This year we kill it: Corona Virus Thread Mark II

[sihnfahl]

Based on the sharper up/down profile in South Africa... It'd be sort of funny if Omicron ends up with COVID driving itself extinct because it spreads so fast that there isn't time for waning immunity to factor in.

"Harris County Reports First COVID-19 Omicron Variant-Related Death

Unvaccinated man with underlying health conditions had tested positive for the Omicron variant

Houston – Harris County Public Health (HCPH) is reporting the first COVID-19 Omicron-variantassociated death in the County.
The death reported this afternoon was of a man between the ages of 50-60 years old who was unvaccinated and had been infected with COVID-19 previously.
The individual was at higher risk of severe complications from COVID-19 due to his unvaccinated status and had underlying health conditions."

Nice thought, but ...

Also, 73% of tested infections in the US are coming back Omicron. The number of cases / day reported are going up, and we're almost at 200k / day.

[Bartmanhomer]

"Harris County Reports First COVID-19 Omicron Variant-Related Death

Unvaccinated man with underlying health conditions had tested positive for the Omicron variant

Houston – Harris County Public Health (HCPH) is reporting the first COVID-19 Omicron-variantassociated death in the County.
The death reported this afternoon was of a man between the ages of 50-60 years old who was unvaccinated and had been infected with COVID-19 previously.
The individual was at higher risk of severe complications from COVID-19 due to his unvaccinated status and had underlying health conditions."

Nice thought, but ...

This is one of the main reasons why I can't stand ant-vaxxers/anti-maskers. He made his choice, a very bad one to be exact.

[NichG]

"Harris County Reports First COVID-19 Omicron Variant-Related Death

Unvaccinated man with underlying health conditions had tested positive for the Omicron variant

Houston – Harris County Public Health (HCPH) is reporting the first COVID-19 Omicron-variantassociated death in the County.
The death reported this afternoon was of a man between the ages of 50-60 years old who was unvaccinated and had been infected with COVID-19 previously.
The individual was at higher risk of severe complications from COVID-19 due to his unvaccinated status and had underlying health conditions."

Nice thought, but ...

Also, 73% of tested infections in the US are coming back Omicron. The number of cases / day reported are going up, and we're almost at 200k / day.

My comment was less about severity to humans and more about whether the really fast spread and fast decay would push things into a 'fire burning itself out' phase as opposed to a slow smoldering endemic burn... At least in simulations, I am seeing that it's possible for an increase in infectiousness (up to a point at least) to also increase the probability of viral extinction, particularly when the virus is in a phase with a sustained series of waves of infection rather than a stable steady-state. One of the important factors seems to be the distribution of immunity persistence - if loss of immunity is Poisson (with some people losing their immunity almost immediately after gaining it), increase in infectiousness generally makes the long-term survival of the virus more likely across the board. But if loss of immunity is a narrower distribution with zero-immunity individuals being extremely rare, then there's an 'infectiousness desert' where increasing infectiousness seems to actually make it more likely for the virus to go extinct up to a point.

I can't say 'Omicron is at that point' based on the data we have, but I might as well register a prediction now since if it does go that way over the course of the next year, I'll definitely want to claim to have called it

[Lord Torath]

US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say

This looks promising, assuming we can actually get people to take it. It's from the army, and many of those who distrust the US government still trust the armed forces, so maybe those who refused the current vaccines will be more likely to trust this one.

I can hope, anyway.

[Tyndmyr]

It's from the army, and many of those who distrust the US government still trust the armed forces, so maybe those who refused the current vaccines will be more likely to trust this one.

There is a vast difference between the military and military medical.

Even those currently in the military don't trust the military medical system. I'd consider a medical product coming directly from them to be somewhere lower than inhaling bleach in terms of safety and reliability.

Also of note, current vaccines are not developed by the US government, but by Pfizer, J&J, and Moderna. The government is merely distributing them in some cases...though the same vaccines are also available from non-government sources. If government distrust is the factor you think is most significant, surely the vaccines made by non-governmental agencies would be less of a concern than vaccines made by a government agency.

At least this year was an improvement.

Mmm. On getting people vaccinated, maybe.

We add another 1 million deaths, worldwide, every 4 months or so. That's been relatively unabated.

And that's IF you can trust the numbers out of countries who are doing their most to hide the true impact of COVID for their own, varied reasons.

Despite this year not being quite over yet, we've had more deaths in the US over 2021 than we had in 2020. Late November numbers surpassed the previous year totals. Leaving aside the mess of comparing data between countries with different standards, that's an unfortunate indicator that the situation has worsened since last year, not improved.

As others have pointed out, that doesn't mean the trend will continue. There is hope that the disease might burn itself out or something, but that is...well, far from certain. It's happened to diseases in the past, such as Black Death, which eventually vanished, but that was not swift, lasting many years. All in all it seems, well, humbling. Our ability to affect the course of a disease at the pandemic stage isn't nearly so large as we hoped.

[Lord Torath]

Sure, Pfizer et.al. are not the government, but it was the government that said the vaccines were safe to use.

I do recall hearing about problems with some of the injections giving to soldiers headed to Iraq in the first Gulf War. There was a lot of talk* that some of the Gulf War Syndrome effects were due to the injections that were supposed to give immunity/resistance to Iraq's (estimated? assumed? projected?) chemical/bioweapon arsenal.

