Probably because the article drew conclusions that completely ignore the criticism that he made. Sure, you could argue they mention it in passing (5th of 7 listed limitations, though it’s not elaborated so not clear they actually connect the dots or mean this the same way Kulldorff does), but when authors ignore the limitations they’ve identified & make much broader statements than the data support, are they really doing science?
He might be trying to convince them to retract this rubbish to redeem both their reputations and the credibility of public health in this country. He does have a vested interest in that.
He’s far from the only person to point out the giant flaws in the reported conclusions; however, the CDC Director falsely extended the conclusion to all prior infected, including non-hospitalized (on Twitter no less#gasp#), and much of the press just went ahead & published this press release without questioning (e.g. NYT), so I’d say the public does need rescuing from bad papers like this.
The wider context is that, unlike other countries that do real science, the US has ignored, downplayed, & discounted the protection afforded by prior infection (“natural immunity”) and is imposing vaccine mandates on people who are already protected, who have little if anything to gain from getting the shots while taking on all the risks of side effects (which are more prevalent & severe among those who were previously infected). Many prior infected people object to this. Governmental agencies contriving statistically-flawed papers only adds fuel to that fire.
You seem to have a strong irrational aversion to Twitter as a medium. I’m curious why.
I disagree with your characterization. The article shows the results from the fit to data that was available, as well as statistical uncertainties. Those uncertainties are not supposed to represent systematic uncertainties like the ones described in that post.
Then the very last paragraph specifically draws out the limitations in the study, and specifically mentions possible bias in the sample as compared to the larger population.
I think twitter is a terrible medium for trying to have critical discussions about science. Similar to bumper stickers, more often than not it seems to be clever gotchas just pretending to be complete thoughts.
It makes me think of Feyman’s complaints about bullet points, which only superficially link different pieces of evidence. He thought it contributed to the challenger explosion.
To my mind, Twitter is even worse. It does have its uses. But analysis of scientific evidence is not one of them.
This is pretty exciting news. This is a protease inhibitor, which is the hypothesized method of action in some of the experimental antiparasitic treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Pfizer’s protease inhibitor, though, was of course developed specifically for SARS-CoV-2 and so should be actually or much more effective. This class of drugs is generally well tolerated with low toxicity. IMO it’s likely to be much safer at least than the nucleoside analogs like Merck developed with molnupiravir.
Spoiler: there’s a trade-off between getting protection as fast as possible, and getting stronger, longer-lasting protection. It might have made sense when the vaccines were first rolled out to go fast. But for less vulnerable population’s (like children) and if there weren’t a pandemic raging, it’s probably better to wait ~8 weeks between the first two mRNA shots.
Pretty sure the Ivermectin thread got locked so I will drop this here. Props to the ACLU for stepping in here, if the allegations are true this is terrible. Jeez.
i read a tweet from someone who is a nurse and she said they never discuss 100% forever immunity like this bc big pharma doesn’t get rich off of it. makes sense
Not an exact fit for the topic, but related as it could impact treatment plans. New blood test might not only detect COVID, but indicate how severe your case will be.
That’s very promising. It would be extremely helpful to know what course of treatment is most appropriate, since that varies from “rest and fluids at home” to some pretty heavy-duty drugs that can be expensive or even require a hospital stay.
The gist of the article is that by looking at what sort of immune response the body has mounted, you can predict early-on how serious the infection will be. And because it’s about the immune response, this is unlikely to the be affected by variants.
For those who don’t click links, there was slightly more (though not ‘statistically significant’) “severe disease” (defined as “the hypoxic stage requiring supplemental oxygen to maintain pulse oximetry oxygen saturation of 95% or higher”) among the ivermectin treatment group. (relative risk [RR], 1.25; 95% CI, 0.87-1.80; P = .25)
There was also “statistically insignificant” (95% confidence interval includes RR 1.0) benefit suggested for secondary outcomes, ventilation, ICU, death:
Most common adverse effect of treatment was diarrhea, occurring in almost 6% of treatment patients (compared to 1.6% of control group).
I’m still happy science came up with a way for my body to make a bunch of toy spike proteins that were pretty much harmless in order to tell my immune system how to recognize threats from real spike proteins if they happened to come around.