[Johnny Brown]

I'd be interested in his response to the response from Offwidth he was so keen to hear.

[teestub]

I'd be interested in his response to the response from Offwidth he was so keen to hear.

 

[Oldmanmatt]

Well there's noting like a hashtag to convince me  Especially as I see on the preview that they don't like the UK terror threat system (wtf has that got to do with a sensible debate on this?). And at least one of the OTs posting a picture on there is moronic too. In fact, from the brief preview I'm swayed to thinking that I'm fine with the mandate, so that backfired...

Come on Dan, convince me to care...

You forgot the bit where there are a whole 744 subscribers to the first link and the second had 92 views and one like. Even I have more Instagram followers and that’s still less than my 13 year old daughter who posts screen shots of Fortnight to her school friends.

So “We are the resistance” strikes me as a bit grandiose.

Did you actually look at those links, Dan?

Plus, Telegram is anonymous, user to user, so anybody could log on under any guise and say what ever they want.

I could do that here, too (except this is moderated, so that would (hopefully) proscribe much extreme behaviour).

Essentially, anything you read on such groups is of a lower evidential value than anecdotal, since it isn’t even given an attributable source.
A modern equivalent of “some bloke in the pub, told me his sister said”.

[petejh]

I'd be interested in his response to the response from Offwidth he was so keen to hear.

 

 

[IanP]

Hi all, I asked Steve as I really value his opinion and I’m not mathematically minded so wanted to check on what was being said in the article. I had a quick look earlier and didn’t quite understand what he was saying, so will have another look now.

Bit late to the party on this and someone may already have made this point, but a quick look at the link shows some pretty dodgy work.

In particular the graph for 10-59 year olds mortality and the following conclusion:

'This makes no sense, especially in the later stages. The early rise in mortality in the vaccinated could be explained by preferentially vaccinating those at higher risk, and so more likely to die, in the early stages, but once large numbers (getting on for tens of millions) of people at normal risk are vaccinated, any such effect will disappear. Bear in mind the rates are all cause mortality — no need to fuss about cause of death — and the numbers are charted as rates, so accounting for the changes in numbers in each group. According to this chart, based on ONS data, for 10 to 59 years olds, being fully vaccinated roughly doubles your chance of dying. No wonder this didn’t make it into the published ONS report, let alone the mainstream media.'

The fact that all cause mortality for the double vaccinated group is higher than for the unvaccinated is almost certainly due to the very different cohorts being analysed.  Double vaccinated will be significantly older than unvaccinated particularly since a lot of 10 to 17 year olds will not have been vaccinated yet as well as vaccination rates being lower as you go down the age range.  It shouldn't come as too big a surprise to anyone that younger people have lower mortality than older people, its kind of how mortality works generally in the modern world.

Don't think you need any more detailed analysis to call bullshit on Dr No but the below linked chart shows death rates by age (2015 so no Covid) and the difference by age is unsurprisingly significant e.g. 50-54 death rate is more than 5 times that of 30-34.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-by-age-group-in-england-and-wales?country=~England+and+Wales

[teestub]

The fact that all cause mortality for the double vaccinated group is higher than for the unvaccinated is almost certainly due to the very different cohorts being analysed.  Double vaccinated will be significantly older than unvaccinated particularly since a lot of 10 to 17 year olds will not have been vaccinated yet as well as vaccination rates being lower as you go down the age range.  It shouldn't come as too big a surprise to anyone that younger people have lower mortality than older people, its kind of how mortality works generally in the modern world.

This.

My main question is: is this a blog written by someone who has an understanding of stats wilfully misrepresenting data in such a way that it will only pass muster with people without any stats knowledge, or someone ignorant enough to think they’re right in this, and which one of these is worse!

[abarro81]

Either option is a bit shitty. I'm sure you know that and know that your characterisation of my position is disingenuous.

As for not trying to convince people...

Please guys, don’t support the mandates and vaccine passports. They are really bad news and not ok. They create division, hate and fear and perpetuate trauma and isolation. These are not the conditions required for people to heal from any illness.

But if you'd rather just post links to stuff than articulate your position a bit more then feel free to link an article that sets out the best arguments for your position... I genuinely feel like I probably "should" care but nothing has made me care yet...

[seankenny]

In reply to IanP maybe an analysis of the excess mortality further broken down by age might be more clear. I’ll have a look.

No, no, no, no. You are not getting this.

Ian and I have both pointed out the same basic problem with these stats, and Offwidth has shown up a more situation specific issue. If you want to make some assertions with some data, which can be very hard, then go away and read an introductory stats textbook or take a course. Learn to think about data rather than trying to prove something that you emotionally require.

And whether you do that or not, the takeaway should be that perhaps this subject matter is hard, there are people out there trying to deceive you and that you are prone to believing the deceivers. Try improving your skills at selecting who to believe.

[IanP]

In reply to IanP maybe an analysis of the excess mortality further broken down by age might be more clear. I’ll have a look.

Re anonymity- who can blame them.

It doesn't need to be more clear, the interpretation placed on the raw data is simply not justified unless the 2 cohorts (vaccinated and unvaccinated) have similar age profiles which we know is not true.

Even worse, I went to look at the source data referenced and it actually includes age standardised mortality data in table 2 which shows significantly higher mortality for unvaccinated across the whole timescale.

The article is inexcusable bullshit. Conspiracy or stupidity?  I tend towards a mix of the two.

[petejh]

But he sounds so credible Dan.

''Dr No is a medical doctor (appeal to authority) who has had over 35 years experience of medicine (appeal to authority), both inside and outside the NHS (appeal to authority). Bad Medicine is his blog in which he casts a sceptical eye (it's good to be sceptical right) on all aspects of medicine. Especially Bad Medicine (implication: if they've deigned something worthy of casting their sceptical eye over for this blog then there must by definition be something wrong with it.''

In reply to IanP maybe an analysis of the excess mortality further broken down by age might be more clear. I’ll have a look.

What's for you to clear up? As others have pointed out you're going to find mortality rates increase as age increases, and almost certainly more old people within the 'vaccinated' cohort than the 'unvaccinated' cohort.

This should be made clear by the blog author (but then he'd have no bollocks to write). If he can be bothered going to the trouble writing all that bollocks then surely he can go to the trouble of researching kind of important stuff like the spread of ages within the two cohorts.
If that data isn't available to them then not to worry because they're a very experienced very sceptical medical doctor don't you know - they make this very clear in their bio. A mind to be trusted with apparently conflicting data. And so, when they cast their (sceptical and very experienced remember) eye over such data, they can decipher anything bad and dispense their opinion with sound authority for us all to trust. They're surely somebody capable of breaking down those stats and not just taking them at face value like the sheep they lead. 

Based on the stats, Dr No dispenses his sound medical opinion:
''ONS’s own data tell us that, for working age people, being vaccinated appears to increase your overall risk of death. Sure, the numbers are small (in the hundreds), but that is of no comfort if you are one of the unlucky ones, and furthermore, it is hundreds week in week out, and they soon add up.
(....)
There is certainly nothing in this unique set of official data to suggest that vaccines do much good, and something to suggest they may well do harm, and to the extent that this is true, the entire Fourth Reich of mandatory vaccination and covid certification is an evil empire built on a falsehood. ''


Yes doctor.


edit: IanP said it first and better.

[IanP]

That’s why I asked Steve. To get a better understanding of what I was reading and reduce the risk of being taken in by a deceiver.

Dan, if you're serious about this, I would suggest starting by being equally (probably more) suspicious of the type person who claims to be giving true analysis that disproves the mainstream 'narrative' as you appear to be about the views of all those mainstream experts.  I think its generally good to apply a degree of questioning to all sources of information but why should you be more suspicious of the general mainstream view as compared to outliers claiming to have access to information being supressed for nefarious reasons.

As referenced a few times More or Less is a pretty good resource for coverage of statistics in the media and has been generally excellent on the pandemic.

For background I'm no great stats expert but did do Maths at Manchester Uni and would consider myself fairly numerate with a nerdy interest in this sort of stuff.

[seankenny]

That’s why I asked Steve. To get a better understanding of what I was reading and reduce the risk of being taken in by a deceiver.

Stop kidding yourself. You read it because - as per Pete’s quote above - it agrees with your prior beliefs and had a whiff of authority about it. But a far better rule of thumb when you don’t know a subject area really is just to go with expert consensus. Boring, but you stand less chance of being wrong. Expert consensus will still be wrong some of the time - this is not a method for infallibility because there’s no such thing - however it is a safer bet than reading easily debunked bullshit. If you were trying to reduce the risk of being deceived you’d probably be reading the FT or BBC.

This is a a bit US centric and goes wider than covid, but worth a read:

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/andrew-sullivan-and-the-narrative?r=1emko

[abarro81]

Yeah but people are tired of experts 

[petejh]

So, to recap. Dan believes, or at least is keen to suggest we consider, the following:

1. covid originated in a bio research lab.
2. there are links between pharma companies and the aforementioned bio research lab. 
3. these links are nefarious, and suggest the pharma companies designed the covid pandemic to make money.
4. however, the vaccine that the pharma companies created to make money is not only ineffective at preventing ill health from Covid, it’s actually *more dangerous* to health than remaining unvaccinated, even for age groups up to 50.
5. we should be concerned about liberty because the UK may introduce covid passes and mandate vaccination in the same way they have in Austria (and Australia, among others), despite evidence to the contrary.  I have a <small> amount of sympathy with this concern.
5. currently-employed doctors should not be trusted.
6. retired doctors who write blogs, they should be trusted.

Anything I missed?

You’re almost making me think cancel culture might have something to be said for it Dan.

[Offwidth]

Even worse, I went to look at the source data referenced and it actually includes age standardised mortality data in table 2 which shows significantly higher mortality for unvaccinated across the whole timescale.

Conspiracy or stupidity?  I tend towards a mix of the two.

If that's so, that's a few times I've come across misuse of the age standardised mortality data to generate misinformation. It's funny how these dishonest methodologies spread  I favour mostly conspiracy for these sites first, given what's happened around people like  Andrew Wakefield in the US (excellent documentary link below). It's rarely stupid if they are cynically making money, so its best to look for any evidence of income for the misinformation (supported  by the rich americans who helped Wakefield or direct income from selling stuff be it clicks or books or quack cures).

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-anti-vax-conspiracy

As a bit of synergy about dark money  I watched this last night...a brutal comedy on the rise of Dick Cheney but there are real truths about how the Republicans fought back against a rise of liberal values in the US....highly recommended..stellar cast and from the same Director as The Big Short

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/

[Nails]

With regard to the misrepresentation of data. I saw a headline in the Guardian about 4 weeks ago that stated that on average each Covid death in the UK had resulted in a loss of life of approximately 10 years. This is a shocking statistic and contrary to the underlying assumption of many people, along the lines that many of us had assumed that a significant proportion of deaths from Covid were amongst the highly vulnerable in society whose life expectancy wasn't great even without the threat of Covid. I had merely read the Guardian article as there was no direct link to the reported research. I've since tried to find the original Guardian article but to no avail. Anyway, on later thought it increasingly bothered me how the research might have been conducted. The obvious question is, how could you reasonably estimate the life expectancy of those people if they hadn't died from Covid? After a bit of searching I suspect that the research that the Guardian article referred to is this https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19.

The big problem with it is that it just uses straight across the population average life expectancies according to age. So the headline "average Covid death reduces life by 10 years" is clearly utter bollocks. The research gives some caveats "These may be overestimates as those who died from COVID-19 were more likely to have co-morbidities than their peers and may have had lower life expectancies." Understatement or what? Average life expectancy for someone in a care home that includes nursing provision (according to the British Geriatrics Society) is around 12 months.

This just indicates to me that it's not possible to take reporting of research at face value even within a supposedly reputable publication ( at least as far as mainstream media goes). Ben Goldacre would not be impressed.

[Will Hunt]

Re the Wakefield channel 4 documentary, I watched it after being recommended by a friend earlier in the year. I believe it to be unadulterated shite.

As ever, you could be more persuasive by describing why you thought this.

[remus]

An interesting post from Prof Norman Fenton, one for those stats boffins to get stuck into.

https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-vaccine-efficacy-statistical-illusion.html?m=1

This post uses measures of 'deaths per 100k' without taking in to account the fact that the underlying population is changing through time. That is people are shifting from the pool of unvaccinated to vaccinated, so the demographic of the 100k people you're measuring a proportion of is changing.

