... many of these people who are losing their jobs right now risk their own personal safety to work in the hospital before there was a vaccine. When you needed them.
These people don't disappear from America either, and their fate is tied to all our fate.
Pressuring people to get vaccinated will increase vaccination rate some fraction and that will provide some marginal extra protection to people who've already chosen to be vaccinated, but it will also lead to firings and that will provide negative countervailing results..
... The final verdict on the policy will be balancing those negative results against the marginal increase in vaccination rate in this moment. It is not intuitively clear what the right answer is. As those negative results are chaotic and unpredictable...
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
My NEW op-ed is out in @usnews!
Mandating 12-18 year old kids get 2 doses of COVID19 vaccine & throwing them out of school if they don't is one of the most regressive, dangerous, and misguided policies in recent years, and I condemn it
The CDC director, a political appointee, siding with the President, & his pre-ordained plan, against the advice of the ACIP advisors, with 0 RCTs measuring clinical outcomes & no idea of adverse events is not "doing one's job" it is politics > science, precisely what we feared 🧵
The process that led up to Pfizer booster is someday going to be seen as what many dreaded during the Trump administration.
The White House decided during the week of Sept 20, boosters will be made available, and all gears of drug regulation made it happen
Consider the 24 year old male health care aid living in Seattle who received 2 doses of Pfizer vax, and is now granted a path to take dose 3.
Can any medical expert answer 2 questions:
Do the benefits exceed the harms to this individual?
Is he a 'safer' employee?
Asymptomatic testing of highly vaccinated young populations (e.g college) serves no purpose. 1. No one will follow similar restrictions off campus (aka pointless) 2. These kids are going to get SarsCOV 2 eventually (endemic) 3. It will disrupt their life 4. Policies...
In response make no sense
Masking outdoors 5. Most of the regions doing this are not the regions suffering from delta wave. In fact the place suffering from delta wave won't do it, and the places with high vaccination will do it.
6 mostly signaling
7. College kids protested Vietnam b/c they understood how pointless it was; They have not yet protested this b/c they have been deceived into thinking it helps. Sad times.
This NEJM booster paper DOES NOT justify mass population boosting
4 issues 1. People who get boosters and those who do not are TOTALLY different people. Look at table 1.
This is confounding by indication/ diff. people/ diff behavior
2. The effect size for severe disease is RR 20!
Too good to be true.
An RCT will be fast to exclude a benefit of this size (its just resid. confounding)
3. The benefit on any disease is smaller than on severe disease, which makes less sense from an Ab point of view (should be opposite), and more from the type of people getting booster point of view.