Dr. Bhattacharya and I disagree quite a lot in this Part. The disagreement is regarding the vaccines. We both agree that the vaccines don’t block transmission. But my intuition says that the vaccinated fare very poorly when it comes to death also. I showed a table of data from Great Britain that showed more deaths in a vaccinated group that had half as many people in it. Jay countered that it means nothing because we don’t know which groups were vaccinated vs unvaccinated. This is correct from Jay since maybe the reason so many more died was because maybe it was just old people who got vaccinated. But then I noticed that the number going to the emergency room was way lower in the vaccinated (which would not have happened if only the old and sick were getting vaccinated.) But still, Jay refused to give me any love. It was a good debate.
The other disagreement we had was on the case fatality rate difference between the Delta and Alpha variants. I was proving how weak Delta was by showing their case fatality rate at 1/20th of Alpha. (You’ll remember Alpha came after the wild type and was barely noticable in the US but was significant in Great Britain where this dataset was recorded.) Jay had a problem with the way the study was conducted. His concerns were justified. This is more important than it sounds at first. I still think I’m right on all of this but I can’t use imporperly-conducted trials to prove it. Please let us know what you think in the comments.
Jay vs me Part 7