Vaccine Megathread No 2 - Read OP before posting

We should always ask questions. But not based on anecdote - and certainly not unverifiable second hand anecdote. Because any anti vax crank can potentially go into any forum and just invent a partner or health care worker who has allegedly said stuff. Not saying you particularly are automatically such a crank - just saying that that is the only form of evaluation intellectually open to us when a random anecdote is presented on a random forum.

Worse a "health care worker" might sound qualified - but is actually no more qualfiied than you or I to make the determinations required to evaluate the effects of vaccines in this way. Rather they are just normal human beings - just as prone to false pattern identification as any other human beings - and are in a place that is "self selecting" for the patterns involved. The average "health care worker" is not an epidemiologist. And in fact the term "Health Care Worker" is massively vague too. It could mean anything from a neurosurgeon to a doctors secretary.

The problem with vaccines - compounded by vaccine paranoia of course - is that people will have issues. And because they recently had a vaccine their false pattern seeking brain will have a tendency to try to link the two things. Alas much - many - maybe even all of the people in question were going to have those exact same issues regardless of having been vaccinated at all. A certain amount of people for example are going to have strokes every year. If you happen to implement a vaccination program in a given year - then many of the people who have strokes in that year - who were going to have those strokes anyway - will question whether the vaccine caused them. The human mind is prone to that kind of fallacy.

Anecdote has to be dismissed to a point - because as I said those anecdotes would happen without vaccines too. Multitudes of people have multitudes of medical issues every day. They were going to happen anyway. So when vaccines happen to be in effect - people will simply ascribe those anecdotes to the vaccine. Entirely erroneously. So anecdote is poor evidence at the best of times. But it is much worse in scenarios like we have now.

Worse though - the anecdotes themselves can not be verified. There are anti vax people with no anