This report has been on the news, claiming that the mRNA vax was associated with less inflammatory complications than getting COVID-19 itself in those younger than 18. Paper here. Is that really true? Let's dive in.
First of all, I noticed that the study population was from the cohort 1/01/2020 to 12/31/2022. While the vaccination cohort was from 8/06/2021 - 12/31/2022. The latter period was when the original dangerous strain was largely gone and we were starting to see the milder omicron strain. So already, the vaccinated group consisted of those who were infected by milder disease than the "non-vaccinated group". They recognized this, and tried to introduce adjustments that they thought would compensate for this. They should have just studied both from the same time period.
The second thing, is look at the raw numbers:
Really not a whole lot of difference between the two populations. The highest difference is in Kawasaki disease, which is not even connected to COVID-19. For myocarditis and pericarditis there was LESS incidence with COVID than with the vaccine! The reason they included Kawasaki disease is because they thought that some cases of heart inflammation might not be counted as COVID but as Kawasaki, so they didn't want to miss the diagnosis –
so they threw it in and counted it!
So it would seem that there is no big difference whether you got the vax or not. But then they did something questionable (to me).
They based it on the observation that when you got sick with COVID you were mildly ill but there were a more drawn out period of
events. Whereas if you got the vax, you got really sick in the beginning, but afterwards there were very few events.
So they make calculations of what they called aHR (adjusted hazard ratios) and found that the risk of getting some complication was higher in non-vaccinated than vaccinated, just because the vaccinated got all their bad events at the beginning.
The main conclusion is based on this figure:
where you can see that the main disadvantage of getting sick with the virus was just in the inflammatory conditions, but most of these children had Kawasaki disease. I haven't heard anyone saying that the vax prevents Kawasaki disease in children, so I would
attribute this to a difference in how this diagnosis was made.
These are calculated 6-month absolute excess risk, and makes the vaxxed group look worse because the events are scattered out over the year, rather than bunched up at the beginning like with the vax. The selection of 6 months as the estimation point was
arbitrary. I would have used another technique called "area under the curve" to see overall differences, rather than just at one
timepoint.
The bottom line is that the incidence of adverse events is very low in both vaxxed and unvaxxed. The authors admitted these
problems were "rare". You would have to vax 20,000 to 35,000 kids to prevent one episode of inflammation. Is it worth it? I'm not sure everyone would agree.
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The
ARC Prize verified was announced. This will reward whoever develops a GenAI model that demonstrates artificial general intelligence.
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How men and women spend their time. Men do more work, social activities and sports/exercise. Women certainly do more household activities, consumer purchases, and phone calls. That I can vouch for. 😂
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Even
Mullvad had to shut down Leta, their privacy proxy search engine. Getting search results from the major search engines is not only more expensive, because of the need to get through their CAPTCHA solvers, but also because the search engines themselves are changing, and more AI-generated crap is being retrieved. I've noticed that it's harder to get good tech reviews to read before making a purchase. And content from Reddit or Stackflow doesn't appear quite as much anymore in tech related questions. I get a lot of results from many years ago, which are not relevant to me now.
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