JFK conspiracy theories or maintaining O.J.’s innocence is as ridiculous as believing in ghosts or believing that UFOs are space aliens, and none of these are as ridiculous as thinking that a vaccine is a worse crime than Hitler and Stalin starting WW2.
I’ve experienced something very similar, with a close friend from my younger days. Early on, he adopted a flexible big-picture framework in which many explanations could be fit. Over time, with each conspiracy he adopted, the next conspiracy became more accessible (especially the less obviously far-out conspiracies).
I do think the last few years have been *different*. Crank magnetism is powerful, but the Covid pandemic has functioned like a crank supermagnet: the “deep end” now more readily creates alliances between opposing poles of the political spectrum.
Actual or borderline mental illness might be a non-negligible factor. My anecdotal evidence is an old friend who was normal until around age 30, then developed full-blown bipolarism. His brain started telling him things which were not true, but what your brain tells you trumps everything else. It tells him not to take prescribed medication (which does have some unfortunate side-effects).
He lost his job as a program director for Honeywell, lost his wife, lost several jobs in fast food service, and spends several hours a day on a computer at a library, browsing and commenting at various sites. The old Ron is still partly there, but not in complete control.
Society often disparages such people for disjointed harangues on street corners or online, but since it happened to my friend I see it as a great tragedy.
The post was not about such obvious cases, but I see some parallelism in people believing what their brains tell them to believe despite contrary evidence and logic.
Jim:
Yes, good point. If the far-out belief doesn’t seem harmful and the person can otherwise live a normal life, we might just shrug it off. In this particular case, I have the impression that my friend is still living a normal life, is doing fine in business, etc. These political obsessions have taken some chunk out of him, but maybe just as a replacement from what might be some other social or political activity he would be doing. He’s been a political activist for awhile, and now it’s taking this extreme form.
I guess there are two things going on.
The first thing is that people can get so stuck in their logic that no amount of persuasion or evidence will change their mind. We see that with Anon in the comment thread above, and we also saw it the other day with Ulrich Schimmack in a discussion of a paper of ours from 2017.
The second thing is the reasonableness or unreasonableness of some of these beliefs. Believing that Gelman and Loken made a mistake in a six-year-old paper, or that the covid vaccines are not as effective as were first thought: These are plausible beliefs. They might be correct, they might be wrong, they might be somewhere in between, but it’s not ridiculous to entertain these views and even hold onto them in the face of some countervailing evidence. At some point, as in the above two cases, the holding-on becomes kind of ridiculous, but, again, a priori these positions don’t seem so ridiculous. Saying that the covid vaccine is a worse crime than invading a country to start a world war: that’s off the deep end.
One question regarding Greg’s comment above is: Suppose someone gets into the habit of tenaciously holding on to erroneous but superficially plausible views. Is this some sort of step leading to outlandish beliefs?
Another factor in all this is the role of flexible insincerity, or trolling, or figures of speech, so that someone can make a statement that makes no sense but still go with it because it sounds good. We see this all the time, that people say complete nonsense because of the rhythm of the words. To take a silly example, remember that voodoo-doll guy who described a study as “long-term” even though it only went on for 3 days (and, no, it was not on fruit flies). That was harmless (except for the waste of grant funding, researchers’ and participants’ time, journal space, attention, and my own time, not to mention doing its small part in degrading our respect for scientific research in general and Ohio State University in particular); the point is that people get in the habit of saying, and publicly writing, things that they can’t possibly believe, and this can cause problems when it gets tied to crank views and strategic interactions.
Andrew, my logic is simple. A medical intervention that (net) saves hundreds of thousands of lives should show up in all cause mortality data. But it doesn’t, either at the RCT or population level. So your claim rests solely on dubious assumptions that can turn anything into an apparently effective intervention.
Would you accept the same methods as valid for a vitamin C trial? I think no, you would rightly dismiss them. All I do is apply the same standards consistently.
You may be right. However, “the biggest crime ever committed on humanity” does seem hyperbolic.
Anoneuoid:
You *wouldn’t* necessarily expect to see that due to confounders. At least here in Ireland, the vaccine rollout coincided (as you would expect) with lifting restrictions almost entirely for people that had been vaccinated or had a confirmed case within the previous 6 months. If the reduction of relative risk in the population was sufficiently counteracted by the increase in contacts, then you absolutely would expect to see infection rates rise on aggregate.
Now, to be totally fair:
1) I have no idea if the same thing happened in the US.
2) I don’t actually know if the purported RRR of the vaccines should have been dominated by the increase in contacts in Ireland. I (very briefly) tried looking for some kind of analysis into this but didn’t find anything. I saw some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations by reversing the RRR formula and setting it to zero, but that’s obviously useless.
3) As you might have noticed, I’m specifically referring to infections here, not mortality. You made a point somewhere that doctors probably didn’t treat vaccinated and non-vaccinated people the same, which I personally think might be true in some cases, and it may be skewing mortality numbers. I don’t think it has quite as much effect as you seem to, but I think it’s a fair point regardless.
The main point though is that your logic above is too simplistic. Simply looking at raw unadjusted mortality rates isn’t nearly enough to make any real empirical judgement of the effect of vaccines on mortality (one way or the other).
I would like to see any proper analysis around this, if anyone knows of any.
Your all-cause mortality analysis rests on at least one shaky assumption: that the medical intervention (covid vaccine uptake) was sufficient to deliver the benefits seen in the Phase 3 trials when let loose in the real world. Vaccine uptake at the very best was about 66% of the adult population for the first two-dose rollout, currently less than 25% of the population is up-to-date on the vaccine. There has always been a large pool of unvaccinated/undervaccinated folks to keep the excess mortality from covid rolling along.
Also, why all cause mortality? should the covid vaccine reduce deaths from stroke, cancer, cardiovascular disease?
All the reputable analysis that I have seen has shown that the vaccinated are at much lower risk for bad outcomes than the unvaccinated when it comes to dealing with covid.
Yes there seems to be a pretty clear vaccine protection against covid-related mortality. e.g US counties with low vaccine uptake having higher covid mortality and vice versa:
https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o867
But some vaccine protection against all-cause mortality isn’t particularly surprising. It’s easier to turn it around and describe in relation to the negative health consequences of catching (but surviving) covid in susceptible populations. Susceptible, especially elderly, individuals that catch covid but survive the 30 day period within which deaths are likely to be ascribed to covid, have higher risk of a whole range of disorders and a higher risk of death (see link just below). Vaccination that protects against catching covid or reduces the severity of its effects provides some protection against these consequences. These negative health consequences of catching, but surviving, covid are likely a cause of some excess mortality in 2021/2022 especially in populations where vaccine uptake wasn’t so high (some of the excess mortality in these periods was also covid mortality as you point out).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03553-9
I had a friend who became a 9/11 Truther. He thought he recognized a truth and that other people were letting themselves be fooled, and this gave him a sense of superiority: “I’m smarter and more savvy than all these sheeple who believe what the authorities tell them”, seemed to be his attitude.
Of course, if he were right then that attitude would be reasonable! So you can’t reason backwards, you can’t say “here’s someone who feels smugly superior because he recognizes a truth others don’t, and because he has that attitude he must be wrong.” Still, I think part of the appeal of conspiracy theories to some people is that they let those people have that feeling of superiority, independent of whether other aspects of their lives are going well or poorly. My Truther friend was not conspicuously successful in other ways, and I suspect his belief in the theory was a way of giving him a sense of superiority in spite of his lack of other successes. By extension, I think this might be a motivation for others. But this obviously isn’t enough to explain the appeal of conspiracy theories to everyone; for instance, JFK Jr was a successful and respected person before getting into anti-vaxx stuff.
Phil:
1. My friend is a success in business but still holds to these conspiracy theories. This makes me think . . . back in the old days, holding a conspiracy theory was associated with losers, people sitting in threadbare clothes sitting on park benches feeding the pigeons. But now the conspiracy theories are popular among tech executives, celebrity athletes, and other people who are viewed as society’s ultimate winners. Maybe 20 years ago my friend wouldn’t have held such extreme views because there was no cultural support for them.
2. I played in a frisbee game with John Kennedy, Jr. in Central Park. More than once, I think! But I didn’t recognize him—in general, I’m not so good with faces—and it was only after he died that I learned that he’d sometimes played with us.
Well, I meant RFK Jr, not JFK Jr. As far as I know, JFK Jr wasn’t anti-vax.
I might not have recognized him either. I’m not great with faces, nor with celebrities. Even after all these years, Juliet still can’t believe it when I say something like “who’s Taylor Swift?”
If you go by some accounts, JFK Jr. might very well be anti-vax … https://news.yahoo.com/why-qanon-believers-think-jfk-183333654.html
“back in the old days, holding a conspiracy theory was associated with losers, people sitting in threadbare clothes sitting on park benches feeding the pigeons”
I don’t think that’s true at all. But it might depend on how you label your nuttyness: if it is expressed by a person “sitting in threadbare clothes sitting on park benches” it’s a “conspiracy theory”, if it’s practiced by a well paid, popular acadmemic, maybe with support in certain political circles, it’s…something else?
Amy Cuddy is still flogging the Power Pose. I mean seriously – can you dream up a more ludicrous claim? It’s not a “conspiracy” per se but it is a ridiculous outlandish claim – every bit as wacky as anit-vax rhetoric. But nobody says she’s “gone off the deep end”. Not to mention the nudge garbage. The entire nudge industry is hucksterism. But no one says Cass Sunstein has “gone off the deep end”. For that matter just look up any local shrink and go through the list of “techniques” or “methods” they purport to be versed it. Other than CBT, none of these methods has scientific backing. What a comedy show. Yet we don’t universally say most shrinks have “gone off the deep end”.
NHST social science is widely accepted *even though it’s almost always false*!!! What do you call that?? I guess the key difference between NHST social science and a “conspiracy theory” is that usually, as your image implies, the conspiracy theorist has nothing to gain or lose from the truth or falsehood of the theory; OTOH, the NHST social science establishment is making a highly paid career out of flogging total nonsense.
Chipmunk:
I’ve had my disagreements with Amy Cuddy and Cass Sunstein, but I don’t think either of them has ever said anything as deranged as that the covid vaccine is “the biggest crime ever committed on humanity.”
If my friend had just been standard-order anti-vax, saying that Andrew Wakefield was on to something, that the covid vaccine actually killed more people than it saved, etc., then I’d say he was misinformed, depending on the context maybe stubbornly engaging in reality-avoidance, but I wouldn’t have said he had gone off the deep end. The “biggest crime ever committed on humanity,” that’s what takes it to the next level.
One take from psychology is that extremism reflects rational decision making processes. I think it is an interesting idea:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/defining-decisions/202305/how-being-rational-can-go-wrong
Dr. Gelman, you have a professional interest in statistics. You must know that all over the world people are putting hard earned money on a roulette wheel. Sometimes they turn out to be right, and even when they are wrong the turn of the wheel provides a thrill. It is thrilling to believe that UFOs are occupied by sentient beings from the stars.
Interesting point. A night at the casino might cost what you would pay for dinner and the theater, and provide the same entertainment value for the different kinds of people choosing those entertainments. So there’s a payoff in excitement believing that the UFOs are out there. And it’s a bet you can’t lose (at least that’s what I think).
Oncodoc:
Yes, and that gives me some further thoughts. Suppose you have the option to believe that UFOs are space aliens, to to believe in ghosts, or whatever. Even if the idea is ridiculous, it could be fun to consider. Here’s where people differ. For some people, there’s a positive value to supposing that the impossible or the extremely unlikely might be true. Even if it turns out to be wrong, it’s a sign of open-mindedness. For other people, such as myself, there’s a positive value to skepticism (while avoiding the Chestertonian paradox). I criticize Nate Silver, Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein, etc., for being UFO-gullible, but from their perspective they might feel that even if they’re entirely wrong, it makes it a better world to believe that such a thing might be true, and that it’s a strength of character on their part that they are open to the possibility. In contrast, I have a penny-pinching statistician’s attitude that belief in something ridiculous degrades one’s beliefs more generally.
P.S. A related issue came up in a blog discussion last year, regarding a friend of mine who’d spent too much time on the internet and found himself in some sympathy with Holocaust deniers:
Ironically, I think that’s where Tyler Cowen, Nate Silver, and other media insiders are regarding UFOs-as-space-aliens: They like being on the opposition side on the issue. It’s kind of dangerous, mildly edgelordy. Indeed, the entire “edgelord” phenomenon fits somewhere into this discussion. Edgelording can be thought of as a form of trolling, but there’s a thin line etc., and some people such as my friend discussed in the above post can take it all too seriously. It’s the difference between sharing outré theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate—ha ha, just poking fun, etc.—and shooting up a pizza parlor.
I like Carl Sagan’s take on this: be open minded but not so open that your brains fall out. Also extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I have run across various explanations of the attractiveness of conspiracy theories and one aspect is the failure to appreciate randomness in the world (The Drunkard’s Walk by Mlodinow is a great read). Conspiracists seem to have an idea that life should be fair and the observed lack of fairness is evidence of dark and malevolent forces controlling everything behind the scenes. That something as massive as the JFK assassination was caused by some doofus who got lucky with a gun just doesn’t compute. Large effects must have large causes. And down the rabbit hole we go.
One of buddhisms four great truths is ‘life is not fair’, I wonder if there are fewer buddhist conspiracy theorists?
Well. If there were, it would not be sufficient to prove that denying the fairness of life makes one resilient against conspiracy beliefs.
I have no data on the question whether Buddhists are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. But I have read news articles based on German intelligence reports about the radical German anti-vax movement*. The intelligence services observed an amalgamation of various ‘alternative’ groups, including spiritualists and Buddhists, into one conspiracy soup.
I also just remembered the story of two conspiracy theorising Buddhist monks with a huge following on YouTube, but unfortunately I was unable to find their names.
The point I am trying to make is that there are indeed Buddhist conspiracy theorists.
*The intelligence agencies’ investigation may sound like overkill, but they were rubbing shoulders with far-right figures who were already under surveillance. The anti-vax movement also showed hostility and even violence towards reporters of the ‘lying press’.
»Indeed I’m sure there’s a big literature on the topic.«
I was trying to find it and didn’t have much luck. The papers I did find complained about a lack of research.
Personally I’ve come to the conclusion that “conspiracy theories” aren’t merely mistakes about facts that then get entrenched. Rather, they are the result of emotional reasoning; their adherents *first* lose their faith in mainstream authorities and *then* seek out conspiracy narratives as a form of rejection of that orthodoxy. That they seem unreasonable to us is in that sense a feature, not a bug. They are also hard to reason with because they were never built on reason to begin with.
As Cory Doctorow says, https://www.spl.org/Seattle-Public-Library/documents/transcriptions/2019/19-03-28_Cory-Doctorow.pdf
“And I have talked to a lot of anti vaccines for example. And when you dig into the anti vax
argument it starts from a place that’s actually kind of hard to argue with. Right. So the anti vax
argument takes three parts. The first one goes Big Pharma is concentrated rapacious and gets away
with murder. Anyone who’s watching the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma and the opioid epidemic
knows that’s absolutely true. Right. And then they say regulators are completely captured. They let
them get away with murder. Well. That’s also obviously true. And then comes the part that’s not true
which is that if pharma is greedy and rapacious and immoral and the people are supposed to keep
them from killing us are asleep at the switch or worse in cahoots with them. Then how can we trust
vaccines and the epistemological incoherence that we have is the result I think of corruption that we
can’t any of us master all of the technical domains we need to master in order to navigate the world
we live in a very complicated technical world”
So the first thing we need to acknowledge is that **YES** there **REALLY ARE** a shitload of conspiracies out there so to speak. Amazon and Bezos for example really did plan to first access enormous quantities of capital, create a website that sells stuff below price and doesn’t collect taxes for many years (over a decade?) and put all the local stores out of business so that they could become a near monopoly in many markets and then “enshittify” their service by jacking up prices charging crazy fees to sellers, pay-to-play to get your product listed, down-play competitors to their house brands… etc etc etc
Google and Apple both *absolutely intend* to create a lock-in ecosystem utilizing regulatory capture to prevent people from putting their apps on iPhones without paying Apple 30% or more for the privilege etc. And they’re doing it with full wide eyes open intent.
