The entire thing can also be trivially refuted just by looking at excess deaths over time, plotted along with the curves of covid cases & vaccine uptake. You will see excess deaths track covid cases pretty clearly (with some lag) at the start of the pandemic, and then dip sharply when vaccines start rolling out. Obviously that still leaves open the possibility that vaccines cause death, just at rates lower than (p(death|covid) * p(catching covid)), but not the possibility that vaccines are _more_ deadly than covid (edit: averaged across the population. I don't know what the state of evidence is re: relative vaccine vs. covid risks for very young males; I'd be fairly but not extremely surprised to find that the vaccines were as or more risky in some pretty small demographic slices.).
This implies that one trusts the official count of excess deaths; I would suspect that people skeptical of the official messaging on COVID might also distrust the death count figures.
COVID-attributed death figures may be fishy, because cause of death is pretty subjective thing. But overall deaths should be verifiable at least to some extent - if X number of people died, there should be some traces of them living before, and then not living, and on the contrary, if people died, but weren't counted, other stats should show the discrepancy - like if 90% of all people over 80 died and the government had a conspiracy to hide it, people would still notice there much less consumption of services people over 80 usually consume, for example.
What happened during the covid episode was that the covid diagnosis superseded every other possible cause of death. If you have a weak body from cancer, and you catch the flu, did cancer kill you or the flu? Before covid cancer would have been cited. The policy explicitly changed for this particular disease, and the health professionals went along. Maybe the financial incentives that accompanied the policy had an effect.
Are you familiar with how death certificates describe the cause of death? I believe (I've linked below a blank Illinois death certificate that I found online as an example) that, if someone dies of COVID (in the opinion of the physician or examiner), while having cancer, then both should be listed on the death certificate. If the hypothesis of COVID being blamed inaccurately is correct, then the rate of COVID on death certificates should be similar to the rate of COVID in the general population at any given time; whereas if COVID does, in fact, make people more likely to die, then COVID should be on death certificates more significantly frequently than the rate of COVID in the general population. So I'd be interested to see statistics about the presence of COVID on death certificates. But it's incorrect that cancer wouldn't have been cited, to use your example, unless physicians/medical examiners were committing fraud on a large scale (since death certificates are sworn documents IIRC).
Are you familiar with how death certificates describe the cause of death? I believe (I've linked below a blank Illinois death certificate that I found online as an example) that, if someone dies of COVID (in the opinion of the physician or examiner), while having cancer, then both should be listed on the death certificate. If the hypothesis of COVID being blamed inaccurately is correct, then the rate of COVID on death certificates should be similar to the rate of COVID in the general population at any given time; whereas if COVID does, in fact, make people more likely to die, then COVID should be on death certificates more significantly frequently than the rate of COVID in the general population. So I'd be interested to see statistics about the presence of COVID on death certificates. But it's incorrect that cancer wouldn't have been cited, to use your example, unless physicians/medical examiners were committing fraud on a large scale (since death certificates are sworn documents IIRC).
I mean maybe, but that's not really relevant to excess deaths. The point OP is making is that is you disregard all possible causes of deaths entirely and only look at how many people died at what time, those deaths track covid waves but not vaccines.
Most countries underestimated the deaths from COVID during the outbreak.
Excess deaths is a relatively simple counting exercise. You have some long term average of how many people day on a day in the year (this is often a bit higher in winter than summer). And you compare it to this year.
You can maybe find plots of deaths per day somewhere for your country or state. Heat waves (if they happen around you) cause spikes on such plots. A bad flu season appears as a few months in winter where there are more deaths than usual. Belgium had two main COVID outbreaks, these are VERY obvious on these plots, as both times, there was a spike during a month or so where deaths were double the usual number.
I’m not a number cruncher nor do I plan to become one. If I were, I wouldn’t trust any single set of data on any topic, small or large. I would look for overlapping sets. I would also look at how the data was gathered. I’m no expert, but when I have looked at a sets of data, no set has been completely clean or even complete. Signals that exist is certain data sets and not in others, what does that tell you? That is the question. It seems to me rather premature to claim that there is no signal based on one particular measurement.
We are not talking about one measurement. Every country has their own separate bureaucracy for gathering information about deaths in general, causes of deaths, and vaccine deployment. Each bureaucracy is run by different people under different rules. Just the U.S. alone has a bureaucracy per-state.
(IIRC someone once argued to me that data from one particular country proved his point, and when I pointed out many other countries showing an opposite trend, he was like "well that's just one data point". I think if the data from most countries supported Kirsch's point, *you* would be the one pointing this out to *me* ― except you wouldn't have to, since I'd never argue that data from hundreds of bureaucracies was "one measurement" in the first place.)
Charts of excess deaths vs "Covid deaths" and vaccine rollouts in a hundred countries can be seen here: https://github.com/hmatejx/COVID_mortality (Edit: Sorry, to be fair, this data was aggregated by two people and presented by one, much as Kirsch is one guy aggregating his data, but I have noticed Kirsch is not only very biased, but also not one to shy away from lying[1]. In a contest between two dudes on the internet, one a shock-jock-in-personality who treats his beliefs as a business venture which he earns a lot of money from, and the other random guy earning nothing by publishing an analysis on GitHub based on a scientific paper based on data from numerous countries, I will trust the second guy (and the paper) virtually every time.)
Let's consider this. Some independent researcher (it has to be independent, nobody would allocate a grant for this) spends a year meticulously analyzing stats and figuring out whether the number of deaths is a Big Lie or not.
Option one. He finds nothing. Maybe small weirdness here and there, but no major smoking guns, nothing to hang your hat on. Now, no journal would publish this obviously. But also no independent outlets would be interested - would "a guy spent a year checking numbers and agreed they were correct" is not going to bring anybody any clicks.
Option two. He finds some serious fudging. Now, he's still a nobody, and no serious journal would publish him. But he can reach out to prominent figures that are politically aligned, Alex Joneses (ignore his current troubles, it's just an example), Tucker Carlsons, etc., various bloggers. Some of them would talk to him if his stuff is convincing enough. Some of them would risk to publish his claims. Some of the opposing side would react by either pointing and laughing or publishing their refutations. In any case, the word would spread that there's this study which found major fudging in death numbers. A lot of people would hear about it.
Now, which world we're more likely to be in, one or two? I would say one is more likely. Of course, it's indistinguishable for us from the world three in which nobody ever cared to check, or world four where a secret government project is dedicated to eliminating any researcher who attempts to check those figures - and so on - but the more time passes, and the more we hear nothing from any people motivated to reveal any shenanigans that have happened, the more we can be assuming that major shenanigans in that area didn't happen. It's not a 100% certainly - there any many possible worlds beyond four consistent with this picture - but it's a reasonable ground to stand on.
Id say the most likely scenario is option 3, nobody checks.
I mean, im not going to check and its unlikely that if someone else did id be in much of a position to confirm or deny it, but it does seem like a bit of a gap in the chain of reasoning to say that x or y could or could not be ture because this statistic would show it, and we know that statistic is true because..... no one has said otherwise even though we would most likely ignore them if they did.
That depends on what you accept as "verifiable". If your theory is that there is a world government which will just make up statistics on the spot feeding its narrative, then no, nobody went around and verified all death certificates and check all graves and crematoriums for the bodies.
If you are just willing to accept official statistical data by bureaucracies: then yes, I went and checked it. It was one of the most relevant statistics in the early days of covid, as it would allow to check public claims about the spread of the virus with a two week lag very easily.
A lot of data is publicly available on this. See for example:
I dont really understand your links so i cant really comment on that, but my question does mostly revolve around official statistical data by bureaucracies. I typically hear the claim that official death counts are accurate around discussions of murders and crime, but its the same problem: People taking as a given that official death counts are correct but not actually knowing if that is the case.
If one of your links addresses that concern, i apologize for not recognizing that, im just a layman.
They don't really address the concern. However: having a mostly accurate count of people being born and people dying is of utmost concern for all societies around the world. Be it for the draft, taxes, creation of travel or identity documents, social services or criminal records ... having a roughly accurate account of people alive and dead is important to all of those, regardless of your ideology.
And the statistics are generated at a very local level where discrepancies are very difficult to hide. Imagine a village of a hundred people: How many people do you expect to die there per year and how would you go about hiding those deaths without locals noticing? How would you add deaths without locals noticing? And since record keeping is so much localized, fudging with those numbers at a large scale involves a lot of people getting to know about it. And in general there is little to no incentive to fudge those numbers.
All of this can of course break down in times of war. And depending on your bureaucracy it can be really difficult to make an accurate tally of your population. But the point stands: those statistics are generally considered among the most accurate statistics we have about any country. And those numbers are made available transparently across the world for all but very few countries, because normally they aren't politicized at all.
The pandemic was the very first time people were foolish enough to even try to politicize those numbers as well, because they didn't like their implications ...
However: independent reproduction of those numbers is impossible, unless you have a time machine. So even asking for that makes no sense. What can be done is researching whether localized data keeping matches centralized data aggregation and whether any anomalies are apparent in the data on statistical analysis. I wouldn't know of any study which tried to research that.
But honestly: if there was any chance that you'd be able to find anything by doing so, Corona skeptics would have done that research long ago. I don't think that anyone from that camp who actually knows what he is talking about has ever disputed those numbers.
Sure, but at that point you're positing a conspiracy that approximately every single country in the world is engaged in. I think there's "skeptical of official messaging" and then there's being that deep down the rabbit hole, which most people who are some degree of skeptical are not.
"Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by shared ideology."
This is a common tactic of the establishment - claim that one possible explanation for something is a conspiracy - then, because we all know that conspiracies are axiomatically impossible ("two or more people agreeing to do something harmful? insane, that could NEVER happen!"), then the original claim must be false. Even putting aside the fact that obviously conspiracies are very possible and very common, there are other explanations than conspiracy, usually simply people sharing an ideology and goal.
> a conspiracy that approximately every single country in the world is engaged in
Not an impossibility. Lockdown policies were almost universal (save a couple of rebel countries), so were mandatory vaccination policies. So, for example, clandestine surveillance cooperations. Given similar motivations, people would react similarly, so the argument "that would require people to act similarly and in concert" does not refute anything. People can do that and did that in the past.
Yeah, but what would be the incentive of countries like Sudan, North Korea, the US, China, France, Iran, Russia, India, Brazil and many more to align in this very specific niche topic, while being unable to agree on any other topic in this world? That's really a next level conspiracy theory where everything must revolve around that one topic whereas virtually any other topic most be a decoy to fake multilateral power distribution.
First, we can be pretty sure death figures for NK, China, Russia and likely Iran are utter garbage, just on general principles that for totalitarian shitholes, any statistical data is utter garbage because nobody is going to publish real statistics and most likely nobody even has it - the incentive to mess with it is too strong on every level. It doesn't have to be covid - economical stats in the USSR has been garbage pretty much the whole time. And, "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is an universally known expression.
Leaving the shitholes aside, you can surely notice how covid policies in US, France, India and Brazil, for example, were rather similar. Again, similar incentives, similar circumstances - similar actions. So, excluding some event from the real of possibilities just because it would have to happen under similar circumstances in many countries sounds wrong to me.
First, we can be pretty sure death figures for NK, China, Russia and likely Iran are utter garbage, just on general principles that for totalitarian shitholes, any statistical data is utter garbage because nobody is going to publish real statistics and most likely nobody even has it - the incentive to mess with it is too strong on every level. It doesn't have to be covid - economical stats in the USSR has been garbage pretty much the whole time. And, "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is an universally known expression.
Leaving the shitholes aside, you can surely notice how covid policies in US, France, India and Brazil, for example, were rather similar. Again, similar incentives, similar circumstances - similar actions. So, excluding some event from the real of possibilities just because it would have to happen under similar circumstances in many countries sounds wrong to me.
How convenient. According to you all the countries either align in ideology or have statistics so bad they don't count.
You don't get to call yourself a man of reason if that's how you explain away that excess deaths somehow aligning well with COVID waves, but not aligning well with vaccinations ... globally ...
I don't even have to get started with how even your assertion about ideological alignment is just plain wrong even just for the very short lost of countries you were allowing to be trusted with statistics about death. Also it's pretty ridiculous how you implicitly trust Brazilian statistics more than Russian statistics ...
By that point you made it very clear that you already are set on the answer and are only looking for reasons which support your believe dismissing literally anytime else.
The kinds of excess deaths implied by 22% of the population having a relative due to the vaccine is not something you can hide or even fail to notice. That would be, what, probably tens of millions of people? Several million, the very least.
Some people are noticing. Most doing work in this area are ignored by the official profession, which seems to want all the questions to just go away. Get the booster you don’t need, and don’t worry about all the unusual myocarditis in your cohort.
Layman: wasn't the myocarditis due to injecting in an artery instead of the muscle? I know they went back to recommending aspiration, but I don't know if myocarditis went down after that.
Anyways, the numbers for that are still way way lower than what this article is saying, right?
"Some people are noticing" it would be impossible for anyone to not notice, is my point. Hospitals already operate at near their maximum capacity; many were easily over-capacity during covid waves. A wave of extremely sick people several times larger than that would be completely impossible to hide. You'd have massive crowds at hospitals, enormous waiting times, shortages of everything, etc.
You aren't interested in the truth though; you just want to fearmonger your baseless conspiracy theories.
That part was entirely based on Grape Sodas low quality comments here and throughout this comment section. Lots of bold claims with no sources, "the mainstream is ignoring this" and similar conspiratorial thinking etc.
The original Pfizer vaccine report - the one the FDA relied on to approve the vaccine for emergency use (and subsequently mandate injections on the populace) - all-cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group than the placebo group.
VAERS, the official monitoring system for vaccine safety, indicates that hundreds of thousands have died from the COVID vaccine. And remember VAERS is well known to be underreported by around a factor of 10.
In 2020, the death rate for people age 15-24 increased about 20 percent. In 2021, the death rate people age 15-24 increased by *another 10 percent*, after the rollout of vaccines.
Excess deaths started going up in January 2021 (huh, where have I heard that before??) and then continued going up *even well after COVID cases had plateaued:
Life insurance data shows excess mortality among the 0-44 age group around 80% above baseline in mid-late 2021 (notably, blood clots typically start causing problems a few months after vaccination):
I don't agree with the way you're interpreting the nejm paper about the Pfizer vaccine. The death rate was very low and all groups (just a handful), so it's not reasonable to infer anything about relative death rates there. If I'm reading it correctly, there are four cardiac deaths in one group and one in the other group, and this is out of a sample of several thousand. That's not a meaningful difference, particularly when it wasn't a primary endpoint of the study.
Also, given that excess deaths increased around the rollout of the vaccine, in order for this survey data to be true (The vaccines are as deadly as covid itself), it would have had to increase by much more, wouldn't it have?
> all-cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group than the placebo group.
15 deaths in a sample of over 21,000 vs 14. Yeah, this is really strong evidence, you got me! And 4 whole cardiac arrests compared to 1, with a whole page of causes listed. Damn.
> COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities
It's clear just from the title that this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
> We have strong short-term temporal association between vaccination and myocarditi
This paper says:
> Despite these observations, the benefits of the vaccines far outweigh the risks of possible myocarditis.
> Vaccines increase severe adverse events, even after taking into account the supposed COVID severity reduction:
I've never seen this paper, whose results seem to contradict the very Pfizer report you link above. It's also not peer reviewed, cites primarily the author's other work, and the author seems to have a history of misleading anti-vaccine work.
Anyway, I'm not working my way through the rest of these, given the poor quality of the first half of this comment. Ironically, given your mocking of my usage of the term "conspiracy theory," this comment is extremely indicative of some of the issues with most conspiracy theories. It's a textbook gish gallop, spamming lots of low-quality arguments and citing sources that are unreliable or don't actually support the claim being made. There's no worry about consistency, either--sources can contradict each other and that's apparently not a concern. You have this big long list which looks convincing at first glance, but applying the slightest bit of scrutiny causes it all to collapse. Very reminiscent of, for example, 2020 election conspiracy theories.
They aren't unusual. They are actually an expected side effect of the virus (and actually also of many other viruses). Just that with the virus they occur even more often and, on average, have a more severe outcome. It's not really surprising that a vaccine which replicates part of the virus also induces a minor version of its side effects. Most of those were only caught because we actively monitored for them. We didn't even know the true baseline for mild myocarditis infections in any cohort when the virus started, because >90% of them simply go away on their own without a few days. That's actually what makes you feel weak during virus infections. The vaccine actually behaves within reasonable bounds regarding that specific topic.
And no: people aren't noticing. Some people are simply lying. Unless millions of death certificates have been suppressed, and continue to be suppressed, since the vaccine became available, there is simply no real signal to notice.
I have no confidence that you know 1) how much myocarditis happens as a side effect of viral infection 2) that you know that the myocarditis induced by the vaccine is either less rare or milder than ‘regular’ virus induced myocarditis
True, I(!) don't know that. But countless studies on this very topic have shown that. I'm merely telling you that this is the case. You'll find countless evidence for my claim if you just type "myocarditis covid vs vaccine prevalence" into the search engine of your choice.
Example result by my own Google search just seconds ago: "The incidence of myocarditis was 2.76 (95% CI, 0.85-8.92) per 1000 among COVID-19-positive patients, 19.7 (95% CI, 12.3-31.6) per million among vaccinated patients, and 0.861 (95% CI, 0.0445-16.7) per million among control patients."
My very own search result, mentioned in the original ranking order:
Although if the vaccine is shifting an appreciable fraction of deaths by a few months then we should see an increase in death rate in periods of high vaccination followed by a decrease in death rate a few months later.
However, we see the opposite - the period of high vaccination rates in early 2021 (peaking on April 2) appears to coincide with the period of lowest excess death rate (April 9) and remarkably similarly with the increased vaccination rate in October/November and the lull in deaths then.
Obviously, this is heavily confounded by the decrease in death rates due to the decrease in COVID due to vaccination in early 2021, and the lull between the delta and omicron waves in the fall (which weirdly coincided with many more vaccine doses). But if someone wanted to claim that vaccine death rates were comparable to COVID death rates, then the signal should still be visible.
If that's the case, then why would anyone even care? The whole point of this vaccine fearmongering is that it's more dangerous for young people than covid is. This sounds like a desperate attempt to wrangle a "I'm not technically wrong!" while giving up all the meaningful claims. Classic motte and bailey.
But in any event, you'd still see patterns in the death rate, as Kenny pointed out, and as far as I can tell, this isn't even possible. The normal death rate is ~1% (or about 3 million people) per year. Official US covid deaths are over a million per year. There aren't 3x that many people "who would have died in a few months anyway" especially since some of those deaths are unrelated to covid or vaccine risk (accidents, violence, other diseases etc).
Some might consider it immoral to encourage people to do something that might rapidly trigger their death, without telling them the risks, even *if* it only robs them of a few months. (I'm not a believer, to be clear, but *if* it were the case that the COVID vaccine was significantly dangerous to the elderly, I think it would be a big deal ethically speaking.)
I don't think I made my point well. It's not that it's not immoral, but rather that as far as I can tell, it's irrelevant. COVID is significantly more dangerous for the elderly, too. As far as I can tell, this was the whole point of most of the "the vaccine is more dangerous" claims--young people have little to fear from the disease. The death rate from being vaccinated would have to be astronomical in this group support claims that the cure is worse than the disease.
This claim would only make sense if avoiding a COVID infection was a real option. However: this wasn't the case.
So comparing taking the vaccine vs not taking the vaccine is a false proposition. The real proposition was, and always has been: facing a COVID infection vaccinated or unvaccinated.
If the combined risk of vaccinating + facing a COVID infection while vaccinated is lower than the risk of facing a COVID infection unvaccinated, than the vaccine is a net win. The infection rate with COVID was very close to 100%. We can simply ignore the "get the vaccine and never get infected with COVID" case. It's simply an irrelevant option to explore because that rarely ever happened.
And this was indeed the case. Facing COVID unvaccinated was WAY more dangerous for all relevant age groups than doing so vaccinated. In no age group did the risk of the vaccination itself exceed the differential between both infection risks. So there simply wasn't a case where the vaccine did more harm than good on average.
This of course still doesn't help you for the individual case, where indeed the vaccine might harm you before you ever get infected. But considering how the vaccine works chances are pretty high that an individual which got harmed by the vaccine would have been harmed way more by the virus infection when facing it non-vaccinated. That last hypothetical can't really be tested scientifically. But just considering the mechanics, it's pretty likely IMO ...
Covid did exactly that and we could clearly see it in the excess death tracking each wave by roughly two weeks. Yet we have no such signal for vaccines ....
I'm skeptical of the official messaging on COVID but I have almost complete trust in death counts from liberal democracies, and I think I'm far from alone.
Death counts were affected by deliberate policies: 1) ramped up testing with a dubious PCR technique that found covid everywhere 2) the decision to call every death with covid a death from covid. Not only unreliable numbers but dishonest ones.
Four years later, and you still didn't understand that we are talking about the total(!) number of deaths, when discussing excess death, not just corona deaths specifically? Really?
That's what happens when you are on an ideological mission instead of using reason to try to understand the world ...
If you don't trust the excess death counts, well, what *do* you trust? Randos on Internet going "there's people dying left and right and it's the vaxx, trust me bro"?
"This implies that one trusts the official count of excess deaths; I would suspect that people skeptical of the official messaging on COVID might also distrust the death count figures."
Some of them do. And, yes, this implies a conspiracy by basically every city (or at least county) in the USA. As well as cooperation from most foreign countries.
I've run into this in on-line forums. No, I have no idea how to constructively engage them.
I'm certain there are people who are skeptical of the official count of excess deaths, because there are people who are skeptical of basically everything. But let's be clear: The "official count of excess deaths" is agnostic as to cause of death, and can't be fudged by having doctors or bureaucrats fudge the cause of death. It is literally just a count of how many dead bodies showed up this month, minus the number of dead bodies we would have predicted from a straightforward extrapolation of previous trends.
And basically every first-word country gives a reasonably honest accounting of dead bodies. Even third-world countries undergoing low-intensity wars usually get that right. Because if you *don't* get it right, then people start saying things like "You said Alice died last month, but I'm Alice and I'm not dead". Or "My husband Bob went in to the hospital and then they hauled a body bag out of his room and I haven't seen him since, but nobody will let me see the death certificate". Or "Hey, I notice you listed five hundred dead bodies last week and none of them have names, what gives with that?"
Excess mortality being agnostic as to cause of death means you can't use it for fine investigation of various causes of death. But if the claim is that a thing almost everyone did in ~2021 has a 10% mortality rate, that signal is going to show up loud and clear. Or 1%, and even a 0.1% mortality rate would be well above the noise floor in excess-mortality numbers.
TL, DR, excess mortality is a statistic that is basically never fudged because nobody can get away with fudging it. and it does put the upper bound on vaccine mortality at <0.1%
And <<0.1% if the claim is that the vaccine is killing healthy young people.
This is an incorrect understanding of what 'excess deaths' means. You absolutely can have excess deaths hiding in the statistics. Imagine a genie who knows everyone that will die in the next 6 months, and instead has them killed in the next 3 months. If nothing else is changed then excess deaths goes up by 100% for 3 months and then drops to -100% for the 3 months following that- ie zero deaths. You can't know 'excess deaths' after a mortality spike without knowing what % of that cohort would have died in the ensuing time frame, plus a bunch of other stuff. If Covid killed off the 1% sickest portion of the population from Nov 2020 to Jan 2021 then you would expect a much lower death rate than normal from February to April 2021- not a return to baseline, a return well under the baseline. Of course Covid could also weaken a large segment of the population as well putting them in the 'likely to die in the next 3 months' basket and keeping the death rate high, but you have to know the granular death data to come to this conclusion and current tracking of excess deaths doesn't do that.
Does anyone actually know this, though? I mean, lets just assume for the purpose of arguing that the official count of deaths in a place was wrong. How would you know this? How would you prove it if you suspected it? Who are you reading or checking with to confirm official counts are correct?
Ive seen several posters assert that death counts are (more) correct, or hard to fake, or variations on that theme, but no one even seems to question how they know that.
What data are you referring to that shows a sharp dip when then vaccines rollout? This doesn't seem to square with the data I have looked at which shows 2021 had a higher rate of excess deaths than either 2020 or 2022. https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000282
Sorry, sharp dip relative to what you'd expect from covid rates at the time. I don't have it offhand but there exist differential analysis e.g. between states with different vaccine uptake rates which demonstrate similar things.
You'll note that other first world countres had their dip a bit later and less evenly. Most people in Canada/EU weren't fully vaccinated until summer 2021. The US banned export of vaccine until after everyone in the US was vaccinated. Being in Canada, I remember this very well.
It's true that 2021 was a bad year for the US, but the peak came well after the rollout and during the delta wave. Delta killed off large numbers of unvaccinated people and was clearly geographically concentrated in the areas with least vaccination (ironically, the Mississippi Delta!).
Excess deaths go down quite a bit in the several weeks after vaccination rates go up. Excess deaths rise again during the delta and omicron waves.
The fact that mitigation measures in 2020 delayed most infections until the end of the year, while 2021 had major death events from the end of the 2020 wave as vaccination was starting, and again during the delta and omicron waves, while 2022 just had the omicron wave, explains why 2021 had the highest rate of excess deaths. They appear to line up with the virus waves, not the vaccine waves.
You could also look at death rates in places where they eradicated the virus, vaccinated the population, and then let the virus back in. I wouldn't trust Chinese statistics, but you could look at Western Australia where the virus was not present from June 2020 to December 2021 (by which time the vaccination rate was 95%). If the vaccine was dangerous you'd expect to see higher death rates in 2021 than 2022. This is not the case https://www.statista.com/statistics/610082/australia-death-rate-by-state/
I'm looking at the aggregate on EuroMOMO, so it's a of a couple dozen countries aggregated. Individual countries seem too random to be worth looking much at.
Covid is still circulating. Instead of being pandemic, it's now endemic. Fortunately most folks have been vaccinated, and most of the rest have already had a case, so it's a much milder disease. Even so it can cause lasting effects. My sister still doesn't have her memory back to what it used to be.
NOTE!!: The vaccine cannot be relied upon to prevent COVID. What it can be relied upon is to reduce the severity. And immunity doesn't appear to be durable. I was quite fortunate, and got COVID about a month after being vaccinated. (I'm in a high risk group, so no surprise.) But it was a mild enough case that it only seriously inconvenienced me for a day or so. The isolation to avoid infecting others was more of a bother.
IIUC, there's a hypothesis that for a vaccine to really prevent COVID, it would need to create "mucosal immunity"...but I've less idea how that works than I have about normal immune mechanisms.
What I was thinking of was the number of people who put off check-up's out of fear of contracting Covid and consequently suffered from undiagnosed cancer, heart disease, etc.
So there are accounts like this guy who apparently use excess-death data and very-smart-statistics to prove that the vaccine is culling the herd, not covid.
I don’t understand the analyses at all and he presents it all very smugly and uses apparently advanced statistical methods (?) and is so self assured that it creates this valence of expertise.
Does anyone have any thoughts about accounts like this? Like are his statistical analyses legitimate or are they just so abstruse and overparameterized that you can’t even argue with them? I’m just curious about how plainly excess deaths can show that the vaccine is quite safe, but apparently there’s some (ab)use of statistics that shows the opposite?
hm, so the implicit claim based on that graph and labels is ... what? that COVID/vaccines leads to an accelerating excess death from this type of cancer?
and the other graphs show things like ... increased cancer rates.
so far "advanced statistics" is fitting an inflection point on a chart.
and when there's a study that actually does fancy stats, then it's dismissed with the spooky "they are lying to you" all caps. (though that study is a strictly looking at data from 1992-2018, and does nothing other than comparing generations.)
edit: Jun 20, okay, OurWorldInData uncritically uses the GBD dataset where the Total cancer series are uncomparable ... because the US series added around 2000 non-melanoma skin cancers, but series for other countries don't have that .. wwwwaaahh ...
Kirsch's method of argument here is disappointing, he's clearly smart enough that he should know better. Sure, product design and electrical engineering are a bit different from statistical analysis, but if he ever had to scale up production of his products, he ought to have learned some stats. "Six Sigma" and other related process control disciplines were all the rage in Silicon Valley when he was making his fortune.
Perhaps a victim of the phenomenon where once you make a fortune, it's all too easy to surround yourself with sycophants who tell you you're right, and stop bothering to ever second-guess your biases and instincts.
Nah. He’s doing exactly what our esteemed author is - trying to objectively measure what is only a hypothesis. Steve K believes a non trivial number of people have been injured or killed by the vaccine. He has quite a lot of anecdotal support but nothing definitive. I don’t think either survey is useful, but it’s interesting that the counter survey also told its author what he suspected: vax hesitation is coded as right wing. News flash: people like to be confirmed in their beliefs. Science is supposed to be above that, but it obviously isn’t.
This proves too much. You either have to engage with the actual arguments or you're living in a world where you can't believe a thing because "news flash" everyone already believes something.
"Clearly smart enough that he should know better" isn't really a category that exists for the type of 'smart' that shows up on standardized tests and gets you into good engineering programs.
Abandoning belief in the existence of that category is critical to any effective attempt to better make sense of the world.
I don't precisely disagree, I think I'm just using "should know better" in a slightly different sense than how you're taking it. See my response to dionisos.
At some level I guess I am a bit of a "consequentialist chauvanist". I think the impact of your actions in the world is what truly matters, and so if you have the mental faculties to do good in the world, and instead you do bad (for whatever reason, including indulging self-flattering confirmation biases), that's a kind of moral failure. It doesn't necessarily make you "A Bad Person", or "Evil", but it does make you a _disappointment_. You're _at best_ a less-good person than you could be.
I think Alternate Steve Kirsch could be looking at some really simple statistics -- statistical concepts that I feel fairly certain he _is_ aware of -- to conclude that vaccines can't possibly be as bad as he had thought, and then not promoting theories that quite literally get people killed. He wouldn't even have to necessarily believe that everything is hunky dory, that there are no problems with Big Medicine pushing over-treatment or certifying things on a dubious basis. But just given how excess deaths moved, it can't be right that the COVID vaccine was worse than COVID. And at the margin, people with no vaccine-harm risk-factors refusing the vaccine statistically _has to_ result in more deaths.
The fact that Real Steve Kirsch would rather do what he's doing is Bad, Actually. Not, like, "lock him up" bad, but it's a way that the world is worse than it could be.
To be clear, I am a moral disappointment to myself in this regard, often, but, in the immortal words of Eleanor Shellstrop, Pobody's Nerfect! I hope at least that my peccadilloes get fewer people killed, compared to Kirsch.
Thinking about what you said, I thought this is mostly true, but we also have a limited amount of concentrations, and we will always do some simple mistakes even on important subjects. Being more cautious on the important subjects will help, but we will still have some blind spots on things which seems too obvious at first glance to make us think of checking them.
But this should be mostly fixed with debates, surely someone should have already brought this kind of stuffs to his attention, so what is going on ? I mostly see three possibles explanations :
1) People did, but it was drowned in too much information so he missed it.
2) People did, but they did a bad job at explaining it.
3) He saw there was a problem, but he just dishonestly refused to see it.
There are probably other possibilities, and we can't do much about 3), but if it is 1) or 2), I think it is another example that show a general problem about how we debate and share information : We are talking and consuming it a lot, but some simple and important information didn't get to who would need it.
Yes, and you're somewhat gesturing back towards my (not particularly fleshed out) speculation that part of the problem may be that Kirsch has surrounded himself with yes-men. It is all too easy for a rich person to listen to flatterers, rather than those who have their true best interests at heart and are willing to tell them uncomfortable truths. It's like an externalized version of the internal narrative of confirmation bias.
You can be smart and quite irrational, and you can have some knowledge about a general subject, but only use this knowledge in the restricted domain you learned to use it (or even not use it at all).
Oh, totally. As I recall there's specifically some evidence that it's harder to dissuade a high-IQ / skilled-at-logic person from a false belief, because they simultaneously (a) have a greater variety of background and subject-relevant knowledge available to sift through, (b) are good at assembling arguments, including self-persuading / sense-of-self-preserving arguments, and yet (c) oblivious to the fact that this is what they're doing. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug!
That doesn't make it any less disappointing to see in action.
Of course people who read ACT and take part in surveys are a-typical non-representative sample, and of course correcting for right-wingness does not help - right-wingers who read ACT and even Trump-supporters who read ACT are also not representative of a general population right-winger and Trump-supporter. Though Trump bump should have provided some clue as to what's going on here. Of course, the question is just a proxy for "do you think (COVID) vaccines can be dangerous?" and most ACT readers a-priori wouldn't. And of course most of the cases would be elderly people that were on the death's door anyway, or morbidly obese people, or otherwise unhealthy people - which is also a major cohort in COVID-attributed deaths. But I think pretending that there's only single right-left parameter that can define one's political views I think makes a big disservice here.
We’re in a weird time when the political categories are shifting. The so called right wing has more anti authoritarian, anti war people in it now than the left, which spends most of its time supporting an obviously corrupt regime- perhaps hoping that they can somehow grab the power to make the socialist utopia happen.
Bruh, Trump attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in a coup attempt. You aren't "anti-authoritarian," you're deluded. That's why you think the Left supports Biden (who is "obviously corrupt" inside your bubble) so they can make the socialist utopia happen, when in fact actual socialists (and even progressives) are largely holding their nose on voting for Biden because they don't want your putschist convicted felon back in office.
Since we're on the overall topic of replication, this kind of thing is currently happening in other Western polities, as well.
The left (and moderate right, which anywhere else would be the label assigned to the majority of American Democrats) is in defence mode against the far right, whose anti-immigration positions are alluring these days even to centrist voters. The idea that the left actually likes each of Biden, Macron, Starmer, VDL, possibly even Merz, makes far less sense than the left being forced into trying to build a firewall against MAGA, RN, AfD, ID, and the rest. Both on the tactical-voting and coalition-building levels.
"and moderate right, which anywhere else would be the label assigned to the majority of American Democrats"
Can we please, please stop with this crap? This has been demolished dozens of times at least (here's one comprehensive instance https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/hjsk2l/the_democratic_party_being_center_right_in_europe/). The average Democrat is to the right of the average western leftist on health care, welfare spending and maybe criminal sentencing, to the left of the average western leftist on immigration, trans issues and maybe affirmative action, and in line with the average western leftist on most other issues.
This kind of attempt to falsely shift the Overton Window and to *define* into acceptability your positions instead of arguing for them on their merits...by trying to trick people into redefining left as centre, or even as right FFS...is one of *the* most dishonest tactics around.
Well sure, but in my experience this particular phrasing (Democrats would be *on the right* in Europe) is almost invariably used by people on the left (whereas a conservatives or a neutral description is usually that "Europe is to the left of the US", or "the European left-wing parties are to the left of the Democrats", to express the same mistaken idea) and has either the implicit or very often explicit purpose of shutting down criticism of leftist policies (universal health care being the most common example, though it's also used unbelievably for abortion laws*) without actually having to engage with their merits. This would be bad enough even if the claim wasn't also false.
Also, phrases like "anywhere else" in the parent comment, to mean "a handful of countries in Western Europe" (which is still false) are such obvious hyperbole that it's hard to see it in good-faith. (Unless someone has an honest belief that Russia, Serbia, Japan etc are to the left of the US...)
*note that less than 2 years ago, the entire US had more liberal abortion laws than pretty much any other western country
First, what happened on Jan 6 was not a coup attempt. Not a single rioter had a firearm, and even the fbi said they found no evidence of a conspiracy to overturn the election. Second, even IF it was a coup attempt, what did Trump do? Didn't he say during his speech on Jan 6 to "to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
I'm not supporting what happened on Jan 6, but to call it a 'coup attempt' or an 'insurrection' is hyperbolic at best.
It was a coup attempt. I know that the right says "ah, but actually, it was just a riot, and he said "peaceful" one time," but there's a reason why the people there were saying to "hang Mike Pence": because Trump told them that Mike Pence could "stop the steal," i.e. prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the lawfully elected opposition. There was an elaborate (false, pernicious) legal theory created to justify this coup attempt: that the VP could throw out the electoral votes of seven states, on the paper-thin justification of "we created alternate slates of electors for seven states (that got absolutely nowhere)." Even the coup plotters themselves, like John Eastman, said that their legal theory was hogwash ("I put the odds at winning in either D.D.C. or CADC closer to zero, and the risk of getting a court ruling that Pence has no authority to reject the Biden-certified ballots very high"). When Mike Pence failed to follow this stupid bullshit, Trump attempted to pressure him with the riot/mob.
