It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly.
Therefore, a statistical control group for such a trial as you describe doing is not an unvaccinated cohort for the same time period, but rather for infinite time. Thus your results will require substantial adjustment for the eventual rates of encountering COVID (and the estimated rates of equivalent adverse effects), since your trial will presumably be of finite duration.
Also consider that it wasn't until the late 90's that the flu vaccine was approved for pregnant women and they were still worried about it. So we have the original adverse event studies post flu vaccine and compare them to post covid vaccine.
You are right, there are lots of confounds and interactions, we are careful to handle that properly. We're a bunch of nerds who don't have a dog in the political fight, we just want to show the data.
https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effec...
It seems very unintuitive but when you have these studies without a control they are shockingly biased… not due to anybody’s fault, just human nature.
Viruses are indeed mostly benign. Medical malpractice is a leading cause of death. In any case, it is not an either or. This vaccine does not prevent infection, the risk reduction for an otherwise healthy person, especially with the new variants and boosters, has never been established in a scientifically rigorous fashion. Yet, it is being recommended even to healthy children. You can hope and speculate that it has a benefit, but “the science” does not say so.
It doesn't exist, nor does anyone "in charge" want it to exist, or so it appears. The FDA waved through a trial for children with a sample size of about 1000, almost guaranteeing that a rare side effect like Myocarditis would not show up. That's a clear signal of regulatory capture, if you ask me.
The data that does show a benefit generally does not stratify across factors like age and risk factors, or if it does, extremely coarsely. That's, of course, misleading - perhaps intentionally so. In general, the paucity of meaningful data is just staggering.
Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too. Unless you think the over 50s are some sort of frog vs the younger tadpole.
Plenty more everywhere.
So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?
1) Belief in 'natural'. This has been a common marketing ploy since 'green' became a thing if not before. Of course the world we actually live in is entirely artificial - just as well as our 'natural' lives were nasty, brutish, and short.
2) Attempting to assert 'independence' or 'agency'. Again another marketing ploy, really we have very little agency or independence - however it is useful to make us believe we do and we should exercise it with our credit cards.
3) Attempting to be contrarian or a 'free thinker' in order to impress (ourselves? others?). Much much more humility is required before starting down that path.
4) Ideological/political propaganda/pressure from our peers. Belief systems have a tendency to become pathological when contained within a tightly delimited group. Probably this is a very great danger to our social discourse at present - though whether worse than before is unclear.
This sort of population-level data is bogus. The data is usually fudged in some way, for example by making it difficult to get counted as "vaccinated" after infection.
The source you quoted (at the end of '21) claimed a factor of 18x to 52x difference in hospitalization rate, but the current data has that down to a factor of 2.7x to 3.8x:
https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiMTgwMzZlZWYtN2E0Ny0...
Did the vaccine really lose that much in potency? Do the boosters work at all? That data can't tell us and this is why we need trials.
> Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too.
We may expect that, but we can't know. We do know that the infection risk is massively lower in the younger age groups. We also know the risk for Myocarditis after vaccination is massively higher in the younger age groups, particularly in males. We don't know why that is, however. Remember, we're not just looking for a risk reduction for one particular disease that many people already had anyway, we're looking for a net benefit of further administrations.
> So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?
All irrelevant to the lack of scientific data. For you to cough up some "business insider" article tells me you haven't exactly followed the relevant publications (or lack thereof) either.
The effects of COVID are so extraordinarily age skewed that this inference doesn't hold.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/ten-thousand-report-me...
[Dutch Reference]: https://www.lareb.nl/news/veel-meldingen-menstruatiestoornis...
Edit: it’s pretty sad that there are people who have such an ingrained agenda that they have convinced themselves that, yes, this IS how a professional involved in a scientific public health study behaves.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/sweden-birthrate-update-m...
https://pasteboard.co/uhkdWFvhCf9c.png
edit: this showed up in my inbox during dinner - more evidence https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/new-data-from-germany-birt...
But yes, one way to answer that question definitively would be to do a cohort study on conception rates. Split the data by vaccine status. This can't be done because public health agencies systematically refuse to do this sort of study, nor do they expose the necessary raw data. They don't want anyone being able to answer these sorts of questions. Most data that is available has to be forced out via FOIA requests and the courts.
I'm actually working (as a computational mathematician) with an OBGYN and a few other doctors on a paper on this topic right now. We're using real data and a control and doing real Bayesian stats and all of that. But the tragic thing is, we don't need to get fancy. There's so much signal that the vaccine is bad for women's reproductive health that it really is obvious. I hope we can find an uncaptured journal to get it published in.
This paper is pure propaganda that's toeing the line about vaccine safety. It's idea laundering so they can later point to an article in "Science" showing that it's safe.
I'm so sad that Science (the journal) as fallen so far and is so captured.