pw201

This technique is called "SHOUT HERE, ARGUMENT WEAK".

> easily verifiable information in this thread

As others have pointed out, none of the information you've posted in this thread supports the conclusion you think it does. You questioned whether the ONS mortality data linked to by kadkadels had a problem you say ONS data used to have. It did not, as it was easy to see by clicking through the link. You haven't been able to produce any ONS data which ever had this problem, which is strange.

You then linked to some Dutch data which, when translated, concludes that "Based on these results, there is no population-level evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse reaction."

You did not check either of these links yourself, so it's a bit rich to criticise others for failing to do so.

> which is a meaningless tautology, as the entire argument is about the definition of vaccinated used by the public health agencies.

The ONS mortality stats linked to by kadkadels at the start of the thread contain data related to people who received at least one COVID vaccine (counted from the day they received it, subdivided by time since reception and number of boosters), as well as an unvaccinated category who never did. This is clear to anyone who read the link that kadkadels posted.

Both you and armchairdweller falsely claimed that the unvaccinated category included people who received the vaccine less than N days ago, presumably because you believe that some deaths caused by the vaccine shortly after people receive it are hidden by these stats. But in fact, the vaccinated category starts from the day of vaccination, the unvaccinated tended to die more back when COVID was new, and the ASMR for unvaccinated and vaccinated converged by about the end of 2022, presumably because we've nearly all had COVID at least once so being vaxed now isn't doing a whole lot of good. Both the "vax did more harm than good" crowd and the "we should still be wearing masks" crowd are wrong.

Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers, as we knew pretty early on when their internal chats were leaked. See https://www.logically.ai/articles/hart-files-anti-vaccine-my... and https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1421397013078360064 for example, and my own small part in pointing out that all the astroturfing groups identified by Neil O'Brien MP were hosted on a single IP address (HART almost immediately moved, lol): https://twitter.com/nameandnature/status/1352998804832870402

Though the prime mover, Narice Bernard, seems to have moved on to newer conspiracies involving "climate lockdowns" and "15 minute cities", people who conclude that nothing HART say on COVID topics can trusted are well within reasonable bounds.

> The statistically invalid time-windowing games the public health agencies all played in which people who had taken vaccines were classed as unvaccinated

As I have just replied to the other commenter, the ONS data he appears to object to categorises various "vaccinated" categories starting immediately after vaccination. The regulator's reply to Fenton makes this clear: https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/ed-hum...

I assume this reply is what you refer to when you say that the ONS admit the data cannot be used that way. However, since that reply, the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population. Paul Mainwood graphed the ASMRs here: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1627979309812965381

I see no evidence here that being vaccinated makes you more likely to die, which is what the original thread was about.

The ONS data linked the comment you're replying to is clear that it counts "vaccinated" from the day of vaccination. What ONS data are you referring to which "used to have the obvious flaw that people dropping dead 3 days after their first dose were defined as unvaccinated"?

> By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product.

Where?

Where does this "publisher/platform" meme come from? It's completely incorrect but I keep seeing it. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre... for more.

> But even if science proposes God as the hypothesis at step 3, the next problem comes at step 4: how are you going to test it? "Um, God, could you do that again? And, um, sign it this time?" You can't run the experiment. I don't see how you could run the experiment even in principle.

Then you should check your Bible ;-) because 1 Kings 18 describes just such an experiment. There's always a Less Wrong article, and this one's is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s...

There have also been things like experiments on the efficacy of healing prayers whose negative results lend credence to the idea that a god who answers prayers does not exist. https://www.noctua.org.uk/blog/2010/07/08/healing-prayer-exp... discusses that (the links to the Premier Radio forums are dead, alas).

> even if we can't see it with science, we might see it with history. We might find historical record of God doing something.

"It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages."

Or consider Elijah and the priests of Baal in 1 Kings 18. Pretty good empirical demonstration there.

Of course, if the priests of Baal had the equivalent of a modern Christian apologist in their ranks, things might have been a little different: http://apastasea.blogspot.com/2014/10/elijah-and-apologist-o...

Thanks. Vim links on your page appear to be broken, btw.

What happens is that the nutters follow and reply to popular threads (see epidemiology Twitter during the pandemic, for example). If there are more of them, Twitter loses value.

Twitter has started to let you control who can reply, but that removes some serendipity, so if everyone worth following does that, Twitter loses value.

That's not how Section 230 works: it's explicitly designed so that some editing does not open you to full liability for user provided content (but it's common to think it does the opposite). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... explains.

> But, it's not the same thing at all, because if you were to separate yourself from the violinist, they would die from their disease / from not being given very extraordinary aid, but if you were to separate yourself from the fetus, it would die from not being given very ordinary means of sustenance.

Why does whether it's a common (pregancy) or uncommon (violinist hooked up to sleeper) occurrence alter the moral status of disconnecting the person who is reliant on their connection to another for their continued existence?