Sackler really did pay enormous amounts to get drug reps to tell doctors patently false stuff about non-addictiveness of their opioids, and really did kill a couple million people in the last 20 years including many really talented people who had enough money to get treatment etc (like the musician Prince, or the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman)
But it still doesn’t mean that in any given instance everything you’re being told is a lie.
In my personal life I definitely play the role of the rational agent that people bounce questions off of. At one point my own mother was sucked in for a week or two by the crazy Ancient Aliens person on History channel… I had to direct her to a bunch of debunking websites because she thought that wasn’t crazy ranting or entertainment it was “actual history”.
In the absence of the recent lawsuits and blog posts on Data Colada, if someone were claiming in some organizational context that “signing at the top vs at the bottom significantly effects people’s honesty in insurance contracts” or something like that, how would they treat me when I say “yeah Gino and Ariely are completely out of their element and likely fraudulent”. They’d weigh “peer reviewed publications and thousands of citations in the psychology research literature” against “Dan, that crazy crank who’s trained as a mathematician and Civil Engineer”. It **just wouldn’t matter** if I were right or not.
My own sister, a medical mental health professional, sent me a bunch of stuff about Alzheimers research being done at USC and how important it was and how it could lead to real improvements for Alzheimers but it might also give clues as to things like Schizophrenia and stroke… she sent that a few months back…
And then in the last few days a massive expose in Science https://www.science.org/content/article/misconduct-concerns-possible-drug-risks-should-stop-stroke-trial-whistleblowers-say
The research my sister was touting done by the head of the Zilkha Neurogenetics Institute which is right next door to my wife’s department is running a $30M clinical trial based on evidence he consistently pressured his grad students and postdocs to fabricate.
At some point people who don’t have the specific knowledge needed to evaluate things on their own will turn to Nihilism because trusting institutions isn’t working.
Three points:
1. I too liked Cory’s takes on these things because no one can deny that there have been plenty of real conspiracies out there. You can start from Brutus, proceed through the Cold War, and end to corporate lobbying and other corporate misbehavior, say, both of which are a topic of investigate journalism and academic research. Yet, you don’t see investigative journalists or academics being accused of being conspiracy theorists. Or maybe you do, but a SLAPP is more efficient, I guess.
2. As I tried to emphasize above, conspiracy theories together with disinformation and whatnot are political weapons in the right hands. Granted, many of the hands belong to amateurs, but there are real professionals in this game too, including those employed by three letter agencies.
3. As Francis pointed out above, I am not sure whether the purveyors of these things are irrational at all even though their victims may be.
Regarding extremism and the point (3), as an anecdote, just recently we had a case here involving a right-wing extremist pushing utmost nonsense, including satanic sacrifices of human beings, and so forth and so on. After having also sent (fortunately fake) bombs to a few local political parties, he is now being investigated of terrorist offenses. So I talked about this case with friends over a beer and many of them were eager to point out mental issues. I don’t believe that for a second, as incitement to violence is very much a rational motive for such people. Was Julius Evola insane? Or Meinhof? Schmitt? Dugin? I doubt it.
All in all, there is thus an element of power involved, and power, as I was taught, is the foundational concept of political science.
+1
I dislike politics. I don’t even know what the word “politics” even means or implies, and I don’t care enough to look it up. I do like thinking about stuff to a certain extent. And I like quotes.
The start of this post reminded me of a quote that goes as follows: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”.
In light of the start of this post that talks about discussions at the dinner table during the holiday season, I wonder whether the above quote can be extended to something like: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people, and idiots discuss politics at a dinner table during the holiday season”.
Anon:
People vary in their interests. You happen to dislike politics. I don’t think that people who discuss politics at a dinner table during the holiday season are “idiots.” They’re just people who are different from you, that’s all. Similarly, lots of people like discuss people; that doesn’t make them “small minds”; their interests are just different from yours.
Quote from above: ” I don’t think that people who discuss politics at a dinner table during the holiday season are “idiots.” ”
I did not want to communicate that people who discuss politics are “idiots” per se, but I meant to communicate that discussing things at a dinner table during the holidays might involve some judgement and wisdom as to what particular topics might be suitable and appropriate in that settting. Perhaps politics might not be a “wise” topic in this setting, hence the use of “idiots” in my extended quote.
It’s merely a joke, the extension of the existing quote is an attempt at humor. It’s taking a quote and trying to make it funny given the topic of this post. It’s taking three things (the topic of the post, a quote, and an attempt at humor) and combining it all. It’s pretty hard to do perhaps, I don’t know. I thought I did pretty well. It might be hard to interpret and judge these things in a way that’s similar to mine, as I reason that humor and interpreting quotes might both be reasonably subjective and personal.
Anyway, your comment also reminded me of the topic of the blogpost. Perhaps certain views about certain things might be just like humor and quotes: you either see or get it, or you don’t.
Responding in one place.
Daniel wrote:
Yep, I said this above. And I am talking about all-cause mortality *not* covid mortality. It seems to be a common error to conflate the two.
Wonks wrote:
Once again, I am talking about *all-cause mortality*. I have always said the vaccination should protect against viremia, but not have any meaningful impact on infection since that occurs in the mucosa.
So if there is a huge drop in covid-attributed mortality, but it is not seen in all-cause mortality, then what?
