Turns out that cherry-picking news stories that agree with your preconceptions is less evidence than it is a basic logical error, but you keep on trying Alex
If we actually wanted to know whether healthcare workers were refusing vaccines at a high rate, we'd need to know a number of things:
1. Vaccine doses available 2. Doses intended to be given to HCW 3. Doses refused by job
We'd ideally want to know why the vaccines were refused, as well. Did HCWs worry about side-effects or did their employers not give them adequate time to get the vaccine?
There are news stories about literally any topic. HCWs refusing vaccines makes for a good story
Finding a few headlines that agree with a point isn't enough
If you actually think through the claim, it's trivially obvious that a few headlines makes no difference whatsoever
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Disagreement over science should not consist of personal attacks
That is not an excuse for uncritically accepting all bad science, nor for refusing to critique things that are clearly flawed
Many people have taken my criticisms of Ioannidis' papers, for example, to be some sort of horrifying vendetta, even though I've never once said anything bad about the man himself
The problem is that some people see any criticism of senior academics by their juniors as impolite and disrespectful, and therefore a personal attack
It's coming towards the end of the year, and there are still countless people minimizing the pandemic and spreading untruths
So I thought I'd do a bit of a thread of FACTS about COVID-19 1/n
2/n Fact 1: the death rate of COVID-19 varies substantially by age, but is high even for relatively young people
For example, a 1 in 2,700 risk of death from COVID-19 for a 35 year old, based on our comprehensive paper on the topic link.springer.com/article/10.100…
3/n Fact 2: COVID-19 is MUCH more dangerous than influenza
For younger age groups, COVID-19 may be similarly lethal. For anyone over 30, it is much worse. @zorinaq has a nice graphic on this
I've been tangentially watching this critique by @ikashnitsky of another worrying paper in JAMA Psych, so I thought I'd briefly discuss my own thoughts on the paper in a bit of twitter peer-review 1/n
2/n Paper is here, it looks at suicide rates in Maryland during 2020, and finds that there are racial disparities in these rates. In particular, there were fewer White individuals dying of suicide during lockdown, but more Black people died this way jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…
3/n @ikashnitsky and one of the authors have had a fantastic back-and-forth, and I strongly recommend you read the threads here:
Wow, 15 locally-acquired cases in NSW. So 23-30-15
That's a huge relief for Sydney, although we won't know for sure if the outbreak is controlled for a few days yet #covidnsw#nswcovid
For those who made fun of the "gold standard", I'd be interested to know of anywhere in the world that ramped up testing by 8x and went from R(t) ~1.4 to R(t)<~1 in THREE DAYS
38,000 tests in one day. That's 5 tests for every 1,000 people in the state in 24 hours!
The authors of the Great Barrington nonsense have produced a website called "collateral global", claiming to document the collateral effects of COVID-19 lockdowns
I thought I'd have a look at the scholarship on display 1/n
2/n First up - suicide. I have actually looked into this subject a fair bit, and as someone with mental health issues I take a fairly personal interest in the statistics
What does this global repository say?
3/n There are currently 4 studies listed. One found no change in suicide rates, one is an opinion piece by a psychiatrist, and the other two are cross-sectional studies of suicidal ideation
This is a massive step by Twitter. If implemented across the board, it could largely shut down many denialist accounts
Some generic responses for all the people replying:
- Twitter is a private company. They do not owe you the right to their platform to spread misinformation
- This is preventing lies about one, specific thing, you can still lie about other things
- if this makes you want to leave Twitter, it makes no sense to reply to this tweet - deleting your account is a much more logical step