The recent SELECT study broadcast that using Wegovy size (2.4mg/weekly) dosages of Semaglutide for three years would reduce the risk of cardiovascular men events among some pretty seriously ill people by 20%. Unfortunately, when you dig deeper, what you discover is that what the study really showed is that if you treated 1,000 of these … Read more
As a precaution against what will surely be misreported by the press, here is a thought experiment with some numbers. The UK is reporting a doubling time of 2 days. Suppose there are 100 Omicron cases now, then in 2 weeks we would have 12,800 people testing positive on a given day if everyone was … Read more
I haven’t written about the pandemic in a while because, well, we have vaccines that work pretty damn well – even against the incredibly contagious delta variant. People just need to get vaccinated. I could do a post every day that just repeats that 500 times I suppose. But I was talking to someone and … Read more
I was just about to write a blog about how insane this claim is. If anything, the numbers show that the AstraZeneca vaccine lowers the risk of blood clots but the great Weekend Editor beat me to it. So, even if you have to skip the great statistical stuff in his blog, just read his … Read more
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00432-3/fulltext Pretty convincing evidence waiting 90 days between 1st and 2nd doses…
I get so mad when the people in charge don’t seem to do the obvious logical reasoning from the facts. But it is actually often even worse that that. Too often, even if they do know what logic requires, they won’t follow through on the conclusions that those facts and logic implied. For the latest … Read more
We now have a one-dose vaccine that we are confident is reasonably effective on younger people while, as usual, being somewhat less confident that it is effective on older people. Moreover, not only does the J&J vaccine require only one dose, it has no fancy requirements for transporting it. Even more, reasoning by analogy with … Read more
Both the UK and the FDA have released enough information so that one can make a good bet on how the Pfizer vaccine worked. (See https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download for example). It makes for fascinating and informative reading. I am not competent to comment on the medical aspects described there other than to say that when I first … Read more
Efficacy in the 18-55 year old group much higher than expected! That augers well for seniors even without efficacy data. But we are a long way from home free. Issues to keep in mind: Only 25 million people (50 million doses/2) worldwide can be treated in the first few months. Only 500 million people worldwide … Read more
Herd immunity is all in the news but in many cases the news media is not really describing the concept clearly. While technically the concept of herd immunity derives from mathematical models of disease transmission, when you drill down, it is just generalizing common-sense thinking about disease transmission. Let’s start by imagining only one person … Read more