I’d still like to see whether the same effect shows up with people who decided to take other vaccines, or possibly to have other procedures requiring the same sort of decision-making.
But will see where this goes from its Twitter thread. I hope it’s true, it would be good for me, and a lot of other people, if so.
No thoughts on that study. But I remember my mother having shingles and it was NOT a pleasant experience. I’d say get the vaccine anyway.
Personally I had a shingles shot about a year ago with no side effects other than slight soreness for a short time at the injection site.
The important aspect of this study, which I don’t think has been mentioned in this thread, is that eligibility for the vaccine was based on birthdate, so not something an individual chooses. People born before September 2, 1933 could not get the vaccine, those born after could. There is not reason to think the people born in the prior two weeks and the post two weeks will be systematically different on some other important variable.
So there are two important factors in whether or not people were vaccinated—were the eligible, and did they choose to. This allows the researchers to setup a causal model.
The hypothesis that people choosing to vax may be different than those who choose not to seems reasonable, but what about the difference between people who choose to get vaxed, and people born two weeks earlier who had no choice? That is a much stronger test, as the two groups are effectively randomized by date of birth.
Caveat: I’ve not read the article, just the abstract, and population epidemiology is not my area of expertise.
As for the vaccine itself, get it. My injection site was sore, and then I had chills and other flu like symptoms for 4-6 hours. Get it on a Friday or Monday based on whether you’d rather mess up your weekend or just take a sick day from work.
Not exactly, unless you had reliable data on which members of the ineligible group would have got vaccinated. As I’ve said, the comparison that completely eliminates this potentially confounding factor is to compare the entire eligible group (regardless of whether they chose to get vaxxed) to the ineligible group. This still shows a significant effect (Fig 3, left side, p=0.02), although obviously smaller because only about half of the eligible group were vaccinated. This is strong evidence that at least part of the effect is real.
Ditto, except that my 2nd shot was less than a month ago. I could kick myself for listening to all the over-hyped moaning about side effects for so long before finally putting on my big boy pants and getting the shots. Get the vaccine, get the vaccine, get the vaccine – if you’re in the right age group (over 50).
Huh. I’ve read the paper, and they make the statement “Finally, we show in exploratory analyses that the vaccine’s protective effects are far stronger among women than men for all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,”
Looking at their evidential charts, I would argue that there is no effect for men whatsoever, and a statistically significant one for women, about a 2 pt. drop in expected rate of diagnosis. It’s not a giant cure, but every save is a win, and it might point toward other potential interventions.
Everyone one is different. My Wife and I both have had the vaccine. A little sore, but no big deal at all. Beats the alternative.
I’m not sure what you’re looking at, but the paper shows a bigger effect than that. 3.5% for the entire sample including both men and women, which is a 20% reduction in the risk of dementia.
And that’s for something that was not designed for this purpose. If we can figure out what’s going on and design and optimize a treatment protocol, you’d imagine that we can do much better.
The difference between men and women is completely unexplained, but it seems to me that it’s further evidence that the effect is real, and is explained by some physiological difference between men and women. If some of the effect were attributable to the choice to get vaccinated rather than a protective effect of the vaccine itself, it’s difficult to see why that confounding factor would be negligible for men and large for women.
I too had no noticeable side effects from either set of shingles vaccines.
Oops, 3 pts for women. Am I looking in the wrong place? Or is this eligibility & not vaccine impact? (ETA: the PDF is crashing now when I try to read it)
This is the most conservative approach of looking at the entire eligible group (regardless of whether they were actually vaccinated) vs the ineligible group. This obviously shows a smaller effect, since just under half were actually vaccinated. It places a lower bound on how much of the effect cannot be attributable to the potentially confounding factor of who was motivated to choose to be vaccinated. If you look at just those who were actually vaccinated, the effect is roughly twice as large.
I read the abstract when I wrote that. I’ve now also read the Twitter thread, but I’m still not seeing that they found a similar effect size. In fact, the only mention I saw of different types of dementia was a mention distinguishing the effect on Alzheimer’s, and saying it was not due to vascular dementia.
Which is the opposite of what I said – I didn’t realize there was more info in the Twitter thread than in the linked abstract. So I apologize for the uninformed posts. But I also didn’t see anything about them looking at different types and finding similar effect sizes. Can you point me to that part?
At the top right of the abstract is a link to the pdf of the paper.
They did an additional analysis for that:
We then show that the vaccine has no effect on any other common causes of morbidity or mortality. This is unlike correlational analyses that usually suffer from bias because healthier/more health motivated folk with better healthcare access are more likely to get vaccinated.
@Riemann Thanks!
Frankly, shingles is so debilitating that anyone who refuses to get the shots must already be a bit demented. My wife and I got the Shringrix shots. There was mild pain.
Anyone who is my age recalls how nasty all the childhood diseases–measles and polio especially–were and have no hesitation about vaccines.
VERY seldom heard shingles in 50-60s.
Then we got “blessed” with hybrid veggies with less nutrients, now GMOs with even less, plus we now eat LOTS of Glyphosate, now shingles are common and folks “need” a “vaccine”.
Proverbs 26:2
As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come.
IMHO, ascertaining and addressing the cause is the smart solution.
Nonsense.
What the what now?
That’s pretty much my experience, but the shots still weren’t all that bad. My younger sister had shingles when she was about 30, and even though it was a minor case, she was in severe pain for weeks.
Didn’t get their shingles shots.