It's the classic "if we like them, they're freedom fighters, and if not, they're terrorists" schtick, except applied to riots as either "mostly-peaceful protests vs. insurrections."
No, if all that had happened on Jan 6 was a mob did stupid mob shit, it would be stupid mob shit. It's a coup attempt because Trump was trying to make Pence throw out the electoral votes of seven states in order to steal the election for himself. Not everyone is a naked hypocrite like Trump.
Do you believe authoritarianism pertains to how much individual rights are infringed upon or to the ceremonies through which the people nominally in charge of said oppression are anointed?
If you believe "lawfully elected" governments cannot be authoritarian, that is certainly not the sense in which people who call the right "anti authoritarian" use the term.
(And if your use of the term "war" is similarly … idiosyncratic, perhaps to exclude military actions in service of causes you consider righteous, that's not the sense in which they use it either.)
I think he is right, authoritarianism pertains to how much individual rights are infringed (more than having a lawful election), and saying there was a coup attempt is at least questionable, it didn't seem like they had anyway to take any power from what they did.
Trump, and the right, are still much more authoritarian than the left.
> I think he is right, authoritarianism pertains to how much individual rights are infringed (more than having a lawful election),
If a country is not democratic, it is authoritarian. It can also be authoritarian for other reasons, theoretically, but democracies are better than all other systems at not being authoritarian in the other ways. We also generally do not consider an election done in the context of authoritarian regimes "democratic," even if votes are counted 1 for 1 with secret ballots, since the regime has previously done things like imprison opposition, shut down opposition media, etc, and thus the voters don't have proper access to important information.
> there was a coup attempt is at least questionable, it didn't seem like they had anyway to take any power from what they did.
The plan was to get Mike Pence to throw out the electoral votes of seven states, making Trump have more EVs than Biden and causing the election to be sent to the House delegations, which were majority Republican and thus would side with Trump, and then hopefully have the SCOTUS side with them and declare it all legal post facto in a landslide 5-4 decision. If this had actually happened, it would have been a coup, since this is obviously not how the President is supposed to be selected. Ergo, coup attempt.
I do think that injections of insufficiently-tested stuff can be dangerous, and the now mainstream rhetoric about it being an obvious mistake not to have the vaccines approved, if not mandated, on the day it's technically feasible to mass-produce them seems insane to me. But, now that a few years have passed, to think that they're anywhere as dangerous as having COVID itself requires believing in truly vast conspiracies that ruling classes of the whole world unanimously engage in, while bitterly hating each other in most other ways.
Analogous lines of argument are also reliable indicators of various other bogus conspiracies. Like, if the US had faked the Moon landing, that would've been an easy propaganda coup for the Soviets, who wouldn't have shut up about that for decades, and yet for some reason they kept quiet.
Correctly estimating the vaccine effect on mortality is not trivial due to several strong confounders, such as "healthy vaccine bias" (see, for example, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38401782/).
> if the US had faked the Moon landing, that would've been an easy propaganda coup for the Soviets
I feel this argument is rather weak. Revealing MKUltra or Tuskegee Experiment would be a huge propaganda coup for the Soviets, yet they didn't reveal them. I mean, I am not here to argue the moon landing is fake, I am just saying "if it were fake, Soviets would know and reveal it" does not cut it. Soviets aren't all-powered all-knowing demigods, and they didn't know a lot of the shady stuff that was going on.
Sure, they didn't know everything, but I don't think those two things would've been particularly big coups. "Americans are racist hypocrites and the CIA is gratuitously evil" were already successful propaganda staples with plenty of evidence.
Of course vaccines can be dangerous! That's not the right way to frame the sentence.
The actual question should be "Were any of the COVID vaccines very dangerous, and if so to what population?". I feel the answer is "No, they weren't.", but at least when phrased that way it is possible to get reasonable and useful evidence.
(Weekly population death rates is one source that's pretty reliable, but it only handles one level of danger. There could well be others. E.g. an earlier post suggested that the occasional heart inflammation was due to the interaction of a protein injected with the vaccine and a dormant prior infection.)
I don't think this is "of course". Couple of years ago this statement alone would get you banned on all major social networks and proclaimed "conspiracy theorist".
> Were any of the COVID vaccines very dangerous, and if so to what population?
And this wasn't a question also. Upon hearing such statements you were supposed to start chanting "safe and effective!" aloud until the heretic goes away. The fact that now it is considered as a real question (whatever the ultimate answer turns out to be) is a result of long, arduous and risky struggle by the "conspiracy theorists" and "pseudoscientists". But on the way to there the question became so politicized that only a very small number of people now actually is interested in per-se answer of it, and not in the question as to which group would you be attached to if you answer one way or another.
Anything you inject can be dangerous. If nothing else, there can be contamination. Don't be excessively silly. Your second point makes me wonder what sites you were frequenting. (OTOH, I don't frequent many social media sites, so I can't really claim you are wrong.)
Again, I don't think this "don't be silly" attitude is earned. It's easy to say it now, when the discussion of vaccine downsides is finally permitted, but when we were in the middle of the panic, pretty much any statement discussing such dangers - such as reminding that we are dealing with new medical technologies and there's always certain danger associated with it, on top of usual well known iatrogenic dangers - was thoroughly suppressed and people persisting at it were shunned, deplatformed and pronounced crazy at best, and murderers and public enemies at worst. So I don't think this attitude of "don't be silly, nobody denies those things and there's no need to push back about anything like that" reflects anything resembling the actual situation.
Your question and Kirsch’s are worded differently enough that I wonder if people aren’t extending “personally know” in Kirsch’s survey a little further than “immediate family” from here. “I personally know [insert celebrity that everybody shouted VAXXED about when they died].”
I agree. For a less-stretched example, take my friend's relative who, I heard, died from COVID. I've never met her, but do I "personally know" her? Well, if I wanted to make a point that deaths like hers happen... I know of her through a personal connection (my friend), so I could easily imagine saying that I "personally know" her.
Or to put it another way, some people might interpret "personally know" as meaning "personally know about", in which case they could answer Yes even if they weren't acquainted with the individual in question.
[Without in any way supporting the idea that vaccines kill more people than covid] Whatever has an effect, and the vaccines clearly do, can have side effects, and here is a plausible mechanism: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38867495/ This error mechanism would be nice to understand better, if only because mRNA vaccines are obviously here to stay.
With most old vaccines it was normal after initial fairly modest safety trials to roll them and and then observe the population.
There are occasionally bad side effects. Like there was a flu vaccine that caused permanent narcolepsy in about 1 in 50K people. It was also how we learned that the natural flu could also cause permanent narcolepsy.
I want the FDA out of the business of telling me whether I can take medication or not. It was created to inspect factories to ensure there were tainted ingredients being consumed, but then their role expanded to requiring hugely expensive trials for medicine, thus creating what Alex Tabbarok calls the "invisible graveyard". https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/the-invisible-graveyard-is-invisible-no-more.html
I'm not that guy, but I'll actually answer your question: Malaria would be a great boon. It's rather easy and cheap to demonstrate that your vaccine is less deadly than being unvaccinated near malaria reservoirs, compared to most vaccine targets. You can even limit deployment to areas with high malarial threat to minimize the impact of any undetected issues with the vaccine.
Do you actually know what changes there were in the protocol? As I understand it, one of the biggest speed ups was just waiting for 100 cases in the trial group before unblinding to see what fraction of those had the vaccine. If you’re testing a vaccine for shingles or mumps or covid, you need to wait for 100 cases to occur, and covid cases were just happening so much faster during late 2020 than almost any disease at almost any other time, so that step was just a few weeks rather than the year or more it might take for other diseases.
I suspect another speed up involved allowing more participants in the phase III trial, which sped up reaching 100 cases as well.
Typical vaccine testing can easily take a decade or more. I think it's debatable whether risks like the myocarditis seen in certain cohorts would have been discovered with a more normal testing period.
How are those tests structured? Presumably the way you test for rare side effects like myocarditis involves approving larger test cohorts in the initial trials. I don't believe they usually think there is any benefit in waiting multiple years from injection, since vaccines are a pharmaceutical that people typically get once, or only occasionally, and thus basically all side effects occur within a few months. (That contrasts with things like diabetes or cholesterol medications, which are often taken continuously for years, and thus often have long-term side effects.)
I recall having seen this discussed in studies of past vaccines. I think narcolepsy from the swine flu vaccine and the perverse worsening of some dengue cases are the few that I’m aware of that showed up a few months later. I don’t have a standard reference to cite on the lack of longer term effects from vaccines, but if you know of any contrary claims I’d be interested to see.
The study he linked is mainstream science (published just this month) - they are studying it. They also cite 53 other studies, many of which have been done in the last couple of years.
It's hard to take Kirsch seriously when he makes arguments like this. He also got hilariously blown out in a debate with a doctor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1nF2YAn9DQ
I only watched a few minutes before closing it because Avi could not possibly be any more annoying. While I have no doubt that he is in the right, his rhetorical approach seems optimized for obscuring the truth rather than revealing it. If you want to win a debate you have to *let your opponent speak* long enough for them to say something wrong, rather than interrupting them incessantly.
(My understanding from elsewhere is that Kirsch is no stranger to such strategies, so maybe he "deserves" it in some karmic sense, but that doesn't make it good for Avi to do such things when he has the actual truth on his side.)
Say your opponent has a conclusive (but complicated) argument in favour of his preposition, and you don't have a substantial counter. Then your best response (rethorically) is to throw up random distractions and use those to sabotage your interlocutor's ability to make his point. Avi's rhetorical approach is to prevent Kirsch from deploying that tactic.
yes locking down the conversation prevents Kirsch from using that tactic, but it also prevents him saying anything meaningful either, so it prevents any actual debate from happening. You can't win a debate that doesn't happen.
If your opponent is employing bad rhetoric the appropriate solution is either to have a moderator / adjudicator intervene, or (sans moderator) refuse to engage with the bad rhetoric and rely on the audience being able to understand who is trying to actually engage intellectually.
When I first read 1984, I always thought the concept of doublethink was intentionally heavy handed and overt to get the point across. But the covid vaccines sure proved me wrong. I remember when Governor Cuomo was talking about refusing the "Trump" vaccine for NY. And Trump was always bragging about how great Warpspeed was. Then everything shifted when the Trumpists were out of power and suddenly the leftists wanted everyone to get vaccinated or else. Such that a few years after the Trump presidency, Trump supporters are far more likely to think the vaccine kills people. Honestly it's a really depressing window into how most people interact with politics. When Herbert was writing Dune, he should have made the mantra be 'Tribalism is the mind-killer'.
> I remember when Governor Cuomo was talking about refusing the "Trump" vaccine for NY. And Trump was always bragging about how great Warpspeed was. Then everything shifted when the Trumpists were out of power and suddenly the leftists wanted everyone to get vaccinated or else. Such that a few years after the Trump presidency, Trump supporters are far more likely to think the vaccine kills people.
The Democratic politicians (it wasn't just Cuomo) trying to sow fear of the vaccine can be easily explained by politics.
The Trump supporters developing fear of the vaccine can't; note that Trump himself never changed his opinion, and his supporters hated that.
People who say masks have zero effect are often saying "I think this is more effective than saying masks shouldn't be mandated" (without specifically knowing they took that step)
Similarly "if I say CO2 warming doesn't exist then I don't even have to think about whether solutions are cost effective" or "vaccines don't work and are actually bad so the only reason to mandate them is conspiracy"
This has not been true in any election where Trump was actually a candidate. Anti-vaccination is historically a left-wing belief, with a few religious separatist types thrown in there who aren't politically relevant. On the eve of the 2020 election, if the approval of the vaccine had been announced, Trump may well have won the thing (maybe not, so much early voting), and all of his voters would have been cheering it. If you poll people about vaccination attitudes today, it's very likely that because of in-group signaling yada yada yada, the left is more pro-vaccination and the right less so compared to 10 years ago, but it's yet to be relevant to an election -- by 2022, the Dems were running away from all the mandates and unpopular NPIs they'd championed, and Trump wasn't on the ballot, and now that Trump IS on the 2024 ballot it won't be discussed again because it makes Trump look good to moderates and bad to a fringe of his own base.
Heck, in 10 years this might all revert to the old norm, and it'll be aging hippies ranting about Big Pharma instead of Daily Wire subscribers doing so.
> This has not been true in any election where Trump was actually a candidate. Anti-vaccination is historically a left-wing belief
I don't think this is true. I half-remembered a conversation on this point (pre-covid) where someone I generally trust argues that the association of anti-vax sentiment was a myth. They basically argued that because the left wing anti-vaxxers were typically more high profile you mostly heard about them. It's hard to google this now because everything is about COVID vaccines specifically but I did find this from 2017 which backs up my point https://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-follow-the-usual-political-polarization-81001.
The tl;dr; is that (as of 2017) the feeling that vaccines were "unsafe" was pretty similar among left and right and was generally correlated with how extreme you were in either direction (moderates on both left and right were more likely to say that vaccines were safe). For somewhat predictable ideological reasons it was conservatives who were more likely to take issue with vaccine mandates though. The article also mentions some conflicting findings (per usual) but I think prior to COVID vaccine-skepticism wasn't nearly as polarized as it is now.
Interesting link. I find some things in there make sense, if antipathy to vaccination was a fringe view on both sides then you'd expect to see it more on the left as we did, since there are plenty of fringe-left people in high visibility entertainment careers. The equivalent fringe-right people (on that issue) are otherwise normal nobodies who never discuss their beliefs outside their families or rural churches where the same 12 people attend every week, and often home school so even the locals don't know them well. Also that "role of government" overrides what you'd otherwise think of as a common liberal/conservative split -- being pro-government and the managerial-expert class overrides liberals' bodily autonomy value, while being anti-government and in favor of family privacy above state interference overrides the once-popular theory that conservatives had a higher disgust response to disease and unclean people.
But I still think that culturally it was strongly left-coded, because those were the famous people championing it.
It's an interesting phenomenon how these things shift over the decades. JFK murder conspiracies used to be entirely a left-wing fringe obsession, though perhaps that too was mostly a feature of prominent lefties being the loudest voices. The other end of that horseshoe was in libertarianism, though not really the libertarians who you'd have viewed as right-aligned. Yet now I'm seeing almost-kinda-edge-of-normal-MAGA types leaping at the chance to exonerate a Communist assassin who loved Castro and tried to kill a prominent Bircher. Presumably out of the same broad anti-authority bias that helped the belief spread for years on the left, and drives the vaccine discourse post-covid.
Mandated vaccination *should* be a right-wing-in-the-US agenda, because the right is theoretically against the government telling us what to do. I'm not sure why it would be a left-wing agenda item. Perhaps some anti-corporate agenda, but the corporations can't mandate vaccination.
I think you're using an overly narrow definition of "politics" here. Trump was accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, doing all kinds of skulduggery, they're bad and they're your enemies, and soon after that the Democratic party line becomes that you have to get the vaccine and if you don't you should be fired from your job and banned from public spaces. Is it not "political" when a bunch of people who think one political party is their enemy decide that anything that party wants must be bad?
> Is it not "political" when a bunch of people who think one political party is their enemy decide that anything that party wants must be bad?
But nobody's made that decision. Here's an element of the current Democratic party platform:
> Democrats will upgrade our nation’s ports, lock and dam systems, and freight infrastructure to accommodate 21st century cargo, reduce air and water pollution, and create and maintain high-quality, good-paying jobs.
Let me know when you find the protest group who say that these are not just poorly thought out, but actually negative goals, that other things equal we should be looking to ensure that our ports can't handle modern cargo and to increase the amount of pollution we're putting out.
Antivaxx sentiment is not driven by political concerns. It's an expression of what people wanted to believe anyway.
Right. You don't need some grand political theory to explain people seeing 80% elevated mortality rates among young people, kids suddenly dropping dead playing sports, higher all-cause mortality in the Pfizer study's vaccine group than the placebo group (and this study being the basis for the vaccine's emergency approval), the vaccine being developed and tested for a ~10x shorter period than a typical vaccine - and deciding that maybe they should opt out of this one.
The real question then is why Democrats saw all of this and *weren't* disturbed enough to resist the mandates. Of course it has to do with their fundamental desire to control and to be controlled - to lick the boots of the state.
Correct - this disconfirms the tribalism theory, to the credit of Trump supporters. While Democrats first opposed the vaccine but then embraced it (especially mandating it) based solely on their tribal affiliation with those taking credit for it, Trump supporters opposed it (especially mandating it) the entire time, indicating genuine belief rather than tribal brainrot.
It doesn't seem inconsistent with tribalism. As you say, many people were anti-vaccine before 2020. If the overwhelming majority of those people are on the right, that still seems consistent with tribalism. Political tensions between the left and the right didn't start in 2020.
Also, just as it's overly simplistic to say that everyone in the American right opposed vaccines the whole time, it's overly simplistic to say that everyone in the American left was anti-vaccine and then supported it. Lots of people, including the leadership of NIAID and CDC, were pro-vaccine the whole time.
Tribalism doesn't explain why Trump can be very pro-vaccine while his supporters are (more elevated, not totally) against them. They begrudgingly accept that Trump got the vaccines out and is supportive of them.
I do agree that the left is a lot more nuanced than "anti, then pro" in regards to the vaccines. It was obviously very political in 2020 when Cuomo and others said the vaccines were unsafe, and we can discount that being their true feelings. I do feel justified in being upset with Democratic supporters not calling him and others out on that at the time.
You say 'most people', but only a small minority in either party are actually swayed by these things in any meaningful way. The talking heads and career politicians on either side are more likely to take sides because that's their job description, and the algorithms are more likely to promote the craziest takes to prominence because that drives engagement, but the average actual person isn't quite so flighty.
The desire to trust authority is actually the way most people get most of their true beliefs about the world. How do you know Moscow is the capital of Russia? Have you ever visited and seen the legislature meeting? Or did you just trust some book or tv that told you?
That's not exactly what double-think is. Double-think isn't switching beliefs based on political affiliation, but believing two contradictory things to be true at the same time. More like believing both that COVID is a hoax and also that the government is covering up COVID deaths.
Yet I do see lots of double-think around political subjects, and more as time goes on.
That's true, the different vaccine beliefs were not held simultaneously but switched when the tribal affiliation of those in power switched. But nothing actually changed in reality. The vaccine was still developed by the same companies on the same expedited timeline from Warp Speed. It went from anti-establishment Trump's vaccine to the Establishment vaccine, but it was always the same vaccine. Maybe there is some pithy term for this other than doublethink.
I've looked, but I can't find one, and Gemini is apparently afraid to answer. It seems somewhat similar to argument from authority.
But it does apply to individuals that don't think, that's for sure. The vaccine is one example, but a Mexican border wall seems to be another now. It seems almost any issue can go that way, if one has the right (wrong) frame of mind.
You can cherry pick comments to tell a narrative but Ds were more pro-vax than Rs well before the 2020 election. At the time Cuomo made his comments (which were much milder than "refusing" the vaccine) Democrats were already 14 points more pro-vax than Republicans (https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/17/u-s-public-now-divided-over-whether-to-get-covid-19-vaccine/). There was no switch between the parties, there was just polarization where Ds became even more pro-vax and Rs became more anti, as happens for almost every subject that becomes politicized in the US.
Yes. Ten years ago Democrats and Republican were about equally likely to be anti-vax and prominent anti-vaxxers were mostly from the left. But I think it's education polarization not Covid as such that changed things. These days Rs are more likely to believe even 9/11 conspiracy theories, which used to be even more left associated than anti-vax.
Well, FWIW I believe the government lied about prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack. IIUC the FBI was warned by a local agent AND the US govt (who?) was warned by a German intelligence agency. This doesn't mean they knew specifically what was in the works, but they knew SOMETHING was. That they had the emergency legislation before congress the next day isn't, however, proof, as they always have secret legislation awaiting an opportunity to be pushed.
OTOH, it was a clear warning that the government lies when it's convenient. This has been shown repeatedly since that time. (Probably earlier if I had been paying attention.)
It's easy to know SOMETHING is in the works, it's hard to know enough details to be able to do something about it.
Also I suspect "the government lies when it's convenient" is a worse explanation than "individuals, including in the government, will lie when needed to protect their reputations and careers".
It's definitely true that "the government" isn't a unitary entity, and a finer grained explanation is better...if you have it. But to know which particular individual or agency within the government espoused some particular statement requires a lot more attention that a more global rule. Occasionally there are certain people within the government that I will trust to be honest (or to lie) about some particular subject. Usually I haven't been paying enough attention to be that specific.
I think a better question would be "which antivaxx"? Hippies are still hippies and think nature is perfect, the antivaxx im hearing now is libertarian, governments sux, mandate people wear seat belts bad, personal nuance beats blind centeral planning, force creates moral harzard, etc.
No, you didn’t understand the article at all, sorry. At worst it is very occasionally pushing the frail over the edge, not at best as you say. And that doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with the vaccine either. It just means that the especially frail shouldn’t receive it unless there is a very strong reason. And your comment about genocide is just wacko.
I’m sorry, but that is still an insane thing to think. That’s not what genocide means at all and no one would claim what you claimed unless their political beliefs were preventing them from thinking clearly. Have a good night.
The word gene takes its root in the ancient Greek, where génos (γένος) means the race, which comes from the word gignomai (γίγνομαι), which means to engender, to become.
Therefore my use of the word genocide may be novel (the context has never occurred before) it is entirely an appropriate use of the word given its roots.
My advice to you would be that you worry about you, I'll manage my own sanity on my own, thanks.
Genocide, like all other "-cides" requires intent. It means to kill people with the intent of wiping out their race or people group. Unless you think vaccine makers intended to kill everyone with a particular genome, it still ain't genocide. At worst it's genomanslaughter.
The genetic link was speculated early on in the mRNA rollout (as most medical conditions have a genetic contribution and this is not a controversial point of view), so by your logic (which I do not support but can work with) the genocide commenced at that point and is ongoing. Even before that point I'd still call it negligent homicide with a genocidal impact.
"Therefore my use of the word genocide may be novel (the context has never occurred before) it is entirely an appropriate use of the word given its roots.”
Oy. That’s not how it works.
You can’t use a -private- personal definition to make an “argument”. People are using the standard (referenceable) not some meaning only you know about. It's secret goalpost moving.
Even if it were reputable, I don't see how polling could be regarded as acceptable methodology for investigating any claims about the actual safety of vaccines. Kirsch's headline making a factual claim about death rates is unsupportable by polling. At best, polling could give us information about societal perceptions regarding vaccine risks.
I'm disappointed with Scott for trying to counter this with better polls. Kirsch needs to be countered with controlled trials, not polls of differently biased audiences.
"But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump from."
Typo here.
"ACX readers are only a little further left than the general population"
Huh? Less than 10% identify as conservative, 88% disapprove of Trump, more than 70% are pro-abortion, and the average left-right numerical score is also substantially to the left of centre. In what sense is this at all true?
That actually does have a partial meaning in the context of the story in which it occurs, but it has LESS meaning (intentionally) that a left-right axis score. (The title of the story is "The Gostak and the Doshes" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34117125-the-gostak-and-the-doshes ) The date of publication is significant.
Also, although this isn't a claim that your statement is wrong just that I don't think it means much: a hypothetical US with 70% self-identifying as 3 (clear progressive) and 30% as 8 (clear conservative) gives an average score of 4.5, and also gives a 70% Biden landslide, which seems like it shouldn't be described as "only a little further left" than the real one.
I tend to agree. But it's less obsessed with ideological purity than most places, and even has a contrarian streak, so we do get a fair number of non-witches from the non-(local-center) areas.
But I think 538 has Trump at a -14 favorable/unfavorable percentage points, and your poll has him at a -88 percentage points. I Rasmussen matches 538 at all, these are COMPLETELY different populations being polled.
I wonder what you'd hear if you asked for the stories of everyone whose family members died of COVID. We know the demographics of COVID deaths - overwhelmingly elderly - could a person with the opposite priors as you dismiss them in the same way? "COVID overwhelmingly 'killed' elderly people with many prior conditions. I interpret the results of the survey to be consistent with a null hypothesis of 'COVID doesn't increase deaths'..."
I'm not saying I would support such an inference. Nor that I believe Kirsch's point in general; I don't. I just want to say: only scrutinizing the stories on one side leaves you without a control, and that seems like very poor practice.
That was indeed a common criticism of Covid death counts at the height of the pandemic. Some countries (I remember Belgium often being mentioned here) would pad their numbers by counting anybody who died with Covid in their blood as having died of Covid, even if they also had other health conditions which could have plausibly been sufficient to explain their death. I remember a story of this happening even to car accident victims but that may have been an urban myth.
Various ways to count, from main cause of death on the death certificate, to mentioned on DC, to within X days of positive test to -- probably the only remotely comparable between countries, and even that will exclude countries that have unreliable death/birth records -- "excess deaths" numbers. And in some places the main measure used changed at some point throughout the pandemic.
Yeah, at some point it becomes a matter of opinion. If you're already at death's door and then you get a Covid infection and you die three days earlier than you otherwise would, did you die of Covid? How about three hours? Three seconds? Three weeks? Three years?
Depending on how much you were already inclined to see Covid as a menace or as "just the flu, bro" you are likely to answer this question differently. This could easily be (part of) the mechanism by which political opinions shape people's answers to such questions.
This absolutely happened and it happened here. In fact everywhere. It was stated as policy. And yes, there were accident deaths counted as covid deaths. All you needed was a test that found it (and the PCR was tuned to find it) and bingo. Hospitals got a bonus too. All documented if you care to know. Many did not, and do not care to know. The count of covid deaths is essentially meaningless.
The text basically refutes it, but not exactly. It does say that the underlying cause of death was reported, so that if someone had COVID and died in a car accident then the underlying cause would have been the accident, and still reported they had COVID.
* Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause): 128,077
* Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 115,574
I'm not going to do in-depth research on this, but my intuition says reporting a COVID death as the underlying cause when more than one possible condition could have caused the death, with incentives to report COVID deaths, indicates some COVID deaths were exaggerated. The amount is up for debate. Also, if someone thinks COVID CAUSED, say, a heart attack due to excess coughing, were they right?
And I even recall a plausible justification, which was that since the disease was new, we needed to track covid status separately from other causes of death, to help identify covid's effects. (Does it make us distractable? Clumsy?)
There are 10x reports of Covid deaths in Scott's poll, so that reasoning doesn't work. Of course, someone with opposite priors would probably dismiss Scott's poll and go with Kirsch's...
Actually, we don't know who actually died from COVID, only what was put on the death certificate. That isn't a notably reliable source, though it's a lot better than flipping a coin. Particularly WRT COVID, a lot of the time whether COVID was or was not put on the death certificate was down to local bias, at least until cheap tests were abundant.
What we CAN trust is the death count. If I recall the news from the time correctly, various places had policies of either always say COVID was involved or never say COVID was involved. With the medical system under strain, corpses piling up in trailers outside the building, and no ready tests available, what else were they to do? (OK, that was an extreme scenario. But it was a real one. One coroner, in NYC IIRC, rented a refer truck to hold the corpses until they could be dealt with.)
I actually have an immediate family member who developed an autoimmune condition in such short proximity to their booster that their doctor recommended they not receive another covid vaccine. In the years since a few papers have been published citing the condition they developed as a rare adverse event secondary to covid vaccination. None of my many family members who got caught up in the politicization of covid were medically savvy enough to add this personal testimony to their furious anti-vaccination meme reposting regimen. I remember being a little put out that the ACX survey didn't ask about non-lethal adverse events, because I felt I had a "legitimate" data point to contribute to the pool. As though a lone datum could be so righteous.
Some events that happen in close temporal proximity will actually be causal; others won't. People naturally fish for potential causes after a disastrous event, but generally don't fish when such events don't occur. It's tricky business to try to suss this stuff out using intuition; we're simply not built to get it right without supporting methodology (e.g., RCTs). I'm sorry to hear about your family member.
I love the phrasing, and want to indulge in it as an extended metaphor. If you think of the government response to COVID, it's massive machine made up of many different "gears," whose purpose was to simultaneously minimize "death" and "disruption." Since those two ideals had massive tradeoffs, the balance between them was always precarious, and infinite fights were started about which one a particular government should favor. Then, the mRNA vaccines come along, and they seem like a miracle "gear" in that they can nearly prevent death while causing only a little bit of disruption. So, the "establishment" goes all-in on installing the new gear in as many places as possible, and it does have massive beneficial effects on allowing the machine to operate.
But, lots of people will point out that the new "gear" doesn't fit well in this or that area of the machine, others will point out that the long-term effects of the new gear can't reasonably be known yet, and still others will deny that the gear could be good, since only God can make a machine that works. But, crucially, the new gear DOES make the machine function dramatically better, so hearing these arguments makes us assume the person making them is just incapable of weighing evidence, and therefore their gripe shouldn't be trusted. I assume most of the anti-gear arguments are from people who can't or won't understand "technology" in general, and dismiss them accordingly. But then someone like your family member becomes the "grit" between the machine's gears, and gets hurt by the process. Normally, I would take one look at the grit of this story, determine it "must" have nothing to do with the machine, and forget about it. But because you have polished the story (and you have a reputation for gem-worthy anecdotes), I've changed my tune to "obviously we should acknowledge that these events happen, and try to investigate whether we can prevent susceptible grains of sand from getting between the gears in the first place."
I wish the best for you and your family. And I appreciate the recurring lesson in epistemic humility.
I mean actually we're insanely good at doing that, to the point where the very rare failures we make get quickly diagnosed and then held up as cautionary examples .
Compare us to an iguana or a chihuahua or even a capuchin, we're orders of magnitude better at figuring out causality via instinct than almost any other entity we know to exist.
I think we're demonstrably good at generating *hypotheses* about causality. It's almost impossible -- especially for dependent events that are rare -- to use intuition alone to suss out causality. It's a challenging statistical task, even once we step away from our intuition.
I think humans do much better than chance at figuring out cause of death.
Say you give a poll: do you suspect a family member of yours has broken a hip in part from riding a bike?
Old people break hips all the time. Causes include falling off a bike, falling down stairs, being in a car crash, or seemingly spontaneous stress breakage.
If your grandmother received a broken hip diagnosis shortly after falling off her bike, and she didn't fall down stairs or get in a car crash recently, it's a good guess the bike fall contributed.
Whereas if your grandmother received a broken hip diagnosis shortly after falling down stairs, you wouldn't attribute that to her uneventful bike ride that morning.
This is why base rates are of limited debunking power here. When you ask who broke a hip likely due to bike riding, rather than asking who broke a hip and separately asking who rode a bike, you engage respondents' common sense to exclude red herrings. So you can't conclude bike riding is unconnected to hip fractures just because the percentage of respondents who suspected a bike-related fracture is less than the base rate of fractures.
Same goes for vaccines. We know immune responses cause inflammation. Actual infections are usually worse than vaccine reactions, but it happens for both. If your recently vaccinated grandmother dies of cardiovascular inflammation near the typical peak time of vaccine side effects, you might answer yes to Scott's poll question; whereas if she dies in a car crash at that time, you will probably answer no.
So again, "old people die" is true, but family members who know them have a decent first-pass perspective on why they likely died.
It's probably true that some folks who responded worked to the poll worked hard to separate plausible connections due to vaccinations (eg, death from heart inflammation vs being run over by a bus). That said, I think the evidence is pretty good that people tend to overestimate causality between two remarkable events that happen in close temporal proximity or are otherwise plausible but incorrect (e.g., soft drinks were the cause of polio). As I noted above, people are quite good at casting the net wide for *potential* causal links, which is great for hypothesis generation.
The Kirsch “survey” asking percent of people with household members dying of COVId should have come up with 1% give or take. I’ll even assume all deaths occurred in unique households. All that survey shows is that about 6-7% of respondents were apparently smoking crack at the time.
The survey results for households with COVId vaccine deaths is even more laden with drug-addled respondents.
When they’re taking survey results as the basis for “fact”….it’s time to move on from the get-go.
Also conservatives being more likely to live in larger households (if only because on average they're older and therefore more likely to have started a family already)?
Also if you're older, you have more older people among your close family and friends, so for any possible cause-of-death you are more likely to know somebody affected by it.
But since we “know” the total number of COVId deaths, having some households with multiple deaths would actually DECREASE the number of respondents who had deaths in their household. So approx 1% should’ve been the top of the range.
No. We know the total number of deaths, and the expected number of deaths. By subtraction we can ESTIMATE the number of COVID deaths. This estimation has various factors affecting it's accuracy. (E.g. during a lock down fewer people were driving on the road, so there should have been fewer traffic caused deaths.)
The causes on the death certificates are unreliable. Sometimes because of time pressure, sometimes because of cost (waste tests on a corpse???), and occasionally because of politics. They're an estimate marker, but not a really reliable one. (At least not until later in the epidemic when tests were abundantly available.)
Consider, someone dies at home. What caused the death? Well, you could X-Ray their lungs and look for diagnostic granules...but it's easier to just put something down, and the workload is a lot higher than it was last year.
Did a quick check with the last census data, seems like the different household size effect gets pretty exactly compensated with the fact that the household size gets reduced by one when people die of covid.
The Kirsch survey seems moronic to begin with. And you’re correct…if they sampled more than 1 member of any given household…it would increase the positive response rate to more than 1%….because it would mean double counting a single death. That would make it even more moronic.
It’s moronic as an attempt to get the number of deaths. But if people are answering accurately, it could tell you about whether deaths due to cause A or deaths due to cause B are more common, because both types of deaths should have roughly the same complex multiplier going on.
When the sampled cohort responds at a rate that is about 6X the expected rate, I’m not sure I’d rely on this particular cohort to accurately tell me what day of the week it is.
Add to the fact that event adjudication is complex even in the context of properly administered clinical trials. It can be difficult to discern whether one died “of COVId”, or “with COVId”, even with all available clinical info. A “survey” based on the learned opinions of household members is truly garbage in/ garbage out.
> The Kirsch “survey” asking percent of people with household members dying of COVId should have come up with 1% give or take.
No, this part is wrong because households are larger than size one. Think about this one: "Is there a man in your household?"
50% of the population are men, but the answer to that question would be much greater: men would answer yes, as would any woman with a male household member.
In the case of covid deaths, if one person dies of the disease then their parents, siblings, partner, or children could all answer 'yes' to that question, so one death creates many possible 'yes' respondents. (On the other hand, if someone in a household by themselves dies, then it creates no 'yes' respondents. Obviously, the best-calibrated question to ask would have been: "did you die of covid?", but alas we cannot survey the dead.)
But the question was “households”…not “family”. Unless that moronic survey sampled morons who can’t tell the difference btw who is in their family Vs who is in their household.
This is why I used data on number of households. That already accounts for households of different sizes. It works out to an average of 2.54 people per household…which makes sense to me. Balance of young couples without kids, childless couples of any age, and empty nesters, below that mark; Vs families in child-raising years and multigenerational households above that mark.
I agree it would undercount people who died while living alone…which again demonstrates the idiotic nature of the study methods.
For what it's worth, as a survey non-respondant, I had an immediate family member who I strongly suspect was killed by heart-related effects of the vaccine. 87, in extremely good health, very active, lived in the basement and regularly made trips up and down the stairs all day. That whole side of the family lived well into their 90s when given the chance. Less than 24 hours after receiving shot #1 she couldn't walk up and down the stairs all of a sudden, which started a very fast progression to stage 4 heart failure over the next few weeks. She died about 34 hours after receiving her second shot, which was delivered to her on a medical bed in our house. At no point did she ever test positive for COVID.
It's not really unusual for old people to suddenly, rapidly decline and die. So I am open to the possibility that it was a coincidence. But the proximity of the key events (start of symptoms and death) to the shot times is strong evidence in favor of a bad reaction. And there's the known issues with myocarditis as well, further pointing toward damage to the heart.
It’s infuriating to me that almost no one in the healthcare profession wants to find out what’s really happening in these cases. I’ve heard about a lot of these situations. At what point does curiosity set in? Will in take an entirely new generation without complicity to look into it? In the meantime, no jabs for me. Taking my chances with Mother Nature. (In case anyone has forgotten how incredibly dishonestly the medical profession behaved, I remind you that most willingly went along with the trashing of natural immunity to sell an untested product.
"almost no one in the healthcare profession wants to find out what’s really happening in these cases"
This is wrong as a matter of fact. The issue is that it is usually not possible to nail down a reason in a specific case. There is no test you can run which tells you "it was the vaccine" vs. "it was coincidence". The tests will usually only tell you something like "heart failure, but we have no idea what caused the heart failure".
