Some people claim that vaccines are killing young people in droves, but I computed excess mortality in France for people between 20 and 49 and, not only was it negative both in 2020 and 2021, but it was slightly more negative in 2021 despite ~29% more confirmed COVID-19 deaths 😂
The only period when excess mortality was higher in 2021 than in 2020 was at the end of the summer, which coincides neatly with the wave of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in August/September, much better than with the wave of vaccinations in that group which started and ended earlier.
I was going to do something complicated to show that vaccines don't kill people, but it turned out to be even more obvious than I thought so I didn't need to. I also like that it's whitepill for both the antivax and the people who think COVID-19 is dangerous for young people 😀
For the record, my view is that it's debatable whether young people should get vaccinated and in any case I don't think we should force them, but that regardless of which risk is higher for them (vaccination or COVID-19), the most important fact is that it's tiny in both cases 🤷♂️
So it's a debate I can't really bring myself to care about. The only thing I care about is the debate about mandates, including mandates in all but name like we have in France, which I strongly oppose. But as to whether young people should get vaccinated I'm like whatever.
Yes, I know there are externalities, but given how quickly protection against infection seems to wane and the fact that young people aren't going to get boosted every 6 months forever, I don't think they really matter either because we're only delaying the inevitable.
Oops, this made me realize there was a typo in the subtitle of the chart I posted above, it should read that excess mortality was estimated by taking the difference with the average of 2017-2019, not just 2019! This is what the graph shows.
Say what you want about epidemiologists, but their ability to be amazed that something that has repeatedly happened in the past is happening once again — when they notice it that is — is truly refreshing. They really have kept a child's soul! 😀 cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
Of course, it had already happened before with Alpha and, by the way, I had already called attention to the importance of the assumptions we make about the generation interval at the time. But it's nice to see they are catching up! cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
I did the same thing for other European countries and France is not an outlier. There are some where there were more excess mortality in 2021 than 2020, but even in those, it was usually negative. Vaccines aren't killing young people and, for the most part, neither is COVID-19 🤷♂️
It's different in some Central and Eastern European countries, but from the timing of the increase in excess deaths, it's obvious that it's because of COVID-19 and not vaccination, since it matches that of COVID-19 waves but not that of vaccine uptake.
In fact, the difference is almost certainly in large part the result of the fact that vaccine uptake was much lower in those countries than in Western Europe, although the effect is probably driven by the higher end of that age group since COVID-19 kills very few people below 40.
Ça en dit long sur l'état du débat public, des journalistes aux politiciens en passant par les scientifiques, que personne ne souligne que la justification du gouvernement pour l'instauration du passe vaccinal est complètement bidon, ce qui ne devrait même pas être controversé.
Si le gouvernement prétend que le passe vaccinal permettra d'empêcher une éventuelle saturation des unités de réanimation, il devrait pouvoir présenter des scénarios reposant sur des hypothèses non-délirantes montrant que ça a une chance d'être le cas, c'est très simple.
Bien sûr, il ne peut pas, car sauf à faire des hypothèses complètement fantaisistes le passe vaccinal n'empêchera pas une saturation des unités de réanimation si celle-ci doit se produire 🤷♂️ Mais les journalistes sont tellement nuls que le gouvernement peut dire ça sans problème.
Je rappelle que, contrairement à ce que prétend cet imbécile, 1) *personne* n'oblige le gouvernement à décider la moindre mesure de restriction et 2) le passe vaccinal n'empêchera *en rien* une éventuelle surcharge des unités de réanimation.
Il ne faut jamais cesser de rappeler le premier point : la décision de mettre en place des restrictions est un choix politique et le gouvernement pourrait tout à fait choisir de ne pas le faire, comme les autorités l'ont fait dans d'autres pays, donc qu'il l'assume son choix !
Quant au second, même si on fait des hypothèses délirantes sur l'effet du passe vaccinal sur la vaccination, compte tenu du délai entre vaccination et protection, la vague actuelle aura déjà commencé à redescendre depuis longtemps au moment où ça produira des effets...
People say that we should update vaccines so they will make antibodies that are better adapted to Omicron, but I wonder if there isn't a case that we should deliberately *not* do that. Here is the argument, which may be completely wrong. 1/n
It's now pretty clear that Omicron is intrinsically milder than previous strains, so since SARS-CoV-2 is not going anywhere, it's better if Omicron replaces all the other strains and fully takes over everywhere eventually. 2/n
If this happens, there is a better chance that all variants in the future will descend from Omicron, and therefore a better chance they'll be similarly mild. This would put us in a more desirable endemic equilibrium other things being equal. 3/n
Even if Delta had a R0 of ~6, and the estimate of Omicron's transmission advantage in that study were correct, you could *not* infer that it has a R0 of ~18 because this advantage is likely due mostly or perhaps even entirely to Omicron's better ability to evade prior immunity!
This inference is based on a confusion between a *transmission* advantage and a *transmissibility* advantage, but as I explained before those are distinct concepts and it's important to distinguish them, otherwise you end up making this kind of mistake. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
Moreover, as I explained in this article, we don't really have very good reasons to think that Delta has a R0 of 6, precisely because it's very difficult to estimate a variant's *transmissibility* advantage from its *transmission* advantage in a particular context.