If Walter Reed goes through the same testing regime that Pfizer et. al. went through, and the FDA goes through the same process for evaluating it, I'll be more inclined to get it.

* I have not followed to story to see if there was anything behind the talk, but I would not be surprised to find out there was.

Also, on a somewhat related note: xkcd: Immunity

[Tyndmyr]

Sure, Pfizer et.al. are not the government, but it was the government that said the vaccines were safe to use.

That is potentially a problem, but there's also distrust of large pharma companies as well. There's a range of reasons for distrust. Pfizer had only just settled for a drug that killed a ton of people when releasing this, J&J is still undergoing litigation for putting asbestos in baby powder for decades, and Moderna had never released a commercial product before this one.

It's sort of a perfect storm of things not working out, and trust being in short supply in many areas. That's solvable, but it's hard to solve fast, and without a lot of work. You can lose trust a lot faster than you can build it.

I do recall hearing about problems with some of the injections giving to soldiers headed to Iraq in the first Gulf War. There was a lot of talk* that some of the Gulf War Syndrome effects were due to the injections that were supposed to give immunity/resistance to Iraq's (estimated? assumed? projected?) chemical/bioweapon arsenal.

There was some talk of that, but possibly a larger problem is that the vaccine wasn't tested against the kind of infection vector it was supposed to protect against. Most chemical weapons are inhalants, generally as a fine powder or liquid. The vaccine was designed for people working with animals to protect against incidental contact-based transmission.

Therefore, it was uncertain that it would work, and the gov ultimately lost it's court case...in part because it was regarded as experimental, and the military is required to obtain informed consent before administering experimental vaccines. That probably hurt trust some...though I believe it actually got re-instated after I got out, and is in at least limited use now. I'm not sure if it's the exact same vaccine now or not.

Distrust in military medical is a lot wider than just vaccines, though. They are legendarily bad, and it is something of a meme that health care consists of a bottle of Motrin and instructions to drink water for literally anything. Lots of people had military medical horror stories(had a couple myself) and most actual significant problems end up getting handled by the civilian medical system, either officially or not.

[farothel]

That is potentially a problem, but there's also distrust of large pharma companies as well. There's a range of reasons for distrust. Pfizer had only just settled for a drug that killed a ton of people when releasing this, J&J is still undergoing litigation for putting asbestos in baby powder for decades, and Moderna had never released a commercial product before this one.

It's sort of a perfect storm of things not working out, and trust being in short supply in many areas. That's solvable, but it's hard to solve fast, and without a lot of work. You can lose trust a lot faster than you can build it.

True, but the Corona vaccines have been given to quite a number of people already, with everybody looking at everything that's happening with them, I think they are quite safe otherwise we would have already seen the reports.

[sihnfahl]

True, but the Corona vaccines have been given to quite a number of people already, with everybody looking at everything that's happening with them, I think they are quite safe otherwise we would have already seen the reports.

These people, though, don't trust the reports. No matter from where. Or from whom.

[warmachine]

It's a pity there's so much disbelief about the Covid vaccines. There is legitimate scepticism about pharma company corruption and that reduction in cases could be the natural evolution of the virus. However, we do have vaccine trials not controlled by the manufacturer or government and can't be normal evolution. A large chunk of the US population refuses the vaccines, making them a control group with similar geography, socioeconomic status and age profile as the vaccine group. And the results are still good.

[sihnfahl]

It's a pity there's so much disbelief about the Covid vaccines. There is legitimate scepticism about pharma company corruption and that reduction in cases could be the natural evolution of the virus. However, we do have vaccine trials not controlled by the manufacturer or government and can't be normal evolution. A large chunk of the US population refuses the vaccines, making them a control group with similar geography, socioeconomic status and age profile as the vaccine group. And the results are still good.

But then they'd argue that the numbers are being manipulated, thus making the vaccine look more successful than they really are.

Just like they said the numbers were being pushed higher because hospitals would be paid more if they were treating a patient for COVID under the CARES Act.

[Tyndmyr]

True, but the Corona vaccines have been given to quite a number of people already, with everybody looking at everything that's happening with them, I think they are quite safe otherwise we would have already seen the reports.

Well, mistrust isn't just about one product. It's true that a company can put out one bad product and another good one, and, say, J&J's baby powder problem isn't directly linked to the vaccine. That said, asbestos has been known to be harmful for quite a long time. So the fact that they continued to sell it long after the negative effects were widely known understandably impacted trust. This is recent enough that court lawsuits are not yet wholly complete...with J&J taking the interesting approach of spinning off a daughter company with the liabilities to eat the costs without impacting the parent company. I have no idea if that legally holds water or not, but from a trust perspective, well...they look shady.

To dig through all the shady things pharma companies have done would take a long time. Longer than most people are willing to put into evaluating a product. Covid has brought this issue front and center, but it's been brewing for a while. It would have probably eventually blown up elsewhere if this hadn't arisen.

And...there are reports. VAERS is showing large numbers of deaths and other side effects. Are these reports trustworthy, though? Well...that's back to the overall question. If you don't trust VAERS, what do you trust? You get different results depending on which sources you trust, and that problem is extremely messy.

