457 Comments

Oh, I'm sure that dude has plenty of other ways to mess up his kids.

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Come on, Alex! Vaccinating the kids will end covid!

But it's gotta do it in the next 10 hours before Biden does it first.

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How have people in America become so weak and weak minded?

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Dear Aubrey Clayton....Since you feel this way I suggest that you contact Pfizer immediately and enroll YOUR children in the ongoing trial. I know it's a little late but I'm sure Pfizer would be happy to include them.

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Another fine example that just because you have a degree and fancy letters after your name, you can still be an idiot. PhD-Phony Dumbass.

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One reason this covid era has been so detrimental to my mental health is now knowing I live around people who are perfectly fine torturing and experimenting on children. As more images come out of unmasked adults at Super Bowls and parties and masked children at recess I can’t help but think we are a sicker society then once thought.

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UChicago, Berkeley, Boston, PhD, uses pronouns. Doesn't get any more NPC than that. And this man is a statistician? Such a disgrace, his poor children will pay the toll of his virtue signaling.

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Dude definitely tells you his/their pronouns, is a member of the Branch Covidians, and probably wants to transition his kids at age 7 also.

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Won't let his kids eat GMO corn chips, but has no issues GMOing his kids.

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Definition of an unfit parent.

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Aubrey's "position" is a prime example of a narcissist's use of cognitive dissonance. I want x to be true so i am going to believe it to be true, hence in my own world it "is true". It is a detachment from reality that is a sign of derangement.

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There's a reason that 90% of American parents don't want to jab their little ones with this stuff.

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People like this don’t write pieces like this because they are trying to do good. This piece signals to the establishment that he will play ball. He will be a manipulative propagandist on their behalf, and as such, they will employ him and shower him with money and prominence.

That’s what this kind of article is about. These people are deranged.

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Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022

They are viewing this as getting their children baptized. They are using their children to show off how virtuous they (the parents) are.

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Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022

My blood ran cold….freezing actually. I thought my blood couldn’t be any colder but I was wrong. The most Optimistic of Americans can hardly see past the onslaught of:

Ukraine. Canada, Border Crisis, Vaccine and pandemic over but continued by Government flunkies , intentional energy DEpendence, pronouns, George Soros, inflation, Education (from pre-school to college), OMG elections, Presidential Dementia (yeah that’s now a thing) aforementioned delivery of the State of the Union address, Hunter Biden, what’s her names diary, Dr. Jill deafening silence, leftist Supreme Court aka black woman, dead children every day in Atlanta.

Ad Infinitum. (I forgot the VP chuckles and her disgusting one button jackets.

Line must be drawn. A big red line that they see! No 5 year old should have to play Russian Roulette with a vaccine because their parents are too stupid And brainwashed to actually submit.

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"Daddy, my chest hurts. Does this mean the vaccine is working?"

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Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022

So the Aubrey guy is nuts, basically.

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Have you seen the TV ads pushing the vax for children? Disgusting people smh😒

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I wonder what the long term psychological damage will be to kids whose parents are terrified of a virus that poses no threat to them and are too lazy to look beyond fake news about the vaccines.

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They hate children.

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I've no doubt that guy has already messed up his kids.

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This will be the first generation to euthanize their parents. The cat will be out of the bag by the time these kids are adults that this was a major psychological operation and their parents abused them terribly for two years for failing to realize that the threat to them was zero.

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Article for those who don’t subscribe to NYT (I’m taking the hit for you)

As a parent of three children under 4, I was hit hard by last month’s announcement that the Food and Drug Administration was delaying its review of Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine for children under 5.

Like many caregivers guarding young children against the coronavirus, my winter has been full of rapid tests, mask reorders and outdoor play dates in borderline frostbite conditions. I’m able to manage this because I believe it’s temporary; we just need to hold out a little longer until our children can get vaccinated.

But because I study statistics, I’m also racked with concern that if the data had been assessed in a more nuanced way, we might be putting vaccination appointments on the family calendar right now.

It’s unclear why the F.D.A. paused the review. The most recent data hasn’t been shared, and reporting suggests Pfizer found that the Omicron wave led to many more infections than previously seen in its clinical trial. The decision was made to wait for data on the third dose. Perhaps the two doses were not effective enough for the full group, though earlier data had suggested the vaccines produced a desired immune response for children ages 6 months to 24 months.

The bigger issue, as I see it, is in general statistical methods that are often relied on to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines and drugs. The standard approach used in almost all clinical trials and endorsed by the F.D.A. requires new drugs to meet an arbitrary statistical threshold, the one people who have taken stats classes may recognize as statistical significance. This is appealing because it serves as a standardized final exam that experimental results all have to pass, unaided by preconceptions on the part of the reviewers or special pleading by the experimenters.

But the whole idea of statistical significance has been losing favor among many statisticians, for two good reasons. For one, this thinking is inherently binary; after the number crunching is complete, results are classified as significant or not significant, suggesting a finality and certitude that are rarely justified, and second, like any standardized test, it’s overly reductive. If relied on too heavily, it becomes a substitute for a more thoughtful, holistic analysis of the data, including important scientific context.

Nearly three years ago, an open letter signed by more than 800 scientists called for an end to the practice, and prominent statisticians, including the head of the American Statistical Association, put it bluntly: “Don’t say ‘statistically significant.’” Too often, they said, this binary labeling of results as worthy or unworthy has become “the antithesis of thoughtfulness,” a shortcut around what should be the hard work of any statistical inquiry.

What we need for the under-5 vaccine trial evaluation, instead of judgments of absolute safety or efficacy, is probable improvement over the next best alternative, taking into consideration all the available information. Even the concept of an emergency use authorization challenges the ordinary F.D.A. binary of approval and disapproval. We should take that idea and extend it.

There is a version of statistics that would be more suitable than significance testing for evaluating this trial data: Bayesian statistics. The essential tenets of this approach are that investigators should constantly update our understanding of any scientific claim based on the latest data and that we never need to label such a claim as definitively proved or disproved.

This methodology has had successes in many domains, from sports analytics to online commerce, and it shines the most when data is limited. Bayesian methods allowed Allied cryptanalysts in World War II to break enemy ciphers using only a few intercepted messages, and similar techniques are essential to marine search-and-rescue operations working from a vessel’s last known position or fragments of debris.

A Bayesian analysis of the vaccine for children under 5 would consider both that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine has an excellent track record of safety for older children (obviously a 6-month-old is not a 5-year-old, but nor are they an entirely different species) and that we can already make reasonable estimates of how effective a two-dose regimen for little children will be, even against the Omicron variant. And if the newest data shows the vaccine losing effectiveness against this variant at the currently recommended dosages and schedules, statistical techniques that can incorporate this information as quickly as possible should be used to guide any necessary changes to the protocols.

The practice of borrowing information from one experiment to help understand another is not unprecedented. The F.D.A. has acknowledged the value of a Bayesian approach in certain circumstances, including pediatric trials. A 2020 policy document states, “Bayesian inference may be appropriate in settings where it is advantageous to systematically combine multiple sources of evidence, such as extrapolation of adult data to pediatric populations.” And the agency’s guidance for medical device clinical trials — where Bayesian methods have been more accepted for years — includes the endorsement that “Bayesian analysis brings to bear the extra, relevant, prior information, which can help F.D.A. make a decision.” The best way to demonstrate the advantages, when the under-5 vaccine is back up for review, would be for those evaluating the vaccine to put on their Bayesian goggles and consider the whole picture.

Referring to the vaccine trials for children under 5, Dr. Gregory Poland, the founder and director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group in Minnesota, said recently, “I don’t like that there isn’t more data.” Neither do I and other parents. But I also don’t like that my children are unvaccinated going into year three of the pandemic. If the vaccines are safe — and we know they work well in other age groups — that’s meaningful to me both as a parent and as a statistician.

A 2018 editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that when it comes to evaluating trial results, it’s time for clinicians to “embrace their inner Bayesian.” The same goes for the pharmaceutical industry and the agency that regulates it.

Now is the time for a statistical overhaul. If ever there was a trial that cried out for Bayesian methods, this is it. And if ever there were institutions powerful enough to bring about a fundamental change in the ways we interpret data, it would be the F.D.A. and the pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic. In the meantime, people across the country who fret about their unvaccinated young children will continue to do what we’ve become experts at: waiting.

[end]

Aubrey Clayton is a mathematical statistics researcher and a parent to three children under 4. He’s the author of “Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Hey, can you post the entire article? NYT requires a subscription to read it, and I just won't do that! Thx!

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I’m guessing that people who use pronouns have a 99.98% vaccination rate. I’m basing this on super detailed scientific studies.

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Some people should not have kids.

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Can these people just start their own vaccine-based religion already??? The Church of Sooner Day Jabs. Westboro Vaxxests.

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Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022

What amount of injections are now given too children by the time they reach age 6. Is it 64 or 76 not including the mRNA injections? I imagine it varies state to state. How does a fragile organic developing human life form stand a chance of living a healthy life with such repeated physiological insult by big pharma created concoctions? Sure they may be alive, but at what cost to their vitality and immunity etc?

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I've stopped believing people like this guy are ignorant, under-informed or stupid. They are just plain evil.

