You are applying the incentive heuristic inconsistently. On the one hand you infer that if there was string evidence of long term effects, governments would be very vocal about it. But on the other hand, you ignore that these incentives would also apply to the Vitamin D effects that you cite. Governments would also surely have an interest to publicize an intervention that has a 25 fold reduction in risk. So the estimate is wrong or your conception of how governments work is wrong.
I fail to see any contradiction. Care to elaborate?
I acknowledge that my model of how governments work is at least incomplete, thank you for pointing it out:
I believe that importance of Vitamin D, at least in prevention, is beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think the world’s supply of vit. D is much lower than world’s population would require as a covid-prevention measure (I think someone on LW said the supply was 0.5%, I can’t bother to look it up right now)
I would predict that governments would not broadcast the importance of vit. D but rather would try to hoard as much as possible and distribute it at their discretion, like they did with PPE in the spring.
I’m not seeing soaring prices or shortages in pharmacies, so I don’t believe this has happened.
Thanks a lot for the study! I was just about to book a trip to Sweden to take a break from the restrictions, and the abstract is scary enough that I might reconsider after reading it:
Significance statement There is evidence that COVID-19 may cause long term health changes past acute symptoms, termed ‘long COVID’. Our analyses of detailed cognitive assessment and questionnaire data from tens thousands of datasets, collected in collaboration with BBC2 Horizon, align with the view that there are chronic cognitive consequences of having COVID-19. Individuals who recovered from suspected or confirmed COVID-19 perform worse on cognitive tests in multiple domains than would be expected given their detailed age and demographic profiles. This deficit scales with symptom severity and is evident amongst those without hospital treatment. These results should act as a clarion call for more detailed research investigating the basis of cognitive deficits in people who have survived SARS-COV-2 infection.
On the other hand, you do not mention the strongest reason for supporting your view: the relatively underexplored long term effects of mRNA vaccines.
You might be right, the reason for that is that I have absolutely no inside-understanding of how vaccines work, and I don’t know whom I could trust right now, given how much political pressure, twisted incentives and increased polarization (due to the crazy anti-vaccine movement) there is. My risk model treats all the available vaccines as “drug that was developed under political and financial pressure and whose trials ended much sooner than is normally the case”.
After reading the linked paper, I find it only mildly worrying:
Normal limitations pertaining to inferences about cause and effect from cross-sectional studies apply3,20. One might posit that people with lower cognitive ability have higher risk of catching the virus. We consider such a relationship plausible; however, it would not explain why the observed deficits varied in scale with respiratory symptom severity. We also note that the large and socioeconomically diverse nature of the cohort enabled us to include many potentially confounding variables in our analysis. Nonetheless, we emphasise that longitudinal research, including follow-up of this cohort, is required to further confirm the cognitive impact of COVID-19 infection and determine deficit longevity as a function of respiratory symptom severity, and other symptoms. It also is plausible that cognitive deficits associated with COVID-19 are no different to other respiratory illnesses. The observation of significant cognitive deficit associated with positive biological verification of having had COVID-19, i.e., relative to suspected COVID-19, goes some way to mitigate this possibility.
I fail to see any contradiction. Care to elaborate?
I acknowledge that my model of how governments work is at least incomplete, thank you for pointing it out:
I believe that importance of Vitamin D, at least in prevention, is beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think the world’s supply of vit. D is much lower than world’s population would require as a covid-prevention measure (I think someone on LW said the supply was 0.5%, I can’t bother to look it up right now)
I would predict that governments would not broadcast the importance of vit. D but rather would try to hoard as much as possible and distribute it at their discretion, like they did with PPE in the spring.
I’m not seeing soaring prices or shortages in pharmacies, so I don’t believe this has happened.
Thanks a lot for the study! I was just about to book a trip to Sweden to take a break from the restrictions, and the abstract is scary enough that I might reconsider after reading it:
You might be right, the reason for that is that I have absolutely no inside-understanding of how vaccines work, and I don’t know whom I could trust right now, given how much political pressure, twisted incentives and increased polarization (due to the crazy anti-vaccine movement) there is. My risk model treats all the available vaccines as “drug that was developed under political and financial pressure and whose trials ended much sooner than is normally the case”.
After reading the linked paper, I find it only mildly worrying: