Mason Malmuth's Thoughts on COVID vaccines (Warning: O/t thread)

Yes, this was in the middle of clinical trials. One of the major steps for FDA approval is to have a three month period where a test group and control group are monitored s for side effects/efficacy after taking the vaccine/placebo. This period was not ending until after the election. All this was fully publicized and in every FDA/CDC etc communication. Trump simply lied and said a vaccine might be available to the public before the election based on nothing and contradicting everything from actual health ad medical agencies. Of course ignoring Trump was correct and what everyone ending up doing as Trump pushed random crackpot miracle cures like ivermectin. Lol at pretending like what Harris said is even remotely controversial. It was equivalent to "you can't wait for 3 months in 2 months".

I am about 40% sure you are trolling here, and if that is true than a legit tip of the hat to you - you've had me going for about 25 years. But I will make a serious reply to this as you clearly aren't getting any help here.

Obviously, there will be a lot of systemic bias in terms of who has chosen to get vaccinated and who dies after contracting COVID regardless of vaccination status. For example, highly vulnerable populations (like the elderly and immunocompromised) were more likely to get vaccinated (because they are more worried about dying) despite the fact that vaccines are less effective for them personally (because their immune systems don't work as well). Also, those that died from COVID were much more likely to be elderly or immunocompromised than those who survived an infection (again, because their immune systems don't work as well).

The COVID vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious disease and death from COVID. That's why following the roll out of the vaccines the death rates from COVID infections plummeted. However, raw deaths from COVID actually increased in 2021 to early 2022 because more people were getting infected as life returned more to normal. But the deaths in this period were disproportionally for unvaccinated people. In particular, during the Delta and Omicron surges death rates for the unvaccinated were more than 10 times higher. And these are raw death rates; they don't take into account the unvaccinated population was disproportionally more vulnerable! The CDC estimates that in this period around a quarter million of those deaths would have not happened if they were vaccinated. And those who died of COVID were not selected randomly from the unvaccinated population; they were much more likely to be elderly and immunocompromised. Had they not died of COVID they would still be expected to have a higher mortality rate than the population at large.

In short, the vaccinated population has a self-selected bias towards higher mortality and the unvaccinated population now has a disease-selected bias towards lower mortality. So if you look at raw mortality figures and see that they are slightly higher for the unvaccinated population, that is not an unexpected finding. In fact, it is in part a suggestion that the vaccines are working as intended! Thinking that it is an indication that people are dying of vaccines is very dumb.

Now don't get me wrong, I do think RFK Jr. is a legitimately dumb guy. But he is regular dumb, not "posts on NVG" dumb. He understands everything I have said here and his suggestion about the deadliness of vaccines is disingenuous. He says it because he suspects that a plurality of Americans are dumb enough to believe it. His real objection to vaccines is not that they don't work, it is that they do. He thinks that some people deserve to live and reproduce more than others and that vaccines gum up this natural process.

i don't like discussing this because talking about how horrific fauci was usually makes people think you are a conspiracy theorist but he was absolutely worthless and caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths through his incompetence

we never should have allowed a man in his late 70s who had become a career bureaucrat to be setting national policy. his entire approach was to protect his seat at the table rather than do his job with integrity

• lied about masks to preserve medical supply. admitted it
  
• privately told the virus looked engineered, then dismissed the lab leak using a paper he secretly edited himself
  
• testified nih never funded gain-of-function in wuhan. other nih officials confirmed they did
  
• the 6-foot rule? admitted in 2024 it "sort of just appeared" with no clinical basis
  
• declared vaccinated people a "dead end to the virus." reversed it months later
  
• admitted he moved the herd immunity threshold based on polling, not science
  
• moved with the political winds constantly. when numbers were inconvenient he adjusted them
  
• declared himself scientific consensus. said attacking him was attacking science
  
• when 3 professors genuinely considered top of their field from elite universities challenged lockdowns, he ran a smear campaign labeling them fringe cranks and never addressed a single point they made
  
• we had ample evidence of how asian countries were handling covid very well that we ignored, usa#1 had 1.2m covid deaths. japan, older population, one third the size, had 74k. we had a live comparison running that showed a much better path and completely ignored it
  
• his senior advisor was caught deleting federal records to protect him
  

i wish luigi found greater inspiration

This was the only one I needed. After this lie he had zero credibility.

I am massively pro-vaccine/actual science.

To come back to this. You might think that somebody would want to look at adjusted mortality rates between vaccinated and non-vaccinated population. And indeed may people have. IF the COVID vaccines are not causing a large amount of death themselves then you would anticipate that non-COVID mortality would be about the same between the two groups once you control for demographics and comorbidities. And indeed many studies show exactly that. However, others indicate that, surprisingly, the vaccinated population have slightly lower adjusted mortality from non-COVID caues, particularly in the US:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm

Not for nothing, but this has been widely talked about and disseminated and those people who don't get all their public health information from Facebook and Next Door have likely heard about it. Certainly RFK Jr. knows all about it and nonetheless chooses not to share that with you. It's worth considering why imo.

