True that. A bit late fix but fix'd.

It's kind of interesting that there's only one author with background in medicine and then there's authors from law, economics, business..

Either way - far as I can tell, the conclusions found here are also what the vast majority of studies have arrived to. The vaccines prevented deaths and worked as intended, but the non-vaccine mitigation strategies were - and are - also important, as vaccines alone weren't/aren't good enough.

Anyone can report anything to VAERS with no confirmation.

Actual studies have been ran on the frequency of adverse effects. They have found the vaccines to be pretty safe.

No, this was specifically something they controlled for. They wanted to remove this effect from the study.

Hints that the unvaccinated were more likely to already in a poorer health. Sentence before the one you quoted: "We found substantially lower non-COVID natural mortality risk for vaccinated than for unvaccinated persons."

Which, if interpreted optimistically, might mean that people who skipped vaccinations had immunity system problems or were already too critically ill.

But it probably just means that the lifestyle choices of the unvaccinated people were generally much less healthy than the vaccinated people.

In the sentence after the one you quoted, they say they controlled for this effect: "After controlling for these selection effects [..]"

For reference:

> We used a novel outcome measure, CEMP, to study how vaccination affects COVID-19 mortality risk. This measure uses mortality from other natural causes to control for selection effects in who gets vaccinated. We found substantially lower non-COVID natural mortality risk for vaccinated than for unvaccinated persons. Thus, the vaccinated would likely face lower COVID-19 risk even if not vaccinated. After controlling for these selection effects, we found substantial vaccine protection against death [..]

You should rely on facts, rather than petty insults.

Here this very matter is discussed: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/7/2077

>Sagan's biographers have argued that the Academy's rejection of Sagan, and Harvard's prior denial of his tenure, were the direct consequence of the phenomenon that has become known as the “Sagan Effect”: the perception that popular, visible scientists are worse academics than those scientists who do not engage in public discourse. Yet, later analyses of Sagan's output have indicated that his academic contributions compared favorably to those of other Academy members

You may want to read about the "Carl Sagan effect".

Ok. I don't think you're discussing in good faith here.

> May I ask you if you've published anything yourself?

Sure! I haven't.

> Do you know what it takes?

I have an idea yes.

> Do you know how easy it is to be added on to someone else's research when you're popular?

Sure, but Carl Sagan has been listed as an author in a decent pile of papers even before he was very famous.

There's also original research he's headed. Most notably to the atmospheric compositions and surface temperatures on other planets and moons.

> May I ask what you know about scientific publication and how it works?

I know the basics of the process! I'm not a researcher, but I've studied in universities and have many researcher friends and colleagues.

Universities, since I stopped computer science studies early on when I got employed, but have been studying up on some statistics and social sciences in another city later on.

Sure, he was and continues to be a huge inspiration to me. Excellent communicator. Good researcher. Skeptical to the core.

If high level research is only the stuff that has led to new inventions or new major discoveries about the universe, then it's only a very tiny fraction of all scientists.

Most scientists don't have as many papers and as often cited discoveries as Sagan does.

I'll add a little bit of philosophy and theory to this:

The general trend in the development of paradigms, rules and methodologies has been to restrict the programmer from doing certain things. goto lets you arbitrarily move to a different place in the code. This can be made less arbitrary by forcing the programmers to use functions and loops.

Similarly, encapsulating variables is a restriction. It restricts easy access to the variables from outside the class.

Type safety is a restriction. It forces assignment and other operators to require explicit casting for variables of different types.

So on, so on.

Without restrictions, the programmer could do anything at any time and it would be extremely difficult to read such code. When you restrict things, you force the code from different programmers to be more easily understandable and you (hopefully) decrease the amount of bugs in the code.

Sometimes you create a restriction that makes it hard to express some things in a clean way. For example, in C, goto still has a place in error checks and in ensuring that an error causes a function to release the resources it initialized at the start of the function. In more modern languages, there really isn't any reason to ever use goto, since the languages offer other more powerful (and more restricted!) constructs for dealing with the issues that goto is used for in C.

Sometimes that happens when you try to do the right thing. Still, the world at large is a better place for all the individual people doing the right thing even when it means personal harm to themselves.

That said, at the moment far as I know Snowden is relatively safe, and there's still time for Biden or some high-enough court to pardon him.

No, it isn't, and it is a risk that major whistleblowers have to take.

In my opinion it's a shame that Russia was the logical safe target for Snowden instead of some other European country, who should have had his back given that it was unlikely that he would get a fair and just judicial treatment in USA. That is grounds for asylum. I'm irked at my own country not giving him an asylum when he applied for it.

Also a shame that USA still hasn't pardoned him. Some politicians and a few judges have suggested it, but seems to be too touchy for the clear majority of American decision-makers.

He exposed the NSA, not the CIA. In any case, the people here saying that nothing whatsoever was done are making a huge disservice for everyone. By claiming this they are disincentivizing future whistleblowers.

Snowden's leaks led to the USA Freedom Act tightening some laws around using surveillance on American citizens.

The federal court also declared NSA's practices as illegal and possibly unconstitutional.

Snowden's leaks inspired the EU to make their surveillance laws tighter. Similar large scale surveillance is extremely unlikely to occur in any large European country, excluding Russia.

NSA was also required to delete a lot of the data they had gathered. Also, some of the data they gathered after that was made illegal to gather by them and they had to delete that later too.

Many of course hoped even more to come from Snowden's leaks, but honestly, the end result was a net positive. More whistleblowers like him need to come forward and we should encourage that by recognizing the good that came from Snowden's leaks.

Send some drillers to set explosives on it.

You actually can use wind power on Mars (source1, source2).

And there's also nuclear power.