These people, though, don't trust the reports. No matter from where. Or from whom.

That's sort of the problem, yeah. If no trusted channel remains, you just have noise. People talking at cross purposes, but not really with one another.

The communication channels that convey science to the public have been...increasingly compromised. Even before this, there was a problem with journals publishing dodgy studies. Toss in the added layer of mainstream media attempting to have non-experts summarize this for other non-experts, and you end up with a pretty good dose of confusion.

I mean, we've got respected journals such as the Lancet publishing a study saying that there's no need to give out booster shots. That's a top tier journal in the field with a long history of well respected research. Is that enough to trust them? If not, why? What about other historically reputable entities putting out studies saying something different?

What about Gibraltar, with it's 100% vaccination rate*, with a vastly increasing infection rate? That's hard to look at and still blame on the unvaccinated. The USS Milkwalkee, with a 100% vaccinated crew is out of service because of all the covid aboard. We have likewise had outbreaks among fully vaccinated populations on cruise ships and airplanes. Now, none of those disproves individual outcome improvement, but the idea that spread can be controlled via vaccine is on extremely shaky ground, and where you fall on that largely depends on which particular sources you're trusting.

*They've actually dispensed enough doses to be at a 140% fully vaccinated rate, but in practice, many of those are boosters or vaccination of visitors. In any case, it is sufficient to be relatively certain that they are fully vaccinated.

[Squire Doodad]

And...there are reports. VAERS is showing large numbers of deaths and other side effects. Are these reports trustworthy, though? Well...that's back to the overall question. If you don't trust VAERS, what do you trust? You get different results depending on which sources you trust, and that problem is extremely messy.

You don't trust VAERS. As Politifact describes in this article, VAERS is basically a large mass of raw data that is accepted before it is properly verified. It is not meant to be used as directly usable source of information, it is meant to be used as a raw database to be processed and interpreted accordingly.
VAERS may read "person X was hospitalized after taking Moderna vaccine" but it 1) does not actually mean that happened (though it'd be ridiculous for someone to lie) 2) does not mean the two were at all related 3) does not describe the kind of affliction and 4) does not describe any of the scenario.

What about Gibraltar, with it's 100% vaccination rate*, with a vastly increasing infection rate? That's hard to look at and still blame on the unvaccinated. The USS Milkwalkee, with a 100% vaccinated crew is out of service because of all the covid aboard. We have likewise had outbreaks among fully vaccinated populations on cruise ships and airplanes. Now, none of those disproves individual outcome improvement, but the idea that spread can be controlled via vaccine is on extremely shaky ground, and where you fall on that largely depends on which particular sources you're trusting.

Think of a car crash.
Vaccines are seatbelts. Masks are brakes.

Having seatbelts mean that if you get in a crash, you are less likely to get hurt. They do not stop you from getting into crashes.
Having brakes help stop you from getting into a crash, both from someone driving too fast and if you are driving too fast. They do not directly help you from dying in a crash.
You would want to get a seatbelt AND have good brakes if you're driving. You don't say seatbelts are useless because you still get into crashes, you go and get brakes to go with them.

The goal of high vaccination rates is so the health system is able to survive - in past waves it has been overwhelmed by high hospitalization rates, which means less resources to take care of people who are critically sick, whether they're sick because of COVID or because of other things. People have been sent miles upon miles to other hospitals for injuries because their local hospital had to put all of its resources into helping victims of the pandemic.
Vaccines also tamp down on the actual spread, but the main benefits are that it means you don't have to go to the hospital or die. You still need to wear masks to help stop the spread and keep people safe.

[NichG]

I mean, we've got respected journals such as the Lancet publishing a study saying that there's no need to give out booster shots. That's a top tier journal in the field with a long history of well respected research. Is that enough to trust them? If not, why? What about other historically reputable entities putting out studies saying something different?

I feel like there's a basic scientific literacy thing here. As a scientist you get a much better idea of what sorts of conclusions can be supported and what sorts of conclusions indicate authorial BS.

I'd be inherently suspicious of any scientific paper which drew unconditional conclusions about what sort of policy should be pursued or what is needed/unneeded. Though in many cases it's not actually the paper doing that, it's someone (media, another paper, etc) talking about the paper through their own lens of interpretation.

A conclusion of 'boosters have X% effect' or 'even with boosters we won't get herd immunity' or things like that are the types of things that its at least structurally possible that a paper could support, but 'you don't need a booster' assumes a relative value judgement that isn't going to be supportable by data or experiment because it's up to individual priorities.

A scientific paper can't really tell you what you should do, it can only tell you what is likely to happen if you choose to do one thing or another. If the author skips over that distinction and assumes what the reader should want, it's time to ignore that section of the paper, reanalyze the raw data, and read the key references to make sure they say what the author is claiming they say. It doesn't mean the entire paper is e.g. falsified, but it does mean time to stop treating it as some sort of integral whole.

I think there's also a sort of benefit to the experience of having to rely on papers for one's day to day job activities. You can't conclude 'they're all BS' because then you can't progress your own stuff, but you also can't conclude they're all perfectly trustworthy because then you'll get stuck looking for your own mistake when it was someone else's. So you learn how to check things and test things and verify and prove not just because it feels better to know, but because that's how you get your program to work or your lab experiment to function or whatever.

