[laichzeit0]

Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.

[Palomides]

doing a double blind study of a vaccine that seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease seems morally questionable

[ekianjo]

> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease

not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.

[arp242]

Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.

Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?

They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.

Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.

I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...

[vkou]

And when you do, the critics will just shift the goal posts, again.

[biophysboy]

Establishing a causal graph like this is not realistic for medical studies. Luckily we have multiple RCTs

[LarsDu88]

I did read the book, and the takeaway is that causal disentaglement is hard and a high bar, with even the causal link between cigarette smoking an cancer hard to "prove" until recently

[turnsout]

Are there really antivax people that would know the word "covariate?" That's gotta be a small Venn diagram overlap.

[dghlsakjg]

They might know the word. Understanding what it means in context is a different matter.

You see this all the time where people will pick up niche jargon and misapply it.

[biophysboy]

Antivaxers surpisingly know quite a lot of lingo. What they lack is an understanding of experimental methods.

[ceejayoz]

Sovcits similarly use lots of complicated legal terms.

They just don't use them correctly and/or appropriately.