So the only thing you can do is statistics: count how many people die shortly after vaccines, compare this to the baseline, and see whether you find any anomalies. Basically all countries collected this data and made the comparisons. The reports are public and free to be read by anyone. Go on and read them. The thing is not that this wasn't done, the thing is that they did not find any anomalies. (Actually, they did find an anomaly for AstraZeneca, which is why lots of countries stopped using that.)
So: healthcare professionals cared a lot about this question, looked into it in the only way that is available, and found that it was probably coincidence.
Ok so we’re all good now? Everyone has done everything necessary already? There’s no need to figure out why cancers are increasing, young people are presenting with heart disease, and excess deaths track with vaccine uptake? Or are those only a right wing conspiracy theorist Trump lover would care about?
Uhm, sorry to be blunt, but for the excess deaths that's simply nonsense. The vaccinations were administered pretty much simultaneously in different countries, but the excess deaths were at rather different times and matched very well the covid waves in the respective countries. There is no mystery here.
Update, a correction: I wrote about EU cancer deaths in 2023. This was a prediction, not a measurement.
But my conclusion stands: given the obviously wrong claim about excess deaths, I assume that indeed those are conspiracy theories.
"given the obviously wrong claim about excess deaths, I assume that indeed those are conspiracy theories"
I don't know how to parse this sentence into a coherent thought - what about the truth or falsity of the claim would have anything to do with whether it's a "conspiracy theory" or not? Claims that have to do with two or more people working together could be called conspiracy theories. A claim could involve this, or it could not. A claim could also be true, or false.
As 1123581321 wrote, the article shows that excess death tracks reported covid deaths, not vaccination.
For the other: there were three claims. For one I knew that it was very wrong because I know the related data well. I had never heard of the other two claims, and not enough time/interest to spend more than 5 minutes researching, which did not give any hints of the claims. I assume that Grape Soda didn't make the claims up themselves, and there is lots of absurd claims about vaccinations. So yes, to be more precise: I defaulted to the assumption that they are nonsense, too, and not worth my time investigating. This would change if I read about them from a source that I trust to be skeptical.
(But a lot of those nonsense claims include some conspiracy aspect about "them" covering up something, so it is also not far-fetched that the full claims are indeed conspiracy theories.)
>Any poll whose outcome can change by more than an order of magnitude based on the respondents’ politics or statistical knowledge isn’t a valid guide to the frequency of real-world events.
So, any poll then. There are a lot of weird subgroups no smaller than the ACX readership.
I don't mean "any poll where you can get a different response in a different subgroup", I mean any poll where we assume the subgroups are in fact equal, but we get an order of magnitude measurement error.
My claim is that you can get measurement error like this in any poll where you assume the subgroups are equal, if you pick the right subgroup (if you allow such small subgroups). And if thats true, theres no reason to think the polls where we *dont* expect equal subgroups somehow have less measurement error - its just not as obvious.
Depends on what you mean by random. Im talking about a subgroup such that retesting it, even retesting a different sample from the same subgroup, would give you the same extreme results again.
Basically, there are always subgroups that are weird along the axis youre testing, and the smaller a subgroup is the harder it can potentially select and the higher its weirdness can potentially be. And there is usually a reason why they are that way - just like it makes sense that rationalists would report fewer vaccine deaths - but maybe if you take a very zoomed-out perspective its sort of random?
Ok, but I think you're mixing up the desired information and the metric. Our target is: how many of X group ACTUALLY died because of the vaccine? And our measurement is "how many of the group report knowing someone who died because of the vaccine."
All of the ways rationalists are idiosyncratic fall into measurement error here (ignoring the obvious and easy regressions of age/friend group size.) They're less likely to report, but they're not less likely to die.
And Scott's point is that any measurement technique that gives answers off by a factor of 20+ for variables that should have basically the same value (death to Vax rate for rationalists vs, say, random democrats) is pretty useless as a metric for actual Vax death rates.
Im not sure what your problem is? There are weird subgroups along every axis, including a measurement thats different from what you really want to know. I expect there to be groups that misreport their blood group by 20x. (And inversely, groups with 20x risk of vaccine death.)
while trump supporter is probably well correlated with anti-scientism its a very bad measure of anti-scientism in high scienctism sample(simpsons paradox) especially given that *trump claims credit for the vaccine*; and when trump desires to claim credit to a cheering crowd of trump supporters at a trump rally; they boo.
(trump is the dam, not the flood; there is right wing energy he is taking advantage of that he's pacifying by negotiating with)
imagine a different question "who do you trust more the who or a dog in a lab coat?"(ideally in the meme format) here you'd get people "well if a dog is sharing his medical opinion I should conclude I've been poisoned and go to the hospital", a right wing boomer will have a simpler analysis of the question.
Id predict *that* question to high better correlation with which excess death theory then trump support.
As I recall, WHO people won't even say the word "Taiwan", so arguably if a dog in a lab coat could be trained to point to Taiwan on a map, the dog would be more accurate at this specific task.
"(trump is the dam, not the flood; there is right wing energy he is taking advantage of that he's pacifying by negotiating with)"
That's backwards. There are a lot of people with stupid/evil beliefs. Generally social pressure prevents them from articulating those beliefs. But when a national figure like Trump comes along and legitimizes those beliefs, suddenly people are willing to articulate them, and the movement for those beliefs becomes much more powerful.
> But when a national figure like Trump comes along and legitimizes those beliefs
With what limits, with what conditions?
bernie sanders exists, should I expect communism next year in america?
> suddenly people are willing to articulate them
*My* politically beliefs came up with the term scientism(its an ancap term from the 70's) I was always willing to articulate them. Its a drastic event that it reached the mainstream and 1/2 of society is using the term and become one of the silly battle lines; if trump won 2020, fox news and tucker may not have been so anti a non-mandated vaccine that trump was going on tv once a week to call his.
While I'm not sure if the death of the university's will be quick; the fracture of right wing people telling their children to not go to college will change the social fabric drastically. And trump isnt *for* that, he was for the vaxxine (in a nonmandated way), he's still a city slicking newyorker who part of the corporate culture.
Could the disparity between ACX survey results and the Pollfish results not simply be due to the difference in sample sizes? If i read your post correctly, pollfish sampled 24% of americans whereas you sampled just a few thousand. Naturally, a lot more people from within the same family / friend circle responded pollfish. So a lot of doublecounting deaths in their survey as compared to yours.
For example, if my granny fell ill and possibly died from the vaccine, and both me and my brother did the pollfish poll, we would both answer yes, but in reality, only one person had possibly died (not two as the poll might initially suggest). Moreover, the broader the definition of the question, the more the double counting.
That wouldn’t compensate for the discrepancy, which was tenfold. It does reduce the number of unique households affected, by my calculation, from 8.5 to 6.5.
Hmmm we should check this with a survey question: "Do you personally know someone who took a Pollfish question asking if they personally knew anyone who died from the COVID vaccine?" Should be pretty close to 100%!
> Respondent 2 notes that some people are so frail that even normal vaccine side effects of the type that everyone agrees exist might kill them
I do actually update somewhat on this. COVID also generally only kills the very frail, so vaccines don't have to be very bad to be worse than COVID.
(I don't think they hit that bar - as you show, at least an OOM more people die of COVID than vaccines and vaccines at least halve the risk of that, so they come out ahead - but it does imply that we probably shouldn't have given them to people who were already very sick and frail, at least if we could have waited).
I think you should trust neither of those results from his original poll. "8.5% of polled people said someone in their household died of the vaccine, and 7.5% think someone died of Covid" - average US household size is 2-3, suggesting even on the high end that people think 8.25 million people died from Covid, and 9.35 million people died from the vaccine.
A certain small percentage of people answering polls will give dumb answers to questions, especially if it's phrased as an opinion question ("do you think") rather than something that requires verification.
Assuming that you can't die of both COVID and the COVID vaccine, that's 17.5 million deaths. Only ~15 million deaths have been reported of *all* causes in the US since 2020.
I think a lot of people who see a question about “someone in your household” with something that sounds rare will probably respond “yes” if someone “almost” in their household had it. They don’t want their data point to be uncounted.
In addition to post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, anti vaccine attitudes might also more or less subtly influence recall and "who do I include among people I 'know' stretching", maybe less in ACT question when "family" is very precisely defined and more in any other survey. I know it worked in my head, as someone with sort-of anti-compulsory universal-lockdown attitudes I had a tendency to swiftly attribute every suicide/overdose I have heard of to lockdown effects (4 iirc) while in fact only one of them was realistically attributable thus (a suicidal person in their 50s who was sectioned very shortly before the first lockdown, discharged in the crazy rush to send everyone home way too soon before meds got properly adjusted, dead within two weeks) and even she wasn't someone I knew personally but a second hand story. But if you asked me if I knew a lockdown related suicide/OD, I'd probably say yes, treating those 4 I have HEARD OF second hand (none known personally to me) as an "at least one possible yes I could have known".
On the other hand I'd NOT count the one case of someone I knew of who died within 2 days of vaccination as someone I knew even though I actually DID meet that person IRL once, but the "post jab death" report felt very unreliable.
Had I been anti-vaccine I'd probably include the latter, had I been rabidly pro lockdown, I'd exclude the former deaths.
I have not even remotely known anyone who died of covid so not sure how biased my recall/inclusion here is.
So all in all, this is a really really prone to distortion question unless we (1) define very precisely who to include relationship wise (2) define precisely how to count "vaccine deaths" (ideally "within X days of vaccination" and maybe if possible with age info).
As an aside idk how valid is to assume an average person would have TWO relatively close relatives with extreme obesity (I'm assuming the "super obesity" BMI of 50+ here -- surely even the US on its own is not THAT fat).
The survey respondents were all guessing. None of these results tell me anything useful about vaccine injuries. I find it outrageous that the health profession seems to entirely lack curiosity about this. Especially since several researchers have shown a correlation between the roll out of spike protein vaccines and population wide excess deaths. Ethical Skeptic on X has data on this. Anecdotally, severe heart disease was never a thing for anyone under 40. Now it’s common. Cancer rates also seem to have spiked lately. If the reason this doesn’t get a serious look is that Trump supporters and so-called right wingers care about it, that’s beyond despicable. As biased as Steve K might be, at least he gives a shit. I’m so done with the attitude of shut up and do what we say because we know more. No you don’t. And many of you don’t care to find out.
Who are those "several researchers"? What was the correlation? What was the rate of heart disease for people under 40 prior to the vaccine vs now? Cancer? I don't see you providing any numbers.
There's a possible explanation for why the ACX poll got such vastly-different results to the general population: lizardman's constant.
"Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?", minus the last word, equals "Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19?" If you're skim-reading or have a bad phone connection, well.
I'd imagine the lizardman's constant for ACX surveys is considerably lower, and even then a decent chunk of your responses to email were lizardman. Lizardman's constant replicates just fine, because "misread the question" is a real phenomenon, but it's not meaningful.
> But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths.
This sounds plausible. Did you also consider the reverse causality interpretation? Or is it inconsistent with the data in a way that isn't obvious to me?
The reverse causality interpretation would be: believing a vaccine killed a relative may have led some respondents to become pro-Trump. (Despite sponsoring the vaccines' development, Trump seems to have become less associated with them than his opponents are.)
No the reverse causality is that my teenager died of a heart attack but it couldn’t possibly be the vax because it’s only right wingers who’d think that.
Don't you think education level is an important variable here, and might account for some of the difference between Kirsch's respondents answers to his questions and ACX respondents? I'm sure this group as a whole has a markedly higher education level than average? Just looked up US info on highest degree attained: 35% of US maxed out at Bachelors, 13% got a masters, 3.5% got a professional degree and 2% got a PhD.
Just looked at ACX survey results, and about 60%. of us have a JD, MD or PhDS and another 28% have a masters. 88% of us have a masters degree or beyond, while about 19% of the US population has a masters or beyond. I'm sure education level correlates with a lot of relevant things, but the ones that seem most likely to make a difference in answers to the 2 survey questions are being (1) better informed about covid and health matters in general; and (2) more able to think critically about whether attributing someone's death to covid or to the vax makes sense
Not really because there was no difference in self-reported family vaccine death in ACX readers of different education levels. I assume something sort of like education is doing it, which is why I said "statistical knowledge", but at least in this sample it's not literal education.
Well, some of the things that are components of intelligence tests measures then: general knowledge, critical thinking. Or just plain old IQ. Looked at the survey IQ results and they seem not to have been put in order yet There’s no graph or table, just a list of numbers. I “averaged”them by scrolling thru a bunch and getting a general impression, and looked like average is between 130 and 145. So the peak of the ACX bell curve is someplace way out on the skinny-to-vanishing far right of the population bell curve, and peak of population bell curve is probably equivalently far out on the left end of our curve. And of course IQ correlates with a lot of things. It would be surprising if as a group we weren't significantly different from population a large in a bunch of things -- number of communicable diseases we could name in a minute, how many qualifiers it occurs to us to insert in a generalization, how many of us remember the color of the receptionist's hair, favorite foods, first childhood memory, and on and on.
"I think the best conclusion from this result is just to stop caring about these kinds of polls..."
Absolute heresy! Scott, we need you to keep on caring about the crazy so that we don't have to....
Your more-than-you-needed-to-know-about posts have in many cases come to fairly boring conclusions: the mainstream was right all along. But they still need doing. I spend most of my time following mainstream views, but they need regular calibration by trusted sources, and you're one of those trusted sources now. Like, the new NYT!
Selection bias must be playing a big role here. The kind of person who *chooses to respond* to a survey about covid vaccines is apriori not representative of the population. You write: "All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population." But from looking at Kirsch's deck, "all other statistics" simply means age and gender. I'm not sure that "belief in vaccine conspiracies" correlates strongly enough with either of these that this is a useful litmus test for selection bias.
Rasmussen posts insane numbers on issue polls that are completely out of step with every other pollster. Their twitter is indistinguishable from a right-wing ideologue. 538 recently removed them from their polling average due to questionable legitimacy, something they rarely do.
538 recently had a change in leadership, and the removal is attributable to that. Their previous reputation is being strip-mined. Don't treat the new 538 as being the old 538.
Nate Silver - who might know a thing or two about 538 - has a substack article about this. The new management of 538 started issuing ideological purity standards, which disqualified Rasmussen because they lean right. This is really stupid to do for pollsters, because they have an objective record that can be checked. According to Nate, Rasmussen is as accurate as most other pollsters. They tend to overestimate how well Republicans do, but most other pollsters underestimate Republican outcomes, so in the end it's a wash. Those who are paying attention can calibrate their priors appropriately, rather than just writing off Rasmussen as those crazy right wingers.
It is sort of a two wrongs make a right situation, where Rasmussen being right-biased comes out ok only because other pollsters are left-biased. But if you know about the bias you can use that to get (more) correct information.
So you believe that the sample is actually representative of the population, and a quarter of respondents are just wrong, either because they didn't understand the question, or falsely believe that they know someone who died from the vaccine?
Isn't the cohort most at risk of complications young men in their 20's and 30's? Given that I find it strange that the poll respondents who believed they knew somebody who died from vaccine injury overwhelmingly cited people at an advanced age.
I think the claim is that young men are most at risk, it's possible that whatever rare real side effects exist concentrate in this population, but I think this is so rare that there shouldn't have been enough to register in the ACX sample, so most of what people reported were old people who died anyway for normal reasons.
People die of old age, doctors may put down a spefic cause like an infection or an illness; but as complex systems fall apart due to debts out striping resources, they fall apart everywhere.
Winter in a first world country doesn't kill people. but someone close to death may *not cope* from a room being slightly cold. The roman empire didnt die from the visgoths, but it wasnt able to cope with it. A broke person with 50k in debt isnt declaring bankruptcy because of a 1000$ emency, but they can't cope when it shows up.
Complex systems die when production falls behind demand, because with so many factors it all evens out.
Excess deaths in the northeast spiked in spring 2020, not 2021. Hard to explain that without COVID. But yes they also did spike in winter of that year, tracking an explosive rise in COVID cases far more than the vaccine uptake, which was rather limited still in January of 2021 at the beginning of the rollout. The spike in excess deaths was happening already in November and December, before anyone but health care workers were receiving vaccines.
Other than a generic heart failure (see my response above), a Covid death leaves pretty clear traces, mostly a lung destroyed by scar tissue. Some countries checked this for all covid patients for some time (I think Denmark), most countries only checked it for a sample. But either way, we know very well the ratio "died from covid"/"died with covid". I don't recall the exact number, but the claim that most of those people would be "dying with covid, but not from covid" has always been wrong. This was known almost from the beginning, and was later confirmed by the data on excess mortality.
The myocarditis risk is highest for young men, but the "vaccine deaths" (as measured by VAERS reports) are overwhelmingly old people (https://medium.com/p/5a61d7d6d91a)
Actually the age histogram of the VAERS reports is an almost exact match for the age histogram of all natural deaths, so it's tempting to think that most or all reported vaccine deaths are natural deaths mistaken for vaccine deaths. But determining causality is harder than that, so it's not simple to give an exact percentage of how many were vaccine caused vs coincidental.
Yes, there was a time where people asked if people died "from covid" or "with covid". For the most part, the answer to this was quite clear, since far more people died in 2020 than in a normal year (but only in countries hit by covid, and not in countries with effective lockdowns).
Vaccine skeptics should have asked a similar question as to whether VAERS cases died "from vaccination" or "with vaccination" -- the answer there is less obvious because there is no spike in excess deaths when vaccines were administered.
The data leaves it easy to rule out the possibility that, say, vaccines were as deadly as covid, or even 10% as deadly as covid. But it's more difficult to rule out the case where, say, vaccines are 1% as deadly as covid.
IIUC, that's because the myocarditis is due to an overactive immune response. So it makes sense that young men would be the most likely to be affected. (I also understood that it was basically an extremely mild reaction, and easily treated in the cases where it wasn't. But that's why they asked you to wait 15 minutes after the vaccination before you left....so they could treat it if any treatment was indicated.
I've lost track of the latest science, but I think you are probably correct that young men's robust immune response drives the reaction, which might be an autoimmune response.
I'm not sure it's fair to call it mild -- it often requires hospitalization and some people take a few months to recover. It's very rare that it's fatal, though.
I think it generally takes longer than 15 minutes to develop, more like a 12-24 hour thing. The 15 minute rule would primarily be for allergic reactions like anaphylaxis, and the nurses could give you an epi-pen or something like that.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I feel like they did not have me wait at all when I got my booster shot, unlike when I got the original vaccine. I wonder if the rules changed, or what was going on there.
It's not wise to ascribe much meaning to tiny differences among single-digit figures. 1/100 versus 2/500 isn't a reliable indication of a real difference. Scott is right to describe it in these terms, although I would suggest next time avoiding translating such results into percentages.
My first reaction was that “25% did not have the vaccine” in the Steve Kirsch poll. That sounds like a lot to me. What percentage of the general population got the vaccination “?
Follow up, I wonder what percentage of the “relative died of vaccine” people did not have the vaccine.
The first thing I Googled said 81% of Americans have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, but Kirsch's poll was a year or two ago and it was probably less then.
Sorry, I meant two relatives in that age bracket. I'm ignoring the obesity because we assume that within the age brackets, death happens at a normal rate, which already prices in that some people are obese.
I'm a doctor who was working in a public hospital during the Covid pandemic. I saw one person who definitely died from the vaccine - an elderly lady who got severe Guillain-Barre syndrome which progressed to respiratory paralysis (this is a known complication of the influenza vaccine as well, but is exceedingly rare.) I saw 3 - 5 people, all young men, who had vaccine-induced myocarditis severe enough to require presentation to hospital, but all of them were basically fine - we kept them in on average 48 hours for monitoring then sent them home. I wasn't directly involved in his care, but my hospital did a case report on the first man in Australia to be diagnosed with vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (the severe clotting disorder) from AstraZeneca (he survived, but had a long complex admission and required multiple loops of bowel to be surgically removed.)
I saw an enormous number of people - hundreds - who presented with Covid infection and were unvaccinated. (A small handful presented with Covid infection and were vaccinated; usually these people had better outcomes.) Some of these people (unvaccinated) died, others had long term respiratory complications. Some of them begged for the vaccine when they hit the emergency department and realised they'd made a mistake, forcing an unpleasant conversation that it was too late now. Others doubled down "even if I die, never give me that vaccine!" In addition to having much worse outcomes from Covid, this group were also a huge drag on health care resources and led to, for example, the ICU closing at the hospital I work at (in order to retrench staff to Covid ICUs) and elective surgeries being cancelled across our entire health service. There was a lot of resentment from health care workers throughout 2021 at people who refused vaccination. At one point there was a big protest about vaccine mandates, in defiance of Covid lockdowns, and there was a Covid outbreak among the rioters; one of the consultants at my hospital declared that if one of these rioters came to our health service he would refuse to treat them.
I still feel frustrated when people argue that you shouldn't get the vaccine and that they have "done the research." Most of them haven't read a single scientific paper on the matter, or listened to any experts. They certainly haven't watched people die who didn't have to.
Of course now the whole thing is irrelevant - since Omicron took over in 2022 Covid has been basically the flu; yes it can still be lethal if you're elderly, immunosuppressed or have underlying respiratory issues, but for most of us it doesn't really matter if you get a booster every year or not. (I myself have been vaccinated x3 only.) And the Covid skeptics do have points about government overreach or social media censorship or Fauci covering up NIH funding to the Wuhan lab. I just think there needs to be a clear red line separating politics from health care.
Short version: vaccines good, lockdowns bad, censorship bad, listen to your doctor.
It IS hypocritical for the rioter to seek treatment. Yet it's also true that one person's unethical behavior does not excuse your own unethical behavior.
I don’t consider this hypocrisy at all. Say someone believes the following: COVID is real, the vaccine doesn’t help prevent infection much, and the vaccine is likely enough to kill you that you’re better off taking your chances. This is almost certainly *wrong*, but someone who believes that might still get COVID and seek treatment, no hypocrisy is involved in that.
Um no. There is a risk to the vaccine. What is it? Doctors don’t really know. But that’s not the part I find outrageous. You don’t want to know! Your mileage may vary but there is little to no recognition of a cost benefit trade off. No, just assume the disease would be worse than the cure. Sorry I’m not buying it. Sure, all my information is anecdotal, but in what world is myocarditis an acceptable side effect for taking a vaccine that was not necessary? (You know as well as I do that anyone in reasonable shape under 60 was not in danger from Covid.) The dishonesty of the medical profession was on display from top to bottom during this episode. The PCR bullshit alone: nearly every single person who died of anything was counted as a covid death. It’s really rich that questions about the safety of the vax is treated as some kind of misinformation. No, your status as a doctor does not inspire trust. It’s about time “science” looked into the actual injury rate from these products. And don’t tell me it’s a fiction of some right winger’s imagination.
I spent the entire first paragraph acknowledging that there is a risk. But in my anecdotal experience it is very small. And in randomised controlled trials, it is also very small.
Of course we want to and need to know what the risk is and how to quantify it. Otherwise we would not know how to trade it off against the benefit. Both are small for healthy people under 60 at the current time. In 2021 the benefit was substantially greater, however.
I also have concerns that questions about vaccine safety were treated as misinformation. See my comment about social media censorship.
I had intended to get the vaccine, but in April 2021, before I had a chance to get the vaccine, I got COVID instead. Knowing how vaccines work, I then determined there was no point to getting vaccinated; I was already "naturally vaccinated".
I was alarmed at recommendations to be vaccinated even in my circumstances, and didn't trust such. Perhaps the drug companies just wanted to make as much money as possible, but it sure didn't seem medically useful.
It could make sense to get the vaccine even after getting COVID. There are multiple strains to COVID, and the vaccine protects against more than one of them. Whether it *would* have made sense or not I cannot say.
The vaccine activates your body's defenses against the virus. Getting COVID activates your body's defenses against the virus. What's the difference? I don't believe the vaccine would protect against more varieties than your natural defense system would also provoke.
One reason to encourage everyone to get the vaccine is because a lot of people *thought* they got COVID when they didn't actually. At the population level, telling people who had COVID that they don't need to get unvaccinated would result in a lot of people being completely unprotected.
Not that it should matter, but I am very sympathetic to the right wing and would probably vote for Trump if I lived in the USA. Unlike most of his voters though I view Operation Warp Speed as one of his greatest achievements
One of his first acts in office was to dismantle the white house pandemic response team, because he deemed it an unnecessary expense. I don't even give him credit for OWS, because I don't believe he had anything to do with the plans or implementation.
I despise Trump the "typical" amount, but I think you do have to give him credit for OWS, simply because it could/would not have been successful without someone "up top" leaning on the agencies to (correctly, imo) make the case that speed should be prioritized over following procedures correctly. If you look at editorials from early in the pandemic about how long vaccines would likely take (20 years was the prediction, if I recall correctly), then it's clear that an executive more committed to the "integrity" of the process would have made different choices. Trump's inability to understand/care about the process was actually a massive benefit, since it gave agencies cover for moving fast and "breaking" things (counter-productive policies). In general, that's not the dynamic you want in government, but in this instance, it was probably more useful than the "standard."
Yes. I’m not scribbling numbers down and trying to come up with a quasi scientific justification of what I’m seeing. Take it for what it’s worth. My overall point is not very new: look at the evidence. How much should anyone believe vax injury reports? I don’t know. What I do know is that enough evidence exists for vaccine injury that it should be taken seriously. I reference the dishonesty of the covid response as a caveat. It seems to me the medical profession would rather remain ignorant than look into the risks of its treatments. I find this both outrageous and unsurprising because of how the profession dealt with Covid itself.
The medical profession isn't as scientific as it should be, but being quasi scientific is better than not being scientific at all (which was how medicine was up until the 20th century*). Because you're not taking a scientific approach, you don't actually know whether enough evidence exists.
There are hundreds of papers investigating vaccine injury, many in the most prestigious scientific journals. If you want to claim that people are simply not looking you need to provide evidence that people are not looking.
My second and third shots put me out for a couple days, but yeah, actual disease much worse
I wish it had been done to create makeshift emergency Covid hospitals to overflow Covid patients to when hospital occupancy reached 90% or whatever, but if you were vaccinated you could continue on to the normal hospital
Maybe we can plant the seeds of this idea for future pandemic plans and save a lot of friction about mandates as well as resentment to the unvaccinated who are going to get treated in a bunch of tents by second year medical students if the situation is more severe
Notice that 35% of the 18-39 age group said they knew someone who had died from a vaccine, as compared to 14% of the 65+ age group. Since we know that "vaccine deaths" are predominantly of old people (i.e. in VAERS reports), this makes no sense.
Also, notice that the percentage of people in each of the 3 age groups that did not get vaccinated (31%, 26%, 17%) is almost an exact percentage match for the percentage of people in that age group that say they know someone who died from the vaccine (35%, 28%, 14%).
There's no crosstab for how well those 2 questions correlate, but I would guess that it's near 1:1 with the people that didn't get vaccinated saying that they know someone who died, and the poll is just a proxy for "I think vaccines are bad", not some objective truth about them knowing someone that died.
I suppose it's hard to know what people were actually thinking, whether it's that a relative died and they chose to blame that on the vaccine, or whether they included some famous case as someone they personally know, or whether they simply answered yes to any question that implies the vaccines are bad.
>Since we know that "vaccine deaths" are predominantly of old people (i.e. in VAERS reports), this makes no sense.
Not necessarily. The question asks whether the respondent knows anyone who has died from the vaccine. If respondent's included relatives of people in their social,school and work circles, people 18-39 might well "know" more elderly people than do people over 65, since the social, etc circles of the former group tend to be much larger than those of the latter group.
Also, isn't it know that myocarditis (a potentially fatal known side effect of the mRNA versions) was much more frequent in young people? The exact prevalence of this is certainly up for debate, but I can imagine a world in which this resulted in more young people thinking that they know someone who died due to the vaccine, even if it's pretty rare. "Young dude dies of heart attack after vaccination" is much more notable than "old person dies of something or other during a global pandemic".
Given the base rate of heart attacks in young people, or even some vaccine elevated rate, I would be shocked if 35% of young people knew someone that recently died this way.
The CDC estimated myocarditis post vaccine at 1 in 14,000 in the highest risk group (males aged 16-17):
Kirsh's whole deal is that these estimates are false and mendacious -- not that I think he's overly right about that, but circular reasoning doesn't prove him wrong.
For what it's worth, Denmark's health authorities have not been making much public fuss about it to avoid vaccine hesitancy but have quietly been processing that vaccines had a troublesome level of side effects, some of them quite severe.
In late 2021, one of the central people in our health care response described one of the problems that had been found and how by aspirating before injection, we had been able to achieve a rate of severe side effects ~3x lower than neighboring countries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkopHLQjtVQ&t=4s&ab_channel=Dr.JohnCampbell
A month ago I spoke to a doctor who told me that the vaccines had turned out to be bad (read: Falling a good deal below the extremely high safety rate we should expect of a vaccine deployed to the full healthy population) and they were openly talking about it in the medical community's channels and behind the scenes with politicians on how to ensure stronger drug safety procedures in a future crisis.
This in a country that I believe went further than any others in ensuring vaccine safety (and as a result had about the highest vaccination rate in the world). We shut down the initial vaccine rollout for 4 weeks after a health concern was discovered, and had to make some changes and restrictions.
"these aren’t just anti-vax Republicans lying to support their party narrative."
This is lazy. The Republican party can be fairly described as anti vaccine mandate. But the most prominent opponent of vaccines as such (and even in Kennedy's case there is some nuance) is a Democrat.
And being anti-mandate is not the same thing as being anti-vaccine; it is possible to think "the vaccine is neutral to beneficial, people should get it, but nobody should be forced to do so".
There is also the ongoing court case with AstraZeneca over its vaccine, which it recently admitted could cause Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome in rare cases.
"In the months after the rollout, the potentially serious side effect of the jab was identified by scientists. It was then recommended that under-40s be offered an alternative jab because the risk of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweighed the harm posed by Covid."
When you're talking about vaccinating millions of people, then even rare cases become more common, so those sceptical about "but the vaccines are perfectly safe!" will be inclined to think that these cases prove the opposite, and that the denials are all part of a conspiracy to force such vaccines on the general population (for whatever nefarious reason, usually profit? I think?)
"AstraZeneca reported that over 17 million people had received the vaccine in the EU and the United Kingdom, among whom there were slightly under 40 cases of thrombosis."
2019, UNICEF is saying AstraZeneca is perfectly safe, you should get it
2024, okay we're withdrawing the vaccine because other companies are making multiple vaccines against newer variants of Covid, oh yeah and the court cases:
"On 30 April, AstraZeneca conceded the vaccine, sold under the name Vaxzevria, can cause fatal blood clots and low platelet counts, also known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS.
The admission came through court documents in a UK class action lawsuit which sought £100 million ($190 million) in compensation for almost 50 victims of AstraZeneca vaccine side effects."
"More than three billion doses of the vaccine have been supplied since it first was administered in the United Kingdom in January 2021."
My maths isn't good enough to figure out what the risk of people developing TTS (or VTTS as the sub-variant is now called) is of those three billion doses, but this paper says there is a slight but genuine risk:
"Conclusions In this multinational study, a pooled 30% increased risk of thrombocytopenia after a first dose of the ChAdOx1-S vaccine was observed, as was a trend towards an increased risk of venous thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after Ad26.COV2.S compared with BNT162b2. Although rare, the observed risks after adenovirus based vaccines should be considered when planning further immunisation campaigns and future vaccine development."
For the record, I'm pro-vaccination, but I have to agree that the politicisation of the entire topic created an unholy mess; the dogged insistence that the vaccines were all perfectly safe and no side effects at all and everyone should and must get them, by compulsion if necessary, elicited the equally dogged insistence that the vaccines were all deadly and we should be loading up on ivermectin etc. instead, plus this was all a government conspiracy.
Nuance about "some vaccines may have very rare side effects in this particular sub-population but on the whole the risk of Covid is worse" got lost in all the noise.
1. Yes. (Although I will allow that MTG consumes outsized space in the minds of her adversaries. )
2. To the best of my knowledge, RFK's skepticism is more thoroughgoing than MTG's. I'm pretty sure that everything MTG says about the vaccine (that it doesn't actually prevent someone from getting or spreading covid and that it has measurable side effects) is now openly acknowledged by vaccine proponents.
> Although I will allow that MTG consumes outsized space in the minds of her adversaries.
I suspect that the same is true of Kennedy and you. I don't think you can reasonably say that a long-shot third party candidate for president is "more prominent" than an actual elected member of congress, let alone one who has played a key role in the chaotic speaker elections.
I wouldn't count myself an adversary of Kennedy. I don't support him because I don't like his policies. But the man himself impresses me with his courage and integrity.
But as to your point about "prominence": I think you are confusing MTG with Lauren Boebert. MTG supported McCarthy. Boebert opposed him, as did every Democrat.
But perhaps Scott could come up with an objective measurement.
Google Consumer Surveys used to be really useful for single question surveys. You could ask 1 question for $0.1 per person, making it possible to get an idea of the majority answer for <$10 and investigate percentages for only $x00. And they were supposed to be a representative sample, albeit probably biased towards android users. But alas, it fell victim to the Google Axe in 2022. Last time I looked, most other vendors were at $1/person/question or above (which was also google's price point for multi-question surveys) which pretty much puts it out of the range of casual interest, for me at least. Which is pity, because they didn't mind really strange questions as long as they were not likely to offend the user. Does anyone know anything as good for a similar cost?
> Of the nine people who answered my email, three said they’d read the question wrong and wanted to retract their answer, leaving six people who gave me real stories.
I really think it’s worth thinking more closely about the fact a third of the people who answered your e-mail had misread the question - even in a sample of people selected for liking to read complicated blog posts, on a survey where there was a separate question about whether any of your relatives had died *of COVID*, which would probably discourage at least one very plausible misreading. (And I really wouldn’t be surprised if people who’d just misread the question would be less likely to answer your e-mail to explicitly tell you that they embarrassingly answered wrong than people with actual stories, so I would expect the true ratio of people answering yes who’d just misread it to be probably be higher than 33%.)
In the Rasmussen survey, not only is the criterion for knowing someone who died very loose and vague - the survey sounds only interested in attitudes towards the vaccine, and thus I doubt it actually asked a parallel question about whether you knew anyone who’d died of COVID. People answering this phone survey in a hurry almost certainly misunderstood the question, and in particular to be about whether they knew anyone who’d died of *COVID*, at significant rates. Again, even in your own survey with people who are probably more careful readers and more priming to notice this question was about the vaccine, a third of the yes answers who responded had just misread it.
There is this from Dr. John Campbell. https://youtu.be/DMYZg8_22y8?si=uUE6xCgB8Q8qbis2 he reviews a paper that found a number of side effects to the vaccine. While you discuss this a little bit, I do think that if a person is inclined to believe that the vaccine is safe and they have a relative die of something common like stroke or heart attack, they will not make the connection, they will a priori rule out the vaccine connection because they have an a priori belief it is safe. To Your general point that we shouldn’t trust surveys like this I agree, it really is a survey about beliefs and opinions. On the other hand, Dr. Campbell does reference a more objective study that compares outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts, curious what you think.
Yes, he is a nurse educator. His channel is fun to watch because he will get fact checked and censored for reading peer reviewed journal articles. An interesting study in science vs The Science.
True, the Johnson & Johnson single I got made me quite ill, very suddenly, a few hours after I got it - for approximately 16 hours, no more. I felt that this was a sign that it "took".
The questions asked were "Did anyone in your family die (as per your best guess) from COVID?" and "Did anyone in your family die (as per your best guess) from side effects of the COVID vaccine?"
But the analysis of the death statistics is as follows:
"The average 80 year old has a 5% chance of dying per year; the average 90 year old a 20% chance. Let’s average it out and say 10% for the 80+ population. That means a 1/3650 chance per day, a 1/500 chance per week, etc. So by coincidence, we would expect about 2 people in my sample to have stories of an older relative dying within one day of vaccination, and about 10 people to have stories of a relative dying within one week. Among people talking about vaccine-related deaths, they seem to range from “same day” to “within six weeks”. So I think this mostly fits the null hypothesis."
But what is missing is a question of "Did anyone in your family die [over time period]?"
It seems to me to be highly unusual for the people statistically likely to die also happen to fall in those who could have died from COVID or the vaccine.
A quick thought based on quote: "Even 19% of Democrats say they know someone killed by the vaccine!"
In Canada, a lot of people wouldn't be caught dead voting for Trump, and also aren't super liberal. Imagine the median person (Ian starts being unfair) who drives an SUV, is on ozempic and spends 4% of their income on Frappuchinos. This person is a Progressive Conservative voter in Canada, is ambivalent about Justin Trudeau, hates Donald Trump because they watch CNN and is probably more left-leaning than Democrats. :)
Doubt has leaked out of the loudest anti-vaxx spaces to the normies.