Anonny wrote:
I am perfectly fine with accepting we simply don’t know if the vaccines had a net benefit on mortality. That is my conclusion.
On infection, from the beginning everything we knew about respiratory viruses, IM vaccines, and from the preclincial trials told us that they wouldn’t. A week after retiring Fauci published a paper saying exactly that:
https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8#%20
Anon: do you have a mechanism whereby covid vaccine causes non-covid deaths in quantity sufficient to counteract or more than counteract reducing covid deaths? Since COVID was like 1-5% mortality in the elderly you’re going to have to somehow argue that say 4 or 5 % of elderly people die of something caused by the covid vaccine. Sorry, I just don’t buy that, nor do we see that in all cause mortality data in the US:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count
what we see is that deviation from historical trends in all cause mortality in the US since start of 2020 is dominated by timings associated with particular COVID viral waves.
What needs to be explained is why covid-attributed deaths dropped but all-cause mortality, if anything, went up after mass vaccination.
I don’t claim to have an explanation, but would have no problem speculating a dozen at least. Some assigning the cause to the vaccine others not.
For example, something like the CDC’s claim of a “healthy vaccinee effect”:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm
Or the ~1/10k chance any given vaccination went straight into a blood vessel because people were not trained to aspirate (pull up the plunger to check for blood, which shouldn’t happen if you are injecting in the right spot).
Or that weird open reading frame in the pfizer vaccine coding an unknown ~3k nucleotide transcript (~1k AA protein, if transcribed) if their modified spike sequence happened to get read in reverse. That definitely should not be there. It seems like what someone trained before the human genome project might give the stamp of approval to though. Back then no one knew ~98% of transcripts were non-protein coding and ~50% are also read in reverse.
All-cause mortality did not go up after mass vaccination.
I’m not going to bother arguing in detail, I’ve tried before and we just go around in circles. But here’s an article about the general topic: https://healthfeedback.org/what-can-explain-the-excess-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-europe-in-2022/
(I note here, only because someone else probably would if I didn’t, that this piece includes the claim that ‘correlation is necessary but not sufficient for [implying] causality’, which, as has been discussed here previously, is not true. Someone gave a nice example of driving a car at a constant speed along a hilly road. There’s no correlation between the depression of the gas pedal (changing all the time) and the speed of the car (constant) but there’s still a causal relationship. The fact that this piece missed this sort of subtlety doesn’t render it all invalid).
Also, PEG allergies. No one is tracking that. I mean if you inject PEG with an adjuvant (which the vaccine obviously is/contains), why wouldn’t you expect the body to react towards it in the future? There could be millions of people with bizarre symptoms only triggered when exposed to products like a certain toothpaste brand, etc. The connection would never be made unless someone was looking for it.
Anon, I’m not going to argue in detail, but they rolled out vaccines in very late 2020 to early 2021… mortality stayed constant afterwards for 5-6 months until the Delta wave hit which increased mortality considerably and was due to covid infection itself, AND at that point in time there was a marked increased rate of death among unvaccinated compared to vaccinated… so you’ve got explanations for events that *didn’t happen*.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count
Daniel:
Your quote, “so you’ve got explanations for events that *didn’t happen*”; that captures so much of what goes on with scientific error. People assume a fact that isn’t true, and then use it as a basis of theory. That’s one reason I think statistics is so important: everyone wants to understand the world, which is great, but it can also be important to pin down exactly what’s going on.
For some accessible examples, see here.
The very first thing was that (according to the CDC) unvaccinated died at ~3x the rate of vaccinated from any cause. So you can’t look just at that time period and claim it is special.
And all the others are plausibly correlated with covid diagnoses for one reason or another.
But like I said, I don’t know the explanation. All we can do is assume or speculate I guess. And next time it will be the same, or worse, since there is no interest in collecting the data required.
>The very first thing was that (according to the CDC) unvaccinated died at ~3x the rate of vaccinated from any cause.
according to what you just said unvaccinated died at higher rate… as you’d expect if they weren’t protected from COVID because they were UNvaccinated.
or am I missing something?
We know that death rates didn’t triple, and that most people WERE vaccinated (let’s say 75% ish), so it couldn’t be the case that vaccinated died at 3x the rate of unvaccinated… because to get that to happen overall mortality rate would have to go up by 3*0.75 = 2.25x but actual death rates during the delta wave were about 73/60 = 1.22x the baseline rate per the ourworldindata graph.
The event that actually happened was … death rates stayed flattish until Delta hit, and then during Delta vaccinated people didn’t die nearly as often as unvaccinated. That’s just the actual fact of what happened in overall mortality. it’s right there in the graphs.
Yes, I am not confused and did not typo. That is something the CDC concluded in the study I linked to.
But, the second part is not what anyone would conclude from it at all.
I don’t think you are even reading my comments. I also remind you we are talking about all-cause mortality here, not deaths attributed to covid. You seem to keep slipping back into conflating the two.
> What needs to be explained is why covid-attributed deaths dropped but all-cause mortality, if anything, went up after mass vaccination.
Do you mean excess deaths went up *immediately* after mass vaccination? Or did you p-hack your way into finding some random time after vaccinations where excess deaths briefly went up in some regions?
Anon. all cause mortality = all cause including COVID… the graph I linked to was all cause weekly deaths.
the only uptick in all cause mortality during 2021 post say April 1 when most people who wanted it had gotten a vax, was during the Delta wave starting late July early Aug.
