Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @aaronecarroll: @NateSilver538 @thehowie Huge issue that so much of this is led by physicians. As a PH friend of mine likes to say - if… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DKThomp I'm borrowing this from @davidshor but I'd also imagine that flu comparisons work reasonably well for a vaccinated person, i.e. if COVID is ~10x worse than the flu and vaccines cut your exposure by ~10x (and likely more than that for severe outcomes). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@thehowie Yeah. And I'm sure it varies a lot from doctor to doctor and public health expert to public health expert. Certainly there are people like Ashish Jha, Julia Marcus, Scott Gottlieb, etc. who are deeply thoughtful on this stuff. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @thehowie: When a guiding tenet is "Primum, non nocere," it is not surprising that *some* physicians are primed to favor non-maleficence… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DKThomp For my own edification, I might have to do a deep-dive at some point into how doctors think about risk, because a lot of it is pretty foreign to me and I think it affects the CDC culture a lot. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@ZoeMcLaren I'm not sure I'm confident that 2-4 won't fall as well, though if I had to guess there probably wouldn't be a huge impact either way. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Some evidence that the J&J vaccine was, in fact, successful at getting to hard-to-reach groups. The race/ethnicity numbers are a decent match for those for the US adult population as a whole, and almost half the people receiving J&J were under age 50. https://t.co/TAEla4gmip https://t.co/mDRyOujula — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @JamesSurowiecki: @NateSilver538 @jbarro Yeah, that's what I tweeted about earlier today: there's a sense in which, before the pause, re… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki @jbarro Plus what happens when they unsuspend J&J, two people in Delaware get blood clots and there's a huge CNN headline about it? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki @jbarro Right, yeah. People with middling trust in the vaccines and the FDA are going to tend to think actions speak louder than words, and the message of suspending the vaccine for at least 10+ days is that there must be something to be very concerned about. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro 3) It's hard for FDA/ACIP to declare J&J "safe" given that they established that even these incredibly rare events are a serious enough concern to put the whole vaccine on hold indefinitely. They can say the benefits far outweigh the risks but that's a more complicated message. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro 2) I'm sort of reminded of the headlines that exonerated Clinton after the Comey look into her emails ended. The Clinton people think it still hurt them because the words "FBI" "Clinton" and "emails" appeared together and it raised the salience of the issue. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro Maybe, but 1) a lot of people are likely to just be confused by the whole thing, especially given people on the fence about vaccines likely have middling trust in the federal agencies. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

OK, this is good news at least. Perceptions of Moderna and Pfizer don't seem to have been affected much. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DemFromCT @thehowie That might explain why AZ was more popular in the UK to begin with. But I don't think it explains why AZ didn't lose popularity in the UK after the clotting reports arose, when it did in the EU. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@thehowie That's fair; there's not a clean counterfactual. Although, the fact that AZ took a much bigger image hit in the EU than in the UK (which never paused it) is an interesting data point at least. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm not sure that it's going to be so easy to rehabilitate the image of J&J or AstraZeneca though. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Their write-up is a bit confusing on how much perceptions of Pfizer and Moderna were affected by the pause. But both based on this data and the data from Europe, people DO seem to differentiate between the various vaccines, which is an important silver lining. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @pbump: @NateSilver538 wow so now you're an expert in polling analysis? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm not a virologist so please feel free to disregard my opinion, but this sure as heck seems bad to me. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Another example of how if the FDA/CDC had consulted a broader range of experts, they might have come to a different decision about pausing J&J. https://t.co/dCavG7mrYM https://t.co/1KFYXq3jfP — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki I think you need Congress to do that review. The agencies aren't going to give themselves a bad grade, and IMO one of the problems they have is groupthink... too many people with similar credentials who think too similarly about risk etc. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @allahpundit: thought about this quote all night https://t.co/3sGqRYr6A6 https://t.co/OoHs8nQtwH — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @ashishkjha: CDC's vaccine advisory committee ACIP met today to advise on J&J pause After thoughtfully discussing what we know & don't… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's not that I can't imagine conditions under which the suspension is right. Rather, it's that, at the very least, it's a highly counterintuitive decision amidst tremendous uncertainty and I can't quite grok the heuristics under which people are highly convinced it's correct. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Every time I try to empathize with the "suspending J&J is wise!" position I look at the fact that we're suspending a vaccine over literally 1-in-a-million complications (yes, the true rate may be higher) for a disease that has killed 570,000 Americans and I just can't get there. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Sometimes you face decisions that are either right by a little or wrong by a lot and the AZ and J&J vaccine pauses probably fall into that category. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

https://t.co/Xr0EEHZGMR — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki One problem I can imagine is that if the FDA establishes an expectation that even this very low risk of complications is unacceptable, they set themselves up to receive even more criticism when complications inevitably arise. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @JamesSurowiecki: One of the core problems is that any people who got clots after taking the J&J vaccine would be highly visible, while… — PolitiTweet.org