Anti-vaxxers

  On 7/4/2020 at 9:30 AM, brian trageskin said:

i don't know if a lot of it is but part of it probably 

therapeutic practices and medicine have to do better than placebo to be considered effective, simple as that

You're living in a fantasy if you seriously think it's simple as that.

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/22/3/88

  Quote

What is already known about this subject?

• Clinicians are encouraged to base their practice on the best available evidence.

• However, much evidence is derived from subspecialty populations or addresses rare, uncommon problems.

• The extent to which recommendations for primary care practice are guided by high-quality evidence is unknown.

What are the new findings?

• In a primary care-oriented medical reference, 18% of recommendations were based on consistent, high-quality patient-oriented evidence (Strength of Recommendations Taxonomy (SORT) A), while approximately half were based on expert opinion, usual care or disease-oriented evidence (SORT C).

• Clinical categories with the most A recommendations were pregnancy and childbirth, cardiovascular, and psychiatric.

• Categories with the least were haematological, musculoskeletal and rheumatological, and poisoning and toxicity.

How might it impact clinical practice in the foreseeable future?

Primary care physicians should be aware that only a minority of recommendations are based on high-quality, patient-oriented evidence. This highlights the need for regular literature surveillance by primary care physicians to identify stronger evidence as it is developed. More research is needed in the primary care setting that evaluates the impact of interventions on patient-oriented health outcomes. Progress could be measured by periodically re-evaluating the percentage of recommendations based on high-quality evidence.

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  On 7/4/2020 at 9:28 AM, dingformung said:

Note that a placebo effect isn't simply an illusionary betterment of your ailment, it can actually improve the disease's process by activating the body's self-healing capabilities/immune system. It's how healers of ancient times often worked with their patients, with a limited amount of available medicines and powerful belief systems (because everyone took them as fact) they did whatever was necessary to activate the immune system through placebo. Belief and intend alone can heal, which is scientifically proven. Every body process that works top-down (from brain chemistry to effect on the body) can can be positively affected through placebos (or negatively through nocebos), namely everything pain or immune response/inflammation related. But it is dishonest to make the patient believe they are given a non-placebo and damages the trust between physician and patient. Placebos can have an effect even when the person who is given the placebo knows it's a placebo.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437#what-is-the-placebo-effect

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again, my point is a medicine has to have a greater measurable effect than what placebo can do to be considered effective

yes, placebo has a real effect, that doesn't mean the substance used to generate this effect has any healing properties. i could pull a thousand new medicines out of my ass and pretend they can heal people, the certain outcome will be an improvement of many people's health, thanks to the placebo effect among others (spontanous healing being huge for example)

  On 7/4/2020 at 9:42 AM, goDel said:

You're living in a fantasy if you seriously think it's simple as that.

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/22/3/88

health professionals may have low standards to judge the effectiveness of a treatment, that doesn't mean they're right in doing so

my point is more an epistemological one btw. i'm not discussing what's being done on the ground

  On 7/4/2020 at 9:22 AM, goDel said:

again, if that's your standard, a lot of what is considered regular care is snake oil as well.

  On 7/4/2020 at 8:50 AM, goDel said:

if it works, it works.

Dr. Del will see you now

As a doctor, take your fucking vaccinations.

inject bleach

  On 7/4/2020 at 6:44 AM, cyanobacteria said:

science is as political and ideological as anything.  look at eugenics experiments, atomic bomb experiments, and the lack of scientific research into various areas where it's clearly needed, like education and optimal governmental structures.  it's a tool that can be pointed anywhere, and both who is doing that pointing and where they're pointing it are completely political and ideological

What you're talking about isn't science, it's the application of scientific discoveries (nuclear power vs. the nuclear bomb), or the appropriation of funds.  The actual research itself (if done by the scientific method with no other motives) and the knowledge it uncovers doesn't care how you use it or who funded it.  It's simply hard facts that we uncover.

lol no, science is a feeling

  On 7/4/2020 at 12:40 PM, Richie Sombrero said:

As a doctor, take your fucking vaccinations.

