I wasn’t disputing that Zvi mentioned the blood clot story, I was disputing your characterisation of it. Quoting from literally the first two paragraphs from your link:
And even if all the observed clots were extra, all were caused by the vaccine, all were fatal, and that represented the overall base rate, and we ignore all population-level benefits and economic issues, the vaccine would still be worth using purely for personal health and safety by multiple orders of magnitude.
The WHO and EMA said there was no evidence there was an issue.
This is not consistent with your characterisation that Zvi made an error because “he did not believe the blood clots were real”.
I feel like it would be exactly the kind of mustache-twirling consequentialism that Eliezer calls out as un-genre-savvy to continue using a vaccination that your calculations say aren’t worth it in terms of naive cost/benefit because switching out the vaccine policy might harm trust. Like I’d rather not have the government decide that I’m too panicky to allow showing doubt.
I’m not disputing that. The assumption and argument here is that the calculations come out positive: we have world A where people get a few more blood clots from a very rare side effect of a vaccine, but a lot fewer blood clots as a Covid symptom, versus world B where people get no blood clots from the vaccine but a lot more people get blood clots as a Covid symptom. That’s what I meant by calling the policy of choosing world B penny-wise but pound-foolish.
(EDIT: And in a yet more competent civilization, you wouldn’t even have to make the tradeoff in the first place, because you could just tell your patients “by the way, we’ve discovered another rare side-effect” instead of suspending the vaccine outright.)
I wasn’t disputing that Zvi mentioned the blood clot story, I was disputing your characterisation of it. Quoting from literally the first two paragraphs from your link:
You are right also said that it was not worth it to deal with even if they were real (which contradicts what the Danish calculations showed, as I mentioned), but the argument he lead with was that they were not real:
There was always going to be something that happened to correlate with vaccination days to some extent, somewhere, over some time period. The number of blood clots experienced after vaccination wasn’t even higher than the base rate you would otherwise expect.
(I had actually initially misremembered him as leading with the argument that they were not worth dealing with, but when I wrote my original post I decided to go back and double-check and found that he was focusing on them not being real instead. So I rewrote it before posting it to say that he didn’t believe them.)
I’m not disputing that. The assumption and argument here is that the calculations come out positive: we have world A where people get a few more blood clots from a very rare side effect of a vaccine, but a lot fewer blood clots as a Covid symptom, versus world B where people get no blood clots from the vaccine but a lot more people get blood clots as a Covid symptom. That’s what I meant by calling the policy of choosing world B penny-wise but pound-foolish.
What I’m saying is that the Danish government did these sorts of calculations at the time and found the trade-off to be worthwhile; the COVID death rate at the time was extremely low, the restrictions were very loose, and the available alternatice vaccines were plentiful, so avoiding AstraZeneca would according to their calculations have lowish costs, such that it is worth it.
Meanwhile, I don’t see any calculations by Zvi showing that it Denmark was obviously stupid; it seems like Zvi was mostly just pattern-matching (as did I when I originally shared Zvi’s article).
I wasn’t disputing that Zvi mentioned the blood clot story, I was disputing your characterisation of it. Quoting from literally the first two paragraphs from your link:
This is not consistent with your characterisation that Zvi made an error because “he did not believe the blood clots were real”.
I’m not disputing that. The assumption and argument here is that the calculations come out positive: we have world A where people get a few more blood clots from a very rare side effect of a vaccine, but a lot fewer blood clots as a Covid symptom, versus world B where people get no blood clots from the vaccine but a lot more people get blood clots as a Covid symptom. That’s what I meant by calling the policy of choosing world B penny-wise but pound-foolish.
(EDIT: And in a yet more competent civilization, you wouldn’t even have to make the tradeoff in the first place, because you could just tell your patients “by the way, we’ve discovered another rare side-effect” instead of suspending the vaccine outright.)
You are right also said that it was not worth it to deal with even if they were real (which contradicts what the Danish calculations showed, as I mentioned), but the argument he lead with was that they were not real:
(I had actually initially misremembered him as leading with the argument that they were not worth dealing with, but when I wrote my original post I decided to go back and double-check and found that he was focusing on them not being real instead. So I rewrote it before posting it to say that he didn’t believe them.)
What I’m saying is that the Danish government did these sorts of calculations at the time and found the trade-off to be worthwhile; the COVID death rate at the time was extremely low, the restrictions were very loose, and the available alternatice vaccines were plentiful, so avoiding AstraZeneca would according to their calculations have lowish costs, such that it is worth it.
Meanwhile, I don’t see any calculations by Zvi showing that it Denmark was obviously stupid; it seems like Zvi was mostly just pattern-matching (as did I when I originally shared Zvi’s article).