It’s slow right now in the ICU, so here it is… the thread you’ve never seen before….

Tips for new interns. First, we must get this out of the way. Saying “it’s slow” does not actually impact the number of sick patients about to come your way. You don’t have that much power.

Nevertheless, everyone will be mad at you if you say this out loud, so probs don’t say this out loud.

What are vitamin K shots, and why do we give them to fresh lil' newborns?

A thread on why we give vitamin K to the little ones. This is vitamin K. It is a vitamin. Basically everyone agrees that vitamins (in the right doses) are good for people. Our bodies need them.

You may recall Florida's vaccine analysis which claimed that mRNA vaccines are associated with increased risk of cardiac death in young men.

This week, @TB_Times published earlier, unpublished drafts of that analysis.

Those earlier drafts tell a dramatically different story... The @TB_Times obtained 5 previous drafts of the analysis from an anonymous source. These drafts show very different results and/or conclusions compared to the final version of the report released last October.

tampabay.com/news/health/20…

I have a lot of thoughts about the Cochrane mask analysis, and will try to summarize them soon. But right now I'm only going to talk about one of them:

the Denmark study. As you have probably heard by now, the Cochrane review looks at randomized-controlled trials (RCTs) of mask use for respiratory infections. The majority of studies were conducted before the pandemic, and only two during the pandemic: one in Denmark, and one in Bangladesh.

You may have heard the shocking headline that 250,000 people die every year in the US due to misdiagnosis in the ER.

You may be even more shocked to know that this statistic is extrapolated from the death of...

just one man.

in a Canadian ER.

over a decade ago. These shocking numbers are the results of a report published by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ), reported in the NY Times this week:

nytimes.com/2022/12/15/hea…

Great thread here by @ENirenberg dissecting why the serious adverse events reported in the moderna vaccine study on kids is not as alarming as the FL state surgeon general is suggesting.

I would add two other quick points:

https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1586422992938340352

First, the vaccine group (N = 1761) was 3 times larger than the placebo group (N = 589). If you are comparing raw numbers of adverse events, you would expect there to be fewer in the placebo group simply because there are fewer kids overall in that group.

Florida just announced the results of an analysis that they performed, saying the results show "an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39" for the mRNA vaccines, and recommend this group not receive these vaccines.

Is this justified? Let's look at the data... The link to the analysis takes you here, not a published study, but a pdf of a word document: floridahealthcovid19.gov/wp-content/upl…

A few notes off the bat:
1. this analysis is not published and is not peer reviewed.
2. there are no authors listed, which is a bit odd.

Do not let anyone convince you that you need to get sick to be healthy. This is very silly.

While the day we fully understand the immune system will probably never come, there are a few things we can say for sure about how exposure to microbes impact your immune health... 1. Microbial exposures ARE important for immune development. For example, if you take away all the microbes from a mouse (germ free mice), their immune systems don't develop properly.

A case study in graphs that crush my soul, and why appropriate axes (and axis labels) are the lifeblood of data visualization.

Thank you to @K_Sheldrick and @DGlaucomflecken for addressing and highlighting this issue. Recently a study was published assessing the effectiveness of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in kids (age 5-11) against omicron. It analyzed data from 255,936 kids in Singapore from Jan-Apr 2022 to see who was vaccinated, who got COVID, and who was hospitalized. nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

Almost 1 million COVID deaths in the US. 1 in 330 Americans have died from COVID.

A look back on how we got here. February 29, 2020: Washington state man becomes first U.S. death from coronavirus
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1…

New study shedding light on the ivermectin kerfuffle:

Here's a (very) brief update on what happened and what this study shows...

https://twitter.com/AviBittMD/status/1506013289779642369

In 2020, a few studies started emerging showing that people with COVID who took ivermectin had a lower chance of dying. This started the idea that ivermectin might be beneficial for COVID.

NEW: 10 logical fallacies used in vaccine arguments

Over the last 2 months I've created a series on logical fallacies, and now collected them all in one place! Check out the series tackling VAERS reports, why diet and exercise ≠ vaccination, and more:

youcanknowthings.com/2022/02/05/10-… #1: “If the COVID vaccines work, then why are vaccinated people getting COVID?”

This is a false dichotomy, suggesting there are only 2 possible options for vaccine efficacy: (1) the vaccines stop 100% of infections or (2) the vaccines don't work. In reality, neither is correct👇🏽

NEW (ongoing) series: logical fallacies in vaccine arguments.

Episode 1: Sealioning. (Not technically a formal fallacy, but still a very common argument strategy.) Episode 2: The appeal to authority fallacy.

New blog post: There is a published paper making the rounds, now viewed over a million times, claiming there is no correlation between vaccination rates and COVID case counts.

This paper, while very popular on twitter, is horribly done. Here's why.
youcanknowthings.com/2021/11/01/is-… The paper:
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

your daily reminder that vaccines do not produce variants. infections produce variants.

https://twitter.com/DanielGriffinMD/status/1426899397368033284

If this is confusing to you, here's some genetics 101:

Variants come from new genetic mutations, which arise randomly when the virus replicates. These mutations are all accidents, and happen randomly. Some mutations do nothing, some hurt the virus, and some help it.

People are looking at the percent of vaccinated hospitalizations and getting alarmed. But by itself, this number can't tell you much about how the vaccines are working, as it's highly dependent on the rate of vaccination in a community. Here's some maths to show what I mean👇🏽 As more people are vaccinated (and all else being equal), total hospitalizations will decrease but the *percent* of vaccinated hospitalizations will increase, not because the vaccines aren't working, but because there are more vaccinated people and fewer hospitalizations overall.

With all the discussion on how to combat false info on social media, a reminder that a lot of vaccine-hesitant folks distrust official sources and believe these false articles in part *because* they are pulled off mainstream platforms. Some people share articles with false info primarily *because* they're censored, as a way to try to fight censorship.

As someone endeavoring to be a science communicator, one of the highest compliments I can receive on my writing is “it’s an easy read.”

I remember reading Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger in college, sometimes spending hours trying to understand a single page… Honestly it made me feel intellectually inferior that I had so much trouble understanding what they were saying.

Then my philosophy prof let us in on a secret: it was in vogue, at the time these authors wrote, to be basically unintelligible. The harder it was to understand…

One of the reasons misinformation can be so mind-boggling and exhausting is the high degree of self-contradiction. Granted, not everyone believes every rumor simultaneously, but overall self-contradiction is often a hallmark of misinformation. Here are a few examples: "If a 75-year-old with pre-existing conditions gets COVID and dies from pneumonia 4 days later, COVID was not the true cause" and "if a 75-year-old with pre-existing conditions gets the vaccine and dies from pneumonia 4 days later, the vaccine was definitely the true cause."

There's a new "explosive paper" (not yet available) that claims SARS-CoV-2 was man-made.

An earlier version of these claims was published by the same group last year. Until the new paper is available, here's a review of the previous claims, many of which appear unchanged. In their original paper, they lay out several claims based on the structure of the spike protein which they claim are evidence that it was engineered by humans and did not arise naturally. They use a lot of flowery scientific language, but here is what they argue, simplified:

Wanted to share all the articles I've written on the COVID vaccines in one place. When I have time I want to make a page on youcanknowthings.com for common vaccine FAQs, but... med school is keeping me busy, so for now, a twitter thread will do.

#SciComm #ScienceUpFirst 1. Step-by-step, hand-animated review of the Pfizer vaccine data (safety and efficacy):
youcanknowthings.com/2020/12/19/a-s…