I'll stick with my bleach and sunlight thank you very much. Mods please ban this obvious deep state agent

Science, e.g. medicine, is evidence based and progressively cumulative; you could say science is a series of better and better guesses about how things are, then the guesses are either verified or falsified (I know there's a verification crisis in science because everybody wants to be special and not verify someone else's research but do their own) and those that are verified become established knowledge - but even then they can be falsified at any time (there's this patent office clerk who wiped two millennia of physics knowledge clean with just a couple of papers).

Calling homeopathy a pseudoscience is giving it way too much credit - homeopathy is not even wrong, it's wishful thinking - you can't falsify faith, blind or otherwise.

Yes, a lot of science is based on probability, but probability is an application of science in and of itself and therefore based on the same progressively cumulative principles like all science is. Yes, probabilities and statistics can be used to deceive, they can use biased data and/or algorithms/normalization factors etc., they can be interpreted with prejudice, data, methodologies, algorithms, interpretations etc. can be massaged to get to a particular end result - but even that is better than pulling stuff out of your imagination (or ass, whichever gets more likes on social media), at least the swindlers know there's a proper way to do it and they make an effort to appear scientific - but with proper peer review (don't get me started on  pay-to-publish pseudojournals or what happened to Aaron Swartz) they're going to get culled.

The whole anti-vaccination movement is based on one (yes, ONE) paper by a discredited doctor; the paper itself has been falsified a gazillion times over, but there are still people who actively think that they know better.

The basic statistics in favour of vaccinations are simple and strong enough for almost anyone to understand, but there are people who don't (want to) understand things like herd immunity; then there are those who actively seek to disseminate (even dangerous, life-threatening) disinformation because they're so Dunning-Krugered (yes, that again) that they're, weill. not even wrong, because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Vaccination causes adults. Be an adult, vaccinate.

  On 7/4/2020 at 1:38 PM, randomsummer said:

What you're talking about isn't science, it's the application of scientific discoveries (nuclear power vs. the nuclear bomb), or the appropriation of funds.  The actual research itself (if done by the scientific method with no other motives) and the knowledge it uncovers doesn't care how you use it or who funded it.  It's simply hard facts that we uncover.

the type of research done and the topic it regards is a political and ideological decision as I described.  how can it not be when funding for scientific research projects is determined by political bodies, very often with economic incentives being considered, typically within a capitalist framework? look at medical research.  they don't bother with stuff that isn't going to make money.

Karl Popper was right, truth is approximative, yo

  On 7/4/2020 at 9:50 PM, dingformung said:

Karl Popper was right, truth is approximative, yo

It gets stretched a lot, too, with all that crazy p-hacking and other statistical tomfoolery.

Still miles and miles better than simply pulling stuff out of your ass, however.

I'm never quite sure if this youtube account is for children or not.

Also interesting.

I'm disappointed with the lack of nuance on this topic among the majority of people.  Just because there are individuals who are sharing false data and speculative theories about the vaccine doesn't mean we all have to swing all the way to the opposite extreme.

The simple fact is that untried technology has been distributed in mass amounts before the ideal testing period was allowed to take place and this is a lapse of medical standards that was done for the sake of expedience.  That doesn't mean there are nanobots that will turn your brain into an Illuminati toaster oven, but it also doesn't mean that the Gods of Science have blessed the mRNA spike protein replicator.

There's a reason why the usual testing period for vaccines exists, and this testing period has been circumvented.  This is a fact.  I do not believe in nanobots, and I'm not against vaccinations, but I am concerned that people have glossed over the context of the situation.

Apparently a LOT of healthcare workers are reluctant/refusing vaccination. I guess there's a lot of misinformation about it spreading in healthcare Facebook communities.  So between that and the existing US supply starting to be at risk of expiring because we're not deploying it fast enough between means testing, lack of organization and responsibility for rolling out immunization being diverted from existing government vaccination programs to private companies, we're pretty fucked.

I'm in one of the smallest states in the country and at the rate we've been vaccinating so far it will take about 18 more months just to get our state done.

