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Comment by mint2 | Hacker News Reader

Disproving misinformation by those who are making flawed arguments, whether out of ignorance or whatever’s takes far more effort than spouting them in the first place.

I glanced over it and it’s clear the author has no idea about statistics or rates. Oh at a time when a few hundred million vaccines were administered there was an uptick in absolute numbers of reported vaccine side effects? Wow! And that happened in the context of a large portion of the population being deathly afraid of the vaccine and anxious about it?

If one wants to present an unpopular and not viewed as credible point of view, it’s pretty important not to look completely ignore simple alternative explanations that are unquestionably causing part of the effects one is talking about

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I scanned through it, and one thing that jumped out is the Google Trends graph for "Myocarditis". Is it really "curious" that more people are searching for that term, given all the media coverage? How many people even heard the term "myocarditis" before 2021?

This is beyond useless as any kind of supporting evidence for the point the author is trying to make. Mixed in with Twitter anecdotes and random YouTube videos, it's just noise making it that much harder to critically evaluate the argument.

The term "Gish gallop" comes to mind.

Same take for me as well. Screams of cherry picking. The stats in favor of vaccines take a sentence to explain (like “of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died”). This is a long term rambling wall of text.

Another part is how individual doctors mention individual patients who develop problems after the vaccine. Statistically, that is guaranteed to happen. There is a guarantee that someone will have their first heart attack today. The overlap between vaccine doses and heart problems is statistically guaranteed but does not imply causation.

> The stats in favor of vaccines take a sentence to explain (like “of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died”)

Are those real numbers?

At least according to table S26. Death summary in Blinded Phase (https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f...) it should be “of the 15184 people with the vaccine 16 died, vs the 15162 people with placebo, 16 died”. Unless I'm mistaken.

Numbers are cherry picked on both sides. Read the results and draw your own conclusions!

Read the results in the paper:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f...

Group A and Group B had the same amount of deaths.

Group B also had more adverse reactions, some serious and some minor.

Given these details in isolation, I would want to be in Group A. But then you look at what that Group A is, and it's actually the control group.

Some statistics about the table:

There were 30,000 participants, and in both test and placebo, there were 16 deaths. The test arm had 3 covid deaths, and the control arm had 1, but it was an HIV patient who was not fully vaccinated so they are arguing it’s 0 deaths for the fully vaccinated cohort. So, the numbers we’re looking at here are pretty small.

So what can we learn from this? Basically, if you remove all the covid deaths, it’s 13 deaths in test and 15 in placebo. These are statistically equivalent. In both test and control you’re equally likely to die of something other than covid in that window.

Now onto the covid deaths. There were 3 in placebo and 0 in control. These are horribly small numbers. More data would be useful.

However.. you can do the stats anyway. The placebo group suggests that the death rate is .02%, with some error. Having 0.00% death rate in the test group is unlikely, but within that error.

So this data is too weak to draw much of a conclusion.

But why would you go look at the results of a year old study with 30,000 participants when there is recent data covering many more people where protection from death among the vaccinated is blatantly obvious?

That's the trick, focus on the evidence that paints a particular picture instead of actually evaluating the available evidence.

The greatest point of failure in these studies is the quality of data. If it isn't ensured to be accurate any further analysis is useless. And this is the core point the article tries to make.

Not saying it is correct or not, but you did not respond to the criticism.

Firstly, as others pointed out, your numbers are wrong so your one sentence explanation is just misinformation. The number of deaths in the trial arms were about the same, actually a bit higher in the vaccine arm. The official explanation for this is that COVID is not deadly enough to show up in a trial population of 'only' ~60-70,000 participants especially because the trials failed to recruit many over 80 year olds, who are by far the most at risk.

Secondly, the article is broken down into sections with proper titles, and many links to evidence. It's not a "wall of text" and it's not "rambling", it's well structured.

Thirdly, the doctors and nurses in question are saying explicitly that they found the sudden prevalence of these events surprising and concerning. They are front line workers, they aren't sitting in an office reading Excel for Dummies, they're saying they noticed a qualitative change in the situation.

Finally, I only got about half way down but I actually found statements that were underplaying the extent of the problem, like this one:

"the English data, though difficult to interpret, contains some worrying signals that all-cause mortality could be higher in the vaccinated, especially in those under 60 years of age"

It doesn't contain "worrying signals" that all cause mortality "could" be higher. It shows outright that the all-cause death rate in the vaccinated has been much higher than in the unvaccinated in 2021. You can find a graph of it here:

https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov...

