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23 May, 10 tweets, 9 min read
1/V

Quick thread on another reason why I don't trust Vinay Prasad.



I'm an immunologist, and one of the main reasons I first came to Twitter 4 years ago was to debunk vaccine denialism.



2/V

To be blunt, I know more about immunology and vaccines than Prasad. This is not his field of expertise.

The study he cites does not support the claim he made:
science.sciencemag.org/content/371/65…

And the John Snow memo is pretty good:



3/V

There were good reasons for thinking COVID-19 vaccines would induce a better immune response than infection.

I was not the first to point this out (h/t @drjenndowd).




4/V

So I responded to Prasad's thread by going over some of the reasons he was wrong.

In reply, he blocked me, without addressing what I said. He's fairly notorious for blocking to evade criticism.





5/V

So let's check some recent evidence on immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines vs. infection.




page 32:
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

page 24:
fda.gov/media/144246/d…
6/V

More evidence on immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines vs. infection:



figure 1C, and:
"[...] post-vaccination neutralization titers were equal to or exceeded the titers found in the high responder convalescent group"
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
7/V

FYI:

Neutralizing antibodies bind to SARS-CoV-2 to prevent it from infecting cells.
Vaccines can not only increase them more initially without infection, but also increase them after infection.



biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…
8/V

So @VPrasadMDMPH's claim on vaccines failed.

Maybe he should spend more time honestly listening to criticism, as opposed:
- to running from it
- sub-tweeting his critics
- messing up more on COVID-19 vaccines for kids?



9/V

FYI:

Saying 'infection is better than vaccination' is a standard trope of vaccine denialism, as is peddling anti-vaxxers' misleading/false tropes while claiming to be pro-vaccine.
Let's not fall for it.


10/V

Twitter's blocking part 6/V for some reason.

So here's the information in it:



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More from @AtomsksSanakan

Atomsk's Sanakan Profile picture
28 Apr
1/Y

Many criticized the article below co-authored by Jay Bhattacharya, who also co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration.

But I haven't seen a detailed explanation of why the article was wrong + dangerous. So I'll give one here



theprint.in/opinion/majori…
2/Y

It was clear Bhattacharya + others were wrong long before the recent resurgence of COVID-19 in India.
So this is not just "hindsight is 20/20."





archive.is/wxqye#selectio…
[judithcurry.com/2021/01/10/cov…]

3/Y

Imagine the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as an accelerating car.

Some brakes help slow the car, such as masks, social distancing, contract tracing, etc.

But even without brakes, the car will eventually start slowing down on its own; that's herd immunity.

Read 26 tweets
Atomsk's Sanakan Profile picture
26 Apr
1/H

There was a recent effort to champion Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) as a non-expert who speaks uncomfortable truths experts don't want to hear.

That's misguided, as we can see by examining how many SARS-CoV-2-infected get hospitalized.

2/H

Some context:

Infection fatality rate, or IFR, is the proportion of people infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2 who die of the disease COVID-19.

Infection hospitalization rate, or IHR, is like IFR, but with COVID-19 hospitalizations instead of deaths

institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an…
3/H

Seroprevalence studies measure antibody levels to estimate the number of infected people.

Dividing COVID-19 hospitalizations by that number of infected people gives a seroprevalence-based IHR.

IHR is good to know.



Read 19 tweets
Atomsk's Sanakan Profile picture
11 Apr
1/T

As we get closer to the end of the pandemic, it's worthwhile to look back on false claims that helped make the pandemic worse.

One of these claims was:
COVID-19 is not much of a danger to people outside of nursing homes + other institutions.

2/T

John Ioannidis is a proponent of this claim.

He argued that relatively few SARS-CoV-2-infected people died of the disease COVID-19, outside of nursing homes.

In other words: the infection fatality rate, or IFR, was low outside of nursing homes.

institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an…
3/T

He defended this idea since at least early May 2020. And he continued to defend it in his most recent work:

"in Europe and the Americas (~0.2% among community-dwelling non-institutionalized people)"
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ec…

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Read 10 tweets
Atomsk's Sanakan Profile picture
3 Apr
1/U

You may recently have heard that COVID-19 has a fatality rate of ~0.15%, making it akin to a bad flu.

In reality, a more accurate fatality rate would be closer to ~0.6%, as per the WHO.
That's ≥10X worse than seasonal flu, and ~100X worse than the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
2/U

Background:

Infection fatality rate (IFR) is the proportion of people infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2 who die of the disease COVID-19.

IFR for seasonal flu is <0.1%, as per the WHO, among others:
who.int/emergencies/di…



institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an…
3/U

So, following @BallouxFrancois, who in their right mind would claim COVID-19 has an IFR comparable with that of seasonal flu?

Well, I can think of at least 2 people.
You likely know who one of them is. 😉

from 2:27 :
Read 30 tweets
Atomsk's Sanakan Profile picture
27 Mar
1/J

John Ioannidis published an article defending his low estimate of COVID-19's fatality rate.

It contains so many distortions that I'll try something I've never done on Twitter for a paper:

Go thru distortions page-by-page.

This will take awhile. 😑

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ec… Image
2/J

Some context:

Infection fatality rate, or IFR, is the proportion of people infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2 who die of the disease COVID-19.

There are many IFR estimates, including some from Ioannidis.



institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an… Image
3/J

Seroprevalence studies (serosurveys) measure antibody levels to estimate the number of infected people.

Dividing COVID-19 deaths by that number of infected people gives a seroprevalence-based IFR.



who.int/bulletin/volum… Image
Read 48 tweets
Atomsk's Sanakan Profile picture
26 Mar
1/C

One my pet peeves is tone trolling, which is:
emphasizing the *tone* of a discussion on X, to avoid addressing the *substance/evidence/facts* on X.

This thread will cover an instance of tone trolling from @VPrasadMDMPH.



2/C

In the above tweet, Prasad uses tone trolling to defend John Ioannidis. Since at least March 2020, + continuing to now, Ioannidis made obviously incorrect claims that downplayed the risk of COVID-19.





web.archive.org/web/2020121700…
3/C

Example: Ioannidis so under-estimated the proportion of people infected people who die of COVID-19 (i.e. the infection fatality rate, or "IFR"), that he needs more people to be infected than actually exist.

That's impossible



Read 11 tweets

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