[Squire Doodad]

In particular, the "boosters aren't important" conclusion was because at the time, there weren't any signs of waning resistance, and getting vaccines to more people was more important than keeping up then-maintained antibody rates.
The actual conclusion is closer to "so far, antibodies have been holding up, so we're better off using spare doses on unvaccinated people than giving boosters."
Prioritizing unvaccinated people getting vaccines is still important, but now we're seeing signs of waning resistance in elderly groups 8 months in, so a booster is a good idea based on what we now know.
Said waning is not because of mutations but rather because antibodies don't always persist indefinitely. Once everything is under control, ensuring there's a long-lasting generalist vaccine can finish off the problem.

You could argue there's value in waiting because of this, but there's almost zero opportunity cost here. Besides, no one can see the future, scientists couldn't have known all this ahead of time.

[NichG]

In particular, the "boosters aren't important" conclusion was because at the time, there weren't any signs of waning resistance, and getting vaccines to more people was more important than keeping up then-maintained antibody rates.
The actual conclusion is closer to "so far, antibodies have been holding up, so we're better off using spare doses on unvaccinated people than giving boosters."
Prioritizing unvaccinated people getting vaccines is still important, but now we're seeing signs of waning resistance in elderly groups 8 months in, so a booster is a good idea based on what we now know.
Said waning is not because of mutations but rather because antibodies don't always persist indefinitely. Once everything is under control, ensuring there's a long-lasting generalist vaccine can finish off the problem.

You could argue there's value in waiting because of this, but there's almost zero opportunity cost here. Besides, no one can see the future, scientists couldn't have known all this ahead of time.

The point is, those aren't just objective conclusions given data, there's subjective values of the particular scientist being woven in there. Like 'the important thing is total lives saved'. That may be a perfectly fine value to hold, but it's sloppy science to blend it with things that can be objectively supported from the data.

'A dose used to boost an average vaccinated member of the population will save an expected number of lives 10 times fewer than a dose used to provide initial vaccination' is an example of the sort of conclusion one might be able to draw from data. 'We shouldn't give out boosters' requires assumed inputs of values and context.

[Squire Doodad]

The point is, those aren't just objective conclusions given data, there's subjective values of the particular scientist being woven in there. Like 'the important thing is total lives saved'. That may be a perfectly fine value to hold, but it's sloppy science to blend it with things that can be objectively supported from the data.

'A dose used to boost an average vaccinated member of the population will save an expected number of lives 10 times fewer than a dose used to provide initial vaccination' is an example of the sort of conclusion one might be able to draw from data. 'We shouldn't give out boosters' requires assumed inputs of values and context.

This is more going into semantics, though. If a paper indicates that there is low benefit from a booster given that antibodies had been staying strong at that point, and then a qualified person reads this and interprets this to indicate there is little reason to give boosters given the circumstances currently at play, then "We shouldn't give out boosters" is both an accurate reading and also not, strictly speaking, the assertion made by the paper.
Thus, the paper itself is not making subjective assumptions, but the information from that paper can validly and accurately be read to have subjective implications.

[warmachine]

Delta already eliminated any chance of herd immunity. Its high reproduction rate and reductions in vaccine efficacy pushed the minimum vaccination rate over 100%. At this point, we're priming immune systems to reduce severe cases and watching everyone get exposed, slowing infection if severe cases of a variant rise too fast.

Like a bad flu season. Only nastier.

[NichG]

This is more going into semantics, though. If a paper indicates that there is low benefit from a booster given that antibodies had been staying strong at that point, and then a qualified person reads this and interprets this to indicate there is little reason to give boosters given the circumstances currently at play, then "We shouldn't give out boosters" is both an accurate reading and also not, strictly speaking, the assertion made by the paper.
Thus, the paper itself is not making subjective assumptions, but the information from that paper can validly and accurately be read to have subjective implications.

Consider different value systems:

- "I only care about my own personal risk of dying in the next year."
- "I only care about long-term consequences to me from COVID, aggregated over risk of death, long COVID, psychological and economic impacts of the pandemic continuing at a particular level, etc"
- "I only care about the risk of my elderly parents dying from COVID"
- "I care about saving the maximum number of lives"
- "I care about saving the maximum number of lives of people in my country/culture/group, and I don't care about others"
- "I care about overall quality of life more than lives saved"
- "I care more about long-term existential risk to humanity than about short-term costs in life"
- "I want as many people to die as possible"

Science when done right provides information which is invariant to those differences - its useful to help someone attain their motives, even if their motives are very different from those of the author. That's the basis on which we try to build something larger than the work of one person which can still be trusted without having to know about the people who contributed each brick of the overall structure. A paper which shows that the relative change in risk of death for boosting a vaccinated individual is lower than using that dose to vaccinate a naive would lead people holding those different values to make different choices about what action is appropriate.