So, people were vaccinated 2021 around Jan-April and then had “normal” mortality (~ 60000 weekly deaths in US) until late July when Delta hit. and the uptick in all cause mortality during the Delta wave was explained by mortality due to Delta Covid. And you say CDC says people without covid vax died at 3x the rate of people with covid vax. That is exactly what you’d expect if the COVID vax had a protective effect against hospitalization and death. So what is there to explain? There’s no increased all cause mortality among vaccinated individuals, there was less all cause mortality for vaccinated individuals. By a lot!
You keep saying vaccinated individuals have increased all cause mortality. The facts seem to say that’s not true at large, even if it was true perhaps randomly in some small sample size RCT where very few people died in general.
Then how could I forget antibody-dependent enhancement/immunogenic priming. Ie, immunity towards the original spike makes the organism more susceptible to similar mutated spikes.
The weird increase in IgG4 antibodies, typically created so you develop tolerance to a chronic allergen.
The effect of NPIs on health/long-term care, in particular not having an advocate present and the extra hoops the staff needs to jump through.
There is no lack of plausible mechanisms. And Phil, you link shows higher mortality after the vaccinations started right at the top of the page.
My major assumption is that when it comes to Alex Jones, almost nobody else who writes in this blog, has devoted as many hours as I have to watching him. He and his many guests claim that not only are Covid vaccinations useless/harmful, but are designed by the Illuminati, the Rothschild family, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros who wish to destroy Christianity and to promote child sex perversions.
Well, I may have left out a few other items, but despite the nuttiness, Jones’ audience and reach is vast. Note as well, some of his guests (e.g., David Icke, George Pieczenik and Stella Immanuel) are way more extreme than he is!
Given the above, the natural question arises: how is it that his audience success is so vast? Is the situation hopeless?
You left out the cyborgs, chimeras, and aliens. Jones usually starts talking about those after one hour. Plus, he’s got a great gravel in the voice.
He made his reputation infiltrating Bohemian Grove (which embarrasses a bunch people born with silver spoon in hand) and opposing the Iraq War / Patriot Act neoconservatives. Before the Obama administration, he wouldn’t sound that different from the mainline left. Sometime around the Snowden / Assange revelations, the mainline left went in for the authoritarian state; around the time that Trump decided to run for President the neoconservatives threw their lot in with the Democrats.
Maybe the better questions is what caused Anderson Cooper (one example) to change his mind about the Patriot Act conservatives? Do they really think that Merrick Garland is a better judge of the danger of speech than John Ashcroft?
Publius:
I don’t really care if Jones is mainline left, neoconservative, or whatever. The stuff he did with those school shooting victims is just horrible.
It’s curious that you ask (essentially) “How it so happens that reasonable (otherwise) people hold ridiculous evidently false beliefs?” and at the same time keep writing “Hitler and Stalin starting WW2” — despite very well-documented efforts of Stalin and Molotov to establish an anti-german (despite nobody naming it as such officially for obvious reasons :)) coalition with France and Britain and East-Europe countries to “ensure the peace in Europe” in the 1930s. The talks went nowhere for obvious reasons — everyone knew Hitler was going to attack the USSR (and Poland because geography, but who cares?) until he occupied Belgium and France. :) And then attacked the USSR.
So I don’t see how exactly Stalin is responsible for WW2, but It would be fun to see a *causal model* with estimates of responsibility attribution compared to France, Britain and USA leadership at the time. :)
Anyway, in light of this and other observations, I personally have a trickier question: “How does one know they themselves haven’t already become the “crazy uncle”? :D Deep rational knowledge and reasoning in _one_ area of science or technology doesn’t protect from wild beliefs in others, it seems…
“Deep rational knowledge and reasoning in _one_ area of science or technology doesn’t protect from wild beliefs in others, it seems…”
Best quote of the thread.
What I always wonder when the words “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theories” are used is what would happen if these “theories” (or perhaps better named “hypotheses”) turn out to be (partly) correct.
If I remember correctly, saying that hospitals may inflate covid death numbers, saying that the vaccine does not prevent transmission, saying that natural immunity might be better than vaccinated immunity (in some cases), saying that masks really don’t work well to prevent transmission, etc. all may have gotten you labeled as a “conspiracy theorist” a few years ago, or even as “anti-science” (how horrendous!).
I am not up to date concerning all the current views amongst the “experts” on all of this, but I think I have seen and heard some more recent findings and statements concerning these things that make me wonder whether these things are still seen as something only a “conspiracy theorist” would say? Are they still “conspiracy theories”, or have they become appropriate things to consider or think about without being labeled as a “conspiracy theorist”? Are some of them perhaps even seen as “facts” and not merely “theories” (or perhaps better named “hypotheses”)?
Quote from above: “Are some of them perhaps even seen as “facts” and not merely “theories” (or perhaps better named “hypotheses”)?”
I like quotes. This sentence reminded me of the quote “All truths passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Perhaps some “conspiracy theories” pass through these three stages as well…
Please read this quote you already responded to multiple times then click on to at least skim this paper, something you clearly have not done.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm
Ever since this paper came out, it has triggered fascinating responses on this blog. The only one to actually look at it so far was Carlos Ungil, a half dozen other people responded in bizarre ways.
It must be key to the belief system that these vaccinated vs not comparisons aren’t hopelessly confounded by baseline differences. Well, according to the CDC itself, they are. Once confidence in that data crumbles* there is only the total all-cause mortality timeseries, then you’ll be like me.
