Chris_Halkides
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2009
- Messages
- 12,589
In his book We Want Them Infected Jonathan Howard began a discussion of an article by Vinay Prasad on page 326. Dr. Howard discussed remarks made by Dr. Kyle Sheldrick on the lack of units for Dr. Prasad's graphs. Dr. Sheldon was quoted: "There are different ways to express data...'Here's risk reduction as a unitless number with no denominator' is not one of them."213
Dr. Howard quoted Dr. Kristen Panthagani (an MD PhD), who had written on Twitter and later made a blog post. Dr. Prasad wrote an article based on a study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Both Dr. Howard and Dr. Panthagani indicated that Dr. Prasad used an inappropriately large y-axis and did not identify what was actually on the y axis. Dr. Panthagani wrote, "After reviewing the original NEJM article in detail, the only analysis that matches the data in this graph came from dividing total hospitalizations in each group by the total number of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids at the end of the study. This is not the correct way to analyze the data (and not the way the NEJM study did it) because it fails to account for the majority of kids who got vaccinated during the study. If I’m correct, then this graph doesn’t faithfully represent anything meaningful in the paper. But I don’t know for sure, because, again, we have no axis label to tell us what data we’re looking at."
On page 332 of his book Dr. Howard wrote, "In other words when Dr. Prasad said 'The risks are so low. You cannot see them,'212 it's because those risks are purposefully hidden."
Dr. Howard quoted Dr. Kristen Panthagani (an MD PhD), who had written on Twitter and later made a blog post. Dr. Prasad wrote an article based on a study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Both Dr. Howard and Dr. Panthagani indicated that Dr. Prasad used an inappropriately large y-axis and did not identify what was actually on the y axis. Dr. Panthagani wrote, "After reviewing the original NEJM article in detail, the only analysis that matches the data in this graph came from dividing total hospitalizations in each group by the total number of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids at the end of the study. This is not the correct way to analyze the data (and not the way the NEJM study did it) because it fails to account for the majority of kids who got vaccinated during the study. If I’m correct, then this graph doesn’t faithfully represent anything meaningful in the paper. But I don’t know for sure, because, again, we have no axis label to tell us what data we’re looking at."
On page 332 of his book Dr. Howard wrote, "In other words when Dr. Prasad said 'The risks are so low. You cannot see them,'212 it's because those risks are purposefully hidden."
