Question for people who are so anti-vaccine

[User135644]

Whether people choose to take the vaccine or not is up to them, that's not what i'm interested in.

But you get people who are so against the Covid vaccines, yet are also vehemently anti-lockdown and any restrictions (i.e. the rabble in London the other day, spreading anti-vax rhetoric all over the city while doing their best William Wallace impressions 'freedom').

Do these people not realise that without vaccines we'd still massively be up shit creek without a paddle (as many countries still are)? We'd likely still be in lockdown with the Indian variant particularly causing many deaths among the elderly and vulnerable. Therefore, whether you choose to take the vaccine or not, are you not at least glad at the effect they've had on suppressing the virus?

Our government have handled Covid so badly that the vaccines have been a literal life saver for thousands of people. We'd be fucked right now without them. Be grateful.

[quote SamanthaChumbaMumba]'there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (“lockdowns”) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020'

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484

'government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality'

www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext

'After preprocessing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis...we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in ~ 98% of the comparisons'

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84092-1

You can find (loads) more here: twitter.com/the_brumby/status/1349478824606502912?s=20[/quote]
With so many variables, I think it would actually be very hard to prove a case either way. For instance, some people will say the easing of restrictions since May is what has caused a rise in cases. Others will say cases kept falling as restrictions were eased and that the variant is the problem.
The thing I draw from these issues is that once governments had gone down the road of lockdowns (or otherwise) they felt they had to stick to their guns for political reasons (ie to save face). There was no turning back.

@englishmaninnewyork

exactly

there's no counterfactual in this scenario

the other issue is that countries that were doing badly had to have more lockdowns, which artificially makes it look they they are associated with worse outcomes

[quote SamanthaChumbaMumba]'there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (“lockdowns”) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020'

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484

'government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality'

www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext

'After preprocessing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis...we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in ~ 98% of the comparisons'

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84092-1

You can find (loads) more here: twitter.com/the_brumby/status/1349478824606502912?s=20[/quote]
@SamanthaChumbaMumba

i said good quality analyses, not that they don't exist

@SamanthaChumbaMumba

i said good quality analyses, not that they don't exist

What are your critiques of those, then?

well I'm not going to critique them all seeing as I've spent all day doing just that, unless you're offering pro rata?

but in brief, actually some of the studies you included are null if you read them - one even clearly states it in the abstract

The "Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study" publication - many many issues with the ecological design (i.e., you don't look at individual data). It isn't possible to adjust for the confounders that will bias effect estimates when making comparisons.

"What are your critiques of those, then?"

also just to point out here that it would take a good two hours to properly read a manuscript, evaluate the methods, assess for risk of bias and critically appraise the discussion. I really doubt many of the people sharing articles are doing that

so many people copy and paste a key sentence from the abstract to back up a claim but it's pretty meaningless.

'Haven’t you seen the mortality rates by age? The average age of COVID death is 81 years of age!'

It has never just been about death rates. It was about the surge on the nhs. Critical care 4 times the usual capacity so if you needed icu for another condition, let alone covid you'd have been hard pushed to get a bed. Many ventilated were under 60.

@SamanthaChumbaMumba

It isn't possible to adjust for the confounders that will bias effect estimates when making comparisons.

If it's never going to be possible to prove whether lockdowns work or not due to too many confounding variable, should we be doing them?

nope you misunderstand - there are far superior designs than ecological when it comes to adjusting for confounders

this is not an appropriate methodological design when attempting to answer the questions

'The people who were likely to die need to get the vaccine - no one else. Life should not have been normal over the course of this pandemic - we should had a wee bit extra to do to help those who needed it. But what we actually did was a travesty.'

But this has been explained repeatedly. The more unvaccinated there are the more variants there are, and they could become vaccine resistant. Don't you watch the news? This isn't social media scaremongering actual epidemiologists and virologists have explained the risks.

What we did wasn't a 'travesty', it was a global response. Everyone had to control the spread and your basic 'protect the vulnerable' would not have sufficed. Luckily we have experts advising Government.

When you look at the data coming out about the Indian variant, we'd be royally screwed without the vaccines and facing lockdown for months on end. Yet people still hate them.

'None of the variants so far have been vaccine resistant, despite the scaremongering for each and every damn one.'

But they could. It is a possibility. So rather than sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for tbe best the experts are trying be transparent and keep people informed. That is not 'scaremongering'.

@SamanthaChumbaMumba

With so many variables, I think it would actually be very hard to prove a case either way

Do you not think that 'we can't prove that these massively harmful measures work or not' might be a good reason to not force them upon a population?

Absolutely, yes. I was trying to explain why they have been imposed and why governments have been loathe to move away from such policies. I believe it's just politics. But I strongly think we need a different approach now, I don't think we can keep using lockdowns as the default setting (which they are in danger of becoming) I think they should be the absolute last resort.

I’ve had my vaccine and was delighted to get it.

However, I don’t think the government are doing a good job of understanding incentives and helping people see the benefits of us all being vaccinated.

First it was vaccinate the vulnerable, then all adults, then all the population, then all of the world, then all of the world with new boosters... I don’t blame people for being sceptical and not wanting to take (what they perceive to be) a risk when it looks like the goal posts will keep changing anyway.