Fuck antivaxxxers, shoot them 666nanobots directly in my ball plis

  On 1/9/2021 at 4:55 PM, drillkicker said:

There's a reason why the usual testing period for vaccines exists, and this testing period has been circumvented.  This is a fact.  I do not believe in nanobots, and I'm not against vaccinations, but I am concerned that people have glossed over the context of the situation.

No. At least the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (most probably the others, too) has been tested with a large enough population due to volunteers that it's been possible top compress the testing period; it has gone through all the regular vaccine three-phase trials. What the context is that hundreds of thousands of people will still die from COVID-19 and related causes; the vaccination process will cause deaths related to unknown, pre-existing conditions (or other complex phenomena) reacting to the vaccine, but they won't even be close to the magnitude of the deaths directly caused by the virus.

I think you're glossing over the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions more will still die from COVID-19 before the vaccine can be administered widely enough; even after all the people who want it have been vaccinated, the virus will not vanish into thin air because there will be those unwilling to get vaccinated, unwilling to take precautions, unwilling to think about anyone else but themselves - and there will still be deaths and pockets of contagion - but not amongst the vaccinated.

It's balancing act between risk and reward, and the rewards are several orders of magnitude higher than the risks.

From what I've read, they were doing test studies simultaneously since they had a shit ton of funding. Doing them in tandem sped up the process a ton.

They usually don't have the funding to do that stuff.

  On 1/9/2021 at 6:32 PM, dcom said:

No. At least the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (most probably the others, too) has been tested with a large enough population due to volunteers that it's been possible top compress the testing period; it has gone through all the regular vaccine three-phase trials. What the context is that hundreds of thousands of people will still die from COVID-19 and related causes; the vaccination process will cause deaths related to unknown, pre-existing conditions (or other complex phenomena) reacting to the vaccine, but they won't even be close to the magnitude of the deaths directly caused by the virus.

I think you're glossing over the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions more will still die from COVID-19 before the vaccine can be administered widely enough; even after all the people who want it have been vaccinated, the virus will not vanish into thin air because there will be those unwilling to get vaccinated, unwilling to take precautions, unwilling to think about anyone else but themselves - and there will still be deaths and pockets of contagion - but not amongst the vaccinated.

It's balancing act between risk and reward, and the rewards are several orders of magnitude higher than the risks.

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The Moderna vaccine went into trials before the first wave and was pretty well confirmed safe and effective by last summer, it's just been completing the rest of the phases since then.

The vast, vast majority of negative side effects with vaccines occur right away or in the first two weeks, so it's possible to actually go through the trials pretty fast without cutting many corners at all if the resources are there.

I believe in nanobots

So nobody thinks it's possible that there could be long-term unknowns that would only manifest after a number of years ?

  On 1/9/2021 at 7:47 PM, drillkicker said:

So nobody thinks it's possible that there could be long-term unknowns that would only manifest after a number of years ?

Your question makes no sense because the alternative - getting Covid-19 - can also have long-term effects that might only manifest after a number of years. So why seeding doubts? Just try to be a little rational

Here's some statistical perspective.

Your chance of dying in a car crash: 1 in 100-ish - and most of us go out every day and don't think twice about this.
Your chance of dying from COVID-19 in the next six months: 1 in 1000 (in the US and the UK).

In general, vaccines cause severe, but non-fatal, non-disabling side-effects for 1 in 50000.
The possibility of anaphylaxis or other life-threatening condition from a vaccine is less than 1 in 1000000.

In the US, you're way more likely to die from gun assault - 1 in 300-ish - than from COVID-19 or anything related to vaccines. It's also more probable to die from a lightning strike - 1 in 180000 - than from a vaccine. Death from sharp objects? 1 in 30000. Suicide? 1 in 86. These are, in general, preventable deaths.

In the US, 100000 people die each year (1 in 3300) from paracetamol (Tylenol, Panadol), one of the most common pain relievers.

The COVID-19 vaccine will prevent a huge amount of deaths.

  On 1/9/2021 at 7:47 PM, drillkicker said:

So nobody thinks it's possible that there could be long-term unknowns that would only manifest after a number of years ?

It's possible, but not probable - but see @TubularCorporation and @dingformung's comments above.

That's why you need to understand statistics and probabilities.