Of course when you read and use a scientific paper, you fuse that with your own motives in order to make a decision as to what to do. But saying e.g. 'the paper says we don't need boosters' implies a specific viewpoint and does disservice to the paper if the paper is written in a viewpoint agnostic way. And if the paper really is written from a specific narrow value system then, as a scientist, I would not grant the paper as much of the benefit of the doubt that I grant to papers which are written in an objective stance. When I see people saying they don't trust science because scientists put their own motives and biases in, while maybe a third of that comes from scientists who write very much non-neutral things and lean on the reputation of science to try to push them as objective, the rest comes from trying to relate to scientific papers the way you'd relate to a persuasive article in a newspaper, rather than, say, the way you'd relate to a piece of software on your computer or a control in your car.

[Squire Doodad]

snip

Okay, but none of this changes the core argument presented - that The Lancet's paper is not a sign that there is a lack of consensus on the topic of boosters, as it was done at a time before said consensus was reached.

[NichG]

Okay, but none of this changes the core argument presented - that The Lancet's paper is not a sign that there is a lack of consensus on the topic of boosters, as it was done at a time before said consensus was reached.

The point is that looking at scientific papers to give you a consensus about 'what you should do' or 'what policy should be' is a fundamental error in the first place, it's asking scientific papers to be and do something that they're not actually for.

If you have 5 papers each of which, for sake of argument, has a sentence at the end saying 'the authors think given this, X is the best policy to pursue' but all the X's are different, that doesn't mean that there are any inconsistencies in the experiments or the data. It may just mean that each of the five authors is prioritizing something different when they convert their data into policy suggestions. So the correct way to deal with that is to ignore the policy suggestions surrounding a paper, attached either by the original authors or those who are using the paper to push their arguments, and just aggregate the data. Then draw conclusions from that aggregate data directly, based on your own priorities.

If people had a habit of treating science papers that way, there'd be less justification for this feeling of betrayal or distrust when different papers seem to suggest different policy directions, or when policy directions supported by the conclusions of one paper turn out to be bad decisions as the situation evolves. A lack of consensus about the results of a particular experimental protocol or the measurement of a particular property of Covid would indicate a problem, but there shouldn't even be a question about scientific consensus on policy choices - it's a non-sequitur.

[Tyndmyr]

You don't trust VAERS. As Politifact describes in this article, VAERS is basically a large mass of raw data that is accepted before it is properly verified. It is not meant to be used as directly usable source of information, it is meant to be used as a raw database to be processed and interpreted accordingly.
VAERS may read "person X was hospitalized after taking Moderna vaccine" but it 1) does not actually mean that happened (though it'd be ridiculous for someone to lie) 2) does not mean the two were at all related 3) does not describe the kind of affliction and 4) does not describe any of the scenario.

My point wasn't that you, specifically, should trust VAERS. The point is that, if you do not, what do you trust instead, and why?

I'm not merely pointing out that wrong information exists...it does, but that is only part of the problem, and to some extent, always exists. Knowledge is never perfect, especially about emerging events, and frequently needs later correction. However, this scenario seems to have gotten worse than most, and credibility has become...incredibly subjective. There have been so very many reversals and modifications of both policy and data that what one believes becomes...while not quite arbitrary, enough so as to have divided the public.

Health system[/I] is able to survive - in past waves it has been overwhelmed by high hospitalization rates, which means less resources to take care of people who are critically sick, whether they're sick because of COVID or because of other things. People have been sent miles upon miles to other hospitals for injuries because their local hospital had to put all of its resources into helping victims of the pandemic.
Vaccines also tamp down on the actual spread, but the main benefits are that it means you don't have to go to the hospital or die. You still need to wear masks to help stop the spread and keep people safe.

One such hospital is near me. It's down to eight nurses, because a majority of the nursing staff rejected the vaccine and either quit or were fired as a result. This has greatly hampered capacity, and they have hit it...and the resulting overflow is stressing other local hospitals.

This isn't specifically a fault of the vaccine, though it gets conflated with that. Rather, it is a consequence of the policies surrounding the vaccine. At some point, it was evidently decided that no nurses would be better than unvaccinated nurses. Certainly this policy would be bonkers if one had applied it earlier, before the vaccines were widely available. Care is obviously superior to no care.

And yet we arrive at the case where people are lacking in care because of this decision. It feels as if an assessment has gone wrong, at a minimum. Perhaps the number of people willing to quit were underestimated. Perhaps the effect of another covid mutation were underestimated. Regardless of how we got here, it's not a great place to be, and it doesn't instill confidence.

I feel like there's a basic scientific literacy thing here. As a scientist you get a much better idea of what sorts of conclusions can be supported and what sorts of conclusions indicate authorial BS.

In theory, yes, relying on the data, and avoiding extrapolating conclusions from it is...stronger. But it's not uncommon. Many abstracts not only fit a story to the data nowadays, they move on to at least suggesting actions.

This isn't always crazy, but as you say, it is definitely more subjective. The more subjective opinion we have marketed as science, well...the less trust science is going to retain.

I think there's also a sort of benefit to the experience of having to rely on papers for one's day to day job activities. You can't conclude 'they're all BS' because then you can't progress your own stuff, but you also can't conclude they're all perfectly trustworthy because then you'll get stuck looking for your own mistake when it was someone else's. So you learn how to check things and test things and verify and prove not just because it feels better to know, but because that's how you get your program to work or your lab experiment to function or whatever.

