mikes

Karma: 214

mikes Jul 4, 2023, 9:45 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: The literature on aluminum adjuvants is very suspicious. Small IQ tax is plausible—can any experts help me estimate it?
Just noting that in the hair/blood analysis paper there were no unvaccinated children, so no useful comparison could be made from that paper alone—I complained about this in the main post body.

Also, most of these kids were probably arriving at the lowest point in their Al cycle, when they’re right about to get more shots? It says “We obtained data for this cross-sectional study from a cohort of healthy infants presenting to an urban, primary care center for well child care.”

They had aluminum levels median ~15 ug / L and a much higher mean with some large positive outlier samples, which the study then excluded. I don’t see this study as evidence against vaccines causing increase in blood aluminum levels

mikes Jul 4, 2023, 2:33 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: The literature on aluminum adjuvants is very suspicious. Small IQ tax is plausible—can any experts help me estimate it?
1,2. [this point edited] I do think the neurotoxicity has been shown in animal studies; not sure how to assess comparability of scales to humans though—see this comment. I agree lack of follow up / re-analysis is kinda sketch, but the study area seems to be generally neglected? I think FDA regulations hit soon after the study, which would limit options for replications, but maybe some retrospective analysis would have been possible in the period where manufacturers were struggling to remove Al from IV fluids.

345. I think the hypothesis is, yes, the aluminum sits in muscle at first and doesn’t rush directly into the blood. I can’t judge it myself, but this paper has lots of thoughts about the rabbit study and ways it could be misleading, and perhaps-too-complicated-but-heck-if-I-know theories about the chemistry.

6. very interesting, this looks like a strong argument I hadn’t considered. thanks for bringing this up! I’m glad they don’t find a correlation in this study. Blood / cord aluminum may be a relatively variable/fleeting thing, though; if this were averaged over gestation time I’d find it quite convincing. Not sure how much it would change in these women day-to-day, and whether we should think a reasonable signal is findable?
7. The child is growing about linearly and getting more vaccines / aluminum load about linearly. blood vol is proportional to body mass. net result, everything looks kinda constant per blood unit, if we didn’t add more then Al per blood unit should drop over time.

mikes Jul 4, 2023, 12:26 PM
9 points
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in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: The literature on aluminum adjuvants is very suspicious. Small IQ tax is plausible—can any experts help me estimate it?
edit 3/4: for those coming off here the front page: on further inspection from the discussions below, and after looking into Bishop’s follow-up study and lack of similar follow-ups, it seems quite possible the original Bishop paper’s analysis was subject to selection effects / p-hacking. But if we ignore the Bishop paper, we are still in the position of multiplying the aluminum intake of infants by a large factor, without ever having done careful studies on long-term side effects. See other threads for discussion on animal studies and neurotoxity.

edit 1: There are neurotoxicity results in animal literature, not just in Bishop. Below I argue there is no evidence of p-hacking in the Bishop paper itself except that there are p-values of size .03 [EDIT: No longer my view]. I am not happy that this is the state of our evidence base, and it is a point against that they did not publish their dataset. But even if their effect size is overstated by a large multiplicative factor, we may still have a problem.

edit 2: I just found that there is a 2009 follow-up study with the same infants studied in Bishop 1997. There was no significance on the cognition reanalysis, which could assemble only 30%. of the original patients, although slightly fewer showed up / were eligible from the high-aluminum group (they entirely excluded recruiting patients with development < 85). “Non-significance” doesn’t say much about the actual cognitive effects, given the very small sample size and a likely Berkson’s paradox effect due to development thresholding and selection on “did-they-show-up.” What bugs me a lot more is that they post nothing about the new cognition data, not even group means, which does support adverse inferences about their publication practices.

re: Bishop et al 1997: and p-hacking

I believe this paper was well-regarded enough that it motivated FDA to create new regulations for aluminum content in IV fluids. They even set the standard at its Al-depleted 5 microgram/kg/day level.

Bishop claimed that the subgroup analysis was pre-planned. If many of those babies were only on the drip for a day or so, as they claim, then the p=0.39 difference of means analysis was never going to be the estimator we should look at.

I thought the regression they did (p = .03) was always going to be the best estimator given the expectation of a dose-response relationship, and should have been the first thing they mentioned in the abstract. It is where I took my estimate from to start. I figured a shrinking factor of about 2 on the effect size would be sensible to account for selection.

Knowing this, would you still high-probability think e.g. they have p-hacked on the choice of outcomes, and the particular cut-point, and then claimed it was a planned subgroup analysis, and chucked in the regression after too, and there’s selection on the neuromotor function, and most likely the whole thing is bunk? Maybe—the medical literature can be awful sometimes. It was apparently enough to make the FDA move before. If this is still a crux, we can probably go look at animal literature.

re: generalization from this study: A “vaccine-age child” is a 1 day old child. We give the hepatitis B vaccine, >200micrograms aluminum, at birth. Al probably enters bloodstream over the next days/weeks. Generalization from premies to newborn/1-month-old infants is probably not perfect, but does seem plausible. As I mentioned, major differences to look for are kidney filtration and brain vulnerability. Are the newborns consistently >>10x more robust, as would be needed to make this a nonissue? This I do not know, and would hope to ask an expert.

re: Priest: the pharmacokinetics literature looks complicated, and I’m not sure what to take away from it. I think animal studies have indicated that release from muscle to the rest of the body is slow, not immediate, hitting the bloodstream over the scale of days/weeks. Not sure if this is settled.

re: radio-labeled aluminum: bang me on the head again if you have a specific takeaway for this, but if it was just context, I’ll add some: This resource claims that about 1% of aluminum in the blood winds up in the brain. I don’t know where they get this claim from, though, or even what it technically means.

