Flu vaccination linked to 40% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease

1. The journal article didn't suggest it was causal. But such a correlation with such a large population warrants publication and further research into causation.

2. literally the first thing that any epidemiologist would consider is potential confounders. There is a big list of covariates they included into their model here: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-...

There are quite a few things that can be done to alleviate potential false correlations: DAGs, prior literature, removing confounders, and including covariates are all things at disposal.

3. Such a large sample size + previously reported findings + an inclusion of enough covariates still doesn't == causation, BUT it's important to publish and shout about so we can then look into the potential biological underpinnings that may cause this. Which by the way, those experiments may still use data science techniques.

4. If you are actually interested, there is a whole topic of this called 'causal inference' with one famous criteria list called the 'Bradford Hill Criteria': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_Hill_criteria. This list is often argued about.

5. If all of this information was new to you, please stop spouting 'correlation != causation'. You probably don't know as much as you think

    "We found that flu vaccination in older adults reduces the risk of 
     developing Alzheimer’s disease for several years. The strength of 
     this protective effect increased with the number of years that a 
     person received an annual flu vaccine – in other words, the rate 
     of developing Alzheimer’s was lowest among those who consistently 
     received the flu vaccine every year"

(As a footnote, personally, I do believe it is causation; I believe that as with COVID and EB, we've dramatically underestimated the long-term impact of many viral infections. But that's just a personal belief.)

Of course any such explanation is provisional. I might think your comment is just to complain the provisional aspect isn't mentioned in the quote (I think it'd be tiresome to say that in every statement, and the public's understanding of science being provisional is underestimated), but you seem to think it's a problem that causal language is used at all?

While quote may have been offhand, look at what the actual paper says [1]: "[the study] design prevent[s] strong conclusions regarding causation." Note that it doesn't say it prevents any conclusions regarding causation.

By the way, it seems weird that you yourself have come to believe it's causal, while seemingly denying that this paper provides any basis. How did you come to that conclusion then?

[1] In the last paragraph: https://content.iospress.com/download/journal-of-alzheimers-...

Yes the paper says differently. So what? We're used to this from epidemiology by now. The claims they make to the government/media/public about disease frequently don't match their actual data. To discover this you have to not only read the paper but often dig through the most obscure parts of it. The fact that their claims are wrong will only emerge in, like, table 3 of Appendix 2 which is by the way only available on GitHub if at all. Here it emerges in literally the last paragraph. Then someone blogs about this and they get kicked off Twitter for spreading "misinformation".

The public's understanding of science being provisional is actually excellent and far better than the supposedly elite decision making classes. That's why the public increasingly doesn't trust claims made by scientists, and correctly so. Scientists will make bold claims of causation whilst actually having a sketchy P=0.049 regression at best and a fictional model built on circular logic at worst.

We need to hold scientists to higher standards, and especially epidemiologists. The amount of damage their sloppy "offhand" approach has caused is astronomical. Or, quicker, just accept that they aren't going to improve, have learned nothing from COVID and cut them out of society and the public conversation entirely.