That's certainly better when available...but realistically speaking, I don't expect every person to read through all relevant papers, understand them to this degree, and be able to test things for themselves on a pandemic. That's a fairly high burden, and most people lack the time to do that, even if they have the expertise. Heck, the expertise isn't guaranteed either.

So, they need to trust someone else to do that for them. At some point, the data needs to be transformed into action. If we all trust the same person, organization, or entity to do this, it mostly works. If we don't, well...we end up here.

Delta already eliminated any chance of herd immunity. Its high reproduction rate and reductions in vaccine efficacy pushed the minimum vaccination rate over 100%. At this point, we're priming immune systems to reduce severe cases and watching everyone get exposed, slowing infection if severe cases of a variant rise too fast.

Like a bad flu season. Only nastier.

Yeah, unfortunately at this point pretty much any measure of control is long gone. Vaccines may still be useful for mitigating individual risk, but herd immunity is impossible. If you are having outbreaks in 100% vaccinated populations, you can be certain that vaccines are not enough for eradication.

Perhaps with earlier detection or something, it could have been halted in time, but Omicron has most certainly blown past even the illusion that it could be halted. But hey, if the severity is less, that's something. Not a lot of comfort, maybe, but it's what we have.

When I see people saying they don't trust science because scientists put their own motives and biases in, while maybe a third of that comes from scientists who write very much non-neutral things and lean on the reputation of science to try to push them as objective, the rest comes from trying to relate to scientific papers the way you'd relate to a persuasive article in a newspaper, rather than, say, the way you'd relate to a piece of software on your computer or a control in your car.

Oh, indeed. The blame does not rest solely...or even primarily, I would argue, with scientists. There are frequently intermediaries between the science and the ultimate consumer of that data, or policies based on that data. Often several intermediaries. Biases creep in everywhere.

Science as a methodology works fine, it's those pesky people that screw it all up.

The point is that looking at scientific papers to give you a consensus about 'what you should do' or 'what policy should be' is a fundamental error in the first place, it's asking scientific papers to be and do something that they're not actually for.

Unfortunately, there has been a fair bit of "trust the science" used to mean "trust the policy" or something other than the raw data itself. Sort of that blending that happens as the data gets filtered through several layers of biases. Science has, or at least had, a certain credibility, and leveraging that is often convenient when trust is needed. And so bias and opinion end up conflated with science in the popular eye.

I'm not sure I have a great answer for all this, just sort of mulling the problem over.

Perhaps the problem lies in seeking to represent scientific consensus as one tidy thing when it usually is far more complex than that? Sure, there are basic facts that don't see a lot of disagreement, but as we dig into the details, a great deal of variation emerges. Describing it all as one single viewpoint is inherently going to be a subjective sort of thing, and whoever summarizes will unavoidably inject a good deal of bias into it.

[Bartmanhomer]

I took the COVID Booster Shot plus Tylenol just in case if I have a fever again.

[LibraryOgre]

https://www.texaschildrens.org/texas...ures-emergency

Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine COVID-19 Vaccine Technology Secures Emergency Use Authorization in India
Mass Distribution of “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine” to be Deployed to India with Other Underserved Countries to Follow

HOUSTON, TX (December 28, 2021) – Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine announced today that CORBEVAX™, a protein sub-unit COVID-19 Vaccine, whose technology was created and engineered at its Center for Vaccine Development (CVD), has received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to launch in India with other underserved countries to follow.

Dubbed “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine”, it uses a traditional recombinant protein-based technology that will enable its production at large scales making it widely accessible to inoculate the global population. The initial construct and production process of the vaccine antigen was developed at Texas Children’s Hospital CVD, led by co-directors Drs. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez and in-licensed from BCM Ventures, Baylor College of Medicine’s integrated commercialization team, to Hyderabad-based vaccine and pharmaceutical company Biological E. Limited (BE).

CORBEVAX™ after completing two Phase III clinical trials involving more than 3000 subjects was found to be safe, well tolerated and immunogenic:

CORBEVAX™ demonstrated superior immune response in comparison with COVISHIELDTM vaccine when assessed for Neutralizing Antibody (nAb) Geometric Mean Titers (GMT) against the Ancestral-Wuhan strain and the globally dominant Delta variant. CORBEVAX™ vaccination also generated significant Th1 skewed cellular immune response.

CORBEVAX™ nAb GMT against Ancestral-Wuhan strain is indicative of vaccine effectiveness of >90% for prevention of symptomatic infections based on the Correlates of Protection assessment performed during Moderna and Astra-Zeneca vaccine Phase III studies.

CORBEVAX™ nAb GMT against the Delta strain indicates a vaccine effectiveness of >80 percent for the prevention of symptomatic infections based on published studies.

While none of the subjects who took CORBEVAX™ or COVISHIELD™ had serious adverse events, CORBEVAX™ had 50 percent fewer adverse events than COVISHIELDT™.

In the continuous monitoring of phase II studies, CORBEVAX™ showed high persistence of immune response as indicated by <30% drop in nAb GMT till 6 months second dose as compared to >80% drop observed with majority of the vaccines.
“Protein-based vaccines have been widely used to prevent many other diseases, have proven safety records, and use economies of scale to achieve low-cost scalability across the world,” said Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, Professor and Associate Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Co-Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. “Our decade-long studies advancing coronavirus vaccine prototypes has led to the creation of this vaccine, which will fill the access gap created by the more expensive, newer vaccine technologies and that today are still not able to be quickly scaled for global production.”