~~removed due to above edits: the chronic exposure calc at the end:~~
~~I think you need to account for infants’ lower body-weight, which means your result is off by a factor of ~20ish and puts us back into elevated-Al territory for the first year of life.~~

mikes Jul 4, 2023, 10:41 AM
9 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: The literature on aluminum adjuvants is very suspicious. Small IQ tax is plausible—can any experts help me estimate it?
Great questions. I am not knowledgeable about new adjuvants. Here is Derek Lowe on the topic of new adjuvants:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/enhancing-enhancers-vaccines

Also,
Many vaccines do not have adjuvants

I would expect it is usually possible to reduce or remove the adjuvant in exchange for more repeated doses. But immune systems are weird, and I can’t say that confidently

mikes Jul 4, 2023, 9:50 AM
3 points
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on: Are vaccine safe enough, that we can give their producers liability?
On the safety question I have just written a post on aluminum adjuvants here. I was unable to confirm safety, but we’ll see what others say.

Should we actually do this policy change, or operate with the existing system?
Generally, I think the social deadweight losses associated with these types of lawsuits are enormous.

Pharma companies would bear the losses for harms, but not be rewarded for the health gains of vaccines. Seems infeasible to maintain current incentives for innovation. Unless we are saying they will charge lots for the vaccines—but we are also having a discourse about paying them too much money!

Add to this, court systems are very, very bad at dealing with probabilistic harms. Judges and juries lack statistical literacy. The main beneficiary of this system would be the lawyers.

This policy is only sensible to consider in combination with other policy to drastically reduce the role of the FDA as the blocker of market access (on the theory that with insurance bearing the load it would be less needed, and we can now afford a faster and less formalized process)

[Question] The literature on aluminum adjuvants is very suspicious. Small IQ tax is plausible—can any experts help me estimate it?

mikesJul 4, 2023, 9:33 AM

61 points

39 comments3 min readLW link

mikes May 10, 2023, 11:29 PM
3 points
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in reply to: matto’s comment on: Where to start with statistics if I want to measure things?
Statistics is trying to “invert” what probability does.
Probability starts with a model, and then describes what will happen given the model’s assumptions.
Statistics goes the opposite direction: it is about using data to put limits on the set of reasonable/plausible models. The logic is something like: “if the model had property X, then probability theory says I should have seen Y. But, NOT Y. Therefore, NOT X.” It’s invoking probability to get the job done.

Applying statistical techniques without understanding the probability models involved is like having a toolbox, without understanding why any of the tools work.

It all goes fine until the tools fail (which happens often, and often silently) and then you’re hosed. You may fail to notice the problems entirely, or may have to outsource judgments to others with more experience.

mikes Apr 21, 2023, 6:41 AM
2 points
2
on: Where to start with statistics if I want to measure things?
Being able to accurately assess a paper’s claims is, unfortunately, a very high bar. A large proportion of scientists fall short of it. see: [https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/05/statistics-is-hard-etc-again/]

Most people with a strong intuition for statistics have taken courses in probability. It is foundational material for the discipline.
If you haven’t taken a probability course, and if you’re serious about wanting to learn stats well, I would strongly recommend to start there. I think Harvard’s intro probability course is good and has free materials: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/youtube

I’ve taught out of Freedman, but not the other texts. It’s well written, but it is targeted at a math-phobic audience. A fine choice if you do not wish to embark on the long path

mikes Mar 4, 2023, 4:42 AM
1 point
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on: Naturalized Induction
In the spirit of: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zp6wG5eQFLGWwcG6j/focus-on-the-places-where-you-feel-shocked-everyone-s
Why do we need naturalized induction? Sorry that I’m showing up late and probably asking a dumb question here-

We seem to doing it for the purpose of, like, constructing idealized infinitely-powerful
models which are capable of self-modeling…
…are we making the problem harder than it needs to be?
Since we eventually want to apply this in “reality”, can we just use the time dimension to make the history of the world partially ordered?
Reality is indistinguishable from a version of itself that is constantly blinking in/out of existence, with every object immediately destroyed and then instantiated as a new copy from that point forward.
So, if we instantiate our agent within the set at time t, and its models concern only the new copies of itself which “aren’t really itself” in times t-, t+… are we now technically all good? Badabing, badaboom? Or is this cheating?

Since we’re assuming we have infinite computing power this seems fine to me?
And it also seems totally amenable to establishing finite approximations of the process later.
And I thought that was kind of the whole point of doing set-theory shenanigans...
Are we unhappy that we’re destroying the agent by instantiating a copy? But the possibility of that destruction/modification seemed to also be the point of embedding it in a universe with physics.
To what specific problem is this not an adequate solution?

mikes

[Question] The liter­a­ture on alu­minum ad­ju­vants is very sus­pi­cious. Small IQ tax is plau­si­ble—can any ex­perts help me es­ti­mate it?

[Question] The literature on aluminum adjuvants is very suspicious. Small IQ tax is plausible—can any experts help me estimate it?