Common exposures are common
Q: Did you hear that pizza boxes are going to stop the Covid vaccine working?
A: You mean people will mistakenly store the vaccine in pizza boxes instead of ultracold deep freeze?
Q: No, research shows that pizza boxes and lots of other things contain chemicals that stop vaccines working. According to the Guardian.
A: Even the Guardian says “At this stage we don’t know if it will impact a corona vaccination”
Q: And is that true?
A: No.
Q: What?
A: The story says these chemicals are ubiquitous, with the majority of people being exposed.
Q: Yes, that’s the scary part
A: So people in the Covid vaccine trials will also have been exposed.
Q: I suppose so?
A: The trials estimate the effect of the vaccines in a reasonably diverse group of people from the US population. If polybathroomfloorine, or anything else widespread, has an adverse effect on the vaccines, that’s already baked in to the trial results.
Q: So without the chemicals, the vaccines might have been, say, 95% effective?
A: If you believe there’s a relationship, yes, that’s what you’d think.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »