> Kids who make it to age N are more likely to survive to age N+1 than kids who make it to age N-1
Look, maybe I'm just giving them credit because this is filtered through journalism, but isn't that the point of the control communities? You can subtract out this bias using the control community. It's all down to picking comparable controls, obviously. If I had to point to a place you could screw up it would be picking the wrong control communities. Ideally you'd probably pair communities and then assign them at random to get the vaccines or not.
I'm not objecting to the idea that there could be confounders, just that it's probably not sampling bias along the lines of "richer and healthier children probably got the vaccine." If all you're saying is, "it's not an RCT" then... yeah, it's not?
The question is how hard is to pick good control communities. During the pandemic I've read a lot of preprints about cures for covid-19 (like Ivermectin) and many of them used a similar aproach. It looks very hard. I've seen too many bad results with this kind of controls. Double blind randomized controled trial or it didn't happen.
We already did the RCT and saw that the incidence of severe malaria was reduced.
Now we've done an actual rollout, and have seen in observational data a bigger reduction in all-cause mortality than we expected. It's relatively high quality observational data, but of course the risk of confounds is larger than the RCT.
Look, maybe I'm just giving them credit because this is filtered through journalism, but isn't that the point of the control communities? You can subtract out this bias using the control community. It's all down to picking comparable controls, obviously. If I had to point to a place you could screw up it would be picking the wrong control communities. Ideally you'd probably pair communities and then assign them at random to get the vaccines or not.
I'm not objecting to the idea that there could be confounders, just that it's probably not sampling bias along the lines of "richer and healthier children probably got the vaccine." If all you're saying is, "it's not an RCT" then... yeah, it's not?