from Hacker News

Excess deaths and SARS-CoV2 vaccinations in Scotland

by spadez on 6/18/21, 9:19 AM with 46 comments

  • by raphlinus on 6/19/21, 2:11 AM

    I often flag and downvote stories like these, because I do not believe they are consistent with HN's mission to feed intellectual curiosity. It is clear we have a very vocal contingent of vaccine deniers, and I do think it is useful to hear their arguments, but I believe that's best done in the context of source stories that actually convey some new understanding.

    From my observations, the best lens for understanding vaccine denial (or other related forms of Covid denial) is religious belief. Articles like these are medium-quality grains of opinion supporting that belief. Outside Covid, such things are obviously not in scope for HN, but the virus has captured our attention.

    If I were the mod, I'd have an explicit policy that Covid stories need to come from high quality sources. Dissenting or unusual perspectives are fine, but these "just asking questions" pieces with confusing (at best) statistics aren't. And I'd honestly consider most mainstream press pieces not to clear the bar either. There are some excellent science journalists and bloggers out there (Derek Lowe is one of my favorites of the latter). We should be listening to them, I think.

  • by wobblyasp on 6/19/21, 1:17 AM

    I may just be exceptionally stupid, but is this a gag article? I mean that in all seriousness.

    Graph of daily vs weekly deaths look completely differently, numbers are present in absence of any context (how are vaccine rates measured? Does it only count it after the two week build up period?), and the article cited for proof of spike protein levels doesn't actually cite spike protein levels, but lipid levels.

  • by dathinab on 6/19/21, 12:40 AM

    What a misleading article.

    1) The weekly excess death tend to always largely fluctuate as far as I know.

    2) If there really is a causation between excess death and vaccination, shouldn't the number of weekly excess death increase when the relative in crease in the amount of vaccinated people is higher (e.g. the steps between the measurement points is larger)?

    3) The drop at the end is also easily explainable, it's a statistics over the first vaccination and vaccination takes some time to take effect and increasingly more people over the same time got vaccinated and once a large amount of people are vaccinated the excess death due COVID will notable fall. So not really that surprising.

    Did I miss something?

  • by jostmey on 6/19/21, 12:27 AM

    So are vaccinations causing excess deaths? Just remember that correlations to not imply causation. To understand why, imagine repeating this analysis using a sliding window with a width of one year. In the last year, you will see an increase in excess deaths and vaccinations. It does not imply vaccinations cause excess deaths. The causation goes the other way... the excess deaths caused the vaccinations

  • by zibzab on 6/18/21, 6:16 PM

    Can you really simplify something this complex this much?

    What happens if we, say, include people who died of covid despite getting the vaccine? Would this still stand?

    Edit: read spadez other links. This is basically monty python witch scene plus some graphs and citations to make it look legit.

  • by didibus on 6/19/21, 1:24 AM

    As far as I know, this also doesn't show a correlation. This is just right now showing a coincidence no?

    Wouldn't you need to compute the correlation coefficient or at least plot a scatter graph?

  • by spadez on 6/18/21, 9:22 AM

  • by stephc_int13 on 6/19/21, 12:51 AM

    What we should expect, here, is a decrease of excess death.

    If we were seeing that it would seem logical to attribute this effect to the vaccination.

  • by rob_c on 6/19/21, 2:15 AM

    Well it is a WordPress.com article...