Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "NBC News"
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@Arnold Frackenmeyer
Reuters: "A similar narrative is replicated in a TikTok video here . “Receiving the COVID-19 vaccine reduces your risk at most 1.3%”, the women says to the camera around timestamp 00:33. “Why have we been hearing this vaccine has a 95% efficacy rate? Simple, they lied to you.”
The posts erroneously claim the article was a “peer reviewed study”, when it was actually a commentary by Piero Olliaro, Els Torreele and Michel Vaillant on April 20, featured in the Lancet Microbe here .
When asked about the claim, Olliaro, professor of poverty related infectious diseases at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health of Oxford University ( here ) told Reuters via email it was “extremely disappointing to see how information can be twisted.” He also said, “Bottom line: these vaccines are good public health interventions,” and added that in the commentary, “We do not say vaccines do not work.”
“Let’s say a study enrolled 20,000 patients into the control group and 20,000 in the vaccine group. In that study, 200 people in the control group got sick and 0 people in the vaccine group got sick. Even though the vaccine efficacy would be a whopping 100%, the ARR would show that vaccines reduce the absolute risk by just 1% (200/20,000= 1%). For the ARR to increase to 20% in our example study with a vaccine with 100% efficacy, 4,000 of the 20,000 people in the control group would have to get sick (4,000/20,000= 20%).”
Natalie E. Dean, assistant professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida, understood why the ARR numbers might have confused users on social media and explained why the RRR is the “usual scale” considered by the medical community when talking about vaccine efficacy.
“Because (the ARR) is a much lower number, it feels like it is saying that the other number (RRR) isn’t true,” but this is not accurate, “they are both capturing some aspect of reality, just measuring it in a different way,” she told Reuters via telephone.
Vaccine efficacy, expressed as the RRR means the vaccine will reduce the risk of infection by that reported percentage irrespective of the transmission setting. “It is more meaningful,” she said.
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@gabrielle-d1b Obviously the blanket immunity stems from the need to expedite the vaccine. In exchange for prioritizing the covid vaccine, drug makers wanted reassurance that if something did go wrong, they wouldn't be held liable. I can understand why it was done, but I don't personally agree with it. Granting immunity to drug makers is almost unheard of in normal circumstances.
That said, the vaccines have proven to be safe and effective. While trials were expedited and EUA invoked, there were 6 months of tests with thousands of people. Side effects to vaccines normally occur within the first 15 minutes to the first 4 weeks after injection. No longterm effects have been apparent, other than being immunized. These vaccines have been scrutinized and are constantly being monitored.
The side effects you mention range from injection site soreness, chills, or fatigue to very rare side effects like myocarditis or blood clots. The former are minor and pass within a few days at the most. They're typical of other vaccines.
Myocarditis appears at a rate of 0.0002% post-vaccination, which is much lower than the rate of myocarditis in people diagnosed with covid, and in most all cases, patients fully recover.
AstraZeneca found that 8.1 in 1 million people will experience a blood clot after the first dose and 2.3 in 1 million after the second. These are serious but treatable side effects and are very rare.
Every medication carries side effects and risks. In the case of the covid vaccine, the risks are very small for most people, and the risk of longterm complications from covid much higher.
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@goldwater1984 The fact is that there isn't anything special about me, and I don't know everything. The problem is that you're being willfully ignorant, spouting lies and misinformation that either take two seconds to debunk or which are contradicted by the very sources you cite.
You're the one who thinks they're a know-it-all even though you clearly are too lazy to do the bare minimum of reading and critical thinking, instead choosing to credulously regurgitate lies you saw on social media. I don't think I know it all, so I actually have to query, read, evaluate, and try to understand something first. When I cite something, I actually read past the headline to make sure the content says what I claim it says. You should do the same.
When dealing with a topic I'm not trained in, I do the sensible thing and defer, at least provisionally, to the consensus of expert opinion, research, and theory. This is really elementary stuff you should've picked up in high school or college.
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@doughesson You're making the assumption that because the outbreak occurred in Wuhan that it originated in Wuhan, and if it originated in Wuhan, it must've come from the lab.
But, as scientists have pointed out, it's not surprising that there was a viral outbreak in a city—that's where people are, allowing the virus to spread rapidly. It's also not surprising that there's a lab that studies coronavirus in a city surrounded by rural coronavirus hotspots—you'd want your lab to be near what it's studying.
You're mistaking these normal circumstantial facts for causation without any evidence, only wild speculation. If you look at the history of previous outbreaks, like Zika, HIV, SARS, MERS, lime disease, they all had their outbreaks in cities, sometimes with medical labs, many miles from where they originated. It took 15 years to track down the origin of the first SARS outbreak, some 50 miles, I think, from where it began to spread rapidly among humans after having been passed from animal to animal to people in rural areas.
Just because the outbreak happened in Wuhan doesn't mean that the virus came from Wuhan. It's a false connection.
