272 Comments

Reuters' "fact check?"

LOL!!! Inventing fantasies out of whole cloth!!! No data, no evidence, just imagination. That's supposed to be science!!! [pound pulpit] Science comes from textbooks and public health, not from actual researchers' data and methods, according to Reuters. No, science is not about experimentation and analysis--it comes from the public health priests and we are supposed to just believe it. /irony

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What's confusing here is that the Denmark study uses vaccine effectiveness (VE) as the metric vs. the CDC study which uses odds ratio (OR) as the metric. VE is just 1 minus OR, so as soon as the OR goes over 1, you have negative VE. Like Steve says, the OR in the CDC study goes over 1 at 7 months for Omicron, which means negative effectivity (i.e., negative VE). The frustrating thing is the 2 studies don't agree totally. The Denmark study finds the effectivity goes negative at 3 months, and goes even more negative at time goes on. Whereas, the CDC study finds 1) the effectivity takes longer to go negative (7 ms.) and 2) doesn't get more negative as time goes on. It hovers around 0 (OR=1).

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I don't think that's true, Rose. I think relative effectivity is 1 minus the risk ratio. The risk ratio is your chances of getting it if you are vaxxed, divided by your chances if you are unvaxxed. So, if 50 out of 100 unvaxed get it vs. 50 out of 100 vaxxed get it, then you have 1 minus 0.5/0.5, which equals zero relative efficacy.

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Those figures aren't even looking at the fact that if a vaccine is 50% effective it means that of the people who get ill, 50% have had the shot and 50% have not. That means that a 50% efficacy means it's worthless, and below 50% means MORE people with the shot get ill than without. So the effect is negative way before you get into the negative numbers!

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https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11763/22-02-16-covid19-winter_publication_report.pdf Steve. Can you talk about figure 15 in this Scotland report. Specifically why the spike in the boosted hospitalizations. Yes the other data is good too but nobody’s talking about this spike. If the booster did nothing at all you would simply expect statistics from the 2 dose to simple move over to the boosted chart. But it doesn’t. The boosted has way higher hospitalizations indicating that the booster puts you in the hospital.

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This data is still biased by the fact that there is a higher prevalence of testing among the unvaccinated. Choosing thousands of positive tests at random is still not a true indication if you have asymmetric testing requirements.

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Please post link to original study

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I’m not having a problem with Steve’s links; they take me right where they should.

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I don’t understand your circular links; I’m trying to get to the article by the CDC authors, but following your link here takes me to another article of yours, and clicking on the link in that article takes me here.

Good way to get clicks I guess 😉

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All net is faked, we can't complain of any crime!

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You're right, but it's worse than that. The Reuters "fact check" does not even establish that anyone made the claims they are refuting. The claims it refutes are straw men, namely (from the first paragraph):

1. "A Danish preprint study...conclude[d] that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines harm the immune system" and

2. "the authors [of the paper] conclude that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are completely ineffective against the Omicron variant".

The two tweets (yes, tweets) that the fact check is supposedly refuting here do not make either of these claims about what the paper CONCLUDES.

In the first case, the tweeter only poses a question, and it's a question about the real world, not about the conclusions of the study ("Is the immune system actually harmed, creating shot repetition dependency (with unknown long-term safety?"). The tweeter is not making any claims about what the study concludes.

In the second case, the tweeter says: "New study from Denmark shows the vaccines have NO effectiveness against Omicron after just 30 days.” That is, the tweeter is, again, not reporting the conclusions of the study, but his or her own interpretation about what the study shows, and only in relation to the period more than 30 days after vaccination. What is more, by Occam's Razor, the tweeter's interpretation is correct, since after 30 days, the study reports confidence intervals for the effectiveness of both vaccines that go below zero effectiveness.

No wonder the fact-check does so much arm-waving. Is Reuters doing itself more good than harm by posting such ridiculous fake refutations?

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You cannot keep using a battering ram against a door

and expect it to hold firm

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Isn't Reuters' CEO on the board of Pfizer? Someone needs to do a chart of each institution and its connection to pharma. It would be like one of those movie scenes with cards all over the walls and different colored strings crisscrossing the room. A trope for paranoia or rogue intel agents in the movies, but now a model of reality, if you had a skyscraper with room after room like that. One can only hope that this tsunami of evil (to mix or switch metaphors) will be the resistance that elicits a counterwave of our evolved capacities for compassion and nurturance and our collective brilliance and creativity. Entheogens in the water supply of the exponentially growing crowd of facultative sociopaths?

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Reuters and "fact check" don't belong in the same sentence.

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If the negative efficacy is caused by a bias, wouldn't it be normal for the vaccines to have different outcomes? E.g bias is 100%, so Pfizer has a 20% true efficacy - bias and Moderna has 40% - bias. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.

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The vaccine pushers are now trying to cover their backs. I am in Uk and the same thing is happening here with the NHS mandates what is the point in mandating a short term vaccine that does not stop transmittion and does not stop reinfection and probably is not needed in people that have previously had Covid as many NHS Doctors and nurses have. I look forward to hearing " sorry we got it wrong we have not yet designed a REAL VACCINE only a short term fix" I will not hold my breath!

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