So are you saying we should listen to the anecdotes of those who died from getting the vaccine?
The vaccine that was pulled very much came down to anecdotes vs numbers of injections in a cost benefit analysis. Presumably it would have still been administered to the elderly if their where no alternative vaccines. But as their where alternatives it wasn’t worth putting people at even such low risks.
You can download the data and crunch it... https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html though note:
> Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.
> The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
I love basing my opinions off of shitty data.
I would not be surprised that the anti-vaxxers know more about VAERS than the general population.
E.g. if 100 people walked out the door and had a heart attack the next day, you need to understand the base rate of heart attacks to know whether 100 is high, low, or normal. Then you need to put that number in the context of statistical significance, e.g. p < 0.05 means an up to 1 in 20 probability that your data is there by random chance, and if you look through all the AEFI data you'll analyse much more than 20 types of adverse event, so you'll most likely find an adverse event or two that looks statistically significant but fails to replicate in any studies.
> A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine.
(crunching some data... Death... Death of pet is listed as one of them? well... ok)
And just looking at that data its... self reported. For example, running it for the current vaccines there's one death reported for a person under 6 months old which is rather surprising since it's not authorized for that age range.
Anyways, the thing is that doing the "simple" query on this shows that 2,694 age 80+ died after receiving the vaccine. That needs to be calibrated against the question of "how many people aged 80+ would die in that time range without either covid or the vaccine being present?"
And that is exactly the problem that you're describing.
The key thing is its there and if people want to approach the data using the proper statistical rigor... the data is there.
The relevant pipeline blog post: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/get-ready-false-si...
> Bob Wachter of UCSF had a very good thread on Twitter about vaccine rollouts the other day, and one of the good points he made was this one. We're talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you're going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That's how many people die and get sick anyway.
> But if you took those ten million people and gave them a new vaccine instead, there's a real danger that those heart attacks, cancer diagnoses, and deaths will be attributed to the vaccine. I mean, if you reach a large enough population, you are literally going to have cases where someone gets the vaccine and drops dead the next day (just as they would have if they didn't get the vaccine). It could prove difficult to convince that person's friends and relatives of that lack of connection, though. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the most powerful fallacies of human logic, and we're not going to get rid of it any time soon. Especially when it comes to vaccines. The best we can do, I think, is to try to get the word out in advance. Let people know that such things are going to happen, because people get sick and die constantly in this world. The key will be whether they are getting sick or dying at a noticeably higher rate once they have been vaccinated.
The referenced tweet is: https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1333966348972539904?s...
Do you think it is worth getting the vaccine if you’ve already had covid and it wasn’t a big deal?
As in if you have firsthand experience that covid didn’t affect you much, wouldn’t that maybe be a valid reason to just say I’m not going to get vaccinated even though the risks of adverse short term effects are small (still don’t know about long term but probably small is my guess)
That said, quite a few people that had COVID before end up suffering far more the second time. As long as we are talking about individual cases, the first person do die of omicron was in their 50’s and had COVID before but never got vaccinated. But again even if we are talking about a 25 year old athlete you only get ~70 * 365 days, why spend more of them sick than you need to?