The reason for the lower mortality is contested, but I am pretty sure that the main contributing factor is stupidity. IME every anti-vaxxer I have met in the US is dumber than a box of doorknobs and I have a hard time thinking that doesn't have a meaningful downwind effect on your lifespan in ways that aren't captured by vital records. Maybe now that we are in the age of AI and big data we will soon be able to tease out some of this. I am pretty sure the unvaccinated will prove to be more susceptible to deaths from choking on a billiard ball, decapiting yourself while shaving, overdosing on ionized wormwood, scurvy - things of that nature.

I can't tell whether you're simply a troll, or whether you're actually this stupid. Or both.

Here, word for word, is the Malmuth post you are pointing to:

His entire post is LITERALLY RFK Jr. said it and that makes it true. The logical--really the only--rebuttal to a statement that "X said Y so Y is true" is to highlight the complete lack of credibility of X.

With perfect logic, then, a number of posters have presented evidence that RFK Jr. lacks any credibility. You have chosen, quite strategically, to characterize that as an ad hominem attack because that's really all you have here--victimhood. (Malmuth is no slouch in the victimhood department either, by the way. He did a nifty job of prebuttal by positioning any objection to RFK Jr. as being merely about hating Trump.)

Victimhod is why you're obsessed with BLM protests and it's why your only response to the intellectual beating you are taking in this thread is to claim that you and your hero Malmuth are being unfairly treated--by parrots, no less, who lack critical thinking skills. That last bit there? That's what's known as projection.

That’s not what my post says. You should read it a few more times.

You originally said that the data shows the vaccine caused more deaths. (SPOILER: It absolutely doesn't). Then you said RFK "clearly said" it and implied that other people would discredit him just because of Trump.

You've yet to offer a shred of any other evidence for your original claim.

You need to read my post a few more times as well.🙄

"There's a lot of question today as to whether the vaccines worked, and I've read that there's some evidence that those who took the vaccine had a higher death rate from other causes."

Your post verbatim.

1) No there isn't question, not among anyone who is educated. The vaccines worked as well as they could realistically have been hoped to.

2) Saying "I've read..." implies either that you think what you read is credible or that you're an irresponsible goon spreading known garbage. I've read the Earth is flat and that we actually live inside the earth ruled by lizard people.

So presuming you aren't knowingly spreading complete nonsense you're saying what you've read is at least credible, and then your post here says that "RFK clearly said it" so the obvious implication is RFK's comments on the matter are credible.

I wrote: “What the real is what do the statistics show and why is he saying this?”

I wonder why you and some of these other people have trouble reading and understanding what I wrote.

There’s not a lot of question today as to whether the vaccine worked.

I don’t really have any questions as to why you peddle that narrative though. It completely fits in with my priors about your reasoning abilities.

They show the vaccine worked and he's saying this because he's a completely unqualified nutter.

The question you pose here has to be read in context with your other post, and I explained exactly why what you posted at minimum implies RFK has credibility.

No it doesn’t. I’m questioning what is the statistical validity of why he makes that statement.

I’ve read this five times and it makes less sense each time. Are you having a stroke or am I?

Mason wants to talk out of both sides of his mouth and wants to attack/insult anyone who calls him on it so he can call attention to his hedge

Nothing to see here. Stop feeding the troll

I don't believe "COVID" existed at all.

As the dismissive reactions to this post demonstrate, your obfuscations are fooling absolutely no one. Everyone understood precisely what you meant in your pathetic original post, and everyone sees this absurd rebuttal for the nothing that it is.

You present yourself as merely an asker-of-questions, a seeker-of-truths, but your tell is “But he’s a member of the Trump administration, so I’m sure that drives you crazy.”

Like RFK Jr., you’re a shadow of whatever you once were. I don’t know if it’s the same or a different worm gnawing on your brain. You’re an ideologue, masquerading as a scholar, adrift in a cult.

Imagine opening a locked thread to dispute something and then immediately re-locking it. Then when called out to defend said post responding with something that's essentially akin to "hey man I was just asking questions". What a tool.

This has gotten such a bloodbath it almost looks like lunch time at RFK Jr's

This is a perfect assessment. Well done.

Because interpersonal communication/human relationships is something you struggle with mightily (and undoubtedly have your entire life), as evidenced by your utterly clueless characterization of Sklansky’s letter to Brandi as merely “stupid”.

Hell, they started the whole thing, with the Hollywood types (McCarthy, et al) screeching nonsense about vaccines causing autism.