The need for safe, streamlined, low-cost vaccines for middle- to low-income countries is central to the world’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Without widespread vaccination of populations in the Global South, additional virus variants will arise, hindering the progress achieved by currently available vaccines in the United States and other Western countries.

“This announcement is an important first step in vaccinating the world and halting the pandemic. Our vaccine technology offers a path to address an unfolding humanitarian crisis, namely the vulnerability the low- and middle-income countries face against the delta variant,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, Professor and Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Co-Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. “Widespread and global vaccination with our Texas Children’s-Baylor-BE vaccine would also forestall the emergence of new variants. We have previously missed that opportunity for the alpha and delta variant. Now is our chance to prevent a new global wave from what might follow.”

“Over the years, we have worked to make quality vaccines and pharmaceutical products accessible to families around the world. With this as our backdrop, we resolved to develop an affordable and effective COVID-19 vaccine. It has now become a reality,” said Mahima Datla, Managing Director, Biological E. Limited. “We deeply appreciate Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Baylor, CEPI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the government of India for their continuous support and cooperation during this journey. The combined efforts & unceasing support demonstrate that we can collectively overcome any challenge”.

Yes, it is a press release. It is still big.

[NichG]

In theory, yes, relying on the data, and avoiding extrapolating conclusions from it is...stronger. But it's not uncommon. Many abstracts not only fit a story to the data nowadays, they move on to at least suggesting actions.

This isn't always crazy, but as you say, it is definitely more subjective. The more subjective opinion we have marketed as science, well...the less trust science is going to retain.

That's certainly better when available...but realistically speaking, I don't expect every person to read through all relevant papers, understand them to this degree, and be able to test things for themselves on a pandemic. That's a fairly high burden, and most people lack the time to do that, even if they have the expertise. Heck, the expertise isn't guaranteed either.

So, they need to trust someone else to do that for them. At some point, the data needs to be transformed into action. If we all trust the same person, organization, or entity to do this, it mostly works. If we don't, well...we end up here.

Not asking everyone to read every paper. Heck, even in my field there's a couple dozen papers published per day, and I'd never get anything done if I tried to exhaustively keep up with the literature. But lets say you read one or two papers a year, or even just look at the abstract or hear them described, you should recognize what sorts of things the paper claims (or people are claiming that the paper claims) that the processes in that paper are actually capable of supporting and what sorts of things are being added on top. That's kind of what I was getting at when I said literacy. It's not being aware of the contents of the literature, or reading large portions of it, it's understanding better how to separate the core things that a given work actually did and the conclusions that can actually be supported from all the interpretive stuff and discourse surrounding the paper.

It's like, if you received orders and a justification for those orders, in some contexts the orders would be the important thing and the justification secondary. But in a scientific paper, the justification is (or at least should be read as) the important thing and the orders are secondary. For a lot of people, that's probably a big mental shift, but it's useful since it lets you separate evidence from agenda.

Oh, indeed. The blame does not rest solely...or even primarily, I would argue, with scientists. There are frequently intermediaries between the science and the ultimate consumer of that data, or policies based on that data. Often several intermediaries. Biases creep in everywhere.

Science as a methodology works fine, it's those pesky people that screw it all up.

Unfortunately, there has been a fair bit of "trust the science" used to mean "trust the policy" or something other than the raw data itself. Sort of that blending that happens as the data gets filtered through several layers of biases. Science has, or at least had, a certain credibility, and leveraging that is often convenient when trust is needed. And so bias and opinion end up conflated with science in the popular eye.

I'm not sure I have a great answer for all this, just sort of mulling the problem over.

Perhaps the problem lies in seeking to represent scientific consensus as one tidy thing when it usually is far more complex than that? Sure, there are basic facts that don't see a lot of disagreement, but as we dig into the details, a great deal of variation emerges. Describing it all as one single viewpoint is inherently going to be a subjective sort of thing, and whoever summarizes will unavoidably inject a good deal of bias into it.

There's that too, and additional layers where a lot of science is actually about definition choice, and implicit stuff there can be incredibly subtle... But it's not just about the realities of science being much more complex than the usual image, I think it's largely about treating purpose and evidence as joined when they should be treated as separable. That is to say, people ask for things like 'what scientific evidence is the CDC using to adjust their quarantine duration recommendation?' but it's an incomplete question, as if scientific evidence could actually make that decision without also having some sort of cost/benefit/prioritization structure. E.g. in that case one answer I've seen given was to cite a study that showed the distribution of infectiousness post-infection, and 'the majority of cases (50%) stopped being infectious by 5 days'. Of course that same data implies that if you stop quarantine at 5 days, 50% of the people who are going back to work will still be infectious. So asking for the scientific evidence doesn't tell you why 50% reduction is the target you should shoot for with quarantine guidelines. And I bet when someone comes back from quarantine and infects someone, we'll be hearing 'the experts were wrong again!' even though the evidence in that study directly tells you that you should expect that to happen.