That's a big problem. Clearly we need to annex Canada. We never *really* gave up on "54-40 or fight", after all. "From sea to shining sea" obviously refers to the Caribbean and the Labrador.
One option is to go full Anschluss, since they're so culturally similar that they're not really a "nation". (Except for the Quebecois, but we can figure out a solution for them. Maybe we can deport them to France. Or Haiti.)
Another option is salami tactics. First we grab our Sudetenland, the 90% of Canadians who live with 100 miles. Then we establish a protectorate over the rest, since there'd be so few people left that they'd be incapable of self-governance.
As a bonus, it would reduce the average temperature of the US, thus fulfilling some climate change goals!
It's also why outsourcing software engineering isn't the obvious win that people might naively think based on salary differences. The best Indian software engineers are all in Silicon Valley already.
Attributing death to a vaccine is an inherently larger psychological "ask" given the implications of the claim. So now do serious adverse events and come back with your results. Leave kirsch out of it; you only picked him because his controversialist style makes you look more reasonable.
Orthogonal to the article, but this, from an opinion piece in the Times, is pretty depressing:
"When I visited London in 2021, I was amazed that people didn’t generally know which vaccine they had taken or when they would get their booster. They answered my question with a shrug and said they would just go whenever they were told they had an appointment. They, too, had a polarizing, Trump-like leader and the usual swirl of social media conspiracies. But they rolled up their sleeves when the National Health Service called because it was cashing in the trust it had built over decades."
The overall thrust of the story is that the U.S. authorities bred distrust during the pandemic with inconsistent policies and disingenuous justifications, and I think there's a lot to that. But there's also a level of skepticism among some people in the USA that has reached absurd levels. If someone thinks a public opinion poll gives them a better handle on the effects of Covid vaccines than health statistics do, I'm not sure what public health authorities can do to reach that person.
Perhaps not attempt to forcibly inject people with an experimental vaccine which was approved and mandated on the basis of a study where more people died in the vaccine group than the placebo group?
By "more people" you mean 15 deaths as opposed to 14 deaths - a statistically insignificant amount - with the vast majority of deaths in both groups being unrelated to covid?
And you're aware that in the UK people DID take the vaccine willingly even though it was equally "experimental"? Whereas in the US there was a lot of screaming and crying over the exact same vaccine? That difference is due to social or political factors, not due to the differences in the vaccine because there were no such differences.
This "statistically insignificant amount" was the supposed ironclad evidence that justified approving the vaccine, and then forcibly injecting it into hundreds of millions of people! Funny how easily your kind falls for that. In your attempt to "own the anti-vaxxers" you forgot you were arguing against Pfizer's own trial!!
The number of infections? Death doesn't matter, since as we all know the vaccine protects people really well against being infected at all? That's your argument now? Funny where we started and now this is all you have left to defend.
> This study showed that the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people. The scientific rationale for mandatory vaccination in the USA relies on the premise that vaccination prevents transmission to others, resulting in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Yet, the demonstration of COVID-19 breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers (HCW) in Israel, who in turn may transmit this infection to their patients, requires a reassessment of compulsory vaccination policies leading to the job dismissal of unvaccinated HCW in the USA. Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. A recent investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of an outbreak of COVID-19 in a prison in Texas showed the equal presence of infectious virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Similarly, researchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection.
Lol, no. Death does matter, the main reason for vaccination is that it prevents deaths. That is implied by the very first line of your link - "Vaccine effectiveness studies have conclusively demonstrated the benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in reducing individual symptomatic and severe disease, resulting in reduced hospitalisations and intensive care unit admissions." Did you actually read your link?
What I said before, and which is true, is that a single cherrypicked study in which 15 vaccinated and 14 vaccinated people died is irrelevant because the difference in deaths in that study is statistically insignificant. Whereas the scientific consensus - based on studies that were statistically significant, and as reflected in your very own link - is that vaccines do prevent death overall.
It's easy to solve. Redo the Pollfish poll, but then you ask question that allow you to calibrate the person knowledge of statistics and rational thinking. Question like "How familiar are you with statistics?" and "Do you know what a null hypothesis is in th context of hypothesis testing?" and "Do you know the Bayes Theorem?" would give you a great way to know these results.
My dad’s heath worsened significantly within a day of receiving every COVID vaccine and booster, and he eventually died in late 2021 soon after getting his (I think) third booster. But he also had a rare and aggressive form of cancer which affects the immune system, and was very likely to kill him by late 2021 anyway.
After some thought, I answered “no” to the “vaccine side effects” question. If you die immediately after stubbing your toe (a real but minor harm), but you also have Toe Disease (which makes stubbing your toe instantly lethal), what killed you: stubbing your toe, or Toe Disease?
I am sure that if we could poll a medieval town with "Have you or a person you know personally ever suffered an misfortune which you think may have been caused by a witch's spell?", by the standard of Kirsch, we would have to conclude that witchcraft is real and a big cause for human suffering.
The universe in which we live does not run on consensus reality (with a few notable exceptions, see "Crazy like us"). Reality is not a democracy.
--
Regarding Scott's poll, it is worth pointing out that most of his readers are grey tribe and the grey tribe is the most enthusiastic tribe about vaccines. Improving human live through technological interventions is kind of our whole shtick. Of course, there could be different reasons for that:
A) I might believe vaccines are safe because grey tribe leaders say they are safe.
B) I might believe they are (very likely) safe because I think I know the operating principles (i.e. the scientific method) and the economic incentives which the people who developed the vaccines were working under.
C) I might try to study the published literature on the safety of the vaccines, and (again together with some assumptions about how scientists work) come to a conclusion.
From the outside, I guess it is hard to distinguish A and B.
There are few intuitions as strong as post hoc ergo propter hoc, especially when self-interest comes into play. Millions of people are sincerely convinced that their health problems are due to exposure to Agent Orange, Roundup, talcum powder, and the drinking water at Camp Lejeune notwithstanding the lack of evidence.
The problem I see is that Kirsch’s survey is trying to extract an objective conclusion from subjective data. Asking people to not only self-report their symptoms but to draw a conclusion on the cause of those symptoms is highly subjective; asking them to draw such conclusions about a medical outcome of others is even more so.
The bottom line is that only a traditional long-term study that includes rigorous pathology on its subjects can even come close to anything like an objective conclusion on such questions. Prior to Covid, we used to do such studies before releasing such medical products to the general public. Certain influential people have decided they want to force the paradigm away from this model of vaccine development. Their motives aren’t relevant to the point I’m trying to make other than to observe that perhaps not all of them are benign, but the result of their actions is that everyone taking these shots has become part of what is by far the largest Phase III trial in medical history.
Most people recognize this (although they might not label it as I did just above), and on top of that, have been forced to rely on “trust in authority” rather than hard science with respect to the Covid shots. “Trust” is a highly subjective concept in general, and polling to determine exactly who we trust and how much we trust them is even more so. Add various mandates into the mix while asking people to accept the product on this basis created much of the resentment.
Combine that with the fact that the relevant authorities have exhibited a lot of what many see as trust-destroying behaviors, and the conversion of a scientific question into a political one is complete.
I think this article and the comments ignore that the positions "I know a person who died of vaccine side effects" and "serious vaccine side effects are rare" and "the vaccines were beneficial overall" are not contradictory at all. It should be easy and common to believe all three of them.
Most medications can have side effects, many medications can have deadly side effects. Aspirin sometimes kills people, and stopping a headache isn't even a life-or-death situation! But the covid vaccines are so politicised that for a while the only publicly stated positions were "it has absolutely no side effects ever" or "it is literally worse than the disease", both of which were false.
(The following is all a joke. Hopefully this comment can encapsulate and seal away all the future craziness on this thread, in much the manner of a scapegoat.)
> But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%).
But you didn't even mention the obvious conclusion, which is that the vaccine preferentially kills Trump supporters! But that confuses correlation and causation: clearly having a vaccine death in the family causes people to become Trump supporters! And since Trump took the lead in the creation of the vaccine, this must have been his intention!
Trump deliberately created a deadly vaccine to increase his political support!
The left-leaning establishment delayed the vaccine rollout until after the election to prevent this tactic from working, and that's why Trump lost the election!
How many deaths does the survey imply? 8.5% of Americans having a household member dying is something like 30m deaths, assuming no overlaps within each household.
Let's make it 15m deaths, presumably concentrated in 2021/22 - did anything like that happen? Are they hiding millions of bodies, given annual deaths are something like 3m?
I think that's a statistical flaw. If 10 people of 20 know one person who died, that is 5% of the population, not 50%. But I don't know offhand how to translate 8.5% into a likely number of total American deaths.
Do you mean my point about overlap within households? I adjusted for that by halving deaths, but can't be sure... (halving would assume two siblings per household answering, unless people don't know what a household is...)
I'd note this isn't even a COVID vs Vaccine issue - 7.5% reported a COVID death in the household!
It isn't enough just to cut it in half. For example, say you have five households each with five members (25 people total), one of which dies of Covid. If everyone knows everyone else, then all of them know a household that had someone who died of Covid.
If you get 27 random people together, odds are better than even that two will have the same birthday.
Yeah, but the question was *within* a household, wasn't it? So to require a five-fold decrease would mean that the survey was getting multiple people from within each household
So I re-read the whole thing from context from the actual survey, and I find it hard to believe. You're right that the question was "Did any members of your household die from the COVID vaccine?" and also that 47% of households have 2-4 people in them.
I think I was initially answering the wrong question, though.
Interestingly, Scott's survey had "Family member", which is more expansive and more likely to create overlaps (though how many ACX readers are related to each other?).
Explain persisting increase in mortality beginning not with COVID, but with rollout of the jabs (which result in persistent spike protein production .)
The assumption that RW or pro-Trump people would be more likely to hold anti-vaccination beliefs may be true with regard to THIS particular vaccine and across the entire country, but probably isn't true everywhere. The only anti-vax candidate in the US election right now is an old school environmentalist, and if you're over 40 that's exactly what you would've expected. Anti-vaccination was stereotypically a belief of granola-crunching California woo-woo types, and would have correlated stronger with owning a dream catcher or magnet bracelet than with support for any Republican. People who believe in healing crystals probably aren't coming here, but I'd bet a lot of left-leaning EA's from the west coast who read this blog grew up in households with moms who did believe in things like that.
But clearly Scott's right, people who read this blog come from a variety of backgrounds that give them a varied set of biases, but across that spectrum they are all vastly more likely to be aware of their own biases, and are definitely more likely to temper their claims with qualifications to maintain credibility as these did.
I hated covid mitigation NPIs more than just about anyone I knew, I wanted to do literally nothing, I was genuinely fully on team "let 'er rip" from March 2020 through to the end. But I can smell nonsense and irrationality on my own "team". It seemed pretty clear to me, from at least the publication of that Israeli study onwards, that the mRNA vaccines were not any better than acquired immunity from infection, and that in most demographics they didn't save enough lives to even be a statistically meaningful intervention, so I thought pushing them that hard was crazy. But most of the stories about them killing people were obviously flaky nonsense that smelled like something I'd regret endorsing. In my circles, it was more plausible to be skeptical of the mRNA's because some of the criticisms did posit particular mechanisms and came from people who knew a lot about that technology -- I ended up taking J&J when I was sorta forced to choose something, despite that being the one that WAS paused for side-effects, bc by a year+ into all of this, the CDC and "some bearded guy who questionably claims he invented the vaccine" were pretty much hitting from the same tees as far as I was concerned.
I pretty much agree with all of this, especially that first paragraph.
I was never particularly skeptical about mRNA, but I never went looking for problems, and all the biologists I knew were politically polarized on the left. I did realize that some of the pro-mRNA arguments were BS, and I was dismayed that no reportable sources were distinguishing the good arguments from the bad. I eventually got mRNA and a booster, but I'd also had an early case, and so I wasn't particularly worried.
When I learned in about February 2020 that it was an mRNA virus, and what that meant (it was unstable and would mutate a lot) I realized a vaccine was as likely as one for a cold. Even if it worked, the virus might be significantly different enough the next time you encounter it that the vaccine wouldn't work. This did indeed turn out to be the case.
I think a lot of the effort and advice was to convince people that the government knew what it was doing and would protect people if only everyone did as they were told. It's even possible that such feelings made people feel better, even if it was an illusion.
But the vaccine still does work to prevent serious illness and death.
(In fact the reason colds are as mild as they are is likely because everyone has many previous exposures to them. If you were exposed to a cold virus for the first time as an adult, it might be dangerous, like "Russian flu".)
Kahneman. Of course. Somebody should do a study on frequency of a sweet idea having already been thought of. Dang. Nothing new under the sun. Never mind. :-)
MY losn would be along the lines of the ratio of observations seeming to contradict the null hypothesis / observations is inversely proportional to those being revealed as not contradictory. Consequent not of the hypothesis under test, but the cussedness of large populations of humans under test.
I suspect a lot of Kirsch’s survey respondents are thinking like Peter Griffin in Family Guy: “Oh no Lois, I’m not buying a used car. I know a guy from work who bought a used car and then ten years later - bam, herpes! We’re buying our car from a dealer and that’s that.”
I would like alternative questions asking "do you know ANYONE who died of Covid or vaccines or had a family member who did"? I suspect you would get a very high number who does not. I not only don't know anyone who had a family member die, but I don't know anyone who who even knows anyone who had a family member die.
If I add up everyone I work with
(whenever an employee's family member dies, everyone gets notified so they can send flowers and sympathies), plus all the people in my very gossipy neighborhood, plus all my Facebook friends, plus the roughly 50 IRL friends and family I've asked if they even know of anyone who has died...that is hundreds of people and no one knows someone who died. Including about a dozen who are in their 80s and living in retirement communities and even THEY don't know anyone who died from COVID or vaccines.
It would be interesting to see if there are entire huge networks of people (likely mostly affluent professional class I'm guessing) where no one knows anyone who died, and then other networks that are completely separate with zero overlap where tons of people died or at least they say that they did.
Heck, forget dying, I've never even heard of anyone in my friend/family/coworker/neighbor network who had a family member who was hospitalized.
My dad went to the hospital. My sister is a chiropractor and had a pulse oximeter with her and noticed his reading was really bad so she convinced him to go.
My brother-in-law's brother died from COVID. He didn't get it checked out in time, and by the time he did go to the hospital it was too late.
I believe there were other people we knew who were seriously ill and maybe another more distantly related death, but I've forgotten about it since 2020.
This is in a small city, people in many different lines of work. I only know one other programmer, my wife was in the medical field at the time.
> Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%).
Could be a confounding variable here, e.g. if foreign influence bots around 2020-21 were targeting Trump supporters predicting them as good targets to get a critical mass to cause anti-vaccine sentiment to spread on its own and become stable domestically, or if the people running domestic influence bots predicted that anti-vaccine sentiment among vocal Trump supporters would increase vaccination among urban liberals (who are in cities, ie higher risk and higher strategic value areas than most Trump supporters).
> One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way.
Your survey indicates that 57.1% of your readers got 1 shot of vaccine, and another 38.7% got the booster for full vaccination, for a total of 95.8%. That would indeed put them far above average for "at least 1 shot received" for the USA (70% + 11%)) and roughly also for the world outside of low-income countries:
Of course, your average survey participant might not be fully representative of the people they know. Is it still reasonable to assume that "people your survey participants know" are more likely than average to have gotten at least one shot? If so, it would at least partially cancel out the "benefit of the doubt" effect you consider.
“True believers” because they’ve not seen serious adverse reactions in their social networks? Or not seeing any serious adverse reactions because they’re “true believers”?
I felt like I was in a WWII propaganda film, with people asking me for "papers", no "please" about it. But they did accept me showing a phone picture of the card, so I didn't have to carry it around all the time.
It makes sense to me that statistical illiteracy would cause people to spuriously attribute deaths to vaccines, but wouldn't it *also* cause people to spuriously attribute deaths to covid, in addition to the real effect of covid causing deaths? Weird that the spurious attribution of deaths to vaccines is enough to *match* perception of deaths caused by covid --- oh but I guess maybe more people got the vaccine than got covid? is that true at this point? most people have had covid I think? I guess if it's true that much more people have had the vaccines than covid then that would explain this
Not directly relevant to his poll, but I thought folks might be interested in hearing about my interactions with Steve Kirsch.
From 2012 until a couple of months ago, I worked at Nextdoor and part of my work involved helping set policy about what kinds of posts are allowed on Nextdoor and then actually making the decisions on our most difficult reported cases.
In early 2021 (I don’t remember precisely when and now that I have left the company no longer have access to these emails), after hearing about my role through an acquaintance, Steve contacted me to ask me to restore his account access and some posts he had made on Nextdoor advising folks to consider fluvoxamine as a potential treatment for COVID. Steve, of course (to his credit), was the key funder that made research into fluvox as a COVID treatment possible: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-03/can-common-antidepressant-help-covid-19-fight
His email prompted me to dive deep on the issue, and I came to the conclusion that while we didn’t want Nextdoor to become a place for people to turn to for medical advice, it would not be inappropriate for neighbors to post messages suggesting that folks discuss with their physician treatments that had received at least some positive coverage in major medical journals. So I restored Steven’s Nextdoor access and his posts and advocated for the position above internally.
Six months or so later Steve contacted me again, this time asking me to restore anti-vaccination messages he had posted. As proof he sent me data from England showing lower COVID and death rates among the unvaccinated. But when I looked closely at the data, I realized it wasn’t broken down by age cohorts. As soon as you broke out the data by age, the rates of infection and death were much lower for the vaccinated.
And this pattern then continued for months. Steven would share anti-vaccination data points and claims that would collapse as soon as one did any due diligence. I eventually came to the conclusion that one could no longer take any of Steve’s claims at face value.
Unfortunately, I think the MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/) had it right three years ago. Some mix of his (justifiable) frustration over the FDAs slowness in evaluating promising cures like COVID, his desire to be perceived as a hero and to get attention, and perhaps his own medical issues has caused Steve to lose the plot, and I think nothing he claims related to vaccines and COVID can be trusted.
Maybe it’s the same problem we see on all sides: once you have a firm hypothesis, you look for evidence that it’s true and discount evidence that it’s not. Confirmation bias is a bitch. And maybe it’s my own confirmation bias speaking, but I wouldn’t dismiss the whole notion of vaccine injury because someone on the internet tells me Steve K is bad at interpreting scientific evidence. As another poster pointed out, signals of vaccine harm do exist. Is this really going to be data shooting match where we all just point our guns at the other side? If so, I’m on the side that wants to reduce possible harms.
Agreed that Steve's motivations and personality are irrelevant to assessing the efficacy or harmfulness of vaccines.
What I do think is relevant when assessing the vaccines is whether there is any credible evidence that suggests that vaccines are causing more problems than they're addressing. A year ago, which is the last time I tried to look into this, the answer was no as far as I could tell. Here was the best review of the data I found at the time:
I can’t think of anyone I know who died of COVID. I did have an employee die of an aneurysm. She was a hardcore Trump supporter who posted anti-impeachment memes (this first one) but also took the precautions seriously. She died in April 2020, so before the vaccines. I was very sad to lose her.
Of your six stories, 50% explicitly reported the individual died after getting the mRNA *booster* shot. If the mRNA vaccine was the most immediate cause of death, why didn't that 50% die after one of the first two shots? Because that would be a very novel dose-response curve if true
Read Cause Unknown by Dowd. And then explain the excess mortality that has been occurring since the rollout of the jabs (and has been persisting even though COVID has tanked as well as uptake of the jabs, and understand that the mRNA producing the spike protein persists.
Talk to us about the decrease in fertility & increase in pregnancy complications since the jab rollout
The ignorance demonstrated on this topic is quite amazing, to the point where it almost seems intentional. Years and years of life insurance reports, mortality data, cost-benefit analyses, and studies showing that the vaccines were significantly more harmful than COVID for everyone other than the elderly, and yet we're deciding to go with "twitter poll doesn't *prove* vaccines were deadly" as the argument?
In the original Pfizer vaccine report - the one the FDA relied on to approve the vaccine for emergency use (and subsequently mandate injections on the populace) - all-cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group than the placebo group.
(page 12 - notably, heart-related deaths were much more common in the vaccinated group.)
This alone should be enough - "inject this substance into your arm - trust me, it will protect you" is an extraordinary claim, and not only is there not extraordinary evidence in favor of this - the original study actively disproved the claim! But, continuing...
Cost-benefit analyses show significant net harm from vaccines:
VAERS, the official monitoring system for vaccine safety, indicates that hundreds of thousands have died from the COVID vaccine. And remember VAERS is well known to be underreported by around a factor of 10.
I will repeat - this is *the* official vaccine safety monitoring system for the FDA and the CDC. If your response to this is "oh, those are just crazy people submitting fake reports, we can't trust VAERS data" - then you've literally admitted that we don't have ANY reliable safety monitoring system in place.
Labor force disability statistics show an interesting trend starting around January 2021 (hmm - what else "rolled out" around January 2021?):
In 2020, the death rate for people age 15-24 increased about 20 percent. In 2021, the death rate people age 15-24 increased by *another 10 percent*, after the rollout of vaccines.
Excess deaths started going up in January 2021 (huh, where have I heard that before??) and then continued going up *even well after COVID cases had plateaued:
Life insurance data shows excess mortality among the 0-44 age group around 80% above baseline in mid-late 2021 (notably, blood clots typically start causing problems a few months after vaccination):
And even after all this, if you still believe the vaccine is Safe and Effective - it still doesn't justify any of the mandates, which overwhelmingly affected the young - those working and in school - who faced thousands of times lower risk than the elderly.
Thank you. It’s truly amazing to see scientific types stick their fingers in their ears and go lalala can’t hear you… or refuse to look and then say they can’t see anything… the cherry on top is that many of these same people were all in on the fear over covid and were ok with forcing a risky treatment on those who didn’t really need it…
Even though you're preaching to the choir in my case and it wouldn't have occurred to me to give Kirsch any credibility (had I somehow come across him), it's still heartwarming to see someone like this called on their bullshit. Thank you and bravo!
> The average 80 year old has a 5% chance of dying per year; the average 90 year old a 20% chance. Let’s average it out and say 10% for the 80+ population. That means a 1/3650 chance per day
Probability is not linear like that! One way to see that is to go the other direction: if you have a 20% chance to die in a given year, then according to this logic, you have 120% chance to die in 6 years which is impossible.
The correct approach is to look at the survival probability. The probability that you survive the year is the probability that you survive day 1 and day 2 and day 3, etc. So if p is the probability to survive a day, then p^365 is the probability to survive the year. If there is 10% chance of not surviving the year, then we have p^365 = 0.9, so p = 0.9^(1/365) ≈ 1 - 1/3465, about a 5% difference from 1/3650.
It's not linear over long time periods, but it is approximately linear for small probabilities (i.e. short time scales), which is what Scott cares about. As you observe, the difference is trivial.
An interesting conclusion here is that the selection bias of an ACX survey mattered massively in a way that was somewhat subtle. I don't think we would have concluded order of magnitude difference in the answer to this question without comparing to a more representative sample. I'm updating to be more cautious about making conclusions from heavily selected samples, even when there's not an obvious reason connecting the selection to the conclusion.
An interesting conclusion here is that the selection bias of an ACX survey mattered massively in a way that was somewhat subtle. I don't think we would have concluded order of magnitude difference in the answer to this question without comparing to a more representative sample. I'm updating to be more cautious about making conclusions from heavily selected samples, even when there's not an obvious reason connecting the selection to the conclusion.
ASSUMING this comment section has not explicitly solved the issue. I now comment: First scott does not recognize conflict vs. mistake in his education post. Then he doesn't realize that the evidence here means that with high certainty a mix of (1) poll A was flawed (2) poll B was flawed and / or bad replication (3) processing / analysis of A failed (4) processing of B was flawed (5) someone is lying (6) scott or the other guy was wrong. He may no longer be a serious rationalist, but if he is still a honest man, he should use his money to comission a poll from that source the other man did, then another from another polling company, then ask the other man in phone what went wrong here, and then comission five analyses from all available evidence (past polls, new polls, this comment, past analyses, online material—AND THE VERY SAME EVIDENCE PACKAGE FOR ALL ANALYSES!) (1) himself (2) by that other man or person of his choice (3) three independent hired experts (preferably from outside US!). Then these five new analyses should be published at the same time along with names of the independent analysts and the whole evidence package for public scrutiny. This can be done well, and does not cost much effort OR money. Where is the public truth-seeking Scott? Still there? Also, I will personally subscribe if you do this, and still pay bit of respect if you refute explicitly why you don't.
I don't think the RNA vaccines killed a huge % of people, though I'd be surprised if they didn't kill any. The Oxford vaccine certainly did kill dozens in the UK, after some 20 million doses,and sadly the people most likely to die were at the least risk from SARS cov2.
No it isn't. Quit parroting RFK Jr. nonsense. The issue was well researched when they discovered the virus and there was no cancer caused by the vaccine.
If you really want to replicate the surveys, please use the same methodology. Why didn't you pay pollfish and try to replicate it?
96% of your readers took the shot so they think it is safe. It seems you forgot to mention that. Your readers are NOT representative of the public. People who believe the shots are safe have a hard time seeing deaths caused by an intervention they think is safe. So you didn't replicate these polls which are a cross section of America.
Why not talk to doctors who are aware of the harms and compare their numbers for COVID deaths vs. vaccine deaths? I can give you the name of a geriatric practice that will give you their numbers. I have a military doctor who would love to talk to you. This doctor had 5 vaccine deaths in 3,500 people and these are young fit people who aren't supposed to die. They died of causes unheard of for people their age.
Can you identify a single nursing home where there was a miraculous drop in COVID ACM only after the shots rolled out.? Can any of your readers find a success story with 150 or more residents and a statistically significant drop in deaths caused by the miraculous vaccines.
How do you explain nursing homes like Apple Valley Village where the all-cause mortality increased 8 fold (to 8 a week) after the shots rolled out?
I see a common thread here even if the adverse effects of vaccines were minimal. The vast majority of people who died of Covid were old and in poor health. This is based on data from the CDC. And it appears that a significant percentage of reportedly who died of a reaction to a Covid vaccine in the ACX poll were in poor health. The issue remains that a very poor state of health amongst a very significant percentage of the population is the biggest health problem we face in United States. It is a shame that in addition to suppressing information from the Covid lunatic brigade like there is no such thing as viruses, the government also suppressed high-quality information indicating that losing weight, exercising, and taking vitamin D could dramatically improve one's outcome. You can argue that this was a moot point after the introduction of the vaccine, but it certainly wasn't a moot point for all of 2020 when these correlations were already well established in the research literature. Our government and media are quite culpable in the deaths of up hundreds of thousands of people during 2020. I think suppressing so-called misinformation during the pandemic backfired badly. People would've been far less likely to believe the most crazy things people were saying if they had just been allowed to disseminate so they would be disinfected by the truth and people also would've received useful information on protecting themselves should they ever become infected pre-or post vaccination.
The entire thing can also be trivially refuted just by looking at excess deaths over time, plotted along with the curves of covid cases & vaccine uptake. You will see excess deaths track covid cases pretty clearly (with some lag) at the start of the pandemic, and then dip sharply when vaccines start rolling out. Obviously that still leaves open the possibility that vaccines cause death, just at rates lower than (p(death|covid) * p(catching covid)), but not the possibility that vaccines are _more_ deadly than covid (edit: averaged across the population. I don't know what the state of evidence is re: relative vaccine vs. covid risks for very young males; I'd be fairly but not extremely surprised to find that the vaccines were as or more risky in some pretty small demographic slices.).
This implies that one trusts the official count of excess deaths; I would suspect that people skeptical of the official messaging on COVID might also distrust the death count figures.
COVID-attributed death figures may be fishy, because cause of death is pretty subjective thing. But overall deaths should be verifiable at least to some extent - if X number of people died, there should be some traces of them living before, and then not living, and on the contrary, if people died, but weren't counted, other stats should show the discrepancy - like if 90% of all people over 80 died and the government had a conspiracy to hide it, people would still notice there much less consumption of services people over 80 usually consume, for example.
What happened during the covid episode was that the covid diagnosis superseded every other possible cause of death. If you have a weak body from cancer, and you catch the flu, did cancer kill you or the flu? Before covid cancer would have been cited. The policy explicitly changed for this particular disease, and the health professionals went along. Maybe the financial incentives that accompanied the policy had an effect.
That can't explain excess deaths, which is based on overall numbers of deaths regardless of cause.
Are you familiar with how death certificates describe the cause of death? I believe (I've linked below a blank Illinois death certificate that I found online as an example) that, if someone dies of COVID (in the opinion of the physician or examiner), while having cancer, then both should be listed on the death certificate. If the hypothesis of COVID being blamed inaccurately is correct, then the rate of COVID on death certificates should be similar to the rate of COVID in the general population at any given time; whereas if COVID does, in fact, make people more likely to die, then COVID should be on death certificates more significantly frequently than the rate of COVID in the general population. So I'd be interested to see statistics about the presence of COVID on death certificates. But it's incorrect that cancer wouldn't have been cited, to use your example, unless physicians/medical examiners were committing fraud on a large scale (since death certificates are sworn documents IIRC).
https://templatelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/death-certificate-template-09.jpg?w=395
It depends on country. In the UK, the headline figures for covid deaths initially reported any death after a positive covid test as a covid death, regardless of the actual cause: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/
This was obviously wrong, so it was later revised to be within 28 days of a death, which was still wrong. And only in January 2023 did we switch to a death certificate method: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2023/01/27/changes-to-the-way-we-report-on-covid-19-deaths/
Thank you, that's really interesting. That explains why people tend to focus on excess death, even when death certificates list causes.
Are you familiar with how death certificates describe the cause of death? I believe (I've linked below a blank Illinois death certificate that I found online as an example) that, if someone dies of COVID (in the opinion of the physician or examiner), while having cancer, then both should be listed on the death certificate. If the hypothesis of COVID being blamed inaccurately is correct, then the rate of COVID on death certificates should be similar to the rate of COVID in the general population at any given time; whereas if COVID does, in fact, make people more likely to die, then COVID should be on death certificates more significantly frequently than the rate of COVID in the general population. So I'd be interested to see statistics about the presence of COVID on death certificates. But it's incorrect that cancer wouldn't have been cited, to use your example, unless physicians/medical examiners were committing fraud on a large scale (since death certificates are sworn documents IIRC).
https://templatelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/death-certificate-template-09.jpg?w=395
I mean maybe, but that's not really relevant to excess deaths. The point OP is making is that is you disregard all possible causes of deaths entirely and only look at how many people died at what time, those deaths track covid waves but not vaccines.
Most countries underestimated the deaths from COVID during the outbreak.
Excess deaths is a relatively simple counting exercise. You have some long term average of how many people day on a day in the year (this is often a bit higher in winter than summer). And you compare it to this year.
You can maybe find plots of deaths per day somewhere for your country or state. Heat waves (if they happen around you) cause spikes on such plots. A bad flu season appears as a few months in winter where there are more deaths than usual. Belgium had two main COVID outbreaks, these are VERY obvious on these plots, as both times, there was a spike during a month or so where deaths were double the usual number.
I’m not a number cruncher nor do I plan to become one. If I were, I wouldn’t trust any single set of data on any topic, small or large. I would look for overlapping sets. I would also look at how the data was gathered. I’m no expert, but when I have looked at a sets of data, no set has been completely clean or even complete. Signals that exist is certain data sets and not in others, what does that tell you? That is the question. It seems to me rather premature to claim that there is no signal based on one particular measurement.
We are not talking about one measurement. Every country has their own separate bureaucracy for gathering information about deaths in general, causes of deaths, and vaccine deployment. Each bureaucracy is run by different people under different rules. Just the U.S. alone has a bureaucracy per-state.
(IIRC someone once argued to me that data from one particular country proved his point, and when I pointed out many other countries showing an opposite trend, he was like "well that's just one data point". I think if the data from most countries supported Kirsch's point, *you* would be the one pointing this out to *me* ― except you wouldn't have to, since I'd never argue that data from hundreds of bureaucracies was "one measurement" in the first place.)
Charts of excess deaths vs "Covid deaths" and vaccine rollouts in a hundred countries can be seen here: https://github.com/hmatejx/COVID_mortality (Edit: Sorry, to be fair, this data was aggregated by two people and presented by one, much as Kirsch is one guy aggregating his data, but I have noticed Kirsch is not only very biased, but also not one to shy away from lying[1]. In a contest between two dudes on the internet, one a shock-jock-in-personality who treats his beliefs as a business venture which he earns a lot of money from, and the other random guy earning nothing by publishing an analysis on GitHub based on a scientific paper based on data from numerous countries, I will trust the second guy (and the paper) virtually every time.)
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations?commentId=f97bJXwj2M5toGDvt
"But overall deaths should be verifiable at least to some extent " Ive heard this a lot, but is it actually true? Has anyone attempted to verify this?
Let's consider this. Some independent researcher (it has to be independent, nobody would allocate a grant for this) spends a year meticulously analyzing stats and figuring out whether the number of deaths is a Big Lie or not.
Option one. He finds nothing. Maybe small weirdness here and there, but no major smoking guns, nothing to hang your hat on. Now, no journal would publish this obviously. But also no independent outlets would be interested - would "a guy spent a year checking numbers and agreed they were correct" is not going to bring anybody any clicks.
Option two. He finds some serious fudging. Now, he's still a nobody, and no serious journal would publish him. But he can reach out to prominent figures that are politically aligned, Alex Joneses (ignore his current troubles, it's just an example), Tucker Carlsons, etc., various bloggers. Some of them would talk to him if his stuff is convincing enough. Some of them would risk to publish his claims. Some of the opposing side would react by either pointing and laughing or publishing their refutations. In any case, the word would spread that there's this study which found major fudging in death numbers. A lot of people would hear about it.
Now, which world we're more likely to be in, one or two? I would say one is more likely. Of course, it's indistinguishable for us from the world three in which nobody ever cared to check, or world four where a secret government project is dedicated to eliminating any researcher who attempts to check those figures - and so on - but the more time passes, and the more we hear nothing from any people motivated to reveal any shenanigans that have happened, the more we can be assuming that major shenanigans in that area didn't happen. It's not a 100% certainly - there any many possible worlds beyond four consistent with this picture - but it's a reasonable ground to stand on.
Id say the most likely scenario is option 3, nobody checks.
I mean, im not going to check and its unlikely that if someone else did id be in much of a position to confirm or deny it, but it does seem like a bit of a gap in the chain of reasoning to say that x or y could or could not be ture because this statistic would show it, and we know that statistic is true because..... no one has said otherwise even though we would most likely ignore them if they did.
That depends on what you accept as "verifiable". If your theory is that there is a world government which will just make up statistics on the spot feeding its narrative, then no, nobody went around and verified all death certificates and check all graves and crematoriums for the bodies.
If you are just willing to accept official statistical data by bureaucracies: then yes, I went and checked it. It was one of the most relevant statistics in the early days of covid, as it would allow to check public claims about the spread of the virus with a two week lag very easily.
A lot of data is publicly available on this. See for example:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
https://www.mortality.org/
https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Excess_mortality_-_statistics&oldid=628176
And yes: all of these eventually track back to the same data sources: governmental records of death certificates of each country.
I dont really understand your links so i cant really comment on that, but my question does mostly revolve around official statistical data by bureaucracies. I typically hear the claim that official death counts are accurate around discussions of murders and crime, but its the same problem: People taking as a given that official death counts are correct but not actually knowing if that is the case.
If one of your links addresses that concern, i apologize for not recognizing that, im just a layman.
They don't really address the concern. However: having a mostly accurate count of people being born and people dying is of utmost concern for all societies around the world. Be it for the draft, taxes, creation of travel or identity documents, social services or criminal records ... having a roughly accurate account of people alive and dead is important to all of those, regardless of your ideology.
And the statistics are generated at a very local level where discrepancies are very difficult to hide. Imagine a village of a hundred people: How many people do you expect to die there per year and how would you go about hiding those deaths without locals noticing? How would you add deaths without locals noticing? And since record keeping is so much localized, fudging with those numbers at a large scale involves a lot of people getting to know about it. And in general there is little to no incentive to fudge those numbers.
All of this can of course break down in times of war. And depending on your bureaucracy it can be really difficult to make an accurate tally of your population. But the point stands: those statistics are generally considered among the most accurate statistics we have about any country. And those numbers are made available transparently across the world for all but very few countries, because normally they aren't politicized at all.
