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Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by mthoms on Saturday August 21, 2021 @07:20PM (#28261465)
>the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket.

From the article. Emphasis is mine.

Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by xiphias2 on Saturday August 21, 2021 @08:28PM (#28261863)
The under-60 part doesn't really count as the age of vaccinated people is generally higher than the age of unvaccinated people. I trust the over-60 data to represent the efficiency of the vaccine against the Delta variant better.
Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by charbonneau on Saturday August 21, 2021 @08:13PM (#28261780)
The question is: What's the difference between un-/vaccinated people >60? Why aren't they vaccinated? Different opinions? Health-related reasons? Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions.
Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by mthoms on Saturday August 21, 2021 @08:59PM (#28262005)
Why would their opinions matter?

As for health, I think you might be alluding to pre-existing conditions? Can you elaborate on how you would see this affecting the result?

Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by charbonneau on Sunday August 22, 2021 @02:50AM (#28263460)
Extreme example: Person A with perfect health gets vaccinated. Person B undergoes palliative care and chooses not to get vaccinated. Person B's routine SARS-CoV-2 PCR test is positive and they're therefore classified as a hospitalized/severe case.

It's a miracle that Israel even offers age-stratified hospitalizations data. But it's still not enough.

Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by mthoms on Sunday August 22, 2021 @03:24PM (#28268624)
Do you really think scenarios like this could account for skewing the data by a multiple of 9? Come on.

>Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions.

Oh please. This data overwhelmingly shows that vaccinated people (>60) have better outcomes than non-vaccinated people(>60). The only debate is by how much.

Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by charbonneau on Monday August 23, 2021 @06:36AM (#28274062)
No, it was an extreme example to better express the issue: We do not know why they're not vaccinated. We do not know their medical history. This isn't a randomized controlled trial.

More realistic example: According to this study [1], 4.0% of US citizens (>80) are immunocompromised. We know that ~5.8% of Israelis (>80) are not vaccinated. Is it possible that the unvaccinated in this age cohort have more serious pre-existing conditions and therefore had a way higher chance of being hospitalized? We don't know.

Is it wrong to ask for better data? We're capable of extracting the smallest detail from a person randomly scrolling through a news feed but we can't get proper stats on hospitalized people? Come on.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779

Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by mthoms on Monday August 23, 2021 @09:08PM (#28284043)
None of the reasons you cited come anywhere near to reasonably accounting for a nine-fold difference. You're really reaching. If you can't take something away from a 9x difference (vaxed vs. non-vaxed) I don't what to tell you.

Better data would be great, but based on your anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-science, comment history I'm not convinced that would be enough for you.

I'm not interested in debating people with an obvious idealogical agenda, so good day to you.

Re:Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in Ne... by charbonneau on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @03:07AM (#28285901)
Since I'm an anti-science woman on a quest to spread my anti-vax agenda, I've taken a look at the raw data.

We're talking about 137 unvaccinated & 268 vaccinated patients >60 with severe disease (What kind of disease? Who cares, am I right?)

So, based on this enormous (!) sample size with one (!) confounding factor (#FuckMedicalHistory), we conclude that of course there is an undeniable nine-fold difference.

Why are we even doing randomized controlled trials? Just observe 137 & 268 patients retrospectively and frame critics as ideologues. A final word from an anti-vax activist:

> Conversely, there was concern that observational data obtained from nonrandomized studies after vaccine deployment could yield unreliable answers. Observational studies are subject to substantial biases and are much less amenable to unambiguous interpretation. Their limitations are of particular concern during this public health emergency, because vaccinated and unvaccinated people will differ in their risk of exposure to infection and of serious disease, partly because of fluctuating attack rates and because during early phases of vaccine deployment, vaccinees may well be at particular risk of infection. In these circumstances, even carefully analyzed observational studies can yield misleading answers about safety and efficacy. In addition, unrelated events that occur by chance after vaccination may be incorrectly attributed to the vaccine, and such anecdotes may be deliberately promulgated by groups opposed to vaccination. [1]

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538