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@doughesson I think you need to reread my comment. The outbreak occurred in Wuhan. That's different from saying the virus originated in Wuhan. I don't know what "the news media" said in every instance, but if they said the virus ORIGINATED in Wuhan, they were either lying or at the least speaking speculatively, not on the basis of any facts.
I know anti-vaxxers aren't too with critical thinking, but the distinction between the origin of the virus and the origin of its initial outbreak isn't too hard to understand.
"Virology labs tend to specialize in the viruses around them, says Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a division of the National Institutes of Health, in Hamilton, Montana. The WIV specializes in coronaviruses because many have been found in and around China. Munster names other labs that focus on endemic viral diseases: influenza labs in Asia, haemorrhagic fever labs in Africa and dengue-fever labs in Latin America, for example. “Nine out of ten times, when there’s a new outbreak, you’ll find a lab that will be working on these kinds of viruses nearby,” says Munster.
Researchers note that a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan isn’t surprising, because it’s a city of 11 million people in a broader region where coronaviruses have been found. It contains an airport, train stations and markets selling goods and wildlife transported there from around the region5 — meaning a virus could enter the city and spread rapidly" (Nature).
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@thecompetentman5384 Clearly you didn't read your own source. For one, this paper concerns a breakout in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, not Vermont, which was the original claim. Nice try.
Second, this outbreak is from the Delta variant, and more needs to be known about how effective existing vaccines are at preventing infection and mitigating the worst symptoms from Delta, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get the vaccine or that it's useless. Breakthroughs happen precisely because people aren't vaccinated, and they can spread the virus even to people who are immunized.
The paper also notes,
1) "vaccination is the most important strategy to prevent severe illness and death."
2) "data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak."
But that's precisely what you're doing—drawing sweeping conclusions from a single event based on data that are insufficient.
3) "As population-level vaccination coverage increases, vaccinated persons are likely to represent a larger proportion of COVID-19 cases."
This makes sense if you think about it. If 100% of the population were vaccinated, any infection—and there would always be some small percentage—would mean that 100% of infections were among the vaccinated, but that's not surprising. According to the CDC, 469 people were infected at "multiple summer events and large public gatherings." Data is not provided for the size of attendance, but we can imagine it could easily be as much as 10,000 for multiple large events.
If we assume that Barnstable has roughly the state average rate of vaccination, 63%, then an infection rate of 74% among the vaccinated might present some concern, depending on the reliability of the data, but isn't the fatal blow to vaccination you seem to think it is, which is why the CDC is recommending masking at public events in areas with rising infection rates, not dismissing vaccination altogether.
Moreover, this breakthrough in Massachusetts seems to be an extreme outlier emerging from a large, crowded event at which many people were unvaccinated and presumably unmasked. National data shows that breakthrough cases constitute <1% of new infections. The number in Massachusetts is a little higher at about 0.15%—which means that in the aggregate the overwhelming number of new cases, 95% in Massachusetts, are from the unvaccinated. Unless you have some miraculous theory to explain the discrepancy, it would seem that the vaccines do work, and about as well as previous studies have indicated, and that the breakthrough in Barnstable County is an exception, not the rule.
Please actually read the stuff you're citing so that you're not appealing to something that contradicts your points. It makes you look silly.
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@thecompetentman5384 1) Colloquially referring to a vaccine as a "shot" doesn't make it any less a vaccine. Flu "shots" are flu vaccines, and they don't have a 30% effectiveness, as you claimed. I don't even know why you bothered citing that number because I already provided a more accurate one of 60%, though the actual number changes a bit from year to year depending on how well doctors can predict which strains will be prevalent. Honestly, this was such an incredibly stupid point that I'm stunned you made it. I also cited figures for other vaccines, neither of which is 100% effective.
2) Who cares what Biden said? Getting vaccinated has been the advice of medical experts around the world ever since we had a vaccine.
3) The CDC actually rescinded its masking recommendation, as did many local governments. It's only because of concentrations of unvaccinated people and the spread of the much more contagious Delta variant that the CDC has advised masking in areas with rising rates of infection. Importantly, the immunized can carry and transmit the virus (at least the Delta variant) even if they are asymptomatic, meaning the vaccine worked for them, but they can still be a spreader.
4) As I already pointed out, the notion that covid vaccines "don't do anything" isn't supported by the data. Overwhelmingly, new infections are occurring among the UNvaccinated, at about 95-99%. Unless you have some miraculous explanation for why that is, it would seem that the vaccines are working, though of course herd immunity can be compromised if enough people continue to refuse to get vaccinated, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where anti-vaxxers generate the very failure they believed always existed. You'd also need to explain the decrease in new cases and deaths—where vaccination is at higher levels—since the vaccine became widely available. Tellingly, surges are occurring in places where more people are refusing the vaccine.
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