January 4, 2021 at 22:55#64308REPLY
node
“What is the Agora Blog? I’ve never heard of it till now and I’m not aware of ever referencing it. You’ve associated me with it in a very negative way. If you don’t have a reason for doing so, the honourable course would be to retract this false association.”
Yes Node, I acknowledge my error, it was not the Agora Blog by Ian Davis, and for this I sincerely apologise and eat humble pie. However I will amend this to say that the source of the original argument you put forward in your post of January 4, 2021 at 17:10#64276 was actually partly from the article by Ian Davis in OffGuardian
So let us see why I and Clark have reached this conclusions:
Your post:
“By the way, your 95% effective claim is based on a calculation that gives relative risk reduction:
100(1 – (0.044/0.88)) = ~95%.
The absolute risk reduction is much more meaningful:
(0.88-0.044)% = ~0.84%”
OffGuardian Ian Davis:
Using Pfizer’s figures, the relative risk reduction is 100(1 – (0.044/0.88)). Which is 95%. Voila!
Almost a cut and paste I would say. Would you agree?
That would have been fine if you had then linked the source of this calculation, but as Clark pointed out, it appears from your post that you have independently arrived at these figures.
Another quote further down from Ian Davis:
However, this was based upon relative risk reduction. That is the declared percentage difference between the vaccinated group’s 8/18310 chance (0.044%) of developing COVID 19 against a 162/18319 (0.88%) chance of COVID 19 symptoms without the vaccine. As this larger group of 43,000 people have yet to be trialled, there is no basis for this claimed outcome. But it is what it is, and we can use these reported figures here.
This sounds fantastic and is a much better marketing strategy than reporting the absolute risk reduction. The absolute risk of developing COVID 19 symptoms without the vaccine is supposedly 0.88% and with the vaccine 0.044%. In absolute terms, the effectiveness of the vaccine is (0.88-0.044)%.
“For the record, my only substantial quote today was from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Blog (“Comment and opinion from The BMJ’s international community of readers, authors, and editors”). You didn’t respond other than to attack me personally.”
You then later did quote the article by Peter Doshi in the BMJ.
I did not attack you personally, I just merely mentioned the confusion created between your two different posts.
The problem here is that I do tend to agree with you to a very small extent, and with Peter Doshi and also with what ET has said. Yes we must be cautious about the vaccine, and yes the data is not mature, how can it be if vaccines have only been developed 6 months ago, of course we do not have long term safety data and so on, but given the gravity of the situation there is a real urgency in breaking this cycle. If you have other suggestions, bolstered by reliable quotes, that naturally acquired herd immunity is the way forward, then let us have this discussion.
Therein is the problem Node. If we can solve our differences by rational discussion then we need to agree as to what our beliefs are and how we can respect each other. But this is impossible if we jump from one subject to another. If you start with the view point that the virus is no worse than the ‘flu, and that the PCR is meaningless, then of course we cannot take you seriously when you then jump onto why the vaccine is not effective and so on. At some point we may just agree to disagree.