The Redditors on /r/cambridge routinely tell American applicants that the whole "extra-curriculars" thing is only relevant if whatever you did demonstrates enthusiasm for or ability in your subject, both of which you will need to survive. Ability for the obvious reason, enthusiasm because you will get the shock of it no longer being effortless and meeting peers who are better at it than you.

For me, the "HR interview" was "what would you say to convince me of your enthusiasm for physics?" (as in, I was explicitly asked that very question) not "tell me about how your adventures pogo-sticking up the Khyber on your gap yah made you a well-rounded person" (and the "technical interview" asked you do actually do some physics).

As someone who couldn't have afforded a gap yah and would probably have been too frail to go on one, I'm pretty happy about that.

The thing that I'm told they will do is look at your school and weight things like GCSE results and A level results accordingly (as in, if you are at a bad school, they'll make allowances for that). https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/10/how-cambri... is interesting from that point of view.

This is called "whataboutery". It's also disingenuous.

In general, there's a fast statistic about COVID deaths, which is something like "deaths within N days of a positive PCR". This will catch some people who died for another reason, though if you think that's a serious problem, you'd need to argue that so many people could be expected to die for some other reason within N days that this would significantly bias the stat.

There's a slow stat, where COVID is a contributing or underlying cause on a death certificate. In the UK, these are in rough agreement. Notably, at the start of the pandemic, when testing wasn't available, the fast stat was an underestimate. https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/measuring-mortali... has some links to the ONS and places like that.

Berenson is a crank: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...

The first sentence of the article is that it's about "People who are fully vaccinated against Covid yet catch the virus". If the vaccines don't lower P(transmission|infection) but do lower P(infection), then they lower P(infection & transmission) (because that's the product of those two).

This is incorrect: we don't know the rates, because we don't know the denominators. Published figures use estimated denominators: "because the proportion of unvaccinated people is small and the NIMS population estimates are high, it makes the unvaccinated population appear significantly larger than it is. As a consequence, the Covid case rate per 100,000 unvaccinated people, when calculated using this figure, is suppressed. Just being out by 1 or 2 per cent could change the apparent population of unvaccinated people by 30 per cent." (from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cfaadc98-35ab-11ec-8ef4-8... )

They can in the UK. Back in January, the QRA Typhoons chasing an unresponsive aircraft back in January went right overhead at 10000 ft at supersonic speeds. That was loud: https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/news/huge-sonic-boom-...

> Seems like the school culture can shape behavior and varies a lot.

Like other universities, things are also going to differ between subjects. But OxBridge has autonomous colleges which provide undergrad accommodation and arrange the individual tutorials/supervisions for undergrads. So there, college culture also matters. Some colleges certainly have a posher reputation than others, some have a reputation for being sportier, and so on. If you read a typical "OxBridge is really like this" articles without bearing that in mind you'll think the whole place is one thing.

Certainly on Twitter, hyping ivermectin as the cure is also good Bayesian evidence that the speaker also believes a bunch of unevidenced or plain wrong things about Covid19.

Samsung bought what was advertised as mobile handset business after CSR failed to spot that combo BT/Wifi chips were the future and threw away their lead. Qualcomm got the rest a few years later.

("what was advertised as" because there wasn't really a differentiation in the R&D bits, so there was a somewhat arbitrary split and hasty redacting of repos given to Samsung to avoid names of other customers in comments).

Samsung's phone division and electronic parts division aren't the same thing, so there was no guarantee that the phones would buy the Bluetooth/Wifi from their new acquisition, although I hear they did eventually.

I investigated this once (while I was sitting around doing not much during a 3 month notice period, funnily enough). It's as you say, the breach of a contract is something where the employer would have to sue you for damages, and if you're sitting around not doing much, it's going to be hard to argue that losing you has caused them harm, much less enough to make it worth suing over.

I didn't break the contract anyway out of some combination of feeling like it was breaking a promise and the worry that Cambridge is a small town.

> The UK Government is arresting people who film empty hospitals:

The police arrested one person who walked, mask-less, though quiet public areas of a busy hospital (and was abusive when challenged by hospital workers). The vital need to spread conspiracy theories on Facebook isn't one of the "reasonable excuses" for leaving your house.

> Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles

This is misleading. The number of cycles used is irrelevant. Reference: https://virologydownunder.com/the-false-positive-pcr-problem... (from someone who has actually used PCR in research, as neither you nor I have).

> and it's causing a lot of false positives.

We can get an upper bound on false positives from ONS surveys over the summer, by assuming all their positives were false (prevelance was low then). At https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... the ONS says "We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false. For example, in the most recent six-week period (31 July to 10 September), 159 of the 208,730 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.92%." (The false positive rate would then be 100% - 99.92% = 0.08 %). The ONS prevelance surveys are processed at a couple of the Lighthouse Labs which also do the Pillar 2 testing in the UK.

Can you explain why "false positives" go down among vaccinated patients?

> fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated)

Evidence for "many"? We have a couple of metrics for UK deaths from COVID: deaths within 28 days of a positive test, and root cause / contributing causes ("of" vs "with") on death certificates. These are imperfect in both directions (for example, some patients who die spend more than 28 days in hospital with COVID, meaning the 28 day metric undercounts them) but agree that the UK has seen around 70000 deaths of COVID.

Comparing winter excess death peaks, where government interventions (like lockdowns) didn't occur, with COVID19 peaks doesn't tell you what would have happened without the interventions. You (I think) say the interventions caused the peaks (or maybe that they're no worse than winter flu peaks so govts shouldn't have intervened, you're not clear on your exact view). The experts say the interventions stopped the COVID peaks from being higher. They also reduced flu deaths as a by-product (https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/128766013743239577...).

> Again, there's just no evidence of anything unusual happening here.

In Switzerland, something unusual certainly happened compared to 2017, namely a peak outside winter flu season (https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/health/state...). What caused that, in your view?

In Sweden, where the government stopped short of a full lockdown but messed up care homes by refusing to hospitalise people with COVID19 symptoms (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52704836), excess deaths also peaked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#Ex...). Were the Swedes also panicked into not going to hospital? What did the care home deaths die of?

To return to the question which started the thread, the PHE stats in the UK overestimate by including people who died for other reasons after a positive test, but this effect cannot have caused anything like the error in the statistics that you claim: a back of the envelope calculation based on typical lifespans (http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2020/07/mountains-and-mole...) gives 20 wrongly-counted deaths per day. If you're claiming that the panic lessened that life expactancy by keeping people out of hospitals, I'd note that even if every single missing cardiac case dropped dead, that's 250 people per day, no where near the 1700 we were seeing at the peak. If PHE continues to count old positive tests now, it will matter, because there are many fewer deaths in total.

> Excess deaths is not the same thing as "deaths caused by COVID". This conflation relies on the assumption that you can virtually empty hospitals out and have no effect on mortality at all, which is absurd.

I know that excess deaths aren't the same as deaths caused by COVID. The idea that you can lockdown in week 13 and have 12,000 excess deaths per week 3 weeks later because hospitals were "virtually empty" also seems absurd. Emergency healthcare remained available and the messaging was that people should still go to hospital if they were ill. I do expect deaths because routine healthcare was limited during lockdown, including people who died during the period of lockdown because they couldn't get hospital treatment (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/08/more-people-...), but without further evidence, I'd be sceptical that this was the dominant effect.

I'm not sure what you're claiming here: are you saying that deaths because people couldn't access healthcare are almost entirely the cause of the UK's excess death peak? What is your evidence for that claim?

> If COVID is so deadly, why do some countries show no difference in excess deaths vs previous years?

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... has Germany's recorded COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths as 8,538 and 7,549 respectively, and Switzerland's at 1,668 and 1,567. Your question seems to boil down to "why did some countries do so much better at containing the epidemic than others?" I don't know, although Germany and Switzerland seem better organised than the UK so that might have something to do with it.

The R is reduced while any effective measures are active. The playable sim for Scenario 1 has them active while there's blue shading over the graph, deactivating them once herd immunity is reached in that sim. In that case, compared to scenario 0 (do nothing), fewer people have been exposed so fewer people die. So it is not true to say, as you did, that "Youre are going to have the same number of deaths sooner or later as long as the hospitals aren't overwhelmed."

> There's no avoiding society returning to normal as people need jobs to pay rent and buy food.

You've moved the goalposts, but even so, the later sims suggest other things that can be done with less invasive measures like test and trace, wearing masks and social distancing. These don't prevent people doing jobs. They do decrease the number of people who die.

Quoting the site: "This reduces total cases! Even if you don't get R < 1, reducing R still saves lives, by reducing the 'overshoot' above herd immunity. Lots of folks think "Flatten The Curve" spreads out cases without reducing the total. This is impossible in any Epidemiology 101 model. But because the news reported "80%+ will be infected" as inevitable, folks thought total cases will be the same no matter what. Sigh."

What I said: "temporarily reducing the R number (lockdowns, distancing, masks) reduces the overshoot in the total number of people who get the disease (some proportion of which will die)."

How are these "completely different"?

> If it hadn't been noticed, the English death toll would eventually have matched the case count.

In about 60 years or so.

>> In the UK, we were loosing 1100 people a day entirely through covid

> which is not true and has never been true.

Excess death stats (all cause deaths over and above the average for the time of year) are available[1] and peak at 12000 in a week or about 1700 a day. I'd say you deserve your downvotes in this case.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/htgq14/oc_...

> Youre are going to have the same number of deaths sooner or later as long as the hospitals aren't overwhelmed.

Even assuming there's never a vaccine or effective cure, this is not true: temporarily reducing the R number (lockdowns, distancing, masks) reduces the overshoot in the total number of people who get the disease (some proportion of which will die). It's the difference between scenario 0 and scenario 1 in the excellent https://ncase.me/covid-19/ playable models.

Where does this "publisher/platform" meme come from? It's completely incorrect (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...) but I keep seeing it.

Suggest you give less credence to whoever you contracted it from.