So it's better to ask 'what is this decision trying to achieve, and what is the evidence that this decision will achieve the stated goal?'. Because you might find that what the decision is trying to achieve isn't what you thought, or isn't what you yourself want. So at least if you're going to feel betrayed you can blame the right step in the decision process for it.

[Liquor Box]

I don't expect every person to read through all relevant papers, understand them to this degree, and be able to test things for themselves on a pandemic. That's a fairly high burden, and most people lack the time to do that, even if they have the expertise. Heck, the expertise isn't guaranteed either.

So, they need to trust someone else to do that for them. At some point, the data needs to be transformed into action. If we all trust the same person, organization, or entity to do this, it mostly works. If we don't, well...we end up here.

I'm not sure of the context of this discussion, but I strongly agree with this point.

I suspect people who try to educate themselves about the pandemic and make decisions accordingly actually make worse decisions with respect to it than those who simply follow the advice from whatever health authority there is in their country. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

As you say, even if people are intelligent have some experience reading scientific papers, have the time to read the various publications and are able to select them without skew they are still not going to be able to understand them as well as a virologist who has years of education on the topic. That putting aside the fact that virologists are able to confer with similarly expert colleagues.

I think the best thing to do is to simply follow the advice of the local health authority.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm not sure of the context of this discussion, but I strongly agree with this point.

I suspect people who try to educate themselves about the pandemic and make decisions accordingly actually make worse decisions with respect to it than those who simply follow the advice from whatever health authority there is in their country. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

As you say, even if people are intelligent have some experience reading scientific papers, have the time to read the various publications and are able to select them without skew they are still not going to be able to understand them as well as a virologist who has years of education on the topic. That putting aside the fact that virologists are able to confer with similarly expert colleagues.

I think the best thing to do is to simply follow the advice of the local health authority.

Considering medicine's garbage track record in the past... I'm going to go with no on that. Early on experts were arguing that you needed to wash everything and masks did nothing, despite this being the opposite of Asian countries' approach.

In a wider context, western medicine has had over one hundred years of giving out counterproductive diet advice, HIV recommendations, has failed to put any effort into male birth control, the list goes on.

If you go to your doctor today they will tell you to lose weight and give you a recipe for weight gain to follow, just as an example. From a purely practical point of view what western medicine does best is triage and what it does worst is preventing disease and illness, which is exactly what we find with covid.

[Tyndmyr]

I think the best thing to do is to simply follow the advice of the local health authority.

I am not exactly arguing either for or against that.

I'm arguing that this has already failed to work here. Trust has broken down, and people are not all trusting the same authorities. That doesn't mean that any particular scientist is wrong...sometimes both sides are citing valid or invalid data...that just depends on the specific person and argument. Even if data is perfect, a bad argument can use good data to argue for a bad action.

Relying on a single authority is something that we no longer really can do, so we need something different. People can't replicate all of science on their own, certainly, so that's out. But everyone is most definitely no longer in agreement as to who to trust, so that is also out...at least for now.

There's some options. We can try to repair trust...but that's slow. I don't think there's anything anyone can do or say to immediately convince everyone to agree.

We can try a hybrid educational approach, such as what NichG is advocating. I don't think it's wrong, exactly. Anyone who wants to learn more is probably improving their decision making to some extent, sure. I am doubtful about how many people can be persuaded to regularly read scientific papers in full. I suspect that most people discussing scientific events are currently reliant on mainstream media, social media, etc for succinct summaries of these, and they read exactly zero of them directly. Perhaps it could be undertaken by changing how primary education works or the like, but that is again a large, slow project. A useful individual action, but perhaps a difficult solution overall.

[Peelee]

From a purely practical point of view what western medicine does best is triage and what it does worst is preventing disease and illness, which is exactly what we find with covid.

From a purely practical point of view, someone who went to four years of college, four years of medical school, one year of internship, several years of residency in a specialty and subspecialty, and not uncommonly a doctoral program, who work sin one of the (if not the) most heavily regulated fields in the US (and possibly the world), whose work and findings are subject to rigorous and intense peer review, and whose very practice carry legal ramifications if not done properly, will probably give better advice than someone who spent a few hours (or even weeks) looking things up on the internet.

I am 100% behind Liquor Box here.

[Tvtyrant]

From a purely practical point of view, someone who went to four years of college, four years of medical school, one year of internship, several years of residency in a specialty and subspecialty, and not uncommonly a doctoral program, and who work in one of the (if not the) most heavily regulated fields in the US (and possibly the world), whose work and findings are subject to rigorous and intense peer review, and whose very practice carry legal ramifications if not done properly, will probably give better advice than someone who spent a few hours (or even weeks) looking things up on the internet.

I am 100% behind Liquor Box here.

That's great! Which health authority? If two healthy authorities disagree which do you pick? How do you know which one hasn't been paid off or is being intimidated by the local authorities? Do you prefer the WHO or CDCs statements?

I personally got my vaccines and wear a mask indoors in public spaces, but here we had an outdoor mask mandate until November 23rd and then lifted it just in time for Holiday crowds. Eating at a restaurant without your mask has been allowed for a year despite being the dumbest of all possible policies (the viruses take a nap while we eat on an airplane I guess.)