deonandan

deonandan, 10 months ago to random

Yes, people have been drinking raw milk for centuries. But they've also been getting sick from it for centuries. People have also been drinking water for centuries. But you wouldn't regularly drink unfiltered river water? Right? RIGHT?

https://gidmk.medium.com/raw-milk-literally-kills-people-60a7a7f4daa5

deonandan, 4 months ago to random

NO CASES OF CERVICAL CANCER in women vaccinated at 12 or 13 years of age. The HPV vaccine is a miracle.

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jnci/djad263/7577291

deonandan, 7 months ago to random

Apparently this needs being said and repeated daily. Jewish people are not the Israeli government. Muslim and Palestinian people are not Hamas. Only those of low intellect or moral vacuity blame innocents for the actions of others. You know who you are. Stop it.

deonandan, 4 months ago to random

Some degree of health care privatization seems inevitable in Canada at this point. But I don't think letting a monolithic corporate juggernaut dominate the space is the best way to do it. There's going to be a steep social, financial, administrative, and infrastructural price down the road.

deonandan, 11 months ago to random

Now that it's public, I am proud and humbled to announce that I have been awarded the 2023 University of Ottawa Research Chair in University Teaching. For the next 3 years, I will be researching how to use artificial intelligence tools to improve skills acquisition among health sciences students. I will not be spending the money on cocaine and strippers. I will NOT. So don't ask.

deonandan, 9 months ago to random

Not a day goes by when I don't see someone online complaining about shows/movies "forcing diversity" into their casting. Yet my (brown) friend's 6 year old daughter just asked her, "'Mama, all the shows we watch, all the actors, why are they all white?'" Just sayin'.

deonandan, 9 months ago to random

can't wait to show this to my kid

deonandan, 10 months ago to random

deonandan, 6 months ago to random

The lesson for me is that tech bros read Heinlein and Addams and missed the point of both books.

deonandan, 10 months ago to random

The most popular podcast in the world, ladies and gentlemen. We are fucked. Well and truly fucked.

deonandan, 9 months ago to random

My Twitter feed, some days.

deonandan, 9 months ago to random

Peeps, I'll be on CTV Morning Live (Ottawa edition) tomorrow at 8:30AM. Doing it remotely from home, so high probability the dog will be barking at phantom rabbits during the broadcast. Also... pants or no pants?

deonandan, 11 months ago to random

OMG yet another person with a "Dr" in front of their name using a Twitter poll to compute relative risks of an infectious disease. I just can't even anymore. Not even. Why do I even bother teaching statistics and research methods to medical students anymore?

deonandan, 9 months ago to random

My first keynote address as part of my new Research Chair on AI uses in university teaching will be in 2 weeks. Question is... should I use ChatGPT to write the lecture for me? Wouldn't that be appropriately ironic?

deonandan, 7 months ago to random

You've probably heard of this atrocious BBC article that fallaciously claims that COVID is less lethal than the flu. (This old canard). I won't link to it, but here are a couple of studies you might find useful.

French study: patients with COVID-19 were 69% more likely to die during their hospital stay than were flu patients.
https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(23)00289-X/fulltext

USVA study: Compared with hospitalization for influenza, hospitalization for COVID-19 was associated with a 61% higher risk of death

Conclusion: both COVID and the flu suck. Don't use one to minimize the other.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2803749

deonandan, 7 months ago to random

I told my 3-year old the old joke, "Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9." He didn't quite get it. But now he wants to have a fulsome discussion about which numbers consume other numbers. And he wants to go over each number's eating habits in detail, from 1 to 100.

deonandan, 2 months ago to random

I'm the guest on today's The Big Story podcast titled, "Measles are back. How worried should we be?"
https://thebigstorypodcast.ca/2024/03/21/measles-are-back-how-worried-should-we-be/

deonandan, 1 year ago to random

Kirsch discovers that the older a kid gets, the more chronic conditions they will accumulate AND the more vaccines they will have received. But they will also have eaten more burgers, seen more TV shows, and had more baths. Kirsch has independently discovered confounding by age.

deonandan, 7 months ago to random

How many of us warned of this scenario? It's here. And it will increase. Urgent action is needed. Fixing healthcare should be a prime election platform across this country.

deonandan, 10 months ago to random

Mastodon censors have been objecting to some of my posts, which is totally their right. Probably means this isn't the right place for me, though. So I'll be posting much less frequently. If you want to find me on Bluesky, I'm "deonandan" there, too.

deonandan, 4 months ago to random

WTAF. Yet voters will hear "cheap beer" and move on.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/most-ontario-hospitals-are-facing-deficits-some-have-reached-their-financial-limit-ontario-hospital-association

deonandan, 4 months ago to random

Before you get too excited, JP, note two things: (1) the authors are an epi student and two "independent researchers" with no expressed training, which leads to (2) they used VAERS to calculate risk. And almost by definition, VAERS cannot be used to calculate risk. BS study.

Why? Because VAERS is not a surveillance database. It's an open registry where anyone can write anything. Increase in VAERS reports probably just means nutters are spamming the registry with more unverified "vaccine adverse event" reports. Proper researchers would know this.

deonandan, 3 months ago to random

We have a flagpole. My spouse entrusted me to acquire the requisite flag. I gave her two options: Klingon empire or United Federation of Planets. I am no longer entrusted with this task.

deonandan, 3 months ago to random

Anyone else notice how the provincial government seems allergic to the words "family doctor"? They will only say "primary caregiver", which includes NPs and pharmacists. The reshaping of reality begins with language choices. Watch for it.

deonandan, 2 months ago to random

This post will trigger a troll feeding frenzy on Xitter. But I think it's necessary, and maybe people are saner here on Mastodon.

It's time to summarize a timeline of COVID vaccine statistics and what they say about whether the vaccines reduced transmission or not, and whether "experts" lied or not. Here goes...

[1]
To begin, let's remember that vaccines seek to do 4 things, in descending order of importance and likelihood:

1. prevent death
2. prevent hospitalization
3. prevent symptomatic disease
4. prevent infection & transmission

[2]
2020: COVID mRNA vaccines shown in RCTs to be ~95% effective in preventing symptomatic disease caused by original Wuhan variant.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

[3]
To receive Emergency Use Authorization, vaccine did NOT need to stop transmission (though that would have been nice). Criterion was reduction in symptomatic disease by >50%, which was met and exceeded.
https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download

[4]
Even so, those original COVID vaccine formulations DID reduce transmission, as shown in multiple studies in early 2021.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736

[5]
Throughout 2021, evidence was mounting that COVID vaccines were indeed significantly curtailing transmission. Every sign pointed to the pandemic ending early if we could get enough people vaccinated quickly.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4292

[6]
This was when some countries brought in vaccine passports, which made scientific sense. (You can debate the ethics elsewhere.) By slowing mixing of vaccinated & unvaccinated populations, risk of breakthrough infections was reduced.
https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/16/e573

[7]
The emergence of Delta variant changed the math considerably. Two doses of vaccine were still ~70% effective at preventing Delta infection, which was pretty darned good! We could still tame the pandemic with vaccination if we did it fast enough...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10169571

[8]
Then the emergence of Omicron (noticeably in Canada in late 2021) changed everything by curtailing vaccine efficacy. This is when vax passports stopped making sense, as they were disproportionately exposing vaxxed people to the virus, though they had diminished protection.

[9]
By 2022, it was clear that vaccination was no longer able to subdue transmission significantly. But three doses of an mRNA vaccine gave substantial protection against death for both delta (80%) and omicron (78%), along with 61% protection against admission to hospital.
https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj.p1111

[10]
Beware the narrative of the vaccine minimizers. The original vaccine could STILL reduce Omicron transmission somewhat.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/new-research-proves-covid-19-vaccines-can-slow-spread-disease-even-omicron

[11]
A telling California prison study in 2023 found that one dose of any COVID vaccine reduced the probability of an infected inmate transmitting infection to his cellmate by 24%. Again, that's reduced TRANSMISSION.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02138-x

[12]
The bivalent booster came out in Sep/2022. It was able to prevent actual infection by ~54%, which means it was also significantly slowing transmission. Yet uptake was poor.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2814536
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7205e1.htm

[13]
The newest XBB1.5 booster came out in 2023. It has an efficacy against hospitalization of >70%. It also has an efficacy of ~54% against symptomatic infection. This is not as great as the 95% we saw in 2020, but it's pretty damned good! Yet currently only 16% of Canadians have received this vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7304a2.htm

[14]
A robust meta-study of secondary attack rates throughout the pandemic found that all the vaccines offered some degree of reduction in TRANSMISSION, regardless of the variant:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2791601

[15]
What's the takeaway?

1. COVID mRNA vaccines work.
2. They have always worked.
3. They work best when the vaccine is updated to match the current variant
4. They have always reduced transmission
5. They still reduce transmission
6. Nobody lied to you.