* And this is not the only problem with it. Eg, we need key info about how you can tell who was actually vaccinated or not. And how unknowns were coded.
What is there to explain in this quote?
First off… This ISNT all cause mortality, it’s non-covid mortality specifically. So I assume we’ve accepted that the vaccine protects against the virus.
Second, is it so surprising that if you didn’t get super sick from COVID that you didn’t die of the long term sequelae of getting COVID? How many people who got COVID and were hospitalized for it died within 6 months of complications? Probably a lot, probably tens of percent of people who were in ICU for example.
What is it that I’m supposed to be shocked by here? I just don’t get it . Give me a reason to dig into the paper! Quoting stuff that seems to perfectly fit the model of “vaccines helped a lot of people avoid COVID death and long term sequelae” doesn’t exactly give me shocked Pikachu face.
That baseline mortality is 3x higher in unvaccinated. Ie, even if there was no virus, and no vaccine, those people would still be dying at a 3x higher rate.
This is not complicated or confusing, and was easily understood for past vaccines. People who are within a few months to years of death are less likely to be vaccinated for a number of reasons. So the unvaccinated have a much higher mortality rate.
There shouldn’t be so much trouble with this concept on this blog, its crazy. You are like the 5th person whose mind just refuses to process the information.
Maybe Carlos could explain it, since he immediately understood like normal.
> Ie, even if there was no virus, and no vaccine, those people would still be dying at a 3x higher rate.
This is an assumption on your part, but the post-covid risk of stroke, heart attack, complications from cancer, lung problems etc etc are well understood right? So if you get covid and have a bad case of it because you aren’t vaccinated, we expect your baseline mortality rate to be something like maybe 2x as high as it otherwise would have been for 6 months to a year. If you were in ICU (for any reason) your risk of mortality is even higher, maybe 5 to 10x or more.
I think we’re just drawing different conclusions from the same information. So, you’ve convinced me at least to look into the study, I’ll get back to you on what it says. The real question I have about the study now is how they’re defining non-covid deaths. Is that things like stroke 3 months after covid? or is that considered COVID associated?
The thing we have to remember is that by the end of Jan 2022 (post Omicron) almost everyone in the country had COVID at least once… 90% or more. So if there’s elevated post-covid risk of death for several months to a year, then the “anomaly” you’re discussing may be largely the expected results of being exposed to covid without vaccination. There isn’t a large group of easily identified unvaccinated un-covid-infected people to compare to for estimation of “baseline” risk since such a large fraction of people had covid.
“People who are within a few months to years of death are less likely to be vaccinated for a number of reasons. So the unvaccinated have a much higher mortality rate.”
Also because they might die of covid, if we are talking all-causes mortality.
If I were doomed to die of cancer in six months, I would still want to be vaccinated against flu and covid so as not to spend that time also suffering from flu or covid. Alternately, I would live in a bubble (see Seinfeld Bubble-Boy episode) to prevent any exposure.
My bottom line is that without a lot of specific data as to the conditions of people who were or were not vaccinated, the simplest (least multiplier of entities beyond necessity) hypothesis for me is that the vaccine was beneficial.
Anecdata: I had a mild (8-hour) case of covid in May of 2020, after which I lost my life-time enjoyment of cola drinks. No vaccine was available locally (in the town pharmacies) until 2021, when I got the Moderna two shots. Early advice was to get a booster in 8 months, so I scheduled one at 8 months which was December 2021. Later the advice changed to six months but I didn’t change the reservation. In November (seven months) I had my worst case of of an infectious disease ever, which kept me in bed with high fever for three days. After that, everything tasted bad, and mostly still does. Popcorn tastes like salted cardboard. (I assume that’s what salted cardboard tastes like.) I have had boosters regularly since then. The good news is that I lost 25 pounds I could afford to lose (within two weeks of the second case), and it is still off today.
The CDC study is definitely weird for more reasons that that (actually, they all are when you take a close look). I’ll try to find my discussion with Carlos when it came out.
In the meantime I searched and saw this is also showing up in other data:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2306683
That one reports unvaccinated have 4x higher mortality for non-covid reasons.
Anoneuoid… with this greater context, yeah, I can see why you think the numbers are unusual. I still think it’s consistent with a model where having a bad case of covid creates a long term health risk… something on the order of 6mo to 2 years say, and 90% of everyone has had COVID… But it’s also quite possible the issue is more about recruitment for these studies. When you look at overall mortality curves… unvaccinated are still on the order of 10 percent of the US. If they have a 3x higher mortality than baseline, then you’d expect something like 0.1*3 = 30% increase in mortality overall. that would lead to mortality curves going from about 60000 per week to 78k per week, and that *is* more or less the kind of level we see in the data from 2021 during and after the delta wave. If you look at 2022 though the mortality rate was flat post Omicron and only mildly increased over the prior year averages. 2023 even more so.
So, I still think the data needs to be analyzed in the context of a dynamic model in which post covid infection people experience increased risk of serious or deadly complications for an unknown time period kind of Gamma(8,6/7) (months, in Julia parameterization). If the studies are done where lots of people are in that timeframe (so any studies done in 2020, 2021, 2022) you’d see potentially a lot of increased risk among the unvaccinated since almost all of them did get covid in that timeperiod.
