Lies, damn lies, and statistics

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some of this I know because we used to talk about these things in our weekly journal club (where risks and benefits touted in the medical literature, and then amplified by the press) were found to be tiny in realiy.

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Other links:
I did a discussion of the Uganda ebola outbreak on my regular blog. LINK

I get annoyed when the anti vax hysteria seems to condemn all public health officials and all vaccines. 

Sheesh. Maybe they need to live in the third world, where epidemics kill folk, but public health and vaccines saves lives.

StrategyPage has a long essay about the various tribal wars in Central Africa/DRC area, and how a Russian mercenary group is looting gold and diamonds to sell via the UAE. 

 But they do have this good news in their report:

November 30, 2022: In western Uganda, the Ebola outbreak that began in September has seen a decline in cases because of rapid medical response. Reported cases have declined but despite that decline, Uganda has closed schools nation-wide in an attempt to curb the spread of the Ebola virus. In November eight children died from Ebola in Uganda. The spread of Ebola to neighboring Congo seems to have been halted.....

Andrew Wefwafa had a series of videos about this

 

.....this was caused by the Sudan variation of the Ebola virus, and the problem is that the vaccines that helped stop the previous epidemics in central Africa were for a different strain. 

Just recently, a new experimental vaccine for this Ebola strain has been sent there. LINK

 

The doses are from the Sabin Vaccine Institute (SVI), according to Reuters. The SVI vaccine is a modified chimpanzee adenovirus (ChAd3) vector vaccine.

note: The adenovirus vector is the technique that was used to develop the british AZ vaccine for covid, and it was also used to develop previous Ebola vaccines .

Health officials had earlier cleared plans to study three candidate Ebola Sudan vaccines. The others are from Merck and Oxford University. 

In the middle of November, a WHO working group recommended that ring vaccine trials prioritize the Merck candidate first, owing to the safety and efficacy of the VSV-EBOV platform used for the Zaire Ebola vaccine, followed by the SVI vaccine, then the Oxford vaccine. A sharp decline in Uganda's Ebola cases presents an obstacle to ring vaccination trials. '

 essentially the disease was stopped by isolation etc. so they will not be able to prove the vaccine works.

 

/sarcasm.

Actually from a scientific point of view, this means that they can't prove it works, but in serioius diseases, when the choice means saving lives, usually the saving lives is more important than purity in scientific experimentation.

I wrote about this awhile back, when I noted that diphtheria anti toxin was so impressive in saving lives that doctors didn't have the heart not to treat children in the "control"group.

There are also ways to stop the spread of disease, such as masks (which keep you from spreading infected saliva when you talk or sneeze), isolation, hand washing etc.

And if you don't want to vaccinate everyone, or if there is not enough vaccine for everyone, you use the "ring vaccination"procedure.

WHO Report.

The ring procedure is to isolate the cases, and vaccinate the ones in contact, then vaccinate the ones who were in contact with the contacts, etc.

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