I’ve been watching VAERS for a while. Not just over COVID but I’ve been curious for a long time if the Anti-Vax movement had a leg to stand on.
I’m still undecided about the Anti-Vaxxers in general.
I noticed something interesting in the charts located here.
In the conservative media there’s been a lot of talk about adverse reactions to the COVID vaccine and the VAERS database does tend to back up their allegations. Bear in mind this is only one data source and there may be contributing factors such as other comorbidities.
It is, and always has been that the sudden rise in death wasn’t necessarily only the COVID vaccine. It’s possible that the deaths might be associated with the vaccine triggering a cascade of issues that resulted in the patient’s death. This is very much in the vein of the CDC and others revising their COVID cause of death statistics.
In both situations, if the patient had diabetes and perhaps pneumonia then it’s possible that having COVID contributed to the patient’s death but was not the sole reason they died. Likewise a patient getting the vaccine may have died after getting it, but the vaccine is not necessarily the sole reason they died.
It pays to keep that in mind when looking at the data.
To get a clear cause / effect relationship you need to exclude everyone who had comorbidities or some other pre-existing condition. Only then, can you reasonably draw some conclusion as to whether the vaccine is dangerous. If the preponderance of deaths due to adverse reactions were in an otherwise healthy population, that should raise a red flag.
The overall numbers of deaths isn’t my point. What caught my attention was that the number of “Vaccine Related” deaths is dropping.
If, as the Anti-Vaxers say, the COVID vaccine is universally bad and dangerous, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers dropping off.
Thinking about it. I came up with three hypotheses.
1 The really vulnerable population has died off. That’s gruesome to think about, but doesn’t exclude it from the realm of possibility.
2 Fewer people are taking the COVID vaccines. If those people who were never going to take the vaccine in the first place are still not taking it, and the population that ran to get the vaccine have already had it, then the numbers wold start to fall pretty much due to reason #1.
3 People are giving up on reporting adverse reactions because they’ve come to the belief that the government won’t listen anyway and therefore it’s pointless to report anything.
As I said, these are only hypotheses. Like all hypotheses they can only be proven or disproven. The science, (A.K.A. Truth,) of the situation doesn’t care if it hurts my feelings. Since I’m not a “Scientist” my hypotheses are pretty much not going to matter in the least.
However, this little exercise might give some of you insight into the workings of my mind. I’m dogmatic to be sure, but there’s a part of me that’s always asking, “Are you sure?”
It’s the “Are you sure?” That makes me go back and reevaluate.
While I may think the traditional Anti-Vaxxers are incorrect in their declaration that all vaccines are bad, I keep looking at their data and determine for myself if I agree.
I suppose it’s along the same lines as watching Ancient Aliens. I find that sometimes there are points they make, that clearly can’t be explained away with our current knowledge of ancient civilizations. There are items, stories or customs that don’t seem to make sense.
In those situations in my mind I relegate the Ancient Aliens “proof” to anomalous items. A kind of a TBD pending further research. I don’t believe that every odd shaped stone, pot, or weird custom is proof of alien contact.
For all we know, 4000 years ago an apprentice craftsman did something weird and the Master craftsman said, “Run with that, you’ll find out why it won’t work for yourself,” The apprentice may have put the item on their workbench as a reminder not to get too wild with innovation.
I myself have done this. I’d hate to think that 4000 years hence, a cult of some sort rose up around one of my failures.
Anecdotal evidence in my mind isn’t evidence. It’s an observed situation that deserves further inquiry. That’s why I reevaluate the Anti-Vaxxers data from time to time. That’s why I’ve been interested in all the COVID issues. That’s why I have always liked science in general. I like testing the anecdotal against the provable.
I like being able to convert anecdotes into demonstrated facts, or disprove anecdotal evidence as an odd coincidence.
The latter is more interesting. You can have a repeatable event, that anecdotally looks like proof but when you really look at it, you discover that what appeared to be a clear cause / effect relationship was dependent on a bunch of conditions that weren’t obviously related.
The puzzling part of that kind of discovery is the most fun to figure out. Then again, I like puzzles so it’s probably just me.