Anon: ok, you convinced me to look through the tables and skim the paper https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7043e2-H.pdf
What I noticed was that they define a covid associated death as within 30 days of a covid positive test. This is more or less similar to my model of increased risk of death, except with a Gamma(10,0.5/9) type prior for the duration of the elevated risk. That puts 95%tile of duration of increased risk at 0.87 months, whereas my intuitively mentioned prior for duration of elevated risk was more like Gamma(8,6/7) with 95%tile duration at 11.3 months… so I just expect everyone to have elevated risk of death for something like 10x longer than they did.
COVID really sucks, I had all the vaccines I was eligible for, and got it in Oct 2022 and definitely felt effects like blood pressure dysregulation, exercise induced lightheadedness, and brain fog for at least 3 months after getting sick. I can’t imagine what the long term effects would be of someone who wasn’t vaccinated, and was hospitalized or even ICU hospitalized … but it isn’t even a little bit shocking that they could be at a 3x or more increased risk of death over someone like me.
https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases/covid-19-patients-retain-elevated-risk-of-death-for-at-least-18-months-after-inf
There are quite a few studies suggesting that post COVID there are elevated risks of death from various causes usually stroke and heart attack and such for up to several years. I’m not really motivated to dig into all the studies and see who exactly are they referring to? Only those people who had “Long covid symptoms” or “all people who tested positive for covid” or some intermediate sort of thing… people hospitalized or who had pre-existing conditions etc. etc.
What seems clear is that infection with covid gives some subset of people substantially increased morbidity for much much longer than 30 days.
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/long-covid-still-worrisome-2-years-after-infection/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37824396/
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/studies-note-higher-risk-death-impaired-health-2-years-after-covid-infection
Well, I plotted that mortality vs the SSA lifetables for 2019 (using Julia btw):
https://i.postimg.cc/nLNZQJtV/mortplot.png
Code and source:
https://pastebin.com/XdcFQkVB
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6_2019_TR2022.html
Vaccinated mortality rate is much lower than expected (~0.3-0.5x), and unvaccinated is a bit higher (~1.2x for the two older age groups), but within the range.
I didn’t do any population weighting for within the age groups or anything, but eg vaccinated in the 45-64 age group had mortality below even what would be expected for 45 year olds. Also for 85+ I just used 85-94 years old, so maybe those last values should be higher.
Looks consistent with “healthy vaccinee effect” to me. If I understand your explanation correctly, we would expect vaccinated to look like the average from the 2019 life tables, and unvaccinated to be much higher.
Where did your vaccinated and unvaccinated mortality rates come from?
From the CDC paper under discussion.
But, then I saw this updated version:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9763207/
Whatever they did now slightly increased vaccinated mortality but did ~2x unvaccinated for 85+. More interestingly, check out table 7 which includes values for all-cause in addition to deaths within 30 days of a positive covid diagnosis filtered out. Hazard ratios were the same.
>there is only the total all-cause mortality timeseries,
You mean the one where for 6 months after the vaccine rollout there was totally normal mortality rate and then Delta hit and unvaccinated people started dying while vaccinated people mostly didn’t… That’s another not-shocked-pikachu face from me.
I just don’t get it.
Once more late to the party but just one thing. One issue in my view is that there is in many cases much less certainty in published scientific results and generally scientific reasoning than how it is often communicated. (This blog is full of examples for that.) There are good reasons to be skeptical of many things, including many “scientific” claims. Somebody who holds a deviating view can very often not only find good arguments against supposedly well established scientific facts (same of course with other kinds of information that are presented as true facts), but also can find many examples where such “facts” have been over-interpreted and misleadingly presented. This fuels ideas such as that “we are being manipulated by the establishment”. Scientists play their part in this game by inflating their claims and trying to sell them to the public, often motivated by the necessity of winning funding.
Of course the weakness of many “conspiration theorists” is that they don’t apply the same skepticism to the sources of “information” on which they relate; but my experience in several discussions with reasonably intelligent people who held such beliefs is that much of their argument relies on often correctly pointing to misrepresentations of evidence and certainty by scientists and other people who represent the “established” view (and then to the fact that a good number of people don’t take the time to argue properly but rather dismiss the deviating view out of hand).
Christian:
Here’s another thing that happens. A person holds a fringe belief which they support by pointing to an error or glaring inconsistency in an official report or statement. Then the apparent error or inconsistency is explained—it turns out that the official report was being misinterpreted, or that the report missed some details that explain the apparent discrepancy, or that there’s an explanation that the fringe-belief-holder didn’t think about. But . . . at this point the fringe-belief-holder is so committed to his view that no facts or explanations can budge him.
This seems to have happened with many people regarding the JFK assassination, or the World Trade Center attacks, or the covid vaccine, or the 2020 election (that last one is perhaps more of a special case in that conspiracy theorists had a direct political motivation to maintain their delusions), or older examples such as the Dreyfus case, or even silly low-stakes things such as our blog commenter who recently kept insisting that a paper of mine from 2017 was wrong.
“once you start with the position that a vaccine is a worse crime than invading countries and starting a world war, there’s really no place to turn”
Scott Adams, during the 2016 Presidential campaign, rightfully rebutted that a majority of Trump opponents would have to see Trump be literally worse than Hitler or live the rest of their lives knowing they are morons.
Lest this seem hyperbolic, one only needs look at the commentary on the Israel Gaza conflict where people legitimately believe and argue that Israel is worse than Hitler… Those too shall live the rest of their lives knowing they are morons.
Publius:
Wait a moment. A cartoonist posted something on social media, so . . . the vaccine is worse than invading countries and starting a world war?? I don’t get the logic here.