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gravitywind1012 t1_j8eawtm wrote

“Thus, the vaccinated would likely face lower COVID-19 risk even if not vaccinated.”

This is such a confusing sentence to me. What?

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SpacedOutKarmanaut t1_j8ek9en wrote

Trash journals gonna print trash. Fun fact - there have already been four papers published with ChatGPT as a coathor, and those are the ones that admit it.

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SecretAdam t1_j8i8ul3 wrote

This article is not some Gawker blog spam, it has 10 authors and cites 44 sources. I know you did not read it like everybody else in this thread but to dismiss it outright based on one confusing sentence is very lazy and cynical.

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Helldozer5000 t1_j8fhz7e wrote

I agree the sentence is confusing in a vacuum but it makes perfect sense in context. They're just saying that the people who chose to be vaccinated were already healthier in general so even if those healthy people didn't get vaccinated they still would've fared better than the people who ended up not getting the vaccination because those people were already in worse health.

Nothing super groundbreaking here, we already knew COVID was way worse for people with multiple comorbidities.

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BenjaminHamnett t1_j8hz5pp wrote

People who care about their health are healthier than people who don’t take health seriously

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dbx999 t1_j8irva0 wrote

Ok so the vaccinated group is biased towards healthier baseline individuals while unvaccinated group is biased for unhealthy lifestyle choices and a lack of self care including getting vaccinated?

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mootmutemoat t1_j8oh2ei wrote

Why the other person snipped that line out is beyond me. Here is the whole paragraph and it is very clear that when you adjust for healthy living, the benefits of being vaccinated are even more obvious:

"Thus, the vaccinated would likely face lower COVID-19 risk even if not vaccinated. After controlling for these selection effects, we found substantial vaccine protection against death, but also increasing two-dose RMR over time, and large differences in RMR after two doses between younger (age 18–59) and older (age 60+) people. These findings imply that boosters are highly important in reducing mortality, especially for ages 60+."

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BenjaminHamnett t1_j8l36z7 wrote

Over simplifying it, but yes that’s what I’m saying I think they are saying

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sw33tr3l33s t1_j8hi7bd wrote

Maybe before becoming a scientists, they should focus on learning how to write proper sentences so people won't have to decipher them and wonder which of 5 possible meanings is the correct one. If one sentence requires 5 additional explanatory sentences to be understood, maybe we should focus on learning how to write that first sentence so that people don't require additional text to understand it. I swear these people are trying to figure out how to save the world but probably can't do their own laundry.

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I-Way_Vagabond t1_j8hlvpr wrote

I think you’ve hit the nail right on the head with you comment.

The inability of public health leaders to explain these things in simple English has resulted in an information vacuum. As a result, people with their own agendas, often self-serving or even nefarious, have moved in to fill it.

The end result is confusion among the public and in many cases distrust and outright hostility towards public health authorities.

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hallgod33 t1_j8i5t0t wrote

I've got a BSPH, and I'd say that is a huge barrier no one wants to tackle. Medical anthropology is designed to help reduce the communication barrier, but no one in practical medicine wants to listen. Even though we use the same English words, the grammar and sentence structure and etc make medical science a functionally different language.

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DrThirdOpinion t1_j8huz99 wrote

The sentence wasn’t difficult to interpret at all.

Maybe before becoming scientists, people should learn how to read?

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darquintan1 t1_j8jv4lz wrote

In this particular case, the sentence mentioned above is clearer when not taken by itself. In the paper, it is immediately preceded by "We found substantially lower non-COVID natural mortality risk for vaccinated than for unvaccinated persons." That statement clarifies why they suggest that because vaccinated individuals die less from all causes, they likely would die less from COVID too, regardless of the effectiveness of the vaccine itself.