The pandemic was the very first time people were foolish enough to even try to politicize those numbers as well, because they didn't like their implications ...
However: independent reproduction of those numbers is impossible, unless you have a time machine. So even asking for that makes no sense. What can be done is researching whether localized data keeping matches centralized data aggregation and whether any anomalies are apparent in the data on statistical analysis. I wouldn't know of any study which tried to research that.
But honestly: if there was any chance that you'd be able to find anything by doing so, Corona skeptics would have done that research long ago. I don't think that anyone from that camp who actually knows what he is talking about has ever disputed those numbers.
Sure, but at that point you're positing a conspiracy that approximately every single country in the world is engaged in. I think there's "skeptical of official messaging" and then there's being that deep down the rabbit hole, which most people who are some degree of skeptical are not.
"Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by shared ideology."
This is a common tactic of the establishment - claim that one possible explanation for something is a conspiracy - then, because we all know that conspiracies are axiomatically impossible ("two or more people agreeing to do something harmful? insane, that could NEVER happen!"), then the original claim must be false. Even putting aside the fact that obviously conspiracies are very possible and very common, there are other explanations than conspiracy, usually simply people sharing an ideology and goal.
> a conspiracy that approximately every single country in the world is engaged in
Not an impossibility. Lockdown policies were almost universal (save a couple of rebel countries), so were mandatory vaccination policies. So, for example, clandestine surveillance cooperations. Given similar motivations, people would react similarly, so the argument "that would require people to act similarly and in concert" does not refute anything. People can do that and did that in the past.
Yeah, but what would be the incentive of countries like Sudan, North Korea, the US, China, France, Iran, Russia, India, Brazil and many more to align in this very specific niche topic, while being unable to agree on any other topic in this world? That's really a next level conspiracy theory where everything must revolve around that one topic whereas virtually any other topic most be a decoy to fake multilateral power distribution.
First, we can be pretty sure death figures for NK, China, Russia and likely Iran are utter garbage, just on general principles that for totalitarian shitholes, any statistical data is utter garbage because nobody is going to publish real statistics and most likely nobody even has it - the incentive to mess with it is too strong on every level. It doesn't have to be covid - economical stats in the USSR has been garbage pretty much the whole time. And, "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is an universally known expression.
Leaving the shitholes aside, you can surely notice how covid policies in US, France, India and Brazil, for example, were rather similar. Again, similar incentives, similar circumstances - similar actions. So, excluding some event from the real of possibilities just because it would have to happen under similar circumstances in many countries sounds wrong to me.
First, we can be pretty sure death figures for NK, China, Russia and likely Iran are utter garbage, just on general principles that for totalitarian shitholes, any statistical data is utter garbage because nobody is going to publish real statistics and most likely nobody even has it - the incentive to mess with it is too strong on every level. It doesn't have to be covid - economical stats in the USSR has been garbage pretty much the whole time. And, "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is an universally known expression.
Leaving the shitholes aside, you can surely notice how covid policies in US, France, India and Brazil, for example, were rather similar. Again, similar incentives, similar circumstances - similar actions. So, excluding some event from the real of possibilities just because it would have to happen under similar circumstances in many countries sounds wrong to me.
How convenient. According to you all the countries either align in ideology or have statistics so bad they don't count.
You don't get to call yourself a man of reason if that's how you explain away that excess deaths somehow aligning well with COVID waves, but not aligning well with vaccinations ... globally ...
I don't even have to get started with how even your assertion about ideological alignment is just plain wrong even just for the very short lost of countries you were allowing to be trusted with statistics about death. Also it's pretty ridiculous how you implicitly trust Brazilian statistics more than Russian statistics ...
By that point you made it very clear that you already are set on the answer and are only looking for reasons which support your believe dismissing literally anytime else.
The kinds of excess deaths implied by 22% of the population having a relative due to the vaccine is not something you can hide or even fail to notice. That would be, what, probably tens of millions of people? Several million, the very least.
Some people are noticing. Most doing work in this area are ignored by the official profession, which seems to want all the questions to just go away. Get the booster you don’t need, and don’t worry about all the unusual myocarditis in your cohort.
Layman: wasn't the myocarditis due to injecting in an artery instead of the muscle? I know they went back to recommending aspiration, but I don't know if myocarditis went down after that.
Anyways, the numbers for that are still way way lower than what this article is saying, right?
Some of the myocarditis was likely due to the AstraZeneca viral vector interacting with the coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor in heart muscle.
"Some people are noticing" it would be impossible for anyone to not notice, is my point. Hospitals already operate at near their maximum capacity; many were easily over-capacity during covid waves. A wave of extremely sick people several times larger than that would be completely impossible to hide. You'd have massive crowds at hospitals, enormous waiting times, shortages of everything, etc.
You aren't interested in the truth though; you just want to fearmonger your baseless conspiracy theories.
"You aren't interested in the truth though; you just want to fearmonger your baseless conspiracy theories. "
Clearly no reason to worry about bias in a sample of ACX readers...
That part was entirely based on Grape Sodas low quality comments here and throughout this comment section. Lots of bold claims with no sources, "the mainstream is ignoring this" and similar conspiratorial thinking etc.
> Clearly no reason to worry about bias in a sample of ACX readers...
its only "slightly left wing" afterall
I suspect you're underestimating people's capability to keep from noticing things it would be dangerous to.
Ah, yes, "baseless conspiracy theories!!!!11!11!"
The original Pfizer vaccine report - the one the FDA relied on to approve the vaccine for emergency use (and subsequently mandate injections on the populace) - all-cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group than the placebo group.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345/suppl_file/nejmoa2110345_appendix.pdf
(page 12 - notably, cardiac arrest was much more common in the vaccinated group.)
Cost-benefit analyses show significant net harm from vaccines:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070
We have strong short-term temporal association between vaccination and myocarditis:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34420869/
Vaccines increase severe adverse events, even after taking into account the supposed COVID severity reduction:
https://www.scivisionpub.com/pdfs/us-covid19-vaccines-proven-to-cause-more-harm-than-good-based-on-pivotal-clinical-trial-data-analyzed-using-the-proper-scientific--1811.pdf
VAERS, the official monitoring system for vaccine safety, indicates that hundreds of thousands have died from the COVID vaccine. And remember VAERS is well known to be underreported by around a factor of 10.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/vaers/access-VAERS-data.html
Labor force disability statistics show an interesting trend starting around January 2021 (hmm - what else "rolled out" around January 2021?):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01374597
In 2020, the death rate for people age 15-24 increased about 20 percent. In 2021, the death rate people age 15-24 increased by *another 10 percent*, after the rollout of vaccines.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm
Excess deaths started going up in January 2021 (huh, where have I heard that before??) and then continued going up *even well after COVID cases had plateaued:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/12/excess-mortality-during-the-pandemic-the-role-of-health-insurance/
Life insurance data shows excess mortality among the 0-44 age group around 80% above baseline in mid-late 2021 (notably, blood clots typically start causing problems a few months after vaccination):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22275411-group-life-covid-19-mortality-03-2022-report (Page 23, Table 5.7. Q3 2021)
Just completely BASELESS, absolutely no base here. Nothing at all interesting. Just keep taking your shots! Nothing to see here!
I don't agree with the way you're interpreting the nejm paper about the Pfizer vaccine. The death rate was very low and all groups (just a handful), so it's not reasonable to infer anything about relative death rates there. If I'm reading it correctly, there are four cardiac deaths in one group and one in the other group, and this is out of a sample of several thousand. That's not a meaningful difference, particularly when it wasn't a primary endpoint of the study.
Also, given that excess deaths increased around the rollout of the vaccine, in order for this survey data to be true (The vaccines are as deadly as covid itself), it would have had to increase by much more, wouldn't it have?
> all-cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group than the placebo group.
15 deaths in a sample of over 21,000 vs 14. Yeah, this is really strong evidence, you got me! And 4 whole cardiac arrests compared to 1, with a whole page of causes listed. Damn.
> COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities
It's clear just from the title that this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
> We have strong short-term temporal association between vaccination and myocarditi
This paper says:
> Despite these observations, the benefits of the vaccines far outweigh the risks of possible myocarditis.
> Vaccines increase severe adverse events, even after taking into account the supposed COVID severity reduction:
I've never seen this paper, whose results seem to contradict the very Pfizer report you link above. It's also not peer reviewed, cites primarily the author's other work, and the author seems to have a history of misleading anti-vaccine work.
Anyway, I'm not working my way through the rest of these, given the poor quality of the first half of this comment. Ironically, given your mocking of my usage of the term "conspiracy theory," this comment is extremely indicative of some of the issues with most conspiracy theories. It's a textbook gish gallop, spamming lots of low-quality arguments and citing sources that are unreliable or don't actually support the claim being made. There's no worry about consistency, either--sources can contradict each other and that's apparently not a concern. You have this big long list which looks convincing at first glance, but applying the slightest bit of scrutiny causes it all to collapse. Very reminiscent of, for example, 2020 election conspiracy theories.
They aren't unusual. They are actually an expected side effect of the virus (and actually also of many other viruses). Just that with the virus they occur even more often and, on average, have a more severe outcome. It's not really surprising that a vaccine which replicates part of the virus also induces a minor version of its side effects. Most of those were only caught because we actively monitored for them. We didn't even know the true baseline for mild myocarditis infections in any cohort when the virus started, because >90% of them simply go away on their own without a few days. That's actually what makes you feel weak during virus infections. The vaccine actually behaves within reasonable bounds regarding that specific topic.
And no: people aren't noticing. Some people are simply lying. Unless millions of death certificates have been suppressed, and continue to be suppressed, since the vaccine became available, there is simply no real signal to notice.
I have no confidence that you know 1) how much myocarditis happens as a side effect of viral infection 2) that you know that the myocarditis induced by the vaccine is either less rare or milder than ‘regular’ virus induced myocarditis
True, I(!) don't know that. But countless studies on this very topic have shown that. I'm merely telling you that this is the case. You'll find countless evidence for my claim if you just type "myocarditis covid vs vaccine prevalence" into the search engine of your choice.
Example result by my own Google search just seconds ago: "The incidence of myocarditis was 2.76 (95% CI, 0.85-8.92) per 1000 among COVID-19-positive patients, 19.7 (95% CI, 12.3-31.6) per million among vaccinated patients, and 0.861 (95% CI, 0.0445-16.7) per million among control patients."
My very own search result, mentioned in the original ranking order:
https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/news/myocarditis-outcomes-and-incidence-after-covid19-mrna-vaccination/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9467278/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10216497/
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-poses-higher-risk-for-myocarditis-than-vaccines
https://bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000373
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2024/4470326
https://www.revespcardiol.org/en-myocarditis-related-sars-cov-2-infection-or-articulo-S1885585723000749
Again: don't trust me. Read a few studies on the topic. It's really not that hard in this day and age to access primary sources.
Not if the vaccine was just killing people who would have died of something else within a couple of months!
Although if the vaccine is shifting an appreciable fraction of deaths by a few months then we should see an increase in death rate in periods of high vaccination followed by a decrease in death rate a few months later.
However, we see the opposite - the period of high vaccination rates in early 2021 (peaking on April 2) appears to coincide with the period of lowest excess death rate (April 9) and remarkably similarly with the increased vaccination rate in October/November and the lull in deaths then.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-doses-per-capita?country=~USA
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
Obviously, this is heavily confounded by the decrease in death rates due to the decrease in COVID due to vaccination in early 2021, and the lull between the delta and omicron waves in the fall (which weirdly coincided with many more vaccine doses). But if someone wanted to claim that vaccine death rates were comparable to COVID death rates, then the signal should still be visible.
If that's the case, then why would anyone even care? The whole point of this vaccine fearmongering is that it's more dangerous for young people than covid is. This sounds like a desperate attempt to wrangle a "I'm not technically wrong!" while giving up all the meaningful claims. Classic motte and bailey.
But in any event, you'd still see patterns in the death rate, as Kenny pointed out, and as far as I can tell, this isn't even possible. The normal death rate is ~1% (or about 3 million people) per year. Official US covid deaths are over a million per year. There aren't 3x that many people "who would have died in a few months anyway" especially since some of those deaths are unrelated to covid or vaccine risk (accidents, violence, other diseases etc).
Some might consider it immoral to encourage people to do something that might rapidly trigger their death, without telling them the risks, even *if* it only robs them of a few months. (I'm not a believer, to be clear, but *if* it were the case that the COVID vaccine was significantly dangerous to the elderly, I think it would be a big deal ethically speaking.)
I don't think I made my point well. It's not that it's not immoral, but rather that as far as I can tell, it's irrelevant. COVID is significantly more dangerous for the elderly, too. As far as I can tell, this was the whole point of most of the "the vaccine is more dangerous" claims--young people have little to fear from the disease. The death rate from being vaccinated would have to be astronomical in this group support claims that the cure is worse than the disease.
This claim would only make sense if avoiding a COVID infection was a real option. However: this wasn't the case.
So comparing taking the vaccine vs not taking the vaccine is a false proposition. The real proposition was, and always has been: facing a COVID infection vaccinated or unvaccinated.
If the combined risk of vaccinating + facing a COVID infection while vaccinated is lower than the risk of facing a COVID infection unvaccinated, than the vaccine is a net win. The infection rate with COVID was very close to 100%. We can simply ignore the "get the vaccine and never get infected with COVID" case. It's simply an irrelevant option to explore because that rarely ever happened.
And this was indeed the case. Facing COVID unvaccinated was WAY more dangerous for all relevant age groups than doing so vaccinated. In no age group did the risk of the vaccination itself exceed the differential between both infection risks. So there simply wasn't a case where the vaccine did more harm than good on average.
This of course still doesn't help you for the individual case, where indeed the vaccine might harm you before you ever get infected. But considering how the vaccine works chances are pretty high that an individual which got harmed by the vaccine would have been harmed way more by the virus infection when facing it non-vaccinated. That last hypothetical can't really be tested scientifically. But just considering the mechanics, it's pretty likely IMO ...
Covid did exactly that and we could clearly see it in the excess death tracking each wave by roughly two weeks. Yet we have no such signal for vaccines ....
I'm skeptical of the official messaging on COVID but I have almost complete trust in death counts from liberal democracies, and I think I'm far from alone.
Death counts were affected by deliberate policies: 1) ramped up testing with a dubious PCR technique that found covid everywhere 2) the decision to call every death with covid a death from covid. Not only unreliable numbers but dishonest ones.
We're talking about excess deaths, not official Corona deaths.
Four years later, and you still didn't understand that we are talking about the total(!) number of deaths, when discussing excess death, not just corona deaths specifically? Really?
That's what happens when you are on an ideological mission instead of using reason to try to understand the world ...
Excess deaths aren't a government statistic - anyone can replicate the results (and many people have).
If you don't trust the excess death counts, well, what *do* you trust? Randos on Internet going "there's people dying left and right and it's the vaxx, trust me bro"?
"This implies that one trusts the official count of excess deaths; I would suspect that people skeptical of the official messaging on COVID might also distrust the death count figures."
Some of them do. And, yes, this implies a conspiracy by basically every city (or at least county) in the USA. As well as cooperation from most foreign countries.
I've run into this in on-line forums. No, I have no idea how to constructively engage them.
I'm certain there are people who are skeptical of the official count of excess deaths, because there are people who are skeptical of basically everything. But let's be clear: The "official count of excess deaths" is agnostic as to cause of death, and can't be fudged by having doctors or bureaucrats fudge the cause of death. It is literally just a count of how many dead bodies showed up this month, minus the number of dead bodies we would have predicted from a straightforward extrapolation of previous trends.
And basically every first-word country gives a reasonably honest accounting of dead bodies. Even third-world countries undergoing low-intensity wars usually get that right. Because if you *don't* get it right, then people start saying things like "You said Alice died last month, but I'm Alice and I'm not dead". Or "My husband Bob went in to the hospital and then they hauled a body bag out of his room and I haven't seen him since, but nobody will let me see the death certificate". Or "Hey, I notice you listed five hundred dead bodies last week and none of them have names, what gives with that?"
Excess mortality being agnostic as to cause of death means you can't use it for fine investigation of various causes of death. But if the claim is that a thing almost everyone did in ~2021 has a 10% mortality rate, that signal is going to show up loud and clear. Or 1%, and even a 0.1% mortality rate would be well above the noise floor in excess-mortality numbers.
TL, DR, excess mortality is a statistic that is basically never fudged because nobody can get away with fudging it. and it does put the upper bound on vaccine mortality at <0.1%
And <<0.1% if the claim is that the vaccine is killing healthy young people.
This is an incorrect understanding of what 'excess deaths' means. You absolutely can have excess deaths hiding in the statistics. Imagine a genie who knows everyone that will die in the next 6 months, and instead has them killed in the next 3 months. If nothing else is changed then excess deaths goes up by 100% for 3 months and then drops to -100% for the 3 months following that- ie zero deaths. You can't know 'excess deaths' after a mortality spike without knowing what % of that cohort would have died in the ensuing time frame, plus a bunch of other stuff. If Covid killed off the 1% sickest portion of the population from Nov 2020 to Jan 2021 then you would expect a much lower death rate than normal from February to April 2021- not a return to baseline, a return well under the baseline. Of course Covid could also weaken a large segment of the population as well putting them in the 'likely to die in the next 3 months' basket and keeping the death rate high, but you have to know the granular death data to come to this conclusion and current tracking of excess deaths doesn't do that.
Does anyone actually know this, though? I mean, lets just assume for the purpose of arguing that the official count of deaths in a place was wrong. How would you know this? How would you prove it if you suspected it? Who are you reading or checking with to confirm official counts are correct?
Ive seen several posters assert that death counts are (more) correct, or hard to fake, or variations on that theme, but no one even seems to question how they know that.
But they're going to be skeptical of literally anything that contradicts their preexisting narrative.
What data are you referring to that shows a sharp dip when then vaccines rollout? This doesn't seem to square with the data I have looked at which shows 2021 had a higher rate of excess deaths than either 2020 or 2022. https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000282
Sorry, sharp dip relative to what you'd expect from covid rates at the time. I don't have it offhand but there exist differential analysis e.g. between states with different vaccine uptake rates which demonstrate similar things.
I would be curious to see that, and to know how they calculated what the Covid rate was expected to be.
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I wrote a few posts looking for vaccine deaths in the excess deaths data:
https://medium.com/p/5ca1386e108c
https://medium.com/p/b614947af5ca
https://medium.com/p/97e1c40f5d74
That's not surprising to me. The vaccines took a long time to roll-out.
Here's a nice chart. The vaccine rollout in the US was at its maximum in the first few months of 2021, which corresponds to a dip in mortality:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/09/27/americas-pandemic-is-now-an-outlier-in-the-rich-world
You'll note that other first world countres had their dip a bit later and less evenly. Most people in Canada/EU weren't fully vaccinated until summer 2021. The US banned export of vaccine until after everyone in the US was vaccinated. Being in Canada, I remember this very well.
It's true that 2021 was a bad year for the US, but the peak came well after the rollout and during the delta wave. Delta killed off large numbers of unvaccinated people and was clearly geographically concentrated in the areas with least vaccination (ironically, the Mississippi Delta!).
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/03/03/the-changing-political-geography-of-covid-19-over-the-last-two-years/
That study seems to only look at excess deaths by year. If you look by week you can see the connection very strongly:
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-vaccination-doses-per-capita?country=~USA
Excess deaths go down quite a bit in the several weeks after vaccination rates go up. Excess deaths rise again during the delta and omicron waves.
The fact that mitigation measures in 2020 delayed most infections until the end of the year, while 2021 had major death events from the end of the 2020 wave as vaccination was starting, and again during the delta and omicron waves, while 2022 just had the omicron wave, explains why 2021 had the highest rate of excess deaths. They appear to line up with the virus waves, not the vaccine waves.
You could also look at death rates in places where they eradicated the virus, vaccinated the population, and then let the virus back in. I wouldn't trust Chinese statistics, but you could look at Western Australia where the virus was not present from June 2020 to December 2021 (by which time the vaccination rate was 95%). If the vaccine was dangerous you'd expect to see higher death rates in 2021 than 2022. This is not the case https://www.statista.com/statistics/610082/australia-death-rate-by-state/
From what I understand excess mortality still hasn't declined to pre-Covid levels.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps looks to me like it has (looking at 2024 & 2019)?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10168510/
That study stops at 2023, but it looks to me like mortality got back to normal in 2024.
Which country in specific are you talking about?
I'm looking at the aggregate on EuroMOMO, so it's a of a couple dozen countries aggregated. Individual countries seem too random to be worth looking much at.
Covid is still circulating. Instead of being pandemic, it's now endemic. Fortunately most folks have been vaccinated, and most of the rest have already had a case, so it's a much milder disease. Even so it can cause lasting effects. My sister still doesn't have her memory back to what it used to be.
NOTE!!: The vaccine cannot be relied upon to prevent COVID. What it can be relied upon is to reduce the severity. And immunity doesn't appear to be durable. I was quite fortunate, and got COVID about a month after being vaccinated. (I'm in a high risk group, so no surprise.) But it was a mild enough case that it only seriously inconvenienced me for a day or so. The isolation to avoid infecting others was more of a bother.
IIUC, there's a hypothesis that for a vaccine to really prevent COVID, it would need to create "mucosal immunity"...but I've less idea how that works than I have about normal immune mechanisms.
What I was thinking of was the number of people who put off check-up's out of fear of contracting Covid and consequently suffered from undiagnosed cancer, heart disease, etc.
You are uninformed. There’s quite a bit of data showing excess deaths tracking with the vaccine.
I don't see you linking to any of it.
So there are accounts like this guy who apparently use excess-death data and very-smart-statistics to prove that the vaccine is culling the herd, not covid.
https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1800730266253807652
I don’t understand the analyses at all and he presents it all very smugly and uses apparently advanced statistical methods (?) and is so self assured that it creates this valence of expertise.
Does anyone have any thoughts about accounts like this? Like are his statistical analyses legitimate or are they just so abstruse and overparameterized that you can’t even argue with them? I’m just curious about how plainly excess deaths can show that the vaccine is quite safe, but apparently there’s some (ab)use of statistics that shows the opposite?
hm, so the implicit claim based on that graph and labels is ... what? that COVID/vaccines leads to an accelerating excess death from this type of cancer?
and the other graphs show things like ... increased cancer rates.
so far "advanced statistics" is fitting an inflection point on a chart.
what they ought to do is try to show that this happens more where there was more vaccination, etc. (or at least explain why it's only happening in the US https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=chart&country=FRA~ESP~USA )
and when there's a study that actually does fancy stats, then it's dismissed with the spooky "they are lying to you" all caps. (though that study is a strictly looking at data from 1992-2018, and does nothing other than comparing generations.)
edit: Jun 20, okay, OurWorldInData uncritically uses the GBD dataset where the Total cancer series are uncomparable ... because the US series added around 2000 non-melanoma skin cancers, but series for other countries don't have that .. wwwwaaahh ...
https://i.imgur.com/mfkK6pY.png (from
https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-results?params=gbd-api-2021-permalink/f03e186f20aa8a45bbb50430a698395d requires login)
this is now much closer to what the strange twitter account is saying.
Kirsch's method of argument here is disappointing, he's clearly smart enough that he should know better. Sure, product design and electrical engineering are a bit different from statistical analysis, but if he ever had to scale up production of his products, he ought to have learned some stats. "Six Sigma" and other related process control disciplines were all the rage in Silicon Valley when he was making his fortune.
Perhaps a victim of the phenomenon where once you make a fortune, it's all too easy to surround yourself with sycophants who tell you you're right, and stop bothering to ever second-guess your biases and instincts.
Nah. He’s doing exactly what our esteemed author is - trying to objectively measure what is only a hypothesis. Steve K believes a non trivial number of people have been injured or killed by the vaccine. He has quite a lot of anecdotal support but nothing definitive. I don’t think either survey is useful, but it’s interesting that the counter survey also told its author what he suspected: vax hesitation is coded as right wing. News flash: people like to be confirmed in their beliefs. Science is supposed to be above that, but it obviously isn’t.
This proves too much. You either have to engage with the actual arguments or you're living in a world where you can't believe a thing because "news flash" everyone already believes something.
"Clearly smart enough that he should know better" isn't really a category that exists for the type of 'smart' that shows up on standardized tests and gets you into good engineering programs.
Abandoning belief in the existence of that category is critical to any effective attempt to better make sense of the world.
I don't precisely disagree, I think I'm just using "should know better" in a slightly different sense than how you're taking it. See my response to dionisos.
At some level I guess I am a bit of a "consequentialist chauvanist". I think the impact of your actions in the world is what truly matters, and so if you have the mental faculties to do good in the world, and instead you do bad (for whatever reason, including indulging self-flattering confirmation biases), that's a kind of moral failure. It doesn't necessarily make you "A Bad Person", or "Evil", but it does make you a _disappointment_. You're _at best_ a less-good person than you could be.
I think Alternate Steve Kirsch could be looking at some really simple statistics -- statistical concepts that I feel fairly certain he _is_ aware of -- to conclude that vaccines can't possibly be as bad as he had thought, and then not promoting theories that quite literally get people killed. He wouldn't even have to necessarily believe that everything is hunky dory, that there are no problems with Big Medicine pushing over-treatment or certifying things on a dubious basis. But just given how excess deaths moved, it can't be right that the COVID vaccine was worse than COVID. And at the margin, people with no vaccine-harm risk-factors refusing the vaccine statistically _has to_ result in more deaths.
The fact that Real Steve Kirsch would rather do what he's doing is Bad, Actually. Not, like, "lock him up" bad, but it's a way that the world is worse than it could be.
To be clear, I am a moral disappointment to myself in this regard, often, but, in the immortal words of Eleanor Shellstrop, Pobody's Nerfect! I hope at least that my peccadilloes get fewer people killed, compared to Kirsch.
In fact this raise another question.
Thinking about what you said, I thought this is mostly true, but we also have a limited amount of concentrations, and we will always do some simple mistakes even on important subjects. Being more cautious on the important subjects will help, but we will still have some blind spots on things which seems too obvious at first glance to make us think of checking them.
But this should be mostly fixed with debates, surely someone should have already brought this kind of stuffs to his attention, so what is going on ? I mostly see three possibles explanations :
1) People did, but it was drowned in too much information so he missed it.
2) People did, but they did a bad job at explaining it.
3) He saw there was a problem, but he just dishonestly refused to see it.
There are probably other possibilities, and we can't do much about 3), but if it is 1) or 2), I think it is another example that show a general problem about how we debate and share information : We are talking and consuming it a lot, but some simple and important information didn't get to who would need it.
Yes, and you're somewhat gesturing back towards my (not particularly fleshed out) speculation that part of the problem may be that Kirsch has surrounded himself with yes-men. It is all too easy for a rich person to listen to flatterers, rather than those who have their true best interests at heart and are willing to tell them uncomfortable truths. It's like an externalized version of the internal narrative of confirmation bias.
You can be smart and quite irrational, and you can have some knowledge about a general subject, but only use this knowledge in the restricted domain you learned to use it (or even not use it at all).
Oh, totally. As I recall there's specifically some evidence that it's harder to dissuade a high-IQ / skilled-at-logic person from a false belief, because they simultaneously (a) have a greater variety of background and subject-relevant knowledge available to sift through, (b) are good at assembling arguments, including self-persuading / sense-of-self-preserving arguments, and yet (c) oblivious to the fact that this is what they're doing. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug!
That doesn't make it any less disappointing to see in action.
Yes you are right, this is quite disappointing.
(And nothing you said was in contradiction with what I said, but sometimes I fear people don't realize this difference)
Of course people who read ACT and take part in surveys are a-typical non-representative sample, and of course correcting for right-wingness does not help - right-wingers who read ACT and even Trump-supporters who read ACT are also not representative of a general population right-winger and Trump-supporter. Though Trump bump should have provided some clue as to what's going on here. Of course, the question is just a proxy for "do you think (COVID) vaccines can be dangerous?" and most ACT readers a-priori wouldn't. And of course most of the cases would be elderly people that were on the death's door anyway, or morbidly obese people, or otherwise unhealthy people - which is also a major cohort in COVID-attributed deaths. But I think pretending that there's only single right-left parameter that can define one's political views I think makes a big disservice here.
We’re in a weird time when the political categories are shifting. The so called right wing has more anti authoritarian, anti war people in it now than the left, which spends most of its time supporting an obviously corrupt regime- perhaps hoping that they can somehow grab the power to make the socialist utopia happen.
Bruh, Trump attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in a coup attempt. You aren't "anti-authoritarian," you're deluded. That's why you think the Left supports Biden (who is "obviously corrupt" inside your bubble) so they can make the socialist utopia happen, when in fact actual socialists (and even progressives) are largely holding their nose on voting for Biden because they don't want your putschist convicted felon back in office.
Since we're on the overall topic of replication, this kind of thing is currently happening in other Western polities, as well.
The left (and moderate right, which anywhere else would be the label assigned to the majority of American Democrats) is in defence mode against the far right, whose anti-immigration positions are alluring these days even to centrist voters. The idea that the left actually likes each of Biden, Macron, Starmer, VDL, possibly even Merz, makes far less sense than the left being forced into trying to build a firewall against MAGA, RN, AfD, ID, and the rest. Both on the tactical-voting and coalition-building levels.
"and moderate right, which anywhere else would be the label assigned to the majority of American Democrats"
Can we please, please stop with this crap? This has been demolished dozens of times at least (here's one comprehensive instance https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/hjsk2l/the_democratic_party_being_center_right_in_europe/). The average Democrat is to the right of the average western leftist on health care, welfare spending and maybe criminal sentencing, to the left of the average western leftist on immigration, trans issues and maybe affirmative action, and in line with the average western leftist on most other issues.
This kind of attempt to falsely shift the Overton Window and to *define* into acceptability your positions instead of arguing for them on their merits...by trying to trick people into redefining left as centre, or even as right FFS...is one of *the* most dishonest tactics around.
I also thought Democrat was more right than the average western leftist, and it seems more complex than that.
But this wasn't a rhetorical tactic, nor a trick. Sometime people can just be wrong, not everything has to be some kind of rhetorical trick.
Well sure, but in my experience this particular phrasing (Democrats would be *on the right* in Europe) is almost invariably used by people on the left (whereas a conservatives or a neutral description is usually that "Europe is to the left of the US", or "the European left-wing parties are to the left of the Democrats", to express the same mistaken idea) and has either the implicit or very often explicit purpose of shutting down criticism of leftist policies (universal health care being the most common example, though it's also used unbelievably for abortion laws*) without actually having to engage with their merits. This would be bad enough even if the claim wasn't also false.
Also, phrases like "anywhere else" in the parent comment, to mean "a handful of countries in Western Europe" (which is still false) are such obvious hyperbole that it's hard to see it in good-faith. (Unless someone has an honest belief that Russia, Serbia, Japan etc are to the left of the US...)
*note that less than 2 years ago, the entire US had more liberal abortion laws than pretty much any other western country
First, what happened on Jan 6 was not a coup attempt. Not a single rioter had a firearm, and even the fbi said they found no evidence of a conspiracy to overturn the election. Second, even IF it was a coup attempt, what did Trump do? Didn't he say during his speech on Jan 6 to "to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
I'm not supporting what happened on Jan 6, but to call it a 'coup attempt' or an 'insurrection' is hyperbolic at best.
It was a coup attempt. I know that the right says "ah, but actually, it was just a riot, and he said "peaceful" one time," but there's a reason why the people there were saying to "hang Mike Pence": because Trump told them that Mike Pence could "stop the steal," i.e. prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the lawfully elected opposition. There was an elaborate (false, pernicious) legal theory created to justify this coup attempt: that the VP could throw out the electoral votes of seven states, on the paper-thin justification of "we created alternate slates of electors for seven states (that got absolutely nowhere)." Even the coup plotters themselves, like John Eastman, said that their legal theory was hogwash ("I put the odds at winning in either D.D.C. or CADC closer to zero, and the risk of getting a court ruling that Pence has no authority to reject the Biden-certified ballots very high"). When Mike Pence failed to follow this stupid bullshit, Trump attempted to pressure him with the riot/mob.
I went into this in depth here, using just public statements/emails of the individuals to show the plan and intent: https://2cradle2grave.substack.com/p/january-6-was-a-coup-attempt
It's the classic "if we like them, they're freedom fighters, and if not, they're terrorists" schtick, except applied to riots as either "mostly-peaceful protests vs. insurrections."
No, if all that had happened on Jan 6 was a mob did stupid mob shit, it would be stupid mob shit. It's a coup attempt because Trump was trying to make Pence throw out the electoral votes of seven states in order to steal the election for himself. Not everyone is a naked hypocrite like Trump.
I don't believe that's true. From my understanding of his plans, Pence would still have counted a slate of electors from each state.
And no, but the ones who aren't tend not to win elections.
Do you believe authoritarianism pertains to how much individual rights are infringed upon or to the ceremonies through which the people nominally in charge of said oppression are anointed?
I believe that authoritarianism is when no democracy. When you do a coup to remove the lawfully elected government, that means no democracy.
If you believe "lawfully elected" governments cannot be authoritarian, that is certainly not the sense in which people who call the right "anti authoritarian" use the term.
(And if your use of the term "war" is similarly … idiosyncratic, perhaps to exclude military actions in service of causes you consider righteous, that's not the sense in which they use it either.)
Nobody who attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government on the basis of "I lost" is anti-authoritarian. Sorry.
I think he is right, authoritarianism pertains to how much individual rights are infringed (more than having a lawful election), and saying there was a coup attempt is at least questionable, it didn't seem like they had anyway to take any power from what they did.
Trump, and the right, are still much more authoritarian than the left.
> I think he is right, authoritarianism pertains to how much individual rights are infringed (more than having a lawful election),
If a country is not democratic, it is authoritarian. It can also be authoritarian for other reasons, theoretically, but democracies are better than all other systems at not being authoritarian in the other ways. We also generally do not consider an election done in the context of authoritarian regimes "democratic," even if votes are counted 1 for 1 with secret ballots, since the regime has previously done things like imprison opposition, shut down opposition media, etc, and thus the voters don't have proper access to important information.
> there was a coup attempt is at least questionable, it didn't seem like they had anyway to take any power from what they did.
The plan was to get Mike Pence to throw out the electoral votes of seven states, making Trump have more EVs than Biden and causing the election to be sent to the House delegations, which were majority Republican and thus would side with Trump, and then hopefully have the SCOTUS side with them and declare it all legal post facto in a landslide 5-4 decision. If this had actually happened, it would have been a coup, since this is obviously not how the President is supposed to be selected. Ergo, coup attempt.
I do think that injections of insufficiently-tested stuff can be dangerous, and the now mainstream rhetoric about it being an obvious mistake not to have the vaccines approved, if not mandated, on the day it's technically feasible to mass-produce them seems insane to me. But, now that a few years have passed, to think that they're anywhere as dangerous as having COVID itself requires believing in truly vast conspiracies that ruling classes of the whole world unanimously engage in, while bitterly hating each other in most other ways.
Analogous lines of argument are also reliable indicators of various other bogus conspiracies. Like, if the US had faked the Moon landing, that would've been an easy propaganda coup for the Soviets, who wouldn't have shut up about that for decades, and yet for some reason they kept quiet.
Correctly estimating the vaccine effect on mortality is not trivial due to several strong confounders, such as "healthy vaccine bias" (see, for example, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38401782/).
Order of magnitude effects are not difficult to determine. And the case of Western Australia was also mentioned earlier.
> if the US had faked the Moon landing, that would've been an easy propaganda coup for the Soviets
I feel this argument is rather weak. Revealing MKUltra or Tuskegee Experiment would be a huge propaganda coup for the Soviets, yet they didn't reveal them. I mean, I am not here to argue the moon landing is fake, I am just saying "if it were fake, Soviets would know and reveal it" does not cut it. Soviets aren't all-powered all-knowing demigods, and they didn't know a lot of the shady stuff that was going on.
Sure, they didn't know everything, but I don't think those two things would've been particularly big coups. "Americans are racist hypocrites and the CIA is gratuitously evil" were already successful propaganda staples with plenty of evidence.
Of course vaccines can be dangerous! That's not the right way to frame the sentence.
The actual question should be "Were any of the COVID vaccines very dangerous, and if so to what population?". I feel the answer is "No, they weren't.", but at least when phrased that way it is possible to get reasonable and useful evidence.
(Weekly population death rates is one source that's pretty reliable, but it only handles one level of danger. There could well be others. E.g. an earlier post suggested that the occasional heart inflammation was due to the interaction of a protein injected with the vaccine and a dormant prior infection.)
