Really? Any day?
Read the part you quoted carefully: the death rate in the control group is 3 per 100,000. And if you read the rest of the paper, you'll see that the study population was entirely over age 50.
Remember that the risk of death from Covid-19 goes up exponentially with age -- something like 90% of all fatalities are over age 50 [1]. If you're in the typical HN demographic (<30 yo), your risk of mortality from Covid-19 is much lower than what is reported for baseline here.
I want to put this in perspective. Per The Book of Risks (chapter 8; annual risks) [2], your overall chance of dying in a typical year is 1 in 115 (~870 per 100,000) Your chance of being murdered is 1 in 11,000 (9 per 100,000). The chance you'll die of an accident is 1 in 2,900 (34 per 100,000). From a fall: 1 in 20,000 (5 per 100,000). By getting hit by a car while walking: 1 in 40,000 (2.5 per 100,000).
In other words, your all-ages chance of dying from Covid-19 after two doses is somewhere between your annual chance of dying from a fall, and dying after being hit by a car -- and it's much lower than that if you're under age 50! Divide that number by ten, and you're in the realm of risks that any sane person wouldn't even consider: the annual chance of dying by freezing, for example (1 in 3,000,000).
Point being: dividing a very small number by 10 is indeed a 90% risk reduction, but you have to weigh it against the costs very carefully. There are tons of reasons why I wouldn't take a 90% relative risk reduction, if the baseline risk were quite small (as it is here).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-tota...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Book-Risks-Fascinating-Facts-Chances/...
Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%?
Edit: Incidentally, I have been hit by cars while walking 3 times. No injuries, luckily, since they were very low speed impacts.
Why are you seemingly advocating against something (getting a booster shot) that's also extremely unlikely to harm you?
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[0]: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/n...
[1]: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-1...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...
Depends entirely on the cost vs. the benefit. As I said, a 90% relative reduction is meaningless without knowledge of the baseline risk.
And once you know the baseline risk, you can do the math instead of just reacting emotionally.
No emotion involved, at least not from me. Seems clear enough to me. You seem to be the one having an emotional response here.
How tiny? It matters. Your risk of a bad outcome from Covid-19 is extremely tiny.
(Also, by the way: the costs are greater than what you pay for the shot. Miss a day of work? Spend a day in bed? That's a cost.)
> it benefits everybody you probably won't infect if you get exposed to the virus.
We have no evidence of this, nor do we have any reason to believe elevated antibody levels will continue indefinitely. Antibodies from the third shot will wane, just as the antibodies from the second shot waned, and antibodies always wane after antigen exposure. It's how our immune systems work.
I'm not timr, but I share a lot of his concerns, so I'll try to answer. I think your model of how he is thinking is probably wrong. Some people (including me) care tremendously about the truth of an argument, independent of whether making that argument leads to a desirable social outcome. His "agenda" is likely a strong philosophical belief that it's more important to base policy on a solid scientific foundation than to reach an apparently preferred conclusion, because this is more likely to reliably reach a long term positive result. At least, that's what it feels like internally for me.
Despite your claims, the situation is not simple. Take this paper for instance. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that it is irredeemably flawed. That is, while boosters are probably a good idea for most people, I don't think it will be the case that greater than 1% of the doubly vaccinated but unboosted population will die of Covid in the next year. I think there are methodological problems with their approach that make their specific conclusions mostly meaningless. Unfortunately, despite these flaws, this is probably a higher quality study than most that are being relied upon to make policy.
For context, understand that I've been laid out in bed for most of the last week recovering from my recent Covid booster. I still believe that for me, taking a Covid booster probably was a better choice than not taking one. I don't currently believe that it produces the best health outcomes for a 14 year old boy, but I'm open to the possibility that it's best for society as a whole to put young males at slightly greater risk for the benefit of the rest of society. Please consider that you might be overconfident in how obvious the answers are.
I don't disagree...but I think it's much more concrete than this. At the scale of 330M people (let alone 7 billion), tiny risks matter. The OP simply cannot see past the emotion of the debate to the idea that even a few hundred-thousandths of a percent of additional mortality risk means that 100 people will die in the US.
If those 100 people were otherwise healthy and at no risk from Covid, that's a disaster. If the OP wants to take the tiny risk, that's fine, but it's a different matter to encourage other people to do it without evidence.