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Once again, proving the words of Malcom X and Cassius Clay to be 100% correct - "The biggest danger to the black man is the white liberal". Idiots like this guy wanting to give little kids the Covid shots prove they truly believe in their own moral and intellectual superiority. Blind, cult like belief that is not only dangerous to themselves but all of us as these clowns permeate academia and most political bodies. They have moved from being the saviors of the poor blacks to now being the savior for all the rest of us rubes. I think not. Pray, plan, prepare and RESIST.

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As I am in the epicenter of “woke” and “mask culture” I am so grateful for very person commenting here. Thank you for letting me know the entire world is not insane.

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What is everyone so damn afraid of??!! Safety. Safety. Safety. Safety. It's obsessive and profoundly illogical.

I once met a woman whose 7 year-old fell out of a 1st floor window and died. Awful tragic story. But she went around preaching that buildings should no longer have windows on the first floor or at least they should have bars on them because children could die.

Prisons are pretty safe, I guess.

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I think this is a last gasp from people who cannot handle seeing this 2 year mostly hoax, unmasked no pun, before their eyes. They will need to return to the climate change for meaning to their existence. Maybe seeing queen Nancy's face for the first time since she was in the hair salon, will give some comfort tonight.

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Probably not the first: "Let's Make Statistics SUBJECTIVE, Boyz and Girlz!

Ideas / Stupid / Only Academic /Embrace

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"Randomized clinical trials are the ONLY way to know with any reasonable certainty whether a new therapeutic will do what its developer says it does."

I think Dr. Eric Ruben, of the FDA panel, might disagree with this. He's the guy that said, in reference to giving this to kids, "We're never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it."

So, I would say randomized control trials aren't the ONLY way to know. You could, as we have, just start jabbing as many people as possible with the therapeutic and then maybe discern how sick they all got from it. And, then, cover up the data because who needs to see *that*.

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This is clearly a novel form of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4341319/

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Wait, Aubrey is a dude? No wonder he’s messed up.

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By the way, you know what is the main difference between Putin ordering the invasion and killing of Ukrainians, and Biden enforcing Co-Fib shots on people that have the likelihood of killing Americans?

Putin says his invasion is justified and basically says, “it’s my right, and I don’t care what happens!“

Biden? “I’m here to help you, and, we don’t care if people die because, that’s the price you pay when you’re trying to save other peoples’ lives, so take a shot, and, we forgot the the part where you are supposed to have a choice!”

Both sociopaths, one with a little more transparency, not much, but Biden, he is the consummate sociopath, he will shoot you, and then demand over your dying corpse, “thank me you bastard!“…

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It is wild that the tagline from his book is "The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations." The irony.

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Bad. Sad. Idiotic. I've always known that we have a certain number of idiots living among us (intelligence, like most things, displays on a sort of bell curve) but these past two years have really made it so much easier to spot them. Thanks for sharing.

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Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022

The good news is that most people have just stopped listening. What do you think Ukraine is largely about? It's the "break glass in case of emergency" for the elites to try to escape accountability for their China Virus destruction.

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The NYT gives us daily condescending wing nut propaganda. Then wrings their hands about why the public won’t trust them.

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The sad thing is that he is not alone; I now know too many parents (can we call them parents if they indulge their off-spring in this way? I think abusers is more like it) who are all in. In another time I would have said something like 'Are you nuts?" but now I simply shrug and mutter my thoughts under my breath and carry on. These people are sadly way past saving.

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Sadly there's a few hysterical parents out there that want it no matter what. I am afraid I have a sister in law that can't wait to inject her two month old. I don't get it, I waited three years before I had my horse injected with the west nile vaccine when it came out.

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NY Times has always been covering up for the fascists.

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Why not? The FDA and CDC have been commanded by big pharma, fauci, gates and the WEF to murder as many as possible. No age limit, no time limit and no conscience...just create the fear of death.

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Mar 1, 2022·edited Mar 1, 2022

Last line of Aubrey's bio that Alex screenshot: "...teaches graduate courses in the philosophy of pro..."

I'm guessing his bio goes on to finish that sentence with "...pronoun use..."

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"Sad me. It looks like the FDA may do what it has done for generations, which is require that the trial designed to show a medicine works actually show it works."

"has" should be "had". The FDA is no longer trustworthy, reputable, or honest.

The reason thalidomide never received approval in America was because bac, in the '60s the head of the FDA refused to allow it. (That's the Cliff's Notes version; she was lauded as a hero when the truth about thalidomide was finally discovered. Read about her. SHE is what the FDA used to be, but is no more.)

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This reminded me of 'Deep thoughts with Jack Handey'. He wrote a book on statistical fallacy? I swear this timeline.

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