The NYTimes coverage of covid and children has sensationalized the risk, & lacked numerical perspective.
As such the coverage torpedoed 1 year of in person school, and now is leading anxious parents to push for off-label vaccine &. going to extremes....
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I believe that people should ALWAYS enroll in randomized controlled trials, but one should do so from a neutral emotional state with knowledge of potential risks and benefits.
Pushing for off-label use is not good.
This is a direct result of NYtimes & others fearmongering 👇
This part puzzles me. Even without a covid vaccine, isn't it totally safe for a kid to go camping -- aka OUTSIDE?-- with their family? Were they holding off on going outside?
Yes, the rate is higher than it has been, but the rate is still.. very very low compared to risks we take all the time in life
Why won't the time put the risks in perspective?
These are UK data:
A bigger risk to kids than sars-cov-2 are adults who lack the ability to weigh those risks against prolonged school closure.
Here is one solution:
We can just increase the sample size of these trials... more slots & more power for rare AEs
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Every single one of these garbage papers use the denominator of PCR+ covid infections, and not the actual denominator of people who had covid-- many do not present to the doc. Every single one of these papers is shit. I would be embarrassed to be an author. Incompetent work.
People with covid who are so sick they have to go to the doctor have poorer health than people who don't. That should be in the journal of obvious things. All of these authors are extrapolating beyond the evidence. They're creating a body of trash calling itself science
Is there a single paper that uses a sero prevalence denominator? Is there a single researcher in this field whose brain is working? Just one. That's all I ask for.
Totally wrong. Because Vincent is not thinking about the counterfactual correctly.
*Teachable moment*
1 These drugs were approved by accelerated approval in the LAST line. Some later improved survival & others didn't in an EARLIER line.
2 The counterfactual to AA... 🧵
is demanding RCTs powered for say, OS (survival). If a company couldn't use RR to get AA, they wouldn't run a trial in the 2nd line or 3rd line setting powered for OS, they would run it in the 7th or 8th line
Why? more dire = faster result
3. We have proven that in these v late lines RR and median DOR (the current AA criteria) result just as fast as OS pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30933235/
Many people want covid to be worse than it is. They imagine it has long-term consequences that are worse than other respiratory viruses. Adjusting for severity of illness, it doesn't. Only anosmia is unusual. Why do they want it to be worse than it is? 🧵
For some reason, some people want to live with perennial precautions. They don't want to take off the mask, they want their children to mask, they want to keep getting booster after booster. I don't know why but they want to live in fear.
They have...
A mountain of retrospective observational data that they think supports their claim that covid has long-term disability. That it's a vascular disease. And all sorts of other claims. Nearly all these studies are flawed. They don't have good controls.
Lots of prior studies show many psychological findings don't reproduce. Obviously that's because so much of this science is bullshit. Small sample size, weak methods. Entire fields struggling to justify their existence & people p hacking and exaggerating to be on @HiddenBrain
How do you fix this problem? No one really knows. All of academia is incentivized for hype and discovery, actually being a thoughtful student, criticizing things, pushing for better methods that's unpopular.
Thank you @Erman_Akkus for ur reply it is a good learning opportunity for #ESMO24
In 15 tweets, I will summarize the trial, my criticism, and why this reply contains 3 common errors that oncologists make because our training doesn't teach these ideas.
First, the trial...
The trial is #LEEP-012 and randomizes pts with INCURABLE (see pic) liver cancer to TACE (embolization) plus costly drugs or embolization alone.
These 2 drugs are TOXIC (lenva is horrible) and cost a FORTUNE 200-300k per annum per person
#ESMO24
Every single person has the cancer return. It is non-metastatic, as @Erman_Akkus says, but it is not curable.
Here is the time until measured lesions grow 20% or new lesions present or the patient dies
That's what he and others are excited by #ESMO24
a 4 months PFS
Just out on @medrxivpreprint and @CityJournal
We analyzed all COVID19 corrections in the @nytimes
We show that 2:1 the Times OVERSOLD covid risk or FALSELY HYPED the benefit of restrictions
1 reporter alone was 7% of all corrections
Let's take a look 🧵
Naturally, in times of crisis, newspapers won't get everything right
Corrections are inevitable and forgivable
But corrections should occur at random
Sometimes they are too high and sometimes too low
If they tend to be in one direction...
That's bias
Here is the key figure
When the New York Times made mistake those mistakes were TWICE as likely to OVERSTATE the harm of COVID, particularly to kids, than UNDERSTATE
This is evidence of systematic BIAS in their reporting