If you're not going to trust the FDA, we don't have anything to say to each other, really, because that's what the FDA is for. They have a great track record on these things, with very, very few drug recalls happening due to unforeseen side effects. As far as government agencies go, when it comes to drug approval, the FDA is probably the most trustworthy and least politicized government agency we've got.
They've examined the data on myocarditis and recently approved boosters for people over 16. They haven't yet approved it for 14 year olds, so, yes, that is an open question. But, it's one which they're working to answer, and which it's essentially part of their mandate to answer.
It's also rational to hold a realistic prior, so, you should take all this into account. Mistrusting the FDA on this is literally irrational.
There is simply no evidence of this. None.
> It's effective in reducing hospitalization, severe disease,
The only evidence we have for this -- so far -- is for people over age 50. There's no evidence of reduction in mortality for younger, healthy people.
> and against getting the disease in the first place.
Our current evidence for this is limited to a few weeks after boosters, and again, it is expected that this will fade over time as antibody titers decline.
> And, if you have a lower probability of getting the disease if exposed, if you get the shot, does it or does it not mean you will infect fewer people if you get the shot? Simple logic.
Still waiting for you to answer the core questions: what is the risk? What is the benefit? Don't just wave your hands. Quantify the benefit.
To make it as clear as I possibly can: if there is a .0000000001% improvement in mortality risk from illness, and a .00001% mortality risk from the vaccine itself, then the logic is obvious: one should not get a booster dose. The risks of the booster dose are (hypothetically; I am making up numbers here) 10,000x greater than the benefits, even though both are quite small.
The death rate of the control group is .16 vs 2.98 per 100,000 people per day. If you annualize this by multiplying by 365 to make it comparable to your other figures, I think this means you get 65 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the booster group versus over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. Which is to say, the Covid risk is higher than all of the specific risks you mentioned with or without a booster. This might (or might not) suggest a different conclusion of the relative benefit of taking the booster.
Or am I the one who is misreading the numbers?
> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted.
We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. For example, a truly conservative back-of-the-napkin calculation: 800k deaths in the US @ 50M reported cases (which we know is low by a factor of at least 2...) -> 1600 per 100,000. And many of those (half?) happened prior to vaccines; many now happen in the unvaccinated population. It's fairly obvious that 1000 per 100,000 is much too high an estimate.
(...and this isn't even the correct number to compare...what you really want is absolute risk per person, which will be far lower than the risk if you get infected, which is what I've estimated above. If you do that calculation, you get ~240 per 100,000 in the US over the entire pandemic. That's somewhere between the annual risk of dying in an accident (1 in 700) and the annual risk of dying from cancer (1 in 500).
Generalizing from the sample in the study is problematic for a bunch of different reasons -- not the least of which is that it's an older group of people -- but I didn't want to get caught up in a debate about IFR estimates.
Could you expand on this, or suggest the right search terms? My intuition is that it will be a little bit lower than straight multiplication, but that this a low enough probability that we can get a pretty good approximation by ignoring the "impossibility" of an individual dying multiple times during that year. Is there another complicating factor?
>> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted. > We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers.
I agree it seems extremely high, but I think this is the clear claim of the paper. There were 85,000 people who were never vaccinated, and over the 54 day period of the study, 137 of them died. Thus if you were to extend the study to a year, you should expect more than 1000 deaths. As I see it, the possibilities are a) the paper is lying, b) I'm grossly misinterpreting what it says, or c) the current death rate in Israel for those older than 50 is about 1% even among the doubly vaccinated. If you have time to read it more closely, I'd love to hear what your thoughts on the discrepancy.
Edit: I realize I should've added another option d) the statistics are hopelessly confounded and the results don't mean anything. My current suspicion is that if people who contract Covid early are no longer eligible for receiving a booster, the apparent Covid incidence in the not-boosted arm may be drastically inflated, but I'm not sure if this is a large enough effect to negate the result.
> RESULTS
> A total of 843,208 participants met the eligibility criteria, of whom 758,118 (90%) received the booster during the 54-day study period. Death due to Covid-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the nonbooster group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day). The adjusted hazard ratio for death due to Covid-19 in the booster group, as compared with the nonbooster group, was 0.10 (95% confidence interval, 0.07 to 0.14; P<0.001).
> CONCLUSIONS
> Participants who received a booster at least 5 months after a second dose of BNT162b2 had 90% lower mortality due to Covid-19 than participants who did not receive a booster.
This paper can't take omicron into account, but, it's definitely good news. I'll take a 90% lower mortality rate any day.