> Of course vaccines can be dangerous!
I don't think this is "of course". Couple of years ago this statement alone would get you banned on all major social networks and proclaimed "conspiracy theorist".
> Were any of the COVID vaccines very dangerous, and if so to what population?
And this wasn't a question also. Upon hearing such statements you were supposed to start chanting "safe and effective!" aloud until the heretic goes away. The fact that now it is considered as a real question (whatever the ultimate answer turns out to be) is a result of long, arduous and risky struggle by the "conspiracy theorists" and "pseudoscientists". But on the way to there the question became so politicized that only a very small number of people now actually is interested in per-se answer of it, and not in the question as to which group would you be attached to if you answer one way or another.
Anything you inject can be dangerous. If nothing else, there can be contamination. Don't be excessively silly. Your second point makes me wonder what sites you were frequenting. (OTOH, I don't frequent many social media sites, so I can't really claim you are wrong.)
Again, I don't think this "don't be silly" attitude is earned. It's easy to say it now, when the discussion of vaccine downsides is finally permitted, but when we were in the middle of the panic, pretty much any statement discussing such dangers - such as reminding that we are dealing with new medical technologies and there's always certain danger associated with it, on top of usual well known iatrogenic dangers - was thoroughly suppressed and people persisting at it were shunned, deplatformed and pronounced crazy at best, and murderers and public enemies at worst. So I don't think this attitude of "don't be silly, nobody denies those things and there's no need to push back about anything like that" reflects anything resembling the actual situation.
Your question and Kirsch’s are worded differently enough that I wonder if people aren’t extending “personally know” in Kirsch’s survey a little further than “immediate family” from here. “I personally know [insert celebrity that everybody shouted VAXXED about when they died].”
I agree. For a less-stretched example, take my friend's relative who, I heard, died from COVID. I've never met her, but do I "personally know" her? Well, if I wanted to make a point that deaths like hers happen... I know of her through a personal connection (my friend), so I could easily imagine saying that I "personally know" her.
Or to put it another way, some people might interpret "personally know" as meaning "personally know about", in which case they could answer Yes even if they weren't acquainted with the individual in question.
[Without in any way supporting the idea that vaccines kill more people than covid] Whatever has an effect, and the vaccines clearly do, can have side effects, and here is a plausible mechanism: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38867495/ This error mechanism would be nice to understand better, if only because mRNA vaccines are obviously here to stay.
Amy new mRNA vaccines should be subject to the old, rigorous standard of testing that took years to complete.
With most old vaccines it was normal after initial fairly modest safety trials to roll them and and then observe the population.
There are occasionally bad side effects. Like there was a flu vaccine that caused permanent narcolepsy in about 1 in 50K people. It was also how we learned that the natural flu could also cause permanent narcolepsy.
I thought mandated vaccine safety testing happened after a single very disastrous example like most regulations?
No, that's insane when a pandemic is killing far larger numbers of people. The FDA's standard of testing has been deadly for a long time.
What pandemic is the world facing at this time?
There are lots of things that kill people other than pandemics. Frequent ACX commenter Jake Seliger can tell you about that.
What specific illness would you like to see addressed with a vaccine developed on an abbreviated schedule.
I want the FDA out of the business of telling me whether I can take medication or not. It was created to inspect factories to ensure there were tainted ingredients being consumed, but then their role expanded to requiring hugely expensive trials for medicine, thus creating what Alex Tabbarok calls the "invisible graveyard". https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/the-invisible-graveyard-is-invisible-no-more.html
I'm not that guy, but I'll actually answer your question: Malaria would be a great boon. It's rather easy and cheap to demonstrate that your vaccine is less deadly than being unvaccinated near malaria reservoirs, compared to most vaccine targets. You can even limit deployment to areas with high malarial threat to minimize the impact of any undetected issues with the vaccine.
Do you actually know what changes there were in the protocol? As I understand it, one of the biggest speed ups was just waiting for 100 cases in the trial group before unblinding to see what fraction of those had the vaccine. If you’re testing a vaccine for shingles or mumps or covid, you need to wait for 100 cases to occur, and covid cases were just happening so much faster during late 2020 than almost any disease at almost any other time, so that step was just a few weeks rather than the year or more it might take for other diseases.
I suspect another speed up involved allowing more participants in the phase III trial, which sped up reaching 100 cases as well.
The other speed-up was not having a long pause between each developmental phase in order to apply for a grant to continue the testing.
Typical vaccine testing can easily take a decade or more. I think it's debatable whether risks like the myocarditis seen in certain cohorts would have been discovered with a more normal testing period.
How are those tests structured? Presumably the way you test for rare side effects like myocarditis involves approving larger test cohorts in the initial trials. I don't believe they usually think there is any benefit in waiting multiple years from injection, since vaccines are a pharmaceutical that people typically get once, or only occasionally, and thus basically all side effects occur within a few months. (That contrasts with things like diabetes or cholesterol medications, which are often taken continuously for years, and thus often have long-term side effects.)
"...thus basically all side effects occur within a few months."
How exactly do you know this?
I recall having seen this discussed in studies of past vaccines. I think narcolepsy from the swine flu vaccine and the perverse worsening of some dengue cases are the few that I’m aware of that showed up a few months later. I don’t have a standard reference to cite on the lack of longer term effects from vaccines, but if you know of any contrary claims I’d be interested to see.
Nice! Nice? FFS. The scientific community should be on this stat. But no, Trumpy people are ick so let’s not ask any questions.
Why are you so confident that this isn't being investigated?
That's not science, that's post hoc fallacy.
Yes, there are lots of people "doing the science", no one is trying to avoid anything.
It is. But not by so-called mainstream science. Correct me if I’m wrong.
The study he linked is mainstream science (published just this month) - they are studying it. They also cite 53 other studies, many of which have been done in the last couple of years.
It's hard to take Kirsch seriously when he makes arguments like this. He also got hilariously blown out in a debate with a doctor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1nF2YAn9DQ
I was about to link this same video. It's a shame Steve never payed Dr Avi the $10,000 he promised to anyone who could beat him in a debate.
Have to second that Kirsch gets absolutely bodied here and if that's your kink this debate is highly recommended.
I only watched a few minutes before closing it because Avi could not possibly be any more annoying. While I have no doubt that he is in the right, his rhetorical approach seems optimized for obscuring the truth rather than revealing it. If you want to win a debate you have to *let your opponent speak* long enough for them to say something wrong, rather than interrupting them incessantly.
(My understanding from elsewhere is that Kirsch is no stranger to such strategies, so maybe he "deserves" it in some karmic sense, but that doesn't make it good for Avi to do such things when he has the actual truth on his side.)
Say your opponent has a conclusive (but complicated) argument in favour of his preposition, and you don't have a substantial counter. Then your best response (rethorically) is to throw up random distractions and use those to sabotage your interlocutor's ability to make his point. Avi's rhetorical approach is to prevent Kirsch from deploying that tactic.
yes locking down the conversation prevents Kirsch from using that tactic, but it also prevents him saying anything meaningful either, so it prevents any actual debate from happening. You can't win a debate that doesn't happen.
If your opponent is employing bad rhetoric the appropriate solution is either to have a moderator / adjudicator intervene, or (sans moderator) refuse to engage with the bad rhetoric and rely on the audience being able to understand who is trying to actually engage intellectually.
When I first read 1984, I always thought the concept of doublethink was intentionally heavy handed and overt to get the point across. But the covid vaccines sure proved me wrong. I remember when Governor Cuomo was talking about refusing the "Trump" vaccine for NY. And Trump was always bragging about how great Warpspeed was. Then everything shifted when the Trumpists were out of power and suddenly the leftists wanted everyone to get vaccinated or else. Such that a few years after the Trump presidency, Trump supporters are far more likely to think the vaccine kills people. Honestly it's a really depressing window into how most people interact with politics. When Herbert was writing Dune, he should have made the mantra be 'Tribalism is the mind-killer'.
Huh, by any chance, have you read https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18abtm7/a_common_claim_is_that_early_leftwing_and/ (title: "A common claim is that early leftwing and rightwing commentary on Coronavirus was reversed, with the left arguing for less caution and the right for more, especially around travel restriction- does anyone have any documentary evidence of this?")? Seems to be talking about the exact same thing, except for the start of the pandemic instead of the vaccine. The top comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18abtm7/comment/kbx51bq/) has a bunch of examples, but the other comments have more too (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18abtm7/comment/kbxk16u/ & https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18abtm7/comment/kbx2sgi/). There are also some discussions of the reversal around vaccines: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18abtm7/comment/kbyid1h/
> I remember when Governor Cuomo was talking about refusing the "Trump" vaccine for NY. And Trump was always bragging about how great Warpspeed was. Then everything shifted when the Trumpists were out of power and suddenly the leftists wanted everyone to get vaccinated or else. Such that a few years after the Trump presidency, Trump supporters are far more likely to think the vaccine kills people.
The Democratic politicians (it wasn't just Cuomo) trying to sow fear of the vaccine can be easily explained by politics.
The Trump supporters developing fear of the vaccine can't; note that Trump himself never changed his opinion, and his supporters hated that.
Trump supporters _in general_ were not anti-vaxx, but most anti-vaxxers in the US were pro-Trump.
OK. Do you think their anti-vaxx beliefs were influenced by political considerations? How so?
People who say masks have zero effect are often saying "I think this is more effective than saying masks shouldn't be mandated" (without specifically knowing they took that step)
Similarly "if I say CO2 warming doesn't exist then I don't even have to think about whether solutions are cost effective" or "vaccines don't work and are actually bad so the only reason to mandate them is conspiracy"
Path of least internal calculation resistance
This has not been true in any election where Trump was actually a candidate. Anti-vaccination is historically a left-wing belief, with a few religious separatist types thrown in there who aren't politically relevant. On the eve of the 2020 election, if the approval of the vaccine had been announced, Trump may well have won the thing (maybe not, so much early voting), and all of his voters would have been cheering it. If you poll people about vaccination attitudes today, it's very likely that because of in-group signaling yada yada yada, the left is more pro-vaccination and the right less so compared to 10 years ago, but it's yet to be relevant to an election -- by 2022, the Dems were running away from all the mandates and unpopular NPIs they'd championed, and Trump wasn't on the ballot, and now that Trump IS on the 2024 ballot it won't be discussed again because it makes Trump look good to moderates and bad to a fringe of his own base.
Heck, in 10 years this might all revert to the old norm, and it'll be aging hippies ranting about Big Pharma instead of Daily Wire subscribers doing so.
> This has not been true in any election where Trump was actually a candidate. Anti-vaccination is historically a left-wing belief
I don't think this is true. I half-remembered a conversation on this point (pre-covid) where someone I generally trust argues that the association of anti-vax sentiment was a myth. They basically argued that because the left wing anti-vaxxers were typically more high profile you mostly heard about them. It's hard to google this now because everything is about COVID vaccines specifically but I did find this from 2017 which backs up my point https://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-follow-the-usual-political-polarization-81001.
The tl;dr; is that (as of 2017) the feeling that vaccines were "unsafe" was pretty similar among left and right and was generally correlated with how extreme you were in either direction (moderates on both left and right were more likely to say that vaccines were safe). For somewhat predictable ideological reasons it was conservatives who were more likely to take issue with vaccine mandates though. The article also mentions some conflicting findings (per usual) but I think prior to COVID vaccine-skepticism wasn't nearly as polarized as it is now.
Interesting link. I find some things in there make sense, if antipathy to vaccination was a fringe view on both sides then you'd expect to see it more on the left as we did, since there are plenty of fringe-left people in high visibility entertainment careers. The equivalent fringe-right people (on that issue) are otherwise normal nobodies who never discuss their beliefs outside their families or rural churches where the same 12 people attend every week, and often home school so even the locals don't know them well. Also that "role of government" overrides what you'd otherwise think of as a common liberal/conservative split -- being pro-government and the managerial-expert class overrides liberals' bodily autonomy value, while being anti-government and in favor of family privacy above state interference overrides the once-popular theory that conservatives had a higher disgust response to disease and unclean people.
But I still think that culturally it was strongly left-coded, because those were the famous people championing it.
It's an interesting phenomenon how these things shift over the decades. JFK murder conspiracies used to be entirely a left-wing fringe obsession, though perhaps that too was mostly a feature of prominent lefties being the loudest voices. The other end of that horseshoe was in libertarianism, though not really the libertarians who you'd have viewed as right-aligned. Yet now I'm seeing almost-kinda-edge-of-normal-MAGA types leaping at the chance to exonerate a Communist assassin who loved Castro and tried to kill a prominent Bircher. Presumably out of the same broad anti-authority bias that helped the belief spread for years on the left, and drives the vaccine discourse post-covid.
Mandated vaccination *should* be a right-wing-in-the-US agenda, because the right is theoretically against the government telling us what to do. I'm not sure why it would be a left-wing agenda item. Perhaps some anti-corporate agenda, but the corporations can't mandate vaccination.
What do you mean? They can and did mandate vaccination. In fact, the Biden government mandated that they mandate vaccination.
I think you're using an overly narrow definition of "politics" here. Trump was accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, doing all kinds of skulduggery, they're bad and they're your enemies, and soon after that the Democratic party line becomes that you have to get the vaccine and if you don't you should be fired from your job and banned from public spaces. Is it not "political" when a bunch of people who think one political party is their enemy decide that anything that party wants must be bad?
> Is it not "political" when a bunch of people who think one political party is their enemy decide that anything that party wants must be bad?
But nobody's made that decision. Here's an element of the current Democratic party platform:
> Democrats will upgrade our nation’s ports, lock and dam systems, and freight infrastructure to accommodate 21st century cargo, reduce air and water pollution, and create and maintain high-quality, good-paying jobs.
Let me know when you find the protest group who say that these are not just poorly thought out, but actually negative goals, that other things equal we should be looking to ensure that our ports can't handle modern cargo and to increase the amount of pollution we're putting out.
Antivaxx sentiment is not driven by political concerns. It's an expression of what people wanted to believe anyway.
Right. You don't need some grand political theory to explain people seeing 80% elevated mortality rates among young people, kids suddenly dropping dead playing sports, higher all-cause mortality in the Pfizer study's vaccine group than the placebo group (and this study being the basis for the vaccine's emergency approval), the vaccine being developed and tested for a ~10x shorter period than a typical vaccine - and deciding that maybe they should opt out of this one.
The real question then is why Democrats saw all of this and *weren't* disturbed enough to resist the mandates. Of course it has to do with their fundamental desire to control and to be controlled - to lick the boots of the state.
Correct - this disconfirms the tribalism theory, to the credit of Trump supporters. While Democrats first opposed the vaccine but then embraced it (especially mandating it) based solely on their tribal affiliation with those taking credit for it, Trump supporters opposed it (especially mandating it) the entire time, indicating genuine belief rather than tribal brainrot.
It doesn't seem inconsistent with tribalism. As you say, many people were anti-vaccine before 2020. If the overwhelming majority of those people are on the right, that still seems consistent with tribalism. Political tensions between the left and the right didn't start in 2020.
Also, just as it's overly simplistic to say that everyone in the American right opposed vaccines the whole time, it's overly simplistic to say that everyone in the American left was anti-vaccine and then supported it. Lots of people, including the leadership of NIAID and CDC, were pro-vaccine the whole time.
Tribalism doesn't explain why Trump can be very pro-vaccine while his supporters are (more elevated, not totally) against them. They begrudgingly accept that Trump got the vaccines out and is supportive of them.
I do agree that the left is a lot more nuanced than "anti, then pro" in regards to the vaccines. It was obviously very political in 2020 when Cuomo and others said the vaccines were unsafe, and we can discount that being their true feelings. I do feel justified in being upset with Democratic supporters not calling him and others out on that at the time.
You say 'most people', but only a small minority in either party are actually swayed by these things in any meaningful way. The talking heads and career politicians on either side are more likely to take sides because that's their job description, and the algorithms are more likely to promote the craziest takes to prominence because that drives engagement, but the average actual person isn't quite so flighty.
No it’s the (entirely human) desire to trust authority that’s the mind killer. It’s every bit as evident on the left as the right.
The desire to trust authority is actually the way most people get most of their true beliefs about the world. How do you know Moscow is the capital of Russia? Have you ever visited and seen the legislature meeting? Or did you just trust some book or tv that told you?
That's not exactly what double-think is. Double-think isn't switching beliefs based on political affiliation, but believing two contradictory things to be true at the same time. More like believing both that COVID is a hoax and also that the government is covering up COVID deaths.
Yet I do see lots of double-think around political subjects, and more as time goes on.
That's true, the different vaccine beliefs were not held simultaneously but switched when the tribal affiliation of those in power switched. But nothing actually changed in reality. The vaccine was still developed by the same companies on the same expedited timeline from Warp Speed. It went from anti-establishment Trump's vaccine to the Establishment vaccine, but it was always the same vaccine. Maybe there is some pithy term for this other than doublethink.
I've looked, but I can't find one, and Gemini is apparently afraid to answer. It seems somewhat similar to argument from authority.
But it does apply to individuals that don't think, that's for sure. The vaccine is one example, but a Mexican border wall seems to be another now. It seems almost any issue can go that way, if one has the right (wrong) frame of mind.
IIRC, the government "warp speed" program was not involved in the first COVID vaccine. The company said the paperwork would have slowed them down.
You can cherry pick comments to tell a narrative but Ds were more pro-vax than Rs well before the 2020 election. At the time Cuomo made his comments (which were much milder than "refusing" the vaccine) Democrats were already 14 points more pro-vax than Republicans (https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/17/u-s-public-now-divided-over-whether-to-get-covid-19-vaccine/). There was no switch between the parties, there was just polarization where Ds became even more pro-vax and Rs became more anti, as happens for almost every subject that becomes politicized in the US.
Personally, I had been associating "anti-vax" with the left wing, prior to covid. Homeopaths, alternative medicine, organic vegan purists, etc.
Yes. Ten years ago Democrats and Republican were about equally likely to be anti-vax and prominent anti-vaxxers were mostly from the left. But I think it's education polarization not Covid as such that changed things. These days Rs are more likely to believe even 9/11 conspiracy theories, which used to be even more left associated than anti-vax.
Well, FWIW I believe the government lied about prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack. IIUC the FBI was warned by a local agent AND the US govt (who?) was warned by a German intelligence agency. This doesn't mean they knew specifically what was in the works, but they knew SOMETHING was. That they had the emergency legislation before congress the next day isn't, however, proof, as they always have secret legislation awaiting an opportunity to be pushed.
OTOH, it was a clear warning that the government lies when it's convenient. This has been shown repeatedly since that time. (Probably earlier if I had been paying attention.)
It's easy to know SOMETHING is in the works, it's hard to know enough details to be able to do something about it.
Also I suspect "the government lies when it's convenient" is a worse explanation than "individuals, including in the government, will lie when needed to protect their reputations and careers".
It's definitely true that "the government" isn't a unitary entity, and a finer grained explanation is better...if you have it. But to know which particular individual or agency within the government espoused some particular statement requires a lot more attention that a more global rule. Occasionally there are certain people within the government that I will trust to be honest (or to lie) about some particular subject. Usually I haven't been paying enough attention to be that specific.
I think homeopathy, alternative medicine, and organic food were never as left wing as we had assumed.
I think a better question would be "which antivaxx"? Hippies are still hippies and think nature is perfect, the antivaxx im hearing now is libertarian, governments sux, mandate people wear seat belts bad, personal nuance beats blind centeral planning, force creates moral harzard, etc.
Having new evidence sometimes changes people's opinions. Yes, I know it's surprising.
Typo thread
"But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump from." From what?
No, you didn’t understand the article at all, sorry. At worst it is very occasionally pushing the frail over the edge, not at best as you say. And that doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with the vaccine either. It just means that the especially frail shouldn’t receive it unless there is a very strong reason. And your comment about genocide is just wacko.
How immature of you, I hope you were not trying to impress anyone with that.
The following is a logical and conditional statement, try to parse it like an adult would.
"_If_ that vulnerability is in any way _genetically determined_ that makes the deaths a _form of genocide_."
I’m sorry, but that is still an insane thing to think. That’s not what genocide means at all and no one would claim what you claimed unless their political beliefs were preventing them from thinking clearly. Have a good night.
The word gene takes its root in the ancient Greek, where génos (γένος) means the race, which comes from the word gignomai (γίγνομαι), which means to engender, to become.
Therefore my use of the word genocide may be novel (the context has never occurred before) it is entirely an appropriate use of the word given its roots.
My advice to you would be that you worry about you, I'll manage my own sanity on my own, thanks.
The person you're responding to is right and you're not.
The person you're responding to is right and you're not!!!!
You can do better, defend your opinion rather than just sharing it.
Genocide, like all other "-cides" requires intent. It means to kill people with the intent of wiping out their race or people group. Unless you think vaccine makers intended to kill everyone with a particular genome, it still ain't genocide. At worst it's genomanslaughter.
The genetic link was speculated early on in the mRNA rollout (as most medical conditions have a genetic contribution and this is not a controversial point of view), so by your logic (which I do not support but can work with) the genocide commenced at that point and is ongoing. Even before that point I'd still call it negligent homicide with a genocidal impact.
(Technically no? In the Anglo system, "homicide" is the intent-less term; "murder" requires intent.)
"Therefore my use of the word genocide may be novel (the context has never occurred before) it is entirely an appropriate use of the word given its roots.”
Oy. That’s not how it works.
You can’t use a -private- personal definition to make an “argument”. People are using the standard (referenceable) not some meaning only you know about. It's secret goalpost moving.
Banned for making weird inflammatory claim with no evidence, plus a side of weird philosophical confusion.
Hyperbole deserves hyperbole I guess
Note that Pollfish is a DIY online survey platform, not any kind of pollster.
Even if it were reputable, I don't see how polling could be regarded as acceptable methodology for investigating any claims about the actual safety of vaccines. Kirsch's headline making a factual claim about death rates is unsupportable by polling. At best, polling could give us information about societal perceptions regarding vaccine risks.
I'm disappointed with Scott for trying to counter this with better polls. Kirsch needs to be countered with controlled trials, not polls of differently biased audiences.
"But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump from."
Typo here.
"ACX readers are only a little further left than the general population"
Huh? Less than 10% identify as conservative, 88% disapprove of Trump, more than 70% are pro-abortion, and the average left-right numerical score is also substantially to the left of centre. In what sense is this at all true?
The numerical score is about 4.5 on a 1 - 10 scale.
And what's the self-described numerical score for the general population? (I don't think we can assume it's 5.5 unless I'm missing something.)
There is nothing quite as meaningless as the right / left axis.
There are many things more meaningless.
The gostak distimms the doshes.
That actually does have a partial meaning in the context of the story in which it occurs, but it has LESS meaning (intentionally) that a left-right axis score. (The title of the story is "The Gostak and the Doshes" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34117125-the-gostak-and-the-doshes ) The date of publication is significant.
Also, although this isn't a claim that your statement is wrong just that I don't think it means much: a hypothetical US with 70% self-identifying as 3 (clear progressive) and 30% as 8 (clear conservative) gives an average score of 4.5, and also gives a 70% Biden landslide, which seems like it shouldn't be described as "only a little further left" than the real one.
(Unless I've calculated incorrectly...)
This matches my intuition from reading comments, too.
I describe this blog to others as a liberal blog with (mostly) intelligent conversation.
I tend to agree. But it's less obsessed with ideological purity than most places, and even has a contrarian streak, so we do get a fair number of non-witches from the non-(local-center) areas.
But I think 538 has Trump at a -14 favorable/unfavorable percentage points, and your poll has him at a -88 percentage points. I Rasmussen matches 538 at all, these are COMPLETELY different populations being polled.
I wonder what you'd hear if you asked for the stories of everyone whose family members died of COVID. We know the demographics of COVID deaths - overwhelmingly elderly - could a person with the opposite priors as you dismiss them in the same way? "COVID overwhelmingly 'killed' elderly people with many prior conditions. I interpret the results of the survey to be consistent with a null hypothesis of 'COVID doesn't increase deaths'..."
I'm not saying I would support such an inference. Nor that I believe Kirsch's point in general; I don't. I just want to say: only scrutinizing the stories on one side leaves you without a control, and that seems like very poor practice.
That was indeed a common criticism of Covid death counts at the height of the pandemic. Some countries (I remember Belgium often being mentioned here) would pad their numbers by counting anybody who died with Covid in their blood as having died of Covid, even if they also had other health conditions which could have plausibly been sufficient to explain their death. I remember a story of this happening even to car accident victims but that may have been an urban myth.
Various ways to count, from main cause of death on the death certificate, to mentioned on DC, to within X days of positive test to -- probably the only remotely comparable between countries, and even that will exclude countries that have unreliable death/birth records -- "excess deaths" numbers. And in some places the main measure used changed at some point throughout the pandemic.
Yeah, at some point it becomes a matter of opinion. If you're already at death's door and then you get a Covid infection and you die three days earlier than you otherwise would, did you die of Covid? How about three hours? Three seconds? Three weeks? Three years?
Depending on how much you were already inclined to see Covid as a menace or as "just the flu, bro" you are likely to answer this question differently. This could easily be (part of) the mechanism by which political opinions shape people's answers to such questions.
This absolutely happened and it happened here. In fact everywhere. It was stated as policy. And yes, there were accident deaths counted as covid deaths. All you needed was a test that found it (and the PCR was tuned to find it) and bingo. Hospitals got a bonus too. All documented if you care to know. Many did not, and do not care to know. The count of covid deaths is essentially meaningless.
You're not linking to any such documentation.
This seems somewhat reputable, at least: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/whetherthosewhohavediedfromacaraccidentwithcovid19willbecountedinonsstatistics
The text basically refutes it, but not exactly. It does say that the underlying cause of death was reported, so that if someone had COVID and died in a car accident then the underlying cause would have been the accident, and still reported they had COVID.
* Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause): 128,077
* Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 115,574
I'm not going to do in-depth research on this, but my intuition says reporting a COVID death as the underlying cause when more than one possible condition could have caused the death, with incentives to report COVID deaths, indicates some COVID deaths were exaggerated. The amount is up for debate. Also, if someone thinks COVID CAUSED, say, a heart attack due to excess coughing, were they right?
This particular claim matches my recollection.
And I even recall a plausible justification, which was that since the disease was new, we needed to track covid status separately from other causes of death, to help identify covid's effects. (Does it make us distractable? Clumsy?)
There are 10x reports of Covid deaths in Scott's poll, so that reasoning doesn't work. Of course, someone with opposite priors would probably dismiss Scott's poll and go with Kirsch's...
Actually, we don't know who actually died from COVID, only what was put on the death certificate. That isn't a notably reliable source, though it's a lot better than flipping a coin. Particularly WRT COVID, a lot of the time whether COVID was or was not put on the death certificate was down to local bias, at least until cheap tests were abundant.
What we CAN trust is the death count. If I recall the news from the time correctly, various places had policies of either always say COVID was involved or never say COVID was involved. With the medical system under strain, corpses piling up in trailers outside the building, and no ready tests available, what else were they to do? (OK, that was an extreme scenario. But it was a real one. One coroner, in NYC IIRC, rented a refer truck to hold the corpses until they could be dealt with.)
Humans are awful at figuring out causality via instinct; these polls don't really tell us much.
I actually have an immediate family member who developed an autoimmune condition in such short proximity to their booster that their doctor recommended they not receive another covid vaccine. In the years since a few papers have been published citing the condition they developed as a rare adverse event secondary to covid vaccination. None of my many family members who got caught up in the politicization of covid were medically savvy enough to add this personal testimony to their furious anti-vaccination meme reposting regimen. I remember being a little put out that the ACX survey didn't ask about non-lethal adverse events, because I felt I had a "legitimate" data point to contribute to the pool. As though a lone datum could be so righteous.
Some events that happen in close temporal proximity will actually be causal; others won't. People naturally fish for potential causes after a disastrous event, but generally don't fish when such events don't occur. It's tricky business to try to suss this stuff out using intuition; we're simply not built to get it right without supporting methodology (e.g., RCTs). I'm sorry to hear about your family member.
Thanks, they're doing all right. My little story is just to explore one kind of path that makes a person eager to polish their pearl of anecdote.
Beautifully put!
I love the phrasing, and want to indulge in it as an extended metaphor. If you think of the government response to COVID, it's massive machine made up of many different "gears," whose purpose was to simultaneously minimize "death" and "disruption." Since those two ideals had massive tradeoffs, the balance between them was always precarious, and infinite fights were started about which one a particular government should favor. Then, the mRNA vaccines come along, and they seem like a miracle "gear" in that they can nearly prevent death while causing only a little bit of disruption. So, the "establishment" goes all-in on installing the new gear in as many places as possible, and it does have massive beneficial effects on allowing the machine to operate.
But, lots of people will point out that the new "gear" doesn't fit well in this or that area of the machine, others will point out that the long-term effects of the new gear can't reasonably be known yet, and still others will deny that the gear could be good, since only God can make a machine that works. But, crucially, the new gear DOES make the machine function dramatically better, so hearing these arguments makes us assume the person making them is just incapable of weighing evidence, and therefore their gripe shouldn't be trusted. I assume most of the anti-gear arguments are from people who can't or won't understand "technology" in general, and dismiss them accordingly. But then someone like your family member becomes the "grit" between the machine's gears, and gets hurt by the process. Normally, I would take one look at the grit of this story, determine it "must" have nothing to do with the machine, and forget about it. But because you have polished the story (and you have a reputation for gem-worthy anecdotes), I've changed my tune to "obviously we should acknowledge that these events happen, and try to investigate whether we can prevent susceptible grains of sand from getting between the gears in the first place."
I wish the best for you and your family. And I appreciate the recurring lesson in epistemic humility.
I mean actually we're insanely good at doing that, to the point where the very rare failures we make get quickly diagnosed and then held up as cautionary examples .
Compare us to an iguana or a chihuahua or even a capuchin, we're orders of magnitude better at figuring out causality via instinct than almost any other entity we know to exist.
I think we're demonstrably good at generating *hypotheses* about causality. It's almost impossible -- especially for dependent events that are rare -- to use intuition alone to suss out causality. It's a challenging statistical task, even once we step away from our intuition.
They tell us nothing useful at all.
I think humans do much better than chance at figuring out cause of death.
Say you give a poll: do you suspect a family member of yours has broken a hip in part from riding a bike?
Old people break hips all the time. Causes include falling off a bike, falling down stairs, being in a car crash, or seemingly spontaneous stress breakage.
If your grandmother received a broken hip diagnosis shortly after falling off her bike, and she didn't fall down stairs or get in a car crash recently, it's a good guess the bike fall contributed.
Whereas if your grandmother received a broken hip diagnosis shortly after falling down stairs, you wouldn't attribute that to her uneventful bike ride that morning.
This is why base rates are of limited debunking power here. When you ask who broke a hip likely due to bike riding, rather than asking who broke a hip and separately asking who rode a bike, you engage respondents' common sense to exclude red herrings. So you can't conclude bike riding is unconnected to hip fractures just because the percentage of respondents who suspected a bike-related fracture is less than the base rate of fractures.
Same goes for vaccines. We know immune responses cause inflammation. Actual infections are usually worse than vaccine reactions, but it happens for both. If your recently vaccinated grandmother dies of cardiovascular inflammation near the typical peak time of vaccine side effects, you might answer yes to Scott's poll question; whereas if she dies in a car crash at that time, you will probably answer no.
So again, "old people die" is true, but family members who know them have a decent first-pass perspective on why they likely died.
It's probably true that some folks who responded worked to the poll worked hard to separate plausible connections due to vaccinations (eg, death from heart inflammation vs being run over by a bus). That said, I think the evidence is pretty good that people tend to overestimate causality between two remarkable events that happen in close temporal proximity or are otherwise plausible but incorrect (e.g., soft drinks were the cause of polio). As I noted above, people are quite good at casting the net wide for *potential* causal links, which is great for hypothesis generation.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-households-in-the-us/
Roughly 1.2 million “COVId deaths “
Roughly 131 million households.
The Kirsch “survey” asking percent of people with household members dying of COVId should have come up with 1% give or take. I’ll even assume all deaths occurred in unique households. All that survey shows is that about 6-7% of respondents were apparently smoking crack at the time.
The survey results for households with COVId vaccine deaths is even more laden with drug-addled respondents.
When they’re taking survey results as the basis for “fact”….it’s time to move on from the get-go.
Household size differ, wich could explain a some of the gap (more people and more deaths in big households).
Also conservatives being more likely to live in larger households (if only because on average they're older and therefore more likely to have started a family already)?
Also if you're older, you have more older people among your close family and friends, so for any possible cause-of-death you are more likely to know somebody affected by it.
But since we “know” the total number of COVId deaths, having some households with multiple deaths would actually DECREASE the number of respondents who had deaths in their household. So approx 1% should’ve been the top of the range.
No. We know the total number of deaths, and the expected number of deaths. By subtraction we can ESTIMATE the number of COVID deaths. This estimation has various factors affecting it's accuracy. (E.g. during a lock down fewer people were driving on the road, so there should have been fewer traffic caused deaths.)
The causes on the death certificates are unreliable. Sometimes because of time pressure, sometimes because of cost (waste tests on a corpse???), and occasionally because of politics. They're an estimate marker, but not a really reliable one. (At least not until later in the epidemic when tests were abundantly available.)
Consider, someone dies at home. What caused the death? Well, you could X-Ray their lungs and look for diagnostic granules...but it's easier to just put something down, and the workload is a lot higher than it was last year.
A different household size might get some dual reporting from individuals but not enough to reduce the percentage from 8.5% to 1%.
Did a quick check with the last census data, seems like the different household size effect gets pretty exactly compensated with the fact that the household size gets reduced by one when people die of covid.
The Kirsch survey seems moronic to begin with. And you’re correct…if they sampled more than 1 member of any given household…it would increase the positive response rate to more than 1%….because it would mean double counting a single death. That would make it even more moronic.
It’s moronic as an attempt to get the number of deaths. But if people are answering accurately, it could tell you about whether deaths due to cause A or deaths due to cause B are more common, because both types of deaths should have roughly the same complex multiplier going on.
When the sampled cohort responds at a rate that is about 6X the expected rate, I’m not sure I’d rely on this particular cohort to accurately tell me what day of the week it is.
Add to the fact that event adjudication is complex even in the context of properly administered clinical trials. It can be difficult to discern whether one died “of COVId”, or “with COVId”, even with all available clinical info. A “survey” based on the learned opinions of household members is truly garbage in/ garbage out.
> The Kirsch “survey” asking percent of people with household members dying of COVId should have come up with 1% give or take.
No, this part is wrong because households are larger than size one. Think about this one: "Is there a man in your household?"
50% of the population are men, but the answer to that question would be much greater: men would answer yes, as would any woman with a male household member.
In the case of covid deaths, if one person dies of the disease then their parents, siblings, partner, or children could all answer 'yes' to that question, so one death creates many possible 'yes' respondents. (On the other hand, if someone in a household by themselves dies, then it creates no 'yes' respondents. Obviously, the best-calibrated question to ask would have been: "did you die of covid?", but alas we cannot survey the dead.)
But the question was “households”…not “family”. Unless that moronic survey sampled morons who can’t tell the difference btw who is in their family Vs who is in their household.
This is why I used data on number of households. That already accounts for households of different sizes. It works out to an average of 2.54 people per household…which makes sense to me. Balance of young couples without kids, childless couples of any age, and empty nesters, below that mark; Vs families in child-raising years and multigenerational households above that mark.
I agree it would undercount people who died while living alone…which again demonstrates the idiotic nature of the study methods.
For what it's worth, as a survey non-respondant, I had an immediate family member who I strongly suspect was killed by heart-related effects of the vaccine. 87, in extremely good health, very active, lived in the basement and regularly made trips up and down the stairs all day. That whole side of the family lived well into their 90s when given the chance. Less than 24 hours after receiving shot #1 she couldn't walk up and down the stairs all of a sudden, which started a very fast progression to stage 4 heart failure over the next few weeks. She died about 34 hours after receiving her second shot, which was delivered to her on a medical bed in our house. At no point did she ever test positive for COVID.
It's not really unusual for old people to suddenly, rapidly decline and die. So I am open to the possibility that it was a coincidence. But the proximity of the key events (start of symptoms and death) to the shot times is strong evidence in favor of a bad reaction. And there's the known issues with myocarditis as well, further pointing toward damage to the heart.
