@Mr._Clark ,
@NINaudio ,
@Danzilla31 and
@Dude#1279435
Thanks for your efforts at explaining why that Israeli study is so misleading. Paying attention only to the calculated percentages, and not the raw numbers, can mislead. Examples:
- Two analyses showed that never-infected but vaccinated people were 6 times and 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who had previously been infected with coronavirus.
- That 13-fold increased risk of infection in one of those analyses was based on just 238 infections in the vaccinated population, less than 1.5% of the more than 16,000 people, versus 19 reinfections among a similar number of people who once had Covid-19 disease.
- In another analysis of 32,000 people, the risk of developing symptomatic Covid-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated. The risk of hospitalization was 8 times higher for the vaccinated.
- However, the real numbers compared for infections and other events were actually very small. The higher hospitalization rate in the 32,000-person analysis was based on just 8 hospitalizations in the vaccinated group, and 1 in the previously infected group.
Are the conclusions warranted by the numbers? The numbers of people in those studies were indeed large. But were the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups selected to equally represent age, gender, racial groups, prior health or other medical conditions? Were these vaccinated and unvaccinated groups randomly selected, or were they used simply because they were already in the database? Because none of these concerns were met, it is very clear that the conclusions are not warranted by the numbers. As a simple guess, I’d say the numbers of people compared, 32,000, might have to be at least 100 (or even 1000) times greater before they could be considered valid.
Do these numbers actually predict what will happen on a much larger scale with many more people? Or is there reasonable doubt caused by significant sampling errors? Although those numbers are real, the conclusions can only be suggestions, not a realistic statistical risk estimated within a reasonable level of confidence. The Israeli study ignored these all of these major concerns.
Proper clinical trial design that permits statistical analysis is essential for useful conclusions to answer questions about the efficacy of vaccines or other medications. All sources of sampling errors must be identified, minimized, or eliminated. The Israeli study made no effort at doing that. The authors readily admitted this. (I strongly suspect the editors of
Science insisted that they add those statements before they would publish that report.)
The US FDA does insist that no clinical trials of any kind can be performed in the USA without proper randomized trial design accompanied by statistical analysis. These designs and statistics methods must be submitted and approved in advance of performing the trial, not afterwards as the Israeli study did.
My only direct comment for Auditor55 is that you used bolded, large type in your posts. This can be interpreted as YELLING at us, much the same as using all caps. I can’t tell what your intention was. I also use bold type to visually emphasize certain sentences, words, or phrases. But I try to make it clear why I bolded things, as I did in post #6406.
