ABC News is playing in the background. They are talking about vaccines and booster shots.
Without the booster (or something) protection is 25 times less. Not 25% less. The graphic read 25 X less.
What does this mean? If protection would be (say) 100 with the booster, then what would it be without it? It seems to me they are sort of saying it backward. Perhaps they meant to talk about percentages. In any case, I am lost.
I think this is the explanation:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/pfizer-covid-booster-offers-protection-omicron-81620705
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said that while two doses may not be strong enough to prevent infection, lab tests showed a booster increased by 25-fold people’s levels of antibodies capable of fighting off omicron.
Not level of protection, antibody titer.
That 25X figure sounds dramatic, but I think it’s a poor way to express how effective the booster is. A booster simulates repeat infection, so with immunological memory from the first two doses, you’d certainly expect antibody titer to jump dramatically in the short term. But that in itself doesn’t tell you much. Longer term protection would be a function of sustained higher antibody titer, and affinity maturation leading to better antibodies.
I recall a thread about this sort of language before, and while there were some holdouts who declared it to be nonsense, I think the general agreement is that an english statement that X is Y times smaller than Z means X = Z / Y.
It’s the linguistic counterpart to Z is Y times larger than X (Z = X*Y).
So, 25 times less means divide by 25. Also agreed with @Riemann that what they’re reporting is a specific lab result and doesn’t translate into anything like “you are 25 times more likely to get Omicron than Delta” or “25 times more likely to be symptomatic/very sick/any other measurable real-world health condition”.
So if the level of protection would have been 100 with the booster, then without it the level would be 04?
Still seems like a roundabout way to say it.
Thank you.
Yep.
I think it’s one of those language constructions that seems totally natural to some people and totally nonsensical to others.
Except no - because the 25X is not level of protection, it’s antibody titer! The two are absolutely NOT synonymous.
If the antibody titer is 100 with the booster, it was 4 without.
The news report doesn’t tell us how much more protection the booster gives. I’d expect that to be something more of the order of 2X, it’s certainly not 25X. And the 25X is almost certainly transient anyway.
Doesn’t mean a thing. You can not have anything 25 times less, That ain’t possable.
It’s only impossible under one possible interpretation. The non-impossible interpretation is the one @iamthewalrus_3 has described above, and that’s obviously what it means.
Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible you may personally feel it to be, is the truth.
It doesn’t actually mean a goddamn thing, in the circumstances. For it to be a meaningful phrase, there would have to be a third referent (e.g. B is half as effective as A. C is one fiftieth as effective as A. Therefore C is 25 times less effective than B.)
Now, there are some smarty-pants who will insist that 25 times less effective means one twenty-fifth as effective, and that language doesn’t work like arithmetic. This signifies one thing: that I’m sharing the planet with people who are wrong about things. I don’t have to like this fact, but I have to accept that it is a fact.
They’re also wrong about this. When Z is Y times larger than X, Z = X(Y + 1).
It bothers me, too, but it’s absolutely everywhere. We have to admit that this is the idiom and understand it whenever it’s used. If we don’t, we lose the intended meaning and what good does that do?
So to paraphrase, removing the bluster:
(1) the meaning is unambiguous;
(2) it’s not your preferred terminology.
Oh, I understand it just fine. But I also hew firmly to my position that if they want to intend something, they should learn how to say it.
Of course it isn’t. Why in the name of heaven would I prefer the terminology that’s wrong?
So to paraphrase, removing the bluster:
Put me in the nonsensical camp. 1/25th the protection makes much more sense to me than 25 times less protection.
25 times the protection for the other way around is okay.
Darn, you too eh? I thought I was the only one.
Anyway. As noted. The 25 times is just plain meaningless as a metric of protection. As it is a booster shot it could simply be a measure of how good the residual vaccination protection is when challenged, and have no relation to the effect of the booster.
Memory T cell capability over time is what will matter and of necessity that takes time and more effort to gauge.
But journalists and media flacks love the appearance of providing quantitative information. And so they do.
Idiom say, I couldn’t care less what you think.
A problem with the “X times less” wording is that people who read that phrase have all different ideas of what it means, or think it is meaningless. So it fails to reliably convey useful information.
But wait, it gets worse: Since that phrasing is so poorly understood, it may mean that the person who wrote it that way doesn’t understand what it means (or what he’s trying to mean) to begin with. So when I see a phrase like that, I can’t be sure what the writer is trying to say.
I tend to interpret a phrase like “X times less” to mean “one Xth as much”, providing that seems to make sense and seems plausible.
I prefer the impossible.
“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."
– Douglas Adams