It’s infuriating to me that almost no one in the healthcare profession wants to find out what’s really happening in these cases. I’ve heard about a lot of these situations. At what point does curiosity set in? Will in take an entirely new generation without complicity to look into it? In the meantime, no jabs for me. Taking my chances with Mother Nature. (In case anyone has forgotten how incredibly dishonestly the medical profession behaved, I remind you that most willingly went along with the trashing of natural immunity to sell an untested product.
"almost no one in the healthcare profession wants to find out what’s really happening in these cases"
This is wrong as a matter of fact. The issue is that it is usually not possible to nail down a reason in a specific case. There is no test you can run which tells you "it was the vaccine" vs. "it was coincidence". The tests will usually only tell you something like "heart failure, but we have no idea what caused the heart failure".
So the only thing you can do is statistics: count how many people die shortly after vaccines, compare this to the baseline, and see whether you find any anomalies. Basically all countries collected this data and made the comparisons. The reports are public and free to be read by anyone. Go on and read them. The thing is not that this wasn't done, the thing is that they did not find any anomalies. (Actually, they did find an anomaly for AstraZeneca, which is why lots of countries stopped using that.)
So: healthcare professionals cared a lot about this question, looked into it in the only way that is available, and found that it was probably coincidence.
Ok so we’re all good now? Everyone has done everything necessary already? There’s no need to figure out why cancers are increasing, young people are presenting with heart disease, and excess deaths track with vaccine uptake? Or are those only a right wing conspiracy theorist Trump lover would care about?
Uhm, sorry to be blunt, but for the excess deaths that's simply nonsense. The vaccinations were administered pretty much simultaneously in different countries, but the excess deaths were at rather different times and matched very well the covid waves in the respective countries. There is no mystery here.
Update, a correction: I wrote about EU cancer deaths in 2023. This was a prediction, not a measurement.
But my conclusion stands: given the obviously wrong claim about excess deaths, I assume that indeed those are conspiracy theories.
Excess deaths strongly tracked vaccine uptake (Jan 2021):
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/12/excess-mortality-during-the-pandemic-the-role-of-health-insurance/
"given the obviously wrong claim about excess deaths, I assume that indeed those are conspiracy theories"
I don't know how to parse this sentence into a coherent thought - what about the truth or falsity of the claim would have anything to do with whether it's a "conspiracy theory" or not? Claims that have to do with two or more people working together could be called conspiracy theories. A claim could involve this, or it could not. A claim could also be true, or false.
The link you provided does not show that excess deaths “strongly tracked vaccine updated” wtf that even means.
As 1123581321 wrote, the article shows that excess death tracks reported covid deaths, not vaccination.
For the other: there were three claims. For one I knew that it was very wrong because I know the related data well. I had never heard of the other two claims, and not enough time/interest to spend more than 5 minutes researching, which did not give any hints of the claims. I assume that Grape Soda didn't make the claims up themselves, and there is lots of absurd claims about vaccinations. So yes, to be more precise: I defaulted to the assumption that they are nonsense, too, and not worth my time investigating. This would change if I read about them from a source that I trust to be skeptical.
(But a lot of those nonsense claims include some conspiracy aspect about "them" covering up something, so it is also not far-fetched that the full claims are indeed conspiracy theories.)
What is the evidence cancers are increasing significantly more since the vaccine?
So far just anecdotal. But when anecdotes have sex they give birth to data.
No, in order to become data you would have to systematically collect data points in order quantify it.
>Any poll whose outcome can change by more than an order of magnitude based on the respondents’ politics or statistical knowledge isn’t a valid guide to the frequency of real-world events.
So, any poll then. There are a lot of weird subgroups no smaller than the ACX readership.
I don't mean "any poll where you can get a different response in a different subgroup", I mean any poll where we assume the subgroups are in fact equal, but we get an order of magnitude measurement error.
My claim is that you can get measurement error like this in any poll where you assume the subgroups are equal, if you pick the right subgroup (if you allow such small subgroups). And if thats true, theres no reason to think the polls where we *dont* expect equal subgroups somehow have less measurement error - its just not as obvious.
Are you basically talking about p-hacking? That if you try enough different sub groups, you'll get one extreme result by pure random chance?
Depends on what you mean by random. Im talking about a subgroup such that retesting it, even retesting a different sample from the same subgroup, would give you the same extreme results again.
Basically, there are always subgroups that are weird along the axis youre testing, and the smaller a subgroup is the harder it can potentially select and the higher its weirdness can potentially be. And there is usually a reason why they are that way - just like it makes sense that rationalists would report fewer vaccine deaths - but maybe if you take a very zoomed-out perspective its sort of random?
Ok, but I think you're mixing up the desired information and the metric. Our target is: how many of X group ACTUALLY died because of the vaccine? And our measurement is "how many of the group report knowing someone who died because of the vaccine."
All of the ways rationalists are idiosyncratic fall into measurement error here (ignoring the obvious and easy regressions of age/friend group size.) They're less likely to report, but they're not less likely to die.
And Scott's point is that any measurement technique that gives answers off by a factor of 20+ for variables that should have basically the same value (death to Vax rate for rationalists vs, say, random democrats) is pretty useless as a metric for actual Vax death rates.
Im not sure what your problem is? There are weird subgroups along every axis, including a measurement thats different from what you really want to know. I expect there to be groups that misreport their blood group by 20x. (And inversely, groups with 20x risk of vaccine death.)
while trump supporter is probably well correlated with anti-scientism its a very bad measure of anti-scientism in high scienctism sample(simpsons paradox) especially given that *trump claims credit for the vaccine*; and when trump desires to claim credit to a cheering crowd of trump supporters at a trump rally; they boo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA306aNtvmk
(trump is the dam, not the flood; there is right wing energy he is taking advantage of that he's pacifying by negotiating with)
imagine a different question "who do you trust more the who or a dog in a lab coat?"(ideally in the meme format) here you'd get people "well if a dog is sharing his medical opinion I should conclude I've been poisoned and go to the hospital", a right wing boomer will have a simpler analysis of the question.
Id predict *that* question to high better correlation with which excess death theory then trump support.
"who do you trust more the who or a dog in a lab coat?"
Just because you're presented with two choices doesn't mean one of the choices is better.
As I recall, WHO people won't even say the word "Taiwan", so arguably if a dog in a lab coat could be trained to point to Taiwan on a map, the dog would be more accurate at this specific task.
....
given a simple metric theres only 3 possibility, equal, greater or less
you may not value doge coin more then ponzi coin, but 0 = 0
There are many more than three possibilities. To name three, there is my viewpoint, your viewpoint, and the truth.
thats only 2, my viewpoint and the truth contain the same value after evaluation
"(trump is the dam, not the flood; there is right wing energy he is taking advantage of that he's pacifying by negotiating with)"
That's backwards. There are a lot of people with stupid/evil beliefs. Generally social pressure prevents them from articulating those beliefs. But when a national figure like Trump comes along and legitimizes those beliefs, suddenly people are willing to articulate them, and the movement for those beliefs becomes much more powerful.
>>right wing energy
>stupid/evil beliefs
Im not mad; just disappointed
> But when a national figure like Trump comes along and legitimizes those beliefs
With what limits, with what conditions?
bernie sanders exists, should I expect communism next year in america?
> suddenly people are willing to articulate them
*My* politically beliefs came up with the term scientism(its an ancap term from the 70's) I was always willing to articulate them. Its a drastic event that it reached the mainstream and 1/2 of society is using the term and become one of the silly battle lines; if trump won 2020, fox news and tucker may not have been so anti a non-mandated vaccine that trump was going on tv once a week to call his.
While I'm not sure if the death of the university's will be quick; the fracture of right wing people telling their children to not go to college will change the social fabric drastically. And trump isnt *for* that, he was for the vaxxine (in a nonmandated way), he's still a city slicking newyorker who part of the corporate culture.
Could the disparity between ACX survey results and the Pollfish results not simply be due to the difference in sample sizes? If i read your post correctly, pollfish sampled 24% of americans whereas you sampled just a few thousand. Naturally, a lot more people from within the same family / friend circle responded pollfish. So a lot of doublecounting deaths in their survey as compared to yours.
For example, if my granny fell ill and possibly died from the vaccine, and both me and my brother did the pollfish poll, we would both answer yes, but in reality, only one person had possibly died (not two as the poll might initially suggest). Moreover, the broader the definition of the question, the more the double counting.
Am i missing something??
That wouldn’t compensate for the discrepancy, which was tenfold. It does reduce the number of unique households affected, by my calculation, from 8.5 to 6.5.
There is no chance that the poll fish survey got 60 million unique responses.
Hmmm we should check this with a survey question: "Do you personally know someone who took a Pollfish question asking if they personally knew anyone who died from the COVID vaccine?" Should be pretty close to 100%!
> Respondent 2 notes that some people are so frail that even normal vaccine side effects of the type that everyone agrees exist might kill them
I do actually update somewhat on this. COVID also generally only kills the very frail, so vaccines don't have to be very bad to be worse than COVID.
(I don't think they hit that bar - as you show, at least an OOM more people die of COVID than vaccines and vaccines at least halve the risk of that, so they come out ahead - but it does imply that we probably shouldn't have given them to people who were already very sick and frail, at least if we could have waited).
I think you should trust neither of those results from his original poll. "8.5% of polled people said someone in their household died of the vaccine, and 7.5% think someone died of Covid" - average US household size is 2-3, suggesting even on the high end that people think 8.25 million people died from Covid, and 9.35 million people died from the vaccine.
A certain small percentage of people answering polls will give dumb answers to questions, especially if it's phrased as an opinion question ("do you think") rather than something that requires verification.
Assuming that you can't die of both COVID and the COVID vaccine, that's 17.5 million deaths. Only ~15 million deaths have been reported of *all* causes in the US since 2020.
I get slightly higher numbers based on the number of households being 131M, so about 11M deaths from vaccines and 10M deaths from Covid.
I think a lot of people who see a question about “someone in your household” with something that sounds rare will probably respond “yes” if someone “almost” in their household had it. They don’t want their data point to be uncounted.
In addition to post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, anti vaccine attitudes might also more or less subtly influence recall and "who do I include among people I 'know' stretching", maybe less in ACT question when "family" is very precisely defined and more in any other survey. I know it worked in my head, as someone with sort-of anti-compulsory universal-lockdown attitudes I had a tendency to swiftly attribute every suicide/overdose I have heard of to lockdown effects (4 iirc) while in fact only one of them was realistically attributable thus (a suicidal person in their 50s who was sectioned very shortly before the first lockdown, discharged in the crazy rush to send everyone home way too soon before meds got properly adjusted, dead within two weeks) and even she wasn't someone I knew personally but a second hand story. But if you asked me if I knew a lockdown related suicide/OD, I'd probably say yes, treating those 4 I have HEARD OF second hand (none known personally to me) as an "at least one possible yes I could have known".
On the other hand I'd NOT count the one case of someone I knew of who died within 2 days of vaccination as someone I knew even though I actually DID meet that person IRL once, but the "post jab death" report felt very unreliable.
Had I been anti-vaccine I'd probably include the latter, had I been rabidly pro lockdown, I'd exclude the former deaths.
I have not even remotely known anyone who died of covid so not sure how biased my recall/inclusion here is.
So all in all, this is a really really prone to distortion question unless we (1) define very precisely who to include relationship wise (2) define precisely how to count "vaccine deaths" (ideally "within X days of vaccination" and maybe if possible with age info).
As an aside idk how valid is to assume an average person would have TWO relatively close relatives with extreme obesity (I'm assuming the "super obesity" BMI of 50+ here -- surely even the US on its own is not THAT fat).
The survey respondents were all guessing. None of these results tell me anything useful about vaccine injuries. I find it outrageous that the health profession seems to entirely lack curiosity about this. Especially since several researchers have shown a correlation between the roll out of spike protein vaccines and population wide excess deaths. Ethical Skeptic on X has data on this. Anecdotally, severe heart disease was never a thing for anyone under 40. Now it’s common. Cancer rates also seem to have spiked lately. If the reason this doesn’t get a serious look is that Trump supporters and so-called right wingers care about it, that’s beyond despicable. As biased as Steve K might be, at least he gives a shit. I’m so done with the attitude of shut up and do what we say because we know more. No you don’t. And many of you don’t care to find out.
Who are those "several researchers"? What was the correlation? What was the rate of heart disease for people under 40 prior to the vaccine vs now? Cancer? I don't see you providing any numbers.
There's a possible explanation for why the ACX poll got such vastly-different results to the general population: lizardman's constant.
"Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?", minus the last word, equals "Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19?" If you're skim-reading or have a bad phone connection, well.
I'd imagine the lizardman's constant for ACX surveys is considerably lower, and even then a decent chunk of your responses to email were lizardman. Lizardman's constant replicates just fine, because "misread the question" is a real phenomenon, but it's not meaningful.
Since I didn't see the link elsewhere in the comments, here we go:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
> But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths.
This sounds plausible. Did you also consider the reverse causality interpretation? Or is it inconsistent with the data in a way that isn't obvious to me?
The reverse causality interpretation would be: believing a vaccine killed a relative may have led some respondents to become pro-Trump. (Despite sponsoring the vaccines' development, Trump seems to have become less associated with them than his opponents are.)
No the reverse causality is that my teenager died of a heart attack but it couldn’t possibly be the vax because it’s only right wingers who’d think that.
It would've been worse without the vaccine.
... That's just the forward causality
Don't you think education level is an important variable here, and might account for some of the difference between Kirsch's respondents answers to his questions and ACX respondents? I'm sure this group as a whole has a markedly higher education level than average? Just looked up US info on highest degree attained: 35% of US maxed out at Bachelors, 13% got a masters, 3.5% got a professional degree and 2% got a PhD.
Just looked at ACX survey results, and about 60%. of us have a JD, MD or PhDS and another 28% have a masters. 88% of us have a masters degree or beyond, while about 19% of the US population has a masters or beyond. I'm sure education level correlates with a lot of relevant things, but the ones that seem most likely to make a difference in answers to the 2 survey questions are being (1) better informed about covid and health matters in general; and (2) more able to think critically about whether attributing someone's death to covid or to the vax makes sense
Not really because there was no difference in self-reported family vaccine death in ACX readers of different education levels. I assume something sort of like education is doing it, which is why I said "statistical knowledge", but at least in this sample it's not literal education.
Well, some of the things that are components of intelligence tests measures then: general knowledge, critical thinking. Or just plain old IQ. Looked at the survey IQ results and they seem not to have been put in order yet There’s no graph or table, just a list of numbers. I “averaged”them by scrolling thru a bunch and getting a general impression, and looked like average is between 130 and 145. So the peak of the ACX bell curve is someplace way out on the skinny-to-vanishing far right of the population bell curve, and peak of population bell curve is probably equivalently far out on the left end of our curve. And of course IQ correlates with a lot of things. It would be surprising if as a group we weren't significantly different from population a large in a bunch of things -- number of communicable diseases we could name in a minute, how many qualifiers it occurs to us to insert in a generalization, how many of us remember the color of the receptionist's hair, favorite foods, first childhood memory, and on and on.
"I think the best conclusion from this result is just to stop caring about these kinds of polls..."
Absolute heresy! Scott, we need you to keep on caring about the crazy so that we don't have to....
Your more-than-you-needed-to-know-about posts have in many cases come to fairly boring conclusions: the mainstream was right all along. But they still need doing. I spend most of my time following mainstream views, but they need regular calibration by trusted sources, and you're one of those trusted sources now. Like, the new NYT!
Selection bias must be playing a big role here. The kind of person who *chooses to respond* to a survey about covid vaccines is apriori not representative of the population. You write: "All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population." But from looking at Kirsch's deck, "all other statistics" simply means age and gender. I'm not sure that "belief in vaccine conspiracies" correlates strongly enough with either of these that this is a useful litmus test for selection bias.
It also showed normal vaccination rate. I think Rasmussen is a real enough pollster not to select on the dependent variable.
Rasmussen posts insane numbers on issue polls that are completely out of step with every other pollster. Their twitter is indistinguishable from a right-wing ideologue. 538 recently removed them from their polling average due to questionable legitimacy, something they rarely do.
538 recently had a change in leadership, and the removal is attributable to that. Their previous reputation is being strip-mined. Don't treat the new 538 as being the old 538.
Nate Silver - who might know a thing or two about 538 - has a substack article about this. The new management of 538 started issuing ideological purity standards, which disqualified Rasmussen because they lean right. This is really stupid to do for pollsters, because they have an objective record that can be checked. According to Nate, Rasmussen is as accurate as most other pollsters. They tend to overestimate how well Republicans do, but most other pollsters underestimate Republican outcomes, so in the end it's a wash. Those who are paying attention can calibrate their priors appropriately, rather than just writing off Rasmussen as those crazy right wingers.
This is what Nate Silver is saying about Rassmussen:
https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1140082337251844101
I saw that other comment but it's a tweet from 2019 that doesn't go into any detail. I referenced this substack post from 2023:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/polling-averages-shouldnt-be-political
It is sort of a two wrongs make a right situation, where Rasmussen being right-biased comes out ok only because other pollsters are left-biased. But if you know about the bias you can use that to get (more) correct information.
It really isn't: https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1140082337251844101
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rasmussen-reports-poll-conspiracy-theories-election-denialism-covid-vaccine_n_64b05d9fe4b093f07cada517 (in which they claim their poll showed Kari Lake winning the AZ senate race, and also that turnout was 92 percent)
So you believe that the sample is actually representative of the population, and a quarter of respondents are just wrong, either because they didn't understand the question, or falsely believe that they know someone who died from the vaccine?
Isn't the cohort most at risk of complications young men in their 20's and 30's? Given that I find it strange that the poll respondents who believed they knew somebody who died from vaccine injury overwhelmingly cited people at an advanced age.
I think the claim is that young men are most at risk, it's possible that whatever rare real side effects exist concentrate in this population, but I think this is so rare that there shouldn't have been enough to register in the ACX sample, so most of what people reported were old people who died anyway for normal reasons.
Most covid deaths were old people who died for normal reasons too. Just saying.
How do you explain the spike in excess deaths in the population that correlates perfectly with the arrival of COVID?
People die of old age, doctors may put down a spefic cause like an infection or an illness; but as complex systems fall apart due to debts out striping resources, they fall apart everywhere.
Winter in a first world country doesn't kill people. but someone close to death may *not cope* from a room being slightly cold. The roman empire didnt die from the visgoths, but it wasnt able to cope with it. A broke person with 50k in debt isnt declaring bankruptcy because of a 1000$ emency, but they can't cope when it shows up.
Complex systems die when production falls behind demand, because with so many factors it all evens out.
Debts didn't spike during COVID, rather they declined.
You mean with the rollout of the vaccine, right?
See: excess mortality spiking Jan 2021 onward.
*citation needed
Excess deaths in the northeast spiked in spring 2020, not 2021. Hard to explain that without COVID. But yes they also did spike in winter of that year, tracking an explosive rise in COVID cases far more than the vaccine uptake, which was rather limited still in January of 2021 at the beginning of the rollout. The spike in excess deaths was happening already in November and December, before anyone but health care workers were receiving vaccines.
In most countries, no.
Other than a generic heart failure (see my response above), a Covid death leaves pretty clear traces, mostly a lung destroyed by scar tissue. Some countries checked this for all covid patients for some time (I think Denmark), most countries only checked it for a sample. But either way, we know very well the ratio "died from covid"/"died with covid". I don't recall the exact number, but the claim that most of those people would be "dying with covid, but not from covid" has always been wrong. This was known almost from the beginning, and was later confirmed by the data on excess mortality.
The question is whether or not the people respondents believe died from vaccine injury actually died from vaccine injury.
If the perceptions of those respondents match up to reality shouldn't the deceased overwhelmingly consist of young men who died from heart problems?
The myocarditis risk is highest for young men, but the "vaccine deaths" (as measured by VAERS reports) are overwhelmingly old people (https://medium.com/p/5a61d7d6d91a)
Actually the age histogram of the VAERS reports is an almost exact match for the age histogram of all natural deaths, so it's tempting to think that most or all reported vaccine deaths are natural deaths mistaken for vaccine deaths. But determining causality is harder than that, so it's not simple to give an exact percentage of how many were vaccine caused vs coincidental.
Same goes for covid itself.
COVID caused a lot more deaths than can be explained by natural death.
Yes, there was a time where people asked if people died "from covid" or "with covid". For the most part, the answer to this was quite clear, since far more people died in 2020 than in a normal year (but only in countries hit by covid, and not in countries with effective lockdowns).
Vaccine skeptics should have asked a similar question as to whether VAERS cases died "from vaccination" or "with vaccination" -- the answer there is less obvious because there is no spike in excess deaths when vaccines were administered.
The data leaves it easy to rule out the possibility that, say, vaccines were as deadly as covid, or even 10% as deadly as covid. But it's more difficult to rule out the case where, say, vaccines are 1% as deadly as covid.
IIUC, that's because the myocarditis is due to an overactive immune response. So it makes sense that young men would be the most likely to be affected. (I also understood that it was basically an extremely mild reaction, and easily treated in the cases where it wasn't. But that's why they asked you to wait 15 minutes after the vaccination before you left....so they could treat it if any treatment was indicated.
I've lost track of the latest science, but I think you are probably correct that young men's robust immune response drives the reaction, which might be an autoimmune response.
I'm not sure it's fair to call it mild -- it often requires hospitalization and some people take a few months to recover. It's very rare that it's fatal, though.
I think it generally takes longer than 15 minutes to develop, more like a 12-24 hour thing. The 15 minute rule would primarily be for allergic reactions like anaphylaxis, and the nurses could give you an epi-pen or something like that.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I feel like they did not have me wait at all when I got my booster shot, unlike when I got the original vaccine. I wonder if the rules changed, or what was going on there.
> Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%).
2.5 times more likely is 'only slightly'?
It's not wise to ascribe much meaning to tiny differences among single-digit figures. 1/100 versus 2/500 isn't a reliable indication of a real difference. Scott is right to describe it in these terms, although I would suggest next time avoiding translating such results into percentages.
My first reaction was that “25% did not have the vaccine” in the Steve Kirsch poll. That sounds like a lot to me. What percentage of the general population got the vaccination “?
Follow up, I wonder what percentage of the “relative died of vaccine” people did not have the vaccine.
The first thing I Googled said 81% of Americans have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, but Kirsch's poll was a year or two ago and it was probably less then.
Two extremely obese relatives *on average*? Seems like a vast overestimate. For this, the demographic bias of ACX readers does matter!
Sorry, I meant two relatives in that age bracket. I'm ignoring the obesity because we assume that within the age brackets, death happens at a normal rate, which already prices in that some people are obese.
I'm a doctor who was working in a public hospital during the Covid pandemic. I saw one person who definitely died from the vaccine - an elderly lady who got severe Guillain-Barre syndrome which progressed to respiratory paralysis (this is a known complication of the influenza vaccine as well, but is exceedingly rare.) I saw 3 - 5 people, all young men, who had vaccine-induced myocarditis severe enough to require presentation to hospital, but all of them were basically fine - we kept them in on average 48 hours for monitoring then sent them home. I wasn't directly involved in his care, but my hospital did a case report on the first man in Australia to be diagnosed with vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (the severe clotting disorder) from AstraZeneca (he survived, but had a long complex admission and required multiple loops of bowel to be surgically removed.)
I saw an enormous number of people - hundreds - who presented with Covid infection and were unvaccinated. (A small handful presented with Covid infection and were vaccinated; usually these people had better outcomes.) Some of these people (unvaccinated) died, others had long term respiratory complications. Some of them begged for the vaccine when they hit the emergency department and realised they'd made a mistake, forcing an unpleasant conversation that it was too late now. Others doubled down "even if I die, never give me that vaccine!" In addition to having much worse outcomes from Covid, this group were also a huge drag on health care resources and led to, for example, the ICU closing at the hospital I work at (in order to retrench staff to Covid ICUs) and elective surgeries being cancelled across our entire health service. There was a lot of resentment from health care workers throughout 2021 at people who refused vaccination. At one point there was a big protest about vaccine mandates, in defiance of Covid lockdowns, and there was a Covid outbreak among the rioters; one of the consultants at my hospital declared that if one of these rioters came to our health service he would refuse to treat them.
I still feel frustrated when people argue that you shouldn't get the vaccine and that they have "done the research." Most of them haven't read a single scientific paper on the matter, or listened to any experts. They certainly haven't watched people die who didn't have to.
Of course now the whole thing is irrelevant - since Omicron took over in 2022 Covid has been basically the flu; yes it can still be lethal if you're elderly, immunosuppressed or have underlying respiratory issues, but for most of us it doesn't really matter if you get a booster every year or not. (I myself have been vaccinated x3 only.) And the Covid skeptics do have points about government overreach or social media censorship or Fauci covering up NIH funding to the Wuhan lab. I just think there needs to be a clear red line separating politics from health care.
Short version: vaccines good, lockdowns bad, censorship bad, listen to your doctor.
> one of the consultants at my hospital declared that if one of these rioters came to our health service he would refuse to treat them.
This is deeply unethical.
Also, Bell's palsy is another vaccine side effect that's actually quite common (don't know how common, only have anecdotal evidence)
It IS hypocritical for the rioter to seek treatment. Yet it's also true that one person's unethical behavior does not excuse your own unethical behavior.
I agree with this, I don’t endorse this consultant’s remarks
I don’t consider this hypocrisy at all. Say someone believes the following: COVID is real, the vaccine doesn’t help prevent infection much, and the vaccine is likely enough to kill you that you’re better off taking your chances. This is almost certainly *wrong*, but someone who believes that might still get COVID and seek treatment, no hypocrisy is involved in that.
Um no. There is a risk to the vaccine. What is it? Doctors don’t really know. But that’s not the part I find outrageous. You don’t want to know! Your mileage may vary but there is little to no recognition of a cost benefit trade off. No, just assume the disease would be worse than the cure. Sorry I’m not buying it. Sure, all my information is anecdotal, but in what world is myocarditis an acceptable side effect for taking a vaccine that was not necessary? (You know as well as I do that anyone in reasonable shape under 60 was not in danger from Covid.) The dishonesty of the medical profession was on display from top to bottom during this episode. The PCR bullshit alone: nearly every single person who died of anything was counted as a covid death. It’s really rich that questions about the safety of the vax is treated as some kind of misinformation. No, your status as a doctor does not inspire trust. It’s about time “science” looked into the actual injury rate from these products. And don’t tell me it’s a fiction of some right winger’s imagination.
I spent the entire first paragraph acknowledging that there is a risk. But in my anecdotal experience it is very small. And in randomised controlled trials, it is also very small.
Of course we want to and need to know what the risk is and how to quantify it. Otherwise we would not know how to trade it off against the benefit. Both are small for healthy people under 60 at the current time. In 2021 the benefit was substantially greater, however.
I also have concerns that questions about vaccine safety were treated as misinformation. See my comment about social media censorship.
I had intended to get the vaccine, but in April 2021, before I had a chance to get the vaccine, I got COVID instead. Knowing how vaccines work, I then determined there was no point to getting vaccinated; I was already "naturally vaccinated".
I was alarmed at recommendations to be vaccinated even in my circumstances, and didn't trust such. Perhaps the drug companies just wanted to make as much money as possible, but it sure didn't seem medically useful.
It could make sense to get the vaccine even after getting COVID. There are multiple strains to COVID, and the vaccine protects against more than one of them. Whether it *would* have made sense or not I cannot say.
The vaccine activates your body's defenses against the virus. Getting COVID activates your body's defenses against the virus. What's the difference? I don't believe the vaccine would protect against more varieties than your natural defense system would also provoke.
Yeah there were some startling claims going around about natural immunity, including that it was less effective than getting vaccinated (!?)
One reason to encourage everyone to get the vaccine is because a lot of people *thought* they got COVID when they didn't actually. At the population level, telling people who had COVID that they don't need to get unvaccinated would result in a lot of people being completely unprotected.
Not that it should matter, but I am very sympathetic to the right wing and would probably vote for Trump if I lived in the USA. Unlike most of his voters though I view Operation Warp Speed as one of his greatest achievements
One of his first acts in office was to dismantle the white house pandemic response team, because he deemed it an unnecessary expense. I don't even give him credit for OWS, because I don't believe he had anything to do with the plans or implementation.
I despise Trump the "typical" amount, but I think you do have to give him credit for OWS, simply because it could/would not have been successful without someone "up top" leaning on the agencies to (correctly, imo) make the case that speed should be prioritized over following procedures correctly. If you look at editorials from early in the pandemic about how long vaccines would likely take (20 years was the prediction, if I recall correctly), then it's clear that an executive more committed to the "integrity" of the process would have made different choices. Trump's inability to understand/care about the process was actually a massive benefit, since it gave agencies cover for moving fast and "breaking" things (counter-productive policies). In general, that's not the dynamic you want in government, but in this instance, it was probably more useful than the "standard."
Why do you think it shouldn't matter?
Truth and science should be separate from politics
All your information is anecdotal? In other comments you were talking about correlations, and differences in various causes of death over time.
Yes. I’m not scribbling numbers down and trying to come up with a quasi scientific justification of what I’m seeing. Take it for what it’s worth. My overall point is not very new: look at the evidence. How much should anyone believe vax injury reports? I don’t know. What I do know is that enough evidence exists for vaccine injury that it should be taken seriously. I reference the dishonesty of the covid response as a caveat. It seems to me the medical profession would rather remain ignorant than look into the risks of its treatments. I find this both outrageous and unsurprising because of how the profession dealt with Covid itself.
The medical profession isn't as scientific as it should be, but being quasi scientific is better than not being scientific at all (which was how medicine was up until the 20th century*). Because you're not taking a scientific approach, you don't actually know whether enough evidence exists.
* https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/
There are hundreds of papers investigating vaccine injury, many in the most prestigious scientific journals. If you want to claim that people are simply not looking you need to provide evidence that people are not looking.
Yes, and these investigations show that vaccines cause more harm than benefit for anyone except the elderly:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070
You either don’t read the papers you reference or lie about their content.
The paper you reference here specifically talks about 19-29 year-olds. Is this your definition of “anyone except the elderly”?
Doctors do know what the risk of the vaccine is - CDC has tons of data on this!
Here is but one example study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234830/
> You know as well as I do that anyone in reasonable shape under 60 was not in danger from Covid.
I know no such thing. In fact, the teenage son of a good friend got Covid and still hasn't recovered entirely from the long-term effects.
COVID also gives people myocarditis.
My second and third shots put me out for a couple days, but yeah, actual disease much worse
I wish it had been done to create makeshift emergency Covid hospitals to overflow Covid patients to when hospital occupancy reached 90% or whatever, but if you were vaccinated you could continue on to the normal hospital
Maybe we can plant the seeds of this idea for future pandemic plans and save a lot of friction about mandates as well as resentment to the unvaccinated who are going to get treated in a bunch of tents by second year medical students if the situation is more severe
It's been a while since I looked at this (https://medium.com/p/4a220092ab0c)
but one thing I recall is that Steve's poll had crosstabs for age:
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/crosstabs_2_vaccine_deaths_december_28_30_2022
Notice that 35% of the 18-39 age group said they knew someone who had died from a vaccine, as compared to 14% of the 65+ age group. Since we know that "vaccine deaths" are predominantly of old people (i.e. in VAERS reports), this makes no sense.
Also, notice that the percentage of people in each of the 3 age groups that did not get vaccinated (31%, 26%, 17%) is almost an exact percentage match for the percentage of people in that age group that say they know someone who died from the vaccine (35%, 28%, 14%).
There's no crosstab for how well those 2 questions correlate, but I would guess that it's near 1:1 with the people that didn't get vaccinated saying that they know someone who died, and the poll is just a proxy for "I think vaccines are bad", not some objective truth about them knowing someone that died.
I suppose it's hard to know what people were actually thinking, whether it's that a relative died and they chose to blame that on the vaccine, or whether they included some famous case as someone they personally know, or whether they simply answered yes to any question that implies the vaccines are bad.
>Since we know that "vaccine deaths" are predominantly of old people (i.e. in VAERS reports), this makes no sense.
Not necessarily. The question asks whether the respondent knows anyone who has died from the vaccine. If respondent's included relatives of people in their social,school and work circles, people 18-39 might well "know" more elderly people than do people over 65, since the social, etc circles of the former group tend to be much larger than those of the latter group.
Also, isn't it know that myocarditis (a potentially fatal known side effect of the mRNA versions) was much more frequent in young people? The exact prevalence of this is certainly up for debate, but I can imagine a world in which this resulted in more young people thinking that they know someone who died due to the vaccine, even if it's pretty rare. "Young dude dies of heart attack after vaccination" is much more notable than "old person dies of something or other during a global pandemic".
Given the base rate of heart attacks in young people, or even some vaccine elevated rate, I would be shocked if 35% of young people knew someone that recently died this way.
The CDC estimated myocarditis post vaccine at 1 in 14,000 in the highest risk group (males aged 16-17):
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2021-10-20-21/07-COVID-Su-508.pdf
Some countries estimated the odds slightly higher, but in all studies I've seen it's less than 1 in 1,000.
Fatal myocarditis is even rarer still. It has happened with covid vaccines, but it's perhaps in the single digits of cases in America.
Kirsh's whole deal is that these estimates are false and mendacious -- not that I think he's overly right about that, but circular reasoning doesn't prove him wrong.
For what it's worth, Denmark's health authorities have not been making much public fuss about it to avoid vaccine hesitancy but have quietly been processing that vaccines had a troublesome level of side effects, some of them quite severe.
In late 2021, one of the central people in our health care response described one of the problems that had been found and how by aspirating before injection, we had been able to achieve a rate of severe side effects ~3x lower than neighboring countries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkopHLQjtVQ&t=4s&ab_channel=Dr.JohnCampbell
A month ago I spoke to a doctor who told me that the vaccines had turned out to be bad (read: Falling a good deal below the extremely high safety rate we should expect of a vaccine deployed to the full healthy population) and they were openly talking about it in the medical community's channels and behind the scenes with politicians on how to ensure stronger drug safety procedures in a future crisis.
This in a country that I believe went further than any others in ensuring vaccine safety (and as a result had about the highest vaccination rate in the world). We shut down the initial vaccine rollout for 4 weeks after a health concern was discovered, and had to make some changes and restrictions.
"these aren’t just anti-vax Republicans lying to support their party narrative."
This is lazy. The Republican party can be fairly described as anti vaccine mandate. But the most prominent opponent of vaccines as such (and even in Kennedy's case there is some nuance) is a Democrat.
And being anti-mandate is not the same thing as being anti-vaccine; it is possible to think "the vaccine is neutral to beneficial, people should get it, but nobody should be forced to do so".
There is also the ongoing court case with AstraZeneca over its vaccine, which it recently admitted could cause Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome in rare cases.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/28/astrazeneca-admits-covid-vaccine-causes-rare-side-effect/
"In the months after the rollout, the potentially serious side effect of the jab was identified by scientists. It was then recommended that under-40s be offered an alternative jab because the risk of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweighed the harm posed by Covid."
When you're talking about vaccinating millions of people, then even rare cases become more common, so those sceptical about "but the vaccines are perfectly safe!" will be inclined to think that these cases prove the opposite, and that the denials are all part of a conspiracy to force such vaccines on the general population (for whatever nefarious reason, usually profit? I think?)
(1) https://www.unicef.org/montenegro/en/stories/astrazeneca-safe-vaccine
"AstraZeneca reported that over 17 million people had received the vaccine in the EU and the United Kingdom, among whom there were slightly under 40 cases of thrombosis."
2019, UNICEF is saying AstraZeneca is perfectly safe, you should get it
(2) https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/why-a-popular-covid-19-vaccine-has-been-withdrawn-worldwide/9okw3jkkd
2024, okay we're withdrawing the vaccine because other companies are making multiple vaccines against newer variants of Covid, oh yeah and the court cases:
"On 30 April, AstraZeneca conceded the vaccine, sold under the name Vaxzevria, can cause fatal blood clots and low platelet counts, also known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS.
The admission came through court documents in a UK class action lawsuit which sought £100 million ($190 million) in compensation for almost 50 victims of AstraZeneca vaccine side effects."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/astra-zeneca-covid-vaccine-1.7198111#:~
"More than three billion doses of the vaccine have been supplied since it first was administered in the United Kingdom in January 2021."
My maths isn't good enough to figure out what the risk of people developing TTS (or VTTS as the sub-variant is now called) is of those three billion doses, but this paper says there is a slight but genuine risk:
https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-071594
"Conclusions In this multinational study, a pooled 30% increased risk of thrombocytopenia after a first dose of the ChAdOx1-S vaccine was observed, as was a trend towards an increased risk of venous thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after Ad26.COV2.S compared with BNT162b2. Although rare, the observed risks after adenovirus based vaccines should be considered when planning further immunisation campaigns and future vaccine development."
For the record, I'm pro-vaccination, but I have to agree that the politicisation of the entire topic created an unholy mess; the dogged insistence that the vaccines were all perfectly safe and no side effects at all and everyone should and must get them, by compulsion if necessary, elicited the equally dogged insistence that the vaccines were all deadly and we should be loading up on ivermectin etc. instead, plus this was all a government conspiracy.
Nuance about "some vaccines may have very rare side effects in this particular sub-population but on the whole the risk of Covid is worse" got lost in all the noise.
Is Kennedy really more "prominent" than say, Marjorie Taylor Greene?
1. Yes. (Although I will allow that MTG consumes outsized space in the minds of her adversaries. )
2. To the best of my knowledge, RFK's skepticism is more thoroughgoing than MTG's. I'm pretty sure that everything MTG says about the vaccine (that it doesn't actually prevent someone from getting or spreading covid and that it has measurable side effects) is now openly acknowledged by vaccine proponents.
> Although I will allow that MTG consumes outsized space in the minds of her adversaries.
I suspect that the same is true of Kennedy and you. I don't think you can reasonably say that a long-shot third party candidate for president is "more prominent" than an actual elected member of congress, let alone one who has played a key role in the chaotic speaker elections.
I wouldn't count myself an adversary of Kennedy. I don't support him because I don't like his policies. But the man himself impresses me with his courage and integrity.
But as to your point about "prominence": I think you are confusing MTG with Lauren Boebert. MTG supported McCarthy. Boebert opposed him, as did every Democrat.
But perhaps Scott could come up with an objective measurement.
I will admit I just assumed she was part of the rebel faction without looking it up. But she did attempt to oust Johnson earlier this year.
> I wouldn't count myself an adversary of Kennedy.
I meant an adversary of Democrats.
This seems relevant: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/
Google Consumer Surveys used to be really useful for single question surveys. You could ask 1 question for $0.1 per person, making it possible to get an idea of the majority answer for <$10 and investigate percentages for only $x00. And they were supposed to be a representative sample, albeit probably biased towards android users. But alas, it fell victim to the Google Axe in 2022. Last time I looked, most other vendors were at $1/person/question or above (which was also google's price point for multi-question surveys) which pretty much puts it out of the range of casual interest, for me at least. Which is pity, because they didn't mind really strange questions as long as they were not likely to offend the user. Does anyone know anything as good for a similar cost?
Onepoll had a good reputation and I remember them being very cheap (caveat: as a market research professional)
> Of the nine people who answered my email, three said they’d read the question wrong and wanted to retract their answer, leaving six people who gave me real stories.
I really think it’s worth thinking more closely about the fact a third of the people who answered your e-mail had misread the question - even in a sample of people selected for liking to read complicated blog posts, on a survey where there was a separate question about whether any of your relatives had died *of COVID*, which would probably discourage at least one very plausible misreading. (And I really wouldn’t be surprised if people who’d just misread the question would be less likely to answer your e-mail to explicitly tell you that they embarrassingly answered wrong than people with actual stories, so I would expect the true ratio of people answering yes who’d just misread it to be probably be higher than 33%.)
In the Rasmussen survey, not only is the criterion for knowing someone who died very loose and vague - the survey sounds only interested in attitudes towards the vaccine, and thus I doubt it actually asked a parallel question about whether you knew anyone who’d died of COVID. People answering this phone survey in a hurry almost certainly misunderstood the question, and in particular to be about whether they knew anyone who’d died of *COVID*, at significant rates. Again, even in your own survey with people who are probably more careful readers and more priming to notice this question was about the vaccine, a third of the yes answers who responded had just misread it.
Yeah, I bet a lot of bio-neural-net minds pattern-matched the question to some version of "right vs left", and answered accordingly.
There is this from Dr. John Campbell. https://youtu.be/DMYZg8_22y8?si=uUE6xCgB8Q8qbis2 he reviews a paper that found a number of side effects to the vaccine. While you discuss this a little bit, I do think that if a person is inclined to believe that the vaccine is safe and they have a relative die of something common like stroke or heart attack, they will not make the connection, they will a priori rule out the vaccine connection because they have an a priori belief it is safe. To Your general point that we shouldn’t trust surveys like this I agree, it really is a survey about beliefs and opinions. On the other hand, Dr. Campbell does reference a more objective study that compares outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts, curious what you think.
Isn't his doctorate in nursing?
Yes, he is a nurse educator. His channel is fun to watch because he will get fact checked and censored for reading peer reviewed journal articles. An interesting study in science vs The Science.
This is so weird because I thought we all agreed that the vaccine did nothing whatsoever!
It definitely does something. My arm ached for several days after my second booster.
True, the Johnson & Johnson single I got made me quite ill, very suddenly, a few hours after I got it - for approximately 16 hours, no more. I felt that this was a sign that it "took".
The questions asked were "Did anyone in your family die (as per your best guess) from COVID?" and "Did anyone in your family die (as per your best guess) from side effects of the COVID vaccine?"
But the analysis of the death statistics is as follows:
"The average 80 year old has a 5% chance of dying per year; the average 90 year old a 20% chance. Let’s average it out and say 10% for the 80+ population. That means a 1/3650 chance per day, a 1/500 chance per week, etc. So by coincidence, we would expect about 2 people in my sample to have stories of an older relative dying within one day of vaccination, and about 10 people to have stories of a relative dying within one week. Among people talking about vaccine-related deaths, they seem to range from “same day” to “within six weeks”. So I think this mostly fits the null hypothesis."
But what is missing is a question of "Did anyone in your family die [over time period]?"
It seems to me to be highly unusual for the people statistically likely to die also happen to fall in those who could have died from COVID or the vaccine.
A quick thought based on quote: "Even 19% of Democrats say they know someone killed by the vaccine!"
In Canada, a lot of people wouldn't be caught dead voting for Trump, and also aren't super liberal. Imagine the median person (Ian starts being unfair) who drives an SUV, is on ozempic and spends 4% of their income on Frappuchinos. This person is a Progressive Conservative voter in Canada, is ambivalent about Justin Trudeau, hates Donald Trump because they watch CNN and is probably more left-leaning than Democrats. :)
Doubt has leaked out of the loudest anti-vaxx spaces to the normies.
I think 0 people in Canada would be caught dead voting for Trump, since he couldn't be on the ballot there.
You might be surprised how little that seems to matter for people who are huge Trump fans here regardless of their inability to vote for him ;)
That's a big problem. Clearly we need to annex Canada. We never *really* gave up on "54-40 or fight", after all. "From sea to shining sea" obviously refers to the Caribbean and the Labrador.
One option is to go full Anschluss, since they're so culturally similar that they're not really a "nation". (Except for the Quebecois, but we can figure out a solution for them. Maybe we can deport them to France. Or Haiti.)
Another option is salami tactics. First we grab our Sudetenland, the 90% of Canadians who live with 100 miles. Then we establish a protectorate over the rest, since there'd be so few people left that they'd be incapable of self-governance.
As a bonus, it would reduce the average temperature of the US, thus fulfilling some climate change goals!
I thought dead people have been voting in US elections for a long time, and I see no reason Canadian dead people would be an exception.
Any Canadian with that kind of gumption has already moved to the US.
It's like that old joke about why Mexico wins so few Olympic medals.
It's also why outsourcing software engineering isn't the obvious win that people might naively think based on salary differences. The best Indian software engineers are all in Silicon Valley already.
Attributing death to a vaccine is an inherently larger psychological "ask" given the implications of the claim. So now do serious adverse events and come back with your results. Leave kirsch out of it; you only picked him because his controversialist style makes you look more reasonable.
"Serious adverse event" has a much vaguer definition than "death".
We'll let you (or him) set the parameters of what qualifies. Or Apoorva from the recent NYT article documenting them among Healthcare professionals.
Orthogonal to the article, but this, from an opinion piece in the Times, is pretty depressing:
"When I visited London in 2021, I was amazed that people didn’t generally know which vaccine they had taken or when they would get their booster. They answered my question with a shrug and said they would just go whenever they were told they had an appointment. They, too, had a polarizing, Trump-like leader and the usual swirl of social media conspiracies. But they rolled up their sleeves when the National Health Service called because it was cashing in the trust it had built over decades."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/opinion/covid-fauci-hearings-health.html
The overall thrust of the story is that the U.S. authorities bred distrust during the pandemic with inconsistent policies and disingenuous justifications, and I think there's a lot to that. But there's also a level of skepticism among some people in the USA that has reached absurd levels. If someone thinks a public opinion poll gives them a better handle on the effects of Covid vaccines than health statistics do, I'm not sure what public health authorities can do to reach that person.
Perhaps not attempt to forcibly inject people with an experimental vaccine which was approved and mandated on the basis of a study where more people died in the vaccine group than the placebo group?
Yeah but what you’re saying is stupid bullshit that killed lots of people, so peddle it elsewhere.
By "more people" you mean 15 deaths as opposed to 14 deaths - a statistically insignificant amount - with the vast majority of deaths in both groups being unrelated to covid?
And you're aware that in the UK people DID take the vaccine willingly even though it was equally "experimental"? Whereas in the US there was a lot of screaming and crying over the exact same vaccine? That difference is due to social or political factors, not due to the differences in the vaccine because there were no such differences.
This "statistically insignificant amount" was the supposed ironclad evidence that justified approving the vaccine, and then forcibly injecting it into hundreds of millions of people! Funny how easily your kind falls for that. In your attempt to "own the anti-vaxxers" you forgot you were arguing against Pfizer's own trial!!
Lol, no. The evidence was vast difference in number of covid infections between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
The number of infections? Death doesn't matter, since as we all know the vaccine protects people really well against being infected at all? That's your argument now? Funny where we started and now this is all you have left to defend.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-30992100768-4/fulltext
> This study showed that the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people. The scientific rationale for mandatory vaccination in the USA relies on the premise that vaccination prevents transmission to others, resulting in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Yet, the demonstration of COVID-19 breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers (HCW) in Israel, who in turn may transmit this infection to their patients, requires a reassessment of compulsory vaccination policies leading to the job dismissal of unvaccinated HCW in the USA. Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. A recent investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of an outbreak of COVID-19 in a prison in Texas showed the equal presence of infectious virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Similarly, researchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection.
Lol, no. Death does matter, the main reason for vaccination is that it prevents deaths. That is implied by the very first line of your link - "Vaccine effectiveness studies have conclusively demonstrated the benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in reducing individual symptomatic and severe disease, resulting in reduced hospitalisations and intensive care unit admissions." Did you actually read your link?
What I said before, and which is true, is that a single cherrypicked study in which 15 vaccinated and 14 vaccinated people died is irrelevant because the difference in deaths in that study is statistically insignificant. Whereas the scientific consensus - based on studies that were statistically significant, and as reflected in your very own link - is that vaccines do prevent death overall.
It's easy to solve. Redo the Pollfish poll, but then you ask question that allow you to calibrate the person knowledge of statistics and rational thinking. Question like "How familiar are you with statistics?" and "Do you know what a null hypothesis is in th context of hypothesis testing?" and "Do you know the Bayes Theorem?" would give you a great way to know these results.
You know the result.
My dad’s heath worsened significantly within a day of receiving every COVID vaccine and booster, and he eventually died in late 2021 soon after getting his (I think) third booster. But he also had a rare and aggressive form of cancer which affects the immune system, and was very likely to kill him by late 2021 anyway.
After some thought, I answered “no” to the “vaccine side effects” question. If you die immediately after stubbing your toe (a real but minor harm), but you also have Toe Disease (which makes stubbing your toe instantly lethal), what killed you: stubbing your toe, or Toe Disease?
I am sure that if we could poll a medieval town with "Have you or a person you know personally ever suffered an misfortune which you think may have been caused by a witch's spell?", by the standard of Kirsch, we would have to conclude that witchcraft is real and a big cause for human suffering.
The universe in which we live does not run on consensus reality (with a few notable exceptions, see "Crazy like us"). Reality is not a democracy.
--
Regarding Scott's poll, it is worth pointing out that most of his readers are grey tribe and the grey tribe is the most enthusiastic tribe about vaccines. Improving human live through technological interventions is kind of our whole shtick. Of course, there could be different reasons for that:
A) I might believe vaccines are safe because grey tribe leaders say they are safe.
B) I might believe they are (very likely) safe because I think I know the operating principles (i.e. the scientific method) and the economic incentives which the people who developed the vaccines were working under.
C) I might try to study the published literature on the safety of the vaccines, and (again together with some assumptions about how scientists work) come to a conclusion.
From the outside, I guess it is hard to distinguish A and B.
There are few intuitions as strong as post hoc ergo propter hoc, especially when self-interest comes into play. Millions of people are sincerely convinced that their health problems are due to exposure to Agent Orange, Roundup, talcum powder, and the drinking water at Camp Lejeune notwithstanding the lack of evidence.
The problem I see is that Kirsch’s survey is trying to extract an objective conclusion from subjective data. Asking people to not only self-report their symptoms but to draw a conclusion on the cause of those symptoms is highly subjective; asking them to draw such conclusions about a medical outcome of others is even more so.
The bottom line is that only a traditional long-term study that includes rigorous pathology on its subjects can even come close to anything like an objective conclusion on such questions. Prior to Covid, we used to do such studies before releasing such medical products to the general public. Certain influential people have decided they want to force the paradigm away from this model of vaccine development. Their motives aren’t relevant to the point I’m trying to make other than to observe that perhaps not all of them are benign, but the result of their actions is that everyone taking these shots has become part of what is by far the largest Phase III trial in medical history.
Most people recognize this (although they might not label it as I did just above), and on top of that, have been forced to rely on “trust in authority” rather than hard science with respect to the Covid shots. “Trust” is a highly subjective concept in general, and polling to determine exactly who we trust and how much we trust them is even more so. Add various mandates into the mix while asking people to accept the product on this basis created much of the resentment.
Combine that with the fact that the relevant authorities have exhibited a lot of what many see as trust-destroying behaviors, and the conversion of a scientific question into a political one is complete.
I think this article and the comments ignore that the positions "I know a person who died of vaccine side effects" and "serious vaccine side effects are rare" and "the vaccines were beneficial overall" are not contradictory at all. It should be easy and common to believe all three of them.
Most medications can have side effects, many medications can have deadly side effects. Aspirin sometimes kills people, and stopping a headache isn't even a life-or-death situation! But the covid vaccines are so politicised that for a while the only publicly stated positions were "it has absolutely no side effects ever" or "it is literally worse than the disease", both of which were false.
(The following is all a joke. Hopefully this comment can encapsulate and seal away all the future craziness on this thread, in much the manner of a scapegoat.)
> But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%).
But you didn't even mention the obvious conclusion, which is that the vaccine preferentially kills Trump supporters! But that confuses correlation and causation: clearly having a vaccine death in the family causes people to become Trump supporters! And since Trump took the lead in the creation of the vaccine, this must have been his intention!
Trump deliberately created a deadly vaccine to increase his political support!
The left-leaning establishment delayed the vaccine rollout until after the election to prevent this tactic from working, and that's why Trump lost the election!
If this theory isn't already out there on the Internet, it will be soon 😀
I can't be sure, but I think it is now out there on the Internet.
How sure are you that the people administering said "vaccine" inject the same substance into everyone?
Alternative theory: it's the microchips, they use 5G to figure out one's political leanings and then kill Trump supporters selectively /s
How many deaths does the survey imply? 8.5% of Americans having a household member dying is something like 30m deaths, assuming no overlaps within each household.
Let's make it 15m deaths, presumably concentrated in 2021/22 - did anything like that happen? Are they hiding millions of bodies, given annual deaths are something like 3m?
I think that's a statistical flaw. If 10 people of 20 know one person who died, that is 5% of the population, not 50%. But I don't know offhand how to translate 8.5% into a likely number of total American deaths.
Do you mean my point about overlap within households? I adjusted for that by halving deaths, but can't be sure... (halving would assume two siblings per household answering, unless people don't know what a household is...)
I'd note this isn't even a COVID vs Vaccine issue - 7.5% reported a COVID death in the household!
It isn't enough just to cut it in half. For example, say you have five households each with five members (25 people total), one of which dies of Covid. If everyone knows everyone else, then all of them know a household that had someone who died of Covid.
If you get 27 random people together, odds are better than even that two will have the same birthday.
Yeah, but the question was *within* a household, wasn't it? So to require a five-fold decrease would mean that the survey was getting multiple people from within each household
So I re-read the whole thing from context from the actual survey, and I find it hard to believe. You're right that the question was "Did any members of your household die from the COVID vaccine?" and also that 47% of households have 2-4 people in them.
I think I was initially answering the wrong question, though.
Interestingly, Scott's survey had "Family member", which is more expansive and more likely to create overlaps (though how many ACX readers are related to each other?).
Explain persisting increase in mortality beginning not with COVID, but with rollout of the jabs (which result in persistent spike protein production .)
You're replying to the wrong guy -this isn't even a COVID vs Vaccine issue - 7.5% reported a COVID death in the household!
Sorry
The assumption that RW or pro-Trump people would be more likely to hold anti-vaccination beliefs may be true with regard to THIS particular vaccine and across the entire country, but probably isn't true everywhere. The only anti-vax candidate in the US election right now is an old school environmentalist, and if you're over 40 that's exactly what you would've expected. Anti-vaccination was stereotypically a belief of granola-crunching California woo-woo types, and would have correlated stronger with owning a dream catcher or magnet bracelet than with support for any Republican. People who believe in healing crystals probably aren't coming here, but I'd bet a lot of left-leaning EA's from the west coast who read this blog grew up in households with moms who did believe in things like that.
But clearly Scott's right, people who read this blog come from a variety of backgrounds that give them a varied set of biases, but across that spectrum they are all vastly more likely to be aware of their own biases, and are definitely more likely to temper their claims with qualifications to maintain credibility as these did.
I hated covid mitigation NPIs more than just about anyone I knew, I wanted to do literally nothing, I was genuinely fully on team "let 'er rip" from March 2020 through to the end. But I can smell nonsense and irrationality on my own "team". It seemed pretty clear to me, from at least the publication of that Israeli study onwards, that the mRNA vaccines were not any better than acquired immunity from infection, and that in most demographics they didn't save enough lives to even be a statistically meaningful intervention, so I thought pushing them that hard was crazy. But most of the stories about them killing people were obviously flaky nonsense that smelled like something I'd regret endorsing. In my circles, it was more plausible to be skeptical of the mRNA's because some of the criticisms did posit particular mechanisms and came from people who knew a lot about that technology -- I ended up taking J&J when I was sorta forced to choose something, despite that being the one that WAS paused for side-effects, bc by a year+ into all of this, the CDC and "some bearded guy who questionably claims he invented the vaccine" were pretty much hitting from the same tees as far as I was concerned.
I pretty much agree with all of this, especially that first paragraph.
I was never particularly skeptical about mRNA, but I never went looking for problems, and all the biologists I knew were politically polarized on the left. I did realize that some of the pro-mRNA arguments were BS, and I was dismayed that no reportable sources were distinguishing the good arguments from the bad. I eventually got mRNA and a booster, but I'd also had an early case, and so I wasn't particularly worried.
When I learned in about February 2020 that it was an mRNA virus, and what that meant (it was unstable and would mutate a lot) I realized a vaccine was as likely as one for a cold. Even if it worked, the virus might be significantly different enough the next time you encounter it that the vaccine wouldn't work. This did indeed turn out to be the case.
I think a lot of the effort and advice was to convince people that the government knew what it was doing and would protect people if only everyone did as they were told. It's even possible that such feelings made people feel better, even if it was an illusion.
But the vaccine still does work to prevent serious illness and death.
(In fact the reason colds are as mild as they are is likely because everyone has many previous exposures to them. If you were exposed to a cold virus for the first time as an adult, it might be dangerous, like "Russian flu".)
Also an argument for natural immunity, which has no side effects
Achieving so-called "natural immunity" through a first-time infection is vastly more dangerous than getting vaccinated. But you knew that.
The Law of Small Numbers.
In the unlikely event (Law of Small Numbers?) no one has invented it yet, YHIHF.
Kahneman & Tversky talked about the Law of Small Numbers:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1972-01934-001
Kahneman. Of course. Somebody should do a study on frequency of a sweet idea having already been thought of. Dang. Nothing new under the sun. Never mind. :-)
MY losn would be along the lines of the ratio of observations seeming to contradict the null hypothesis / observations is inversely proportional to those being revealed as not contradictory. Consequent not of the hypothesis under test, but the cussedness of large populations of humans under test.
Thanks for the reply. Direct link to the paper: http://stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/TverskyKahneman1971.pdf
I suspect a lot of Kirsch’s survey respondents are thinking like Peter Griffin in Family Guy: “Oh no Lois, I’m not buying a used car. I know a guy from work who bought a used car and then ten years later - bam, herpes! We’re buying our car from a dealer and that’s that.”
https://youtu.be/F5SmUNYF-c8?si=Un1cqfRxdpGBnJei&t=36s
I would like alternative questions asking "do you know ANYONE who died of Covid or vaccines or had a family member who did"? I suspect you would get a very high number who does not. I not only don't know anyone who had a family member die, but I don't know anyone who who even knows anyone who had a family member die.
If I add up everyone I work with
(whenever an employee's family member dies, everyone gets notified so they can send flowers and sympathies), plus all the people in my very gossipy neighborhood, plus all my Facebook friends, plus the roughly 50 IRL friends and family I've asked if they even know of anyone who has died...that is hundreds of people and no one knows someone who died. Including about a dozen who are in their 80s and living in retirement communities and even THEY don't know anyone who died from COVID or vaccines.
It would be interesting to see if there are entire huge networks of people (likely mostly affluent professional class I'm guessing) where no one knows anyone who died, and then other networks that are completely separate with zero overlap where tons of people died or at least they say that they did.
Heck, forget dying, I've never even heard of anyone in my friend/family/coworker/neighbor network who had a family member who was hospitalized.
My dad went to the hospital. My sister is a chiropractor and had a pulse oximeter with her and noticed his reading was really bad so she convinced him to go.
My brother-in-law's brother died from COVID. He didn't get it checked out in time, and by the time he did go to the hospital it was too late.
I believe there were other people we knew who were seriously ill and maybe another more distantly related death, but I've forgotten about it since 2020.
This is in a small city, people in many different lines of work. I only know one other programmer, my wife was in the medical field at the time.
> Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%).
Could be a confounding variable here, e.g. if foreign influence bots around 2020-21 were targeting Trump supporters predicting them as good targets to get a critical mass to cause anti-vaccine sentiment to spread on its own and become stable domestically, or if the people running domestic influence bots predicted that anti-vaccine sentiment among vocal Trump supporters would increase vaccination among urban liberals (who are in cities, ie higher risk and higher strategic value areas than most Trump supporters).
Since when did actuaries start to compile death statistics using self-reported polls?
> One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way.
Your survey indicates that 57.1% of your readers got 1 shot of vaccine, and another 38.7% got the booster for full vaccination, for a total of 95.8%. That would indeed put them far above average for "at least 1 shot received" for the USA (70% + 11%)) and roughly also for the world outside of low-income countries:
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Of course, your average survey participant might not be fully representative of the people they know. Is it still reasonable to assume that "people your survey participants know" are more likely than average to have gotten at least one shot? If so, it would at least partially cancel out the "benefit of the doubt" effect you consider.
IDK how it was in the US but in Oz, one didn’t need to be pro-vaccine to get 2 jabs, one just needed to be pro-“keeping one’s job”.
If we compare full vax only (true believers, if you will), the ACX crowd is even more pro vax than average, 38.7 vs 11%
“True believers” because they’ve not seen serious adverse reactions in their social networks? Or not seeing any serious adverse reactions because they’re “true believers”?
It was the same here.
I felt like I was in a WWII propaganda film, with people asking me for "papers", no "please" about it. But they did accept me showing a phone picture of the card, so I didn't have to carry it around all the time.
All I know is that one of my closest friends stroked out 1 hour after his second shot.
It would've been worse if he hadn't been vaccinated.
People say this with a straight face
It makes sense to me that statistical illiteracy would cause people to spuriously attribute deaths to vaccines, but wouldn't it *also* cause people to spuriously attribute deaths to covid, in addition to the real effect of covid causing deaths? Weird that the spurious attribution of deaths to vaccines is enough to *match* perception of deaths caused by covid --- oh but I guess maybe more people got the vaccine than got covid? is that true at this point? most people have had covid I think? I guess if it's true that much more people have had the vaccines than covid then that would explain this
We have seen excess deaths lining up with Covid mortality data pretty well
Not directly relevant to his poll, but I thought folks might be interested in hearing about my interactions with Steve Kirsch.
From 2012 until a couple of months ago, I worked at Nextdoor and part of my work involved helping set policy about what kinds of posts are allowed on Nextdoor and then actually making the decisions on our most difficult reported cases.
In early 2021 (I don’t remember precisely when and now that I have left the company no longer have access to these emails), after hearing about my role through an acquaintance, Steve contacted me to ask me to restore his account access and some posts he had made on Nextdoor advising folks to consider fluvoxamine as a potential treatment for COVID. Steve, of course (to his credit), was the key funder that made research into fluvox as a COVID treatment possible: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-03/can-common-antidepressant-help-covid-19-fight
His email prompted me to dive deep on the issue, and I came to the conclusion that while we didn’t want Nextdoor to become a place for people to turn to for medical advice, it would not be inappropriate for neighbors to post messages suggesting that folks discuss with their physician treatments that had received at least some positive coverage in major medical journals. So I restored Steven’s Nextdoor access and his posts and advocated for the position above internally.
Six months or so later Steve contacted me again, this time asking me to restore anti-vaccination messages he had posted. As proof he sent me data from England showing lower COVID and death rates among the unvaccinated. But when I looked closely at the data, I realized it wasn’t broken down by age cohorts. As soon as you broke out the data by age, the rates of infection and death were much lower for the vaccinated.
And this pattern then continued for months. Steven would share anti-vaccination data points and claims that would collapse as soon as one did any due diligence. I eventually came to the conclusion that one could no longer take any of Steve’s claims at face value.
Unfortunately, I think the MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/) had it right three years ago. Some mix of his (justifiable) frustration over the FDAs slowness in evaluating promising cures like COVID, his desire to be perceived as a hero and to get attention, and perhaps his own medical issues has caused Steve to lose the plot, and I think nothing he claims related to vaccines and COVID can be trusted.
Maybe it’s the same problem we see on all sides: once you have a firm hypothesis, you look for evidence that it’s true and discount evidence that it’s not. Confirmation bias is a bitch. And maybe it’s my own confirmation bias speaking, but I wouldn’t dismiss the whole notion of vaccine injury because someone on the internet tells me Steve K is bad at interpreting scientific evidence. As another poster pointed out, signals of vaccine harm do exist. Is this really going to be data shooting match where we all just point our guns at the other side? If so, I’m on the side that wants to reduce possible harms.
Agreed that Steve's motivations and personality are irrelevant to assessing the efficacy or harmfulness of vaccines.
What I do think is relevant when assessing the vaccines is whether there is any credible evidence that suggests that vaccines are causing more problems than they're addressing. A year ago, which is the last time I tried to look into this, the answer was no as far as I could tell. Here was the best review of the data I found at the time:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/excess-deaths-for-2022-still-show-no-signs-of-covid-vaccine-deaths-b614947af5ca
What is the data that has emerged since then that suggests that there is a problem.
I can’t think of anyone I know who died of COVID. I did have an employee die of an aneurysm. She was a hardcore Trump supporter who posted anti-impeachment memes (this first one) but also took the precautions seriously. She died in April 2020, so before the vaccines. I was very sad to lose her.
Of your six stories, 50% explicitly reported the individual died after getting the mRNA *booster* shot. If the mRNA vaccine was the most immediate cause of death, why didn't that 50% die after one of the first two shots? Because that would be a very novel dose-response curve if true
Sensitization, and some kind of anaphylaxis? Not THAT novel a phenomenon.
Read Cause Unknown by Dowd. And then explain the excess mortality that has been occurring since the rollout of the jabs (and has been persisting even though COVID has tanked as well as uptake of the jabs, and understand that the mRNA producing the spike protein persists.
Talk to us about the decrease in fertility & increase in pregnancy complications since the jab rollout
The ignorance demonstrated on this topic is quite amazing, to the point where it almost seems intentional. Years and years of life insurance reports, mortality data, cost-benefit analyses, and studies showing that the vaccines were significantly more harmful than COVID for everyone other than the elderly, and yet we're deciding to go with "twitter poll doesn't *prove* vaccines were deadly" as the argument?
In the original Pfizer vaccine report - the one the FDA relied on to approve the vaccine for emergency use (and subsequently mandate injections on the populace) - all-cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group than the placebo group.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345/suppl_file/nejmoa2110345_appendix.pdf
(page 12 - notably, heart-related deaths were much more common in the vaccinated group.)
This alone should be enough - "inject this substance into your arm - trust me, it will protect you" is an extraordinary claim, and not only is there not extraordinary evidence in favor of this - the original study actively disproved the claim! But, continuing...
Cost-benefit analyses show significant net harm from vaccines:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070
We have strong short-term temporal association between vaccination and myocarditis:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34420869/
Vaccines increase severe adverse events, even after taking into account the supposed COVID severity reduction:
https://www.scivisionpub.com/pdfs/us-covid19-vaccines-proven-to-cause-more-harm-than-good-based-on-pivotal-clinical-trial-data-analyzed-using-the-proper-scientific--1811.pdf
VAERS, the official monitoring system for vaccine safety, indicates that hundreds of thousands have died from the COVID vaccine. And remember VAERS is well known to be underreported by around a factor of 10.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/vaers/access-VAERS-data.html
I will repeat - this is *the* official vaccine safety monitoring system for the FDA and the CDC. If your response to this is "oh, those are just crazy people submitting fake reports, we can't trust VAERS data" - then you've literally admitted that we don't have ANY reliable safety monitoring system in place.
Labor force disability statistics show an interesting trend starting around January 2021 (hmm - what else "rolled out" around January 2021?):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01374597
In 2020, the death rate for people age 15-24 increased about 20 percent. In 2021, the death rate people age 15-24 increased by *another 10 percent*, after the rollout of vaccines.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm
Excess deaths started going up in January 2021 (huh, where have I heard that before??) and then continued going up *even well after COVID cases had plateaued:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/12/excess-mortality-during-the-pandemic-the-role-of-health-insurance/
Life insurance data shows excess mortality among the 0-44 age group around 80% above baseline in mid-late 2021 (notably, blood clots typically start causing problems a few months after vaccination):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22275411-group-life-covid-19-mortality-03-2022-report (Page 23, Table 5.7. Q3 2021)
And even after all this, if you still believe the vaccine is Safe and Effective - it still doesn't justify any of the mandates, which overwhelmingly affected the young - those working and in school - who faced thousands of times lower risk than the elderly.
https://archive.ph/ZtEcw
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Bollettino-sorveglianza-integrata-COVID-19_21-settembre-2022.pdf
Thank you. It’s truly amazing to see scientific types stick their fingers in their ears and go lalala can’t hear you… or refuse to look and then say they can’t see anything… the cherry on top is that many of these same people were all in on the fear over covid and were ok with forcing a risky treatment on those who didn’t really need it…
Even though you're preaching to the choir in my case and it wouldn't have occurred to me to give Kirsch any credibility (had I somehow come across him), it's still heartwarming to see someone like this called on their bullshit. Thank you and bravo!
> The average 80 year old has a 5% chance of dying per year; the average 90 year old a 20% chance. Let’s average it out and say 10% for the 80+ population. That means a 1/3650 chance per day
Probability is not linear like that! One way to see that is to go the other direction: if you have a 20% chance to die in a given year, then according to this logic, you have 120% chance to die in 6 years which is impossible.
The correct approach is to look at the survival probability. The probability that you survive the year is the probability that you survive day 1 and day 2 and day 3, etc. So if p is the probability to survive a day, then p^365 is the probability to survive the year. If there is 10% chance of not surviving the year, then we have p^365 = 0.9, so p = 0.9^(1/365) ≈ 1 - 1/3465, about a 5% difference from 1/3650.
It's not linear over long time periods, but it is approximately linear for small probabilities (i.e. short time scales), which is what Scott cares about. As you observe, the difference is trivial.
I have asked, over and over again, a simple question: where are the bodies? And none of the anti-vaxxers has a remotely good answer.
An interesting conclusion here is that the selection bias of an ACX survey mattered massively in a way that was somewhat subtle. I don't think we would have concluded order of magnitude difference in the answer to this question without comparing to a more representative sample. I'm updating to be more cautious about making conclusions from heavily selected samples, even when there's not an obvious reason connecting the selection to the conclusion.
An interesting conclusion here is that the selection bias of an ACX survey mattered massively in a way that was somewhat subtle. I don't think we would have concluded order of magnitude difference in the answer to this question without comparing to a more representative sample. I'm updating to be more cautious about making conclusions from heavily selected samples, even when there's not an obvious reason connecting the selection to the conclusion.
Is it possible that age is a big confounder for your readers? We just know way fewer old people than genpop.
ASSUMING this comment section has not explicitly solved the issue. I now comment: First scott does not recognize conflict vs. mistake in his education post. Then he doesn't realize that the evidence here means that with high certainty a mix of (1) poll A was flawed (2) poll B was flawed and / or bad replication (3) processing / analysis of A failed (4) processing of B was flawed (5) someone is lying (6) scott or the other guy was wrong. He may no longer be a serious rationalist, but if he is still a honest man, he should use his money to comission a poll from that source the other man did, then another from another polling company, then ask the other man in phone what went wrong here, and then comission five analyses from all available evidence (past polls, new polls, this comment, past analyses, online material—AND THE VERY SAME EVIDENCE PACKAGE FOR ALL ANALYSES!) (1) himself (2) by that other man or person of his choice (3) three independent hired experts (preferably from outside US!). Then these five new analyses should be published at the same time along with names of the independent analysts and the whole evidence package for public scrutiny. This can be done well, and does not cost much effort OR money. Where is the public truth-seeking Scott? Still there? Also, I will personally subscribe if you do this, and still pay bit of respect if you refute explicitly why you don't.
I don't think the RNA vaccines killed a huge % of people, though I'd be surprised if they didn't kill any. The Oxford vaccine certainly did kill dozens in the UK, after some 20 million doses,and sadly the people most likely to die were at the least risk from SARS cov2.
No it isn't. Quit parroting RFK Jr. nonsense. The issue was well researched when they discovered the virus and there was no cancer caused by the vaccine.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/187182
If you really want to replicate the surveys, please use the same methodology. Why didn't you pay pollfish and try to replicate it?
96% of your readers took the shot so they think it is safe. It seems you forgot to mention that. Your readers are NOT representative of the public. People who believe the shots are safe have a hard time seeing deaths caused by an intervention they think is safe. So you didn't replicate these polls which are a cross section of America.
Why not talk to doctors who are aware of the harms and compare their numbers for COVID deaths vs. vaccine deaths? I can give you the name of a geriatric practice that will give you their numbers. I have a military doctor who would love to talk to you. This doctor had 5 vaccine deaths in 3,500 people and these are young fit people who aren't supposed to die. They died of causes unheard of for people their age.
Can you identify a single nursing home where there was a miraculous drop in COVID ACM only after the shots rolled out.? Can any of your readers find a success story with 150 or more residents and a statistically significant drop in deaths caused by the miraculous vaccines.
How do you explain nursing homes like Apple Valley Village where the all-cause mortality increased 8 fold (to 8 a week) after the shots rolled out?
I see a common thread here even if the adverse effects of vaccines were minimal. The vast majority of people who died of Covid were old and in poor health. This is based on data from the CDC. And it appears that a significant percentage of reportedly who died of a reaction to a Covid vaccine in the ACX poll were in poor health. The issue remains that a very poor state of health amongst a very significant percentage of the population is the biggest health problem we face in United States. It is a shame that in addition to suppressing information from the Covid lunatic brigade like there is no such thing as viruses, the government also suppressed high-quality information indicating that losing weight, exercising, and taking vitamin D could dramatically improve one's outcome. You can argue that this was a moot point after the introduction of the vaccine, but it certainly wasn't a moot point for all of 2020 when these correlations were already well established in the research literature. Our government and media are quite culpable in the deaths of up hundreds of thousands of people during 2020. I think suppressing so-called misinformation during the pandemic backfired badly. People would've been far less likely to believe the most crazy things people were saying if they had just been allowed to disseminate so they would be disinfected by the truth and people also would've received useful information on protecting themselves should they ever become infected pre-or post vaccination.