Even this chart is BS for a bunch of reasons (like trusting covid data from NY/CA).
The biggest problem is they did nothing to match the groups on health. Other studies have shown non-covid-vaccinated group as being overall significantly more likely to die, so much of this difference in the graph may just be due to the groups being different health to begin with.
There may be any number of reasons for that, for example people in hospice or with a cancer death sentence may avoid the vaccine since they've made peace with dying and this study makes no attempt to correct for that. Ultimately these are self-selected groups and are not directly comparable like this paper did.
The authors intended to show a big benefit from the vaccine:
Second, persons with undiagnosed infection are misclassified as having no previous COVID-19 diagnosis; however, this misclassification likely results in a conservative bias
Non-biased authors would identify "undiagnosed infection are misclassified as having no previous COVID-19 diagnosis" as a limitation, but adding "however that's ok because it still showed what we wanted" shows their intentions; they're ok with the difference being bigger, but not smaller, because this is what they intended to show.
Even this chart is BS for a bunch of reasons (like trusting covid data from NY/CA).
The biggest problem is they did nothing to match the groups on health. Other studies have shown non-covid-vaccinated group as being overall significantly more likely to die, so much of this difference in the graph may just be due to the groups being different health to begin with.
There may be any number of reasons for that, for example people in hospice or with a cancer death sentence may avoid the vaccine since they've made peace with dying and this study makes no attempt to correct for that. Ultimately these are self-selected groups and are not directly comparable like this paper did.
The authors intended to show a big benefit from the vaccine:
Non-biased authors would identify "undiagnosed infection are misclassified as having no previous COVID-19 diagnosis" as a limitation, but adding "however that's ok because it still showed what we wanted" shows their intentions; they're ok with the difference being bigger, but not smaller, because this is what they intended to show.