Thursday Throughput: Vaccines Vs Cancer Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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3 Responses

  1. Zinnia Thorne
    Ignored
    says:

    ThTh7: 15 years to determine whether a vaccine worked or not? Sounds about right. the caveat on RCTs and HPV vaccines is well taken.

    “We did not find a significant difference in risk reductions associated with HPV vaccination among birth cohorts”
    Um. What??? I’m literally citing the article above.

    Does the OP even read these?Report

    • Michael Siegel in reply to Zinnia Thorne
      Ignored
      says:

      We have know that the vaccine worked since Phase 3 trials. This is just the latest and most extensive study of just how effective they are.

      The cohort analysis is to see if there are herd immunity effects, which we don’t expect unless vaccinations rates are very high, given how contagious HPV is.

      Reading comprehension is your friend.Report

  2. Brandon Berg
    Ignored
    says:

    ThTh3 is sophistry. The basic point the meme is making is completely correct. This strikes a nerve, so people want to say it’s wrong; since it isn’t, they pretend that it’s saying something else, and critique that instead. The point is that while the media obsessively focus on white-on-black violence and promote the idea that it’s a major threat to black people, while black-on-white violence is an order of magnitude more common.

    Yes, intraracial violence is much more common, but the chart is explicitly about interracial violence, and how the media chooses to exaggerate the prevalence of one kind while ignoring other kinds. And I can’t help noticing that right up until this meme went viral, the left was saying that talking about black-on-black homicide was a racist distraction from the real problem, white-on-black homicide.

    Responding to a couple of specific points:

    Tweets 6 and 7: It makes no sense to adjust for population. If non-Hispanic whites are 60% of the population and blacks are 15%, and they both offend at the same rate and choose victims at random, then the rates of white-on-black and black-on-white offending will be 0.6 * 0.15 and 0.15 * 0.6, both equal to 9%. If we assume a same-race bias such that 80% of crime is same-race, and the other 20% is random-victim, then both should be 0.2 * 0.09 = 4.5%. If a fixed percentage of people of each race specifically target the other race for violence, then we should expect to see much more white-on-black crime, because the number of X-on-Y crimes depends only on the population of X and not at all on Y. The data shown in the original chart cannot be explained away by unequal populations.

    The caption doesn’t make it clear, but the chart in tweet 7 (from the report “Race and Hispanic Origin of
    Victims and Offenders, 2012-15”) is adjusting for the population of the victim’s race. Figure 4 in the same report shows absolute numbers, which reveals that for 2012-15, white-on-black crime was about a sixth as common as the reverse. The correct interpretation of that chart is that interracial violence poses a similar threat to both black and white people, not that white and black people commit interracial violence at similar rates.

    If you switched it to use the population of the race of the offender as the denominator, the chart would show a huge gulf between black-on-white and white-on-black, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, either. I believe that that’s what that (incorrect) viral chart about interracial homicide from a couple of years ago was doing.

    The study linked in tweet 10 was published in 2014, with data from 2008-2012. It may have been true that in those years the media downplayed white-on-black crime while exaggerating black-on-white crime, but a) this isn’t actually contradicted by the excerpts he posted, and b) this was before the BLM movement, and before the media went all in on gaslighting us with the new blood libel.

    I agree that interracial violence is not a major threat to white Americans right now. But it’s at least as much of a concern as it is for black Americans. I don’t want the media to exaggerate black-on-white violence—I want them to stop lying about white-on-black violence.

    And I want people to take crime seriously. Since 2015, half of the progress in reducing homicide rates since the early 90s has been reversed. In some sense we’re all in this together, but black people are bearing a wildly disproportionate share of the impact, well over half of all homicides. The people who are hurt most by black crime denialism and the idea that black overrepresentation in prison is inherently racist are the law-abiding black people who have to deal with it in their neighborhoods. Whitey just gets the spillover.

    Good response from Richard Hanania here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/interracial-crime-and-perspectiveReport

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