The post actually alludes to this issue at the start but then fails to mention that the underlying assumption in the first example, that the population is uniform, is not true for real world data. This is exactly the issue Barrows raised a few posts ago.

Imagine that a placebo rather than a vaccine is quickly rolled out to a population of one million people of similar age and health.

[teestub]

Hopefully Dan is feeding these insights back into the anti vax circles where these links originated…

[Fultonius]

The irony of everyone having to refute Dan's (usually fairly baseless) assertions on all of this is that it means we're all having to defend the "mainstream" view, even if many *are* sceptical of *some* aspects of the way the data is represented.

It's just bringing the whole debate down a level.

[Nutty]

An interesting post from Prof Norman Fenton, one for those stats boffins to get stuck into.

https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-vaccine-efficacy-statistical-illusion.html?m=1

Why is he looking at 'other than covid' mortality rates to assess the efficacy of a covid vaccine? A covid vaccine is not a panacea, it reduces your risk of dying from one specific cause - the specific cause he's stripped out. So he's pointing out that being vaccinated doesn't reduce your risk of dying from things that aren't covid? I don't think anyone was claiming that it did?

[Offwidth]

The irony of everyone having to refute Dan's (usually fairly baseless) assertions on all of this is that it means we're all having to defend the "mainstream" view, even if many *are* sceptical of *some* aspects of the way the data is represented.

It's just bringing the whole debate down a level.

That's the name of the game though. The film Vice illustrates it perfectly and memorably ...truth is no longer important, with a clever enough message you can convince 70% of the US population that invading Iraq is important and that the fairness of taxation can be regarded as a moral evil.... inheritance tax becomes a death tax.

On the subject of the covid conspiracy documentary I'd be interested in Dan's views...  I might even agree with some of them as it's hard to make a documentary that is entirely unbiased and perfectly fair (as if nothing else it would lose its impetus with visual footnotes!). I was previously unaware how much Wakefield had slipped into the dishonest Republican system of misinformation and how big that was wrt covid misinformation (the Russian influence is much better known) and Republican supporting dirty funding, so I'll take a few minor journalistic faults for an important warning message.

[AJM]

The big problem with it is that it just uses straight across the population average life expectancies according to age. So the headline "average Covid death reduces life by 10 years" is clearly utter bollocks. The research gives some caveats "These may be overestimates as those who died from COVID-19 were more likely to have co-morbidities than their peers and may have had lower life expectancies." Understatement or what? Average life expectancy for someone in a care home that includes nursing provision (according to the British Geriatrics Society) is around 12 months.

How much of an understatement do you think it is? Or in other words how significant a condition is "a comorbidity"?

I'm not sure from the last part of my quote whether you're suggesting the right answer is 12 months rather than ten years, or of not what it is there to illustrate.

Regardless, comorbidities shouldn't necessarily be thought of as either rare or particularly limiting on lifespan, depending on exactly which comorbidity of course. If they are common - obesity being perhaps the most obvious common comorbidity for covid - then average lifespans will include a reasonable weight towards any effect they have. If they are not particularly life limiting in normal circumstances - noting for example that CDC defines pregnancy as a risk factor for covid - then the presence of the comorbidity is an irrelevancy.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html

I guess one thing that's easy to say is that it would have to take a very significant skew towards very life-limiting comorbidities for the number of years of life lost to be less than ten years for those in middle age or younger. A quick Google didn't find me the proportion of covid deaths from the under-65s, but I thought it was a quarter or a third or something in that sort of region.

[Offwidth]

The one I linked Dan (and you said you watched it). Why exactly do you think it is it unadulterated shite?

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-anti-vax-conspiracy

[Oldmanmatt]

The irony of everyone having to refute Dan's (usually fairly baseless) assertions on all of this is that it means we're all having to defend the "mainstream" view, even if many *are* sceptical of *some* aspects of the way the data is represented.

It's just bringing the whole debate down a level.

That’s why I called Brandolini and opted not to engage him directly (tried to not engage, anyway).

As it turns out, I’ve learned a lot from the ancillary discussion that grew out of others refutation of his claims. So, ill wind and all that.

Seriously though, his last post simply reads as “everyone who disagrees with my beliefs is engaged in propaganda” and he thinks it’s a trump card. I’m not convinced anyone arguing with him gains anything.