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Comment by adamiscool8 | Hacker News Reader

According to my governments stats, the COVID-19 hospitalization rate for my age + health cohort, when modestly adjusted for their known undercount of cases, is less than 1 in 3000.

Also by their stats, more than 1 in 2000 4-dose mRNA vaccine series have resulted in a serious adverse event reported by a health professional.

Then, factoring in the additional risk of acquiescing bodily autonomy to an opaque bureaucracy — considering what herding behaviors have been blatantly manufactured over the last few years, and the conflicting interests involved.

I think declining is a very reasonable choice.

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Don't forget natural/recovered immunity, which people seem to finally be considering again. For a lot of people any vaccination was unnecessary risk for no reward.

What constitutes a 'serious adverse event' in this data? Do you mind linking the source? Having a 1 in 3000 chance of getting so sick you need to be hospitalized seems quite bad.

In case they don't answer, I would guess they are referring to VAERS data, and some random guy who once claimed it underreports everything by 40x. This is not logistically plausible (where would you hide 40x more patients than expected arriving at hospitals?), and I have seen some recent studies suggest that the underreporting factor is actually <1x (meaning it is overreported) when doing statistically random sampling. But that does not stop people from repeating the claim ad nauseam.

In Canada, all reports to our Public Health Infobase must be made by a health care professional. I do suspect underreporting, given social and collegial pressure on practitioners to not undermine vaccination efforts, but I accept the given stats linked above at face value for the purposes of my model.

the 40x is possible, and even likely - but that is often twisted to suggest that if there were (for example) 10,000 reported deaths in vaers, then it must mean there were 400,000 actual deaths from the vaccine - yes, there is a lot of under-reporting, and maybe even a 40x factor, but those unreported events are usually of the trivial kind - i.e. 'I had a sore arm after getting the shot' - likely trivial symptoms are under-reported by quite a bit - not plausible that there are 40 deaths for every reported one.

The true hospitalization risk from COVID could be 1/4th to 1/10th that given that cases are widely estimated to be 4-10X what was reported.

The serious adverse event definition and rates are defined here: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/ut...

1 in 9000 doses reportedly results in a SAE, so if you are mandated to take 4 doses, your risk becomes ~0.04% or ~1/2500.

This also does not factor in the risk of "adverse events of special interest", which can be serious or non-serious (though neither seems great for the end user).

And looking at how this page has been updated since the last time I saw it, another red flag is how they separate those out - with a dead link to boot. In my opinion a continuation of efforts that seem intent on obfuscating the ability to make individual risk calculations through this pandemic.

I'm looking at your link but I can't find anything about serious events controlled for age group (to make it a fair comparison to your covid hostpitalisation number). Is the data in there somewhere?

Would be nice, but all they volunteer is that the adverse event rate is highest in the 30-50 year olds. Given that, I don’t think it makes a material difference

What makes you think that? Serious events for regular covid was heavily skewed towards the elderly.

Inference based on overall adverse events post-vaccination being lowest in elderly recipients, plus the early SAE warnings (myocarditis, etc.) being exclusively towards young adults.

Also more conspiratorially, because I think they would have provided the age-stratified data if it supported their objectives of improving lagging uptake among younger cohorts.

> 1 in 9000 doses reportedly results in a SAE, so if you are mandated to take 4 doses, your risk becomes ~0.04% or ~1/2500.

That sounds like motivated bad assumptions.

Seems highly plausible that those who would get the reaction in the 1/9000 would select out the sensitive individuals so the rate would be less for subsequent shots on the other 8999. It seems very unlikely it will be a constant rate.

Anecdotally, I had the same reaction to all four shots. Mild symptoms the lasting 24 hours. With your comment’s assumption that’s pretty statistically unlikely, statistically it would have been likely that one would have been less or more, since by your comments logic it’s completely random.

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