Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by maxk42 on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:20PM
(#29740320)
The study indeed did not set out to prove negative efficacy but a negative VE of 75% is a result that absolutely warrants further research.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:22PM
(#29740342)
Assuming that Denmark vaccinated oldest/most vulnerable first, this could be a confounded estimate (because age both means you got the vaccine first, and that your immune system will be less effective against Covid).
Personally, I think it's a statistical fluke, and was going to argue that it must be due to a smaller sample size until I saw the width of the confidence intervals (CI's get narrower as observations increase).
Very odd, and I'll be surprised if that makes it through peer review intact.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by incrudible on Thursday December 30, 2021 @04:24PM
(#29741612)
It's a statistical fluke that has been observed with Delta as well, particularly with the AstraZeneca vaccine:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410
It stands to reason that the unvaccinated at this point are in large parts hermits who are "protected" by their lifestyle. However, it's also plausible that the non-neutralizing antibodies from the vaccine induce a suboptimal immune response with Omikron.
That's from the linked paper. The authors don't claim at all that the vaccine has negative efficacy, and the study is simply not set up to measure that anyway. You cannot draw this conclusion from the data in this paper.