Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Jay Bhattacharya on good fellows; tests vaccines and more


Podcast:

Link in case the above embeds don't work. 

Stanford Doctor and Professor Jay Bhattacharya joins the GoodFellows for an engaging discussion of covid, vaccines, tests and more. He starts off with a view directly contradicting the conclusion I have come to: he thinks the vaccine should be deployed first to protect old people, not to control the spread of an exponentially growing and mutating virus. I love it when very well informed people disagree with me. Was I wrong?  Then Niall goes on to challenge the Great Barrington Declaration, and maybe consider that lockdowns might not be so dumb. Then the conversation gets really interesting! 

On Tuesday, I also recorded an Econ Talk podcast with Russ Roberts on the same issues. I'll post when up. 

5 comments:

  1. Good information from Dr Jay and decent discussion all around. However, your repeated insistence that "parties" are "superspreader" events doesn't seem to be borne out from a lot of the data that I've seen and seems to be you simply repeating the media moral panic narrative which seeks to blame "folk devil" groups like "selfish" college kids partying (outside!) on Florida beaches and MAGA bikers at Sturgis (again - largely an outside event) for any rise in case numbers - which to some degree are driven by over-cycled PCR testing. Also, as Dr Jay mentions, there are a number studies which show little or no correlation between mask/distancing mandates and cases/deaths.

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  2. Terrific discussion. I greatly appreciated hearing a range of views this time. (I had likened an earlier GoodFellows podcast to "three like-minded people conversing in a smoke-filled room". This time there was balance to the discussion. Bravo.)

    But, Cochrane himself continues to mix scholarship with wild speculation (new subject-ready vaccines in a weekend! Bhattacharya politely pushed back on this extreme idea).

    Mixing scholarship with opinion I don't like. Instead, I wish Cochrane would take a cue from flagship news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, and place a firewall between his opinionating and his scholarship.

    Despite the blunt criticism, a great podcast. Looking forward to more of these.

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  3. For an alternative view, see https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/01/29/team-stanford/#comments

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  4. Contrary to Jay's assertion, it's news to me that we (NZ) are intending to keep our borders closed for another 2 years. Even our infinitely risk-averse prime minister is only talking about until the end of this year.

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