And that article links to the original ONS report, if you want to read that.

that comment is an excellent example of why these articles get flagged rather than debated. They become an incessant Sisyphean slog through every minor detail that has between twisted or cherry picked in ways that really seems intentional on the part of the pro-death anti vax movement in order to prove their narrative at any cost.

210 million America are vaccine as of today. Are you trying to say the number I mentioned in my comment was wrong because I said “few hundred million” instead of “a couple hundred million plus change” when even if it were just “one” hundred million my point would be valid? Quibbling over whether it should be a couple or few when either of them support the point is 100th level nitpicking on the unimportant. Of course the point I made has been ignored because it was valid.

> show up in a trial population of 'only' ~60-70,000 participants

Why are you looking at the number of participants? It’s not relevant to your point there. The number that had covid is needed to answer the question you’re posing.

"Are you trying to say the number I mentioned in my comment was wrong because I said “few hundred million” instead of “a couple hundred million plus change”"

No. You claimed "of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died" which is just factually wrong. The trials didn't show anything even close to this disparity.

"Why are you looking at the number of participants? It’s not relevant to your point there. The number that had covid is needed to answer the question you’re posing."

Trial size determines ability to detect small but real effects, which is why the larger number of deaths in the vaccine vs placebo arm was ignored.

Oh oops wrong level of comment. You weren’t saying that my numbers were wrong, my bad. But the other points still stand. Those numbers the person quoted do appear off.

So you agree with my points about the few hundred million getting vaccinated in a highly anxious climate with tons of misinformation about side effects is essentially guaranteed to have high levels of reported side effects simply due to psychology. That alone means nearly all of the articles points fall apart so quibbling with sub comments in an effort to salvage the article is pointless.

Also the article is a long mass of poor quality text. Having section dividers doesn’t make bad references and argumentative fallacies good logic.

For the question you posed about Covid and the excuse giving, yes the number of Covid patients matters.

You are correct about that but your dismissal doesn't convey scientific rigor either.

you’ve pointed out exactly why allowing misinformation posts literally kills people. It takes more effort to thoroughly debunk every single claim and lie, and yet the damage is already done. And despite the debunking the anti bad narrative crowd just posts it again.

Nicely wrapped packages of turds is super common for vaccine posts, if the box smelled like poop and has fudge like material smeared on it, it would be odd to open the box and send it to a lab for a 12 page assessment of the exact species and last meal.

So Forgive me for just pointing out this box smelled bad and has smears on the outside. Now that I pointed it out, you’re welcome to send it off to a lab yourself if you want to know whether it’s cow or horse.

One of the links in the article is to Steve Kirsch's http://www.skirsch.com/covid/Deaths.pdf.

"Anaphylaxis is a well known side effect and doctors are required to report it (see FDA Fact Sheet at the top of page 10) because it is considered a “severe adverse reaction.” It occurs right after the shot. You can’t miss it. It should always be reported. A study at Mass General Brigham (MGM) that assessed anaphylaxis in a clinical setting after the administration of COVID-19 vaccines published in JAMA on March 8, 2021, found “severe reactions consistent with anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10,000 vaccinations.” This rate is based on reactions occurring within 2 hours of vaccination, the mean time was 17 minutes after vaccination. This study used “active” surveillance and tried not to miss any cases."

251,000,000 people have received 1 or more doses of COVID vaccines (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-... taking that 0.000247 rate at face value results in about 62,000 cases of anaphylaxis-related symptoms. VAERS reports 282, meaning 220x under-reporting, much worse than Kirsch's "As noted in the letter, this implies that VAERS is under-reporting anaphylaxis by 50X to 123X."

Unfortunately, anaphylaxis is not as bad as death and should be more common than death, right? But Kirsch also claims, right at the top of the paper, "The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans so far." So that's more than two times as many instances of a result that should be less common, by his own argument.

Somebody here isn't understanding statistics.

Oh, and about that 2.45/10,000 vaccinations? That paper is https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777417.

"In this prospective cohort of health care employees, 98% did not have any symptoms of an allergic reaction after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The remaining 2% reported some allergic symptoms; however, severe reactions consistent with anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10 000 vaccinations. All individuals with anaphylaxis recovered without shock or endotracheal intubation. The incidence rate of confirmed anaphylaxis in this study is larger than that reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on passive spontaneous reporting methods (0.025-0.11 per 10 000 vaccinations).1 However, the overall risk of anaphylaxis to an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine remains extremely low and largely comparable to other common health care exposures.4 Although cases were clinically compatible with anaphylaxis, the mechanism of these reactions is unknown."

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