…that actual science is about skepticism, about diligently questioning one’s assumptions, about relentlessly searching for the facts on either side of them, pro or con.
All of that being said?
I’m astounded at how many of my knee-jerk responses to Covid turned out to be scientifically valid.
Natural immunity is significant and long-lasting.
The virus is spread via the air – not surface contact.
And the latest among them? The J&J vaccine appears, despite some early hysteria from the US government, to be the better bet against Delta – in addition to its initial sales pitch, it’s efficacy against hospitalization and serious symptoms (which, having reason to believe that natural immunity was itself a serious hedge against infection, was my biggest goal), appears to be better at allaying the Delta Variant than Moderna or Pfizer.
It’s not quite a Berg’s Law, but it’s getting there.
In the comments under the second link above there is lots to read. The little fella is in prime form as is MP and JD. With regards to the latter, there is an interesting one from JD (in this context it would be considered a threadjack, so I’ll just link to it).
Good times, JDM, good times.
I had forgotten about the paper that demonstrated that official models, presented as having a confidence interval of 95%, were, in fact, wrong 2/3 of the time.
These figures show that for March 30 only 27% of states had an actual number of deaths lying in the 95% PI for the 1-step-ahead forecast. The corresponding percentages for March 31, April 1 and April 2, are 35%, 27% and 51%, respectively. Therefore percentage of states with actual number of deaths lying outside this interval is 73%, 65%, 73% and 49% for March 30, March 31, April 1 and April 2, respectively. We note that we would expect only 5% of observed death counts to lie outside the 95% PI.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062257v1.full.pdf
These models were used to justify the lockdowns.
Worst.
Elites.
Ever.
We now know, from the personal behavior of said elites, who repeatedly violate their own mandates, that covid is, in fact, “no big deal.”
From Insty:
COVID Cases Fell 40% in the UK After Restrictions Were Lifted, Proving the Experts Wrong Yet Again
https://fee.org/articles/covid-cases-fell-40-in-uk-after-restrictions-lifted-proving-the-experts-wrong-yet-again/
This is why people who write about cherry-picked, useless numbers from states with governors they hate should be ignored. They are not honest attempts to make a case or argue towards a point, they are a robotic repetition of DNC talking points, written by people of limited intelligence to achieve a political goal that has nothing at all to do with covid.
J&J is good against Delta? Give us a source, that’s great news for guys like me who had the J&J!
Tell me again, why do we still have experimental vaccines being pushed when there are multiple treatment options available? And NOBODY has to die? Because science?
I’m sorry, but the Covidians are so mouth-foaming rabid that even a just slightly skeptical person like Our Host looks to be a heretic. Even tho’ he will happily echo many MSM opinions. Remember those comments like “Sorry to say, I am afraid there’s a solid chance of absolute carnage along the gulf coast” after the tut-tuting about Spring Break 2020?
This comment above, “The J&J vaccine appears, despite some early hysteria from the US government, to be the better bet against Delta” is more of the same. First of all, what exactly is this Delta? Can it be tested for? As Roger Kimball wrote last week, “Perhaps the so-called Delta variant is ‘more communicable’. So what? It is also markedly less deadly”. That’s what viruses do. To survive. They don’t kill their hosts.
As to the vaccines, all of them (except possibly the Novavax which continues to be unapproved for some strange reason) are a scam. And this information is trickling out, slowly but surely. <a href="This doctor tears the entire pandemic reaction a new asshole here – and you’ll notice he’s willing to put his career on the line in the process. Or this comment from a four days ago:
I don’t think people get yet what the Israeli data mean.
Barring an extraordinary reversal, in days Israel will have more serious cases than at this time in 2020.
In a week it will have more VACCINATED serious cases than the total serious cases at this time in 2020…
Or the same guy this morning:
We are in a race. It’s not a race of vaccines against variants, though. We know who wins that race.
We are in a race of truth against hysteria, honest appraisal of data against a desperate unwillingness to admit error, and health against profit.
The stakes could not be higher.
Shit, forgot to close that a-tag. Try again
Today’s news will be a full court press on Abbott and Desantis. Don’t buy the lies, much less the troll’s cut and pastes. Florida’s vax numbers are at the national average, death’s below the national average.
Spare yourselves the waste of time trolls.
Bike,
Here you go.
Never trust a computer model developed by
a) someone in one of the soft sciences
b) anyone with a financial or reputational interest in one particular outcome
Folks think computer models are easy to develop. That’s true, for extremely simplistic systems (2 particle models, for example), but for anything real it’s extremely hard. Weather models, things of massive value, have improved in my lifetime, but only by throwing vast amounts of money and computing power at them; the biggest supercomputers are typically weather machines. And even then, they’re often wrong.
You need a great deal of knowledge about a system, all its inputs, reactions, etc to build a decent model. And for most systems involving biology and humans we simply don’t have that knowledge. We don’t have that knowledge for transistors, much less humans.
And then there’s statistics. Again, you need a vast amount of knowledge about the system to make valid statistical interpretation and prediction and again, for most complex systems we don’t have that knowledge. That “95% confidence level” can only be reached if you assume certain forms of statistical variation, certain forms of sampling, etc as your basis. And when you’re dealing with humans, that’s rarely the case. In fact, for most social science research you can be assured that’s not the case since most of it is performed on captive college undergraduates, who are not the typical human. Medical research is much the same, since most studies are formed of folks who fall into archetypes that aren’t typical.
THanks, Mitch. 71% is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
As most reputable and credible scientists, not sucking at the government teat, will proclaim that “science is never settled”.
As most reputable and credible scientists, not sucking at the government teat, will proclaim that “science is never settled”.
For the rest, the science is “settled” as soon as the check clears.
Nerdbert, they had real time mobility info from Google, relatively fine grained, and their models were still crap.
I think that their models on how covid is transmitted is crap as well. In Hawaii, they had a hard lockdown, only big box stores (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Safeway) were open. Since these stores were the only place where strangers mingled, you would think they would be the focus of covid outbreaks, right?
Wrong! The outbreak clusters were hospitals, nursing homes, homes where a large number of people lived together (10+), and funerals.
Regarding where the disease was being transmitted, the huge drop in infections came about two weeks–the disease’s gestation period–after they started to vaccinate “essential workers”, meaning “medical staff” right after government employees.
I infer that, contrary to the rhetoric, hospitals and clinics were a key place where the disease was transmitted. Maybe it’s time to pull an Ed Garcia and keep super contagious diseases away from our big hospitals. (Garcia was the guy who made Firestone’s response to Ebola work–starting with zero knowledge of infectious disease, he beats the **** out of Fauci’s response)
Yeah, Bikebubba, we all know that the most likely to die were not just the elderly, but the elderly WITH two or more comorbidities. I tried to find out how many people died from covid who were admitted to the hospital for issues due to these comorbidities, and contracted covid while they were there.
But apparently those numbers don’t exist.
Read a story on Buzzfeed I think, about an uncomfortable consequence of using AI in medicine.
Turns out, the algorithms can predict the race of a patient by scanning an x-ray with 99% accuracy.
The reprobates are losing their shit.
But how can that beeeee? RACE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT!!!!!!
One can only imagine the shit show we’re headed for in the coming years.
Today I listened to a conservative “group podcast.” All of the group were pundits and academics, not politicians (tho one had been a Trump political appointee).
All of these guys were pro vax, up and including vax passports and bans of the unvaxxed from public spaces.
I suppose there was some group think going on, but these people needed someone to hold an intervention. The stuff they were talking about was not only not conservative, it was insane. Vax mandate the young to save the elderly? You don’t vax people who are not personally at risk of the disease. It has literally never been done. You give people a vax for their own health, not the health of others.
There is no such thing as a “vaccine passport.” It exists only in the imagination. Many places that are vaxxing people are not keeping proper records, meaning records that can be tied a particular “John Smith” and not just any guy named “John Smith.”
I am going to add a new acronym to the lexicon: “VDS,” meaning Vaccine Derangement Syndrome.
I am going to quote myself: “You don’t vax people who are not personally at risk of the disease.”
There are huge implications if this is done. It is not a slippery slope, it is an f’ing cliff.
You don’t need two kidneys.
You only need one. And there are people dying from kidney disease on the transplant list.
Same thing with bone marrow. The process of transplanting bone marrow is hell for both the donor and receiver. But the alternative for the donor is continueing a pain free life. The alternative for the receiver is death. Do you want the government to order you to undertake a bone marrow “donation” because that is government policy?
MP, that’s another thing that bothers the snot out of me. Yes, COVID tended to kill people mostly who had other problems–so why on earth wasn’t Fauci standing against state shutdowns of health clubs and routine medical care, two if the key facets of dealing with those co-morbidities?
He’s not a dummy, so we would have to wonder whether there’s a purpose to all this in enhancing the power of the state.