Ok, so someone does want to talk about Kentucky - Volume #1
- Dr. Stephen Smith
- Aug 11, 2021
- 2 min read
And they criticize my study's design?!
Kentucky Study Design -
Yeah, so they first defined a group of re-infected pts based off a database. And then, off a database, figured out which ones had been unvaccinated, before re-infection.
Laboratory-confirmed infection had to occur in the 2020.
Re-infection had to occur during May 1 - Jun 30th, 2021.
Next, the investigators found "Controls", age and sex matched only and.
Each control had been infected during 2020, but NOT re-infected.
The Control, in an attempt to compensate for lack of a true control group, was twice as big as the Case group.
So, now two groups, the Re-infected (the Case Group) and NOT Re-infected (the Age-Sex Matched Control Group).
Next, they simply compared vaccination rates.
One does this type of case-control study -
1. If they cannot do a prospective study;
2. The disease of interest is rare, or:
3. You just want to see if there is a signal before investing the time and energy to do a large, prospective study on the same issue.
And this again, is one of those studies that could have and is being done prospectively and much better.
Yet, the CDC publishes this study as if the O.R. is absolute and true.
Questions that this study cannot answer include -
Why didn't those previously infected pts not get vaccinated?
Those reasons can be very important and can bias these results significantly.
Were there differences in the degree of Covid severity?
Did pts who got infected and then got vaccinated have less or more severe disease than those who got infected and did not get vaccinated?
What was the time from infection to re-infection in both groups?
In other words, there are many variables that they cannot control for simply but doing matching sex and age.
These studies are nice to look for a signal, but that OR doesn't mean much.
The OR in this study means one thing - The group should do a prospective study.
I don't think the study is worthless, I just think it is worth less than the CDC is proclaiming it to be.
But it get's worse for the Kentuckians. Check Vol. #2
SMS
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