I had a stats teacher back in the 80s who loved to talk about all of the problems with Albert Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He'd make jokes about the 10% of us played for the other team, which, while totally inappropriate, made his classes quite memorable.
We were all engineering students, so one of the big things he emphasized was that while Kinsey's study was complete bs, in the bigger scheme of life, it didn't really matter, because the study was just a stunt, a way to get publicity, not something, that if it failed, would kill someone. When engineers make mistakes, like O-rings in the space shuttle spectacular and fatal events follow. When medical people.make errors, they indiscriminately kill people. I'm not too sure the authors of the study, TKT Lo, Hussain Usman, Khokan C. Sikdar, David Strong, Samantha James, Jordan Ross, Lynora M. Saxinger, are fine with murder, but since they put their names on that trash study, I have to think they are cool with whacking the weak, allegedly. Who knows, maybe they are just morons.
I love your professors point. I am guessing engineers, in general, are more careful about making mistakes because eventually it will be obvious where the mistake occurred.
With medical science, it's easy to make mistakes because another root cause can always be found. Combined with the need to publish, there is a serious lack of due care in the field. The only time mistakes are found is in scandals like the replication crisis or Tamiflu type investigations, both of which took years to resolve and rarely lead to consequences for those involved.
Minor point: The Challenger disaster was not an engineering failure; it was a management failure. The engineers at Morton Thiokol who were responsible for the SRBs practically begged management to recommend against launching that morning because they know just how cold it was the night before (18F at Cape Canaveral!). They knew that this was well outside the design specs for the o-ring joints in the SRBs due to the effect it would have on the o-ring's elasticity. Those engineers were ignored.
I had read that the engineers had not tracked the problem and non-problem o-rings properly against temp. Regardless, someone screwed up, and as is always the case, the political winner writes the history. I wonder how our covid history will be written...
The Science Worshiper Method has been the entrenched favourite used by AHS, academia, and provincial and municipal politicians for decades, for attacking everything from home birth midwifery to wild horse preservation. I remember well the attacks on the Empower Plus supplement studies at U Calgary, and also the fury of those same worshipers when voters dared to object to water fluoridation in Calgary on grounds of logic, science and ethics.
Those are excellent criticisms. I agree, odds ratios should be stratified by age. In fact, considering the context of the study, it doesn't actually make any sense at all not to do so.
Three charts for each severe outcome should have also been included. One of the things I noted was individuals can count for three outcomes. So a vaxxed death in a care home (where most/all are vaxxed) may count as one outcome if they never make it to the hospital, despite getting hospital level care, but an unwanted death of the same age could count as three outcomes. It's unclear whether this is a large concern, but it might be. We simply don't know.
FYI, 1.0 odds ratio for vaccination status seems to be someone that as received a booster shot.
I had a stats teacher back in the 80s who loved to talk about all of the problems with Albert Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He'd make jokes about the 10% of us played for the other team, which, while totally inappropriate, made his classes quite memorable.
We were all engineering students, so one of the big things he emphasized was that while Kinsey's study was complete bs, in the bigger scheme of life, it didn't really matter, because the study was just a stunt, a way to get publicity, not something, that if it failed, would kill someone. When engineers make mistakes, like O-rings in the space shuttle spectacular and fatal events follow. When medical people.make errors, they indiscriminately kill people. I'm not too sure the authors of the study, TKT Lo, Hussain Usman, Khokan C. Sikdar, David Strong, Samantha James, Jordan Ross, Lynora M. Saxinger, are fine with murder, but since they put their names on that trash study, I have to think they are cool with whacking the weak, allegedly. Who knows, maybe they are just morons.
I love your professors point. I am guessing engineers, in general, are more careful about making mistakes because eventually it will be obvious where the mistake occurred.
With medical science, it's easy to make mistakes because another root cause can always be found. Combined with the need to publish, there is a serious lack of due care in the field. The only time mistakes are found is in scandals like the replication crisis or Tamiflu type investigations, both of which took years to resolve and rarely lead to consequences for those involved.
Minor point: The Challenger disaster was not an engineering failure; it was a management failure. The engineers at Morton Thiokol who were responsible for the SRBs practically begged management to recommend against launching that morning because they know just how cold it was the night before (18F at Cape Canaveral!). They knew that this was well outside the design specs for the o-ring joints in the SRBs due to the effect it would have on the o-ring's elasticity. Those engineers were ignored.
I had read that the engineers had not tracked the problem and non-problem o-rings properly against temp. Regardless, someone screwed up, and as is always the case, the political winner writes the history. I wonder how our covid history will be written...
The Science Worshiper Method has been the entrenched favourite used by AHS, academia, and provincial and municipal politicians for decades, for attacking everything from home birth midwifery to wild horse preservation. I remember well the attacks on the Empower Plus supplement studies at U Calgary, and also the fury of those same worshipers when voters dared to object to water fluoridation in Calgary on grounds of logic, science and ethics.
Does Canadian Health Care use the NPM-model and/or the QALY-model? They are very good at wrecking well-functioning practical systems.
Those are excellent criticisms. I agree, odds ratios should be stratified by age. In fact, considering the context of the study, it doesn't actually make any sense at all not to do so.
Three charts for each severe outcome should have also been included. One of the things I noted was individuals can count for three outcomes. So a vaxxed death in a care home (where most/all are vaxxed) may count as one outcome if they never make it to the hospital, despite getting hospital level care, but an unwanted death of the same age could count as three outcomes. It's unclear whether this is a large concern, but it might be. We simply don't know.
FYI, 1.0 odds ratio for vaccination status seems to be someone that as received a booster shot.