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jokester1801 t1_j8ljr22 wrote

You've hit the nail on the head but i think in a different way than you originally thought. The thing is, this paper isn't necessarily meant for the general public. One of the worst parts of the scientific literature in its present state is that it's written for other scientists, who already know the jargon and who are familiar with the field. Scientific writing just isn't meant to be easily digestible anymore, especially by people without training in it. This is a major flaw in scientific publishing though because it makes science much more inaccessible and creates the information vacuums that others have mentioned.

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sw33tr3l33s t1_j8wz7g7 wrote

Everybody can overcomplicate things, a few can simplify.

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Breezy207 t1_j8kqp4x wrote

It also makes sense that those who got the jabs were more concerned w distancing, masking and stayed away from public spaces…

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advanced_approach t1_j8lkrxf wrote

Parents who read parenting books tend to be better parents because they're the type to read parenting books.

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updatedprior t1_j8euga4 wrote

Vaccinated and unvaccinated were not from homogenous populations. I’m not sure if that is what they are getting at here, but it does add something to the mix when looking at and comparing results.

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BenjaminHamnett t1_j8hz1c9 wrote

Like people who would take vitamins live longer than those who wouldn’t. Regardless of if they do or not in studies

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skibbi9 t1_j8iesws wrote

Bunch of studies actually the opposite for vitamins but agree on the sentiment

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bannedPosts t1_j8jty0t wrote

So the take-home point with vitamins is that they don't have any effect on mortality. Cool.

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tzaeru t1_j8ent0k wrote

Hints that the unvaccinated were more likely to already in a poorer health. Sentence before the one you quoted: "We found substantially lower non-COVID natural mortality risk for vaccinated than for unvaccinated persons."

Which, if interpreted optimistically, might mean that people who skipped vaccinations had immunity system problems or were already too critically ill.

But it probably just means that the lifestyle choices of the unvaccinated people were generally much less healthy than the vaccinated people.

In the sentence after the one you quoted, they say they controlled for this effect: "After controlling for these selection effects [..]"

For reference:

> We used a novel outcome measure, CEMP, to study how vaccination affects COVID-19 mortality risk. This measure uses mortality from other natural causes to control for selection effects in who gets vaccinated. We found substantially lower non-COVID natural mortality risk for vaccinated than for unvaccinated persons. Thus, the vaccinated would likely face lower COVID-19 risk even if not vaccinated. After controlling for these selection effects, we found substantial vaccine protection against death [..]

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Immovable-Floss t1_j8gb9wx wrote

MDPI is known to publish low-quality research from institutions whose scientific practices are questionable. Not saying this is the case for this study but MDPI has low standards and people will often use this as a means to discredit studies, unless the study agrees with what they already agree with.

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International_Bet_91 t1_j8ghcg5 wrote

Probably means the kind of people who get vaccinated also wear seatbelts, don't smoke, don't drink and drive, go for annual doctors visits etc etc etc.

And maybe even more relevant than the boring stuff, people who are homeless, addicted to drugs, running from the law, etc etc also don't get vaccinated.

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onyerbikedude t1_j8mhx3q wrote

That is taking very polar views and is quite cynical to me as a scientist who certainly got vaccinated, goes to the doctor annually, yet smokes, drinks and - most of all - doesn't judge others for their problems.

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slo1111 t1_j8iap44 wrote

They were referring to the fact that mortality for non-covid reasons was lower in the vaccinated versus the non-vaccinated which suggests there are other hidden variables as one would not expect the vaccination to have any impact on non-covid related deaths, so they used statistics to adjust for that anomaly.

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[deleted] t1_j8em3q4 wrote

[deleted]

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tzaeru t1_j8eo53q wrote

No, this was specifically something they controlled for. They wanted to remove this effect from the study.

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rashaniquah t1_j8embe3 wrote

Probably because of a smaller sample size.

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QuartzPuffyStar t1_j8i0p2i wrote

Bs science funded to give "scientific proof" to show governments that they have to keep the vaccine consumption high. Even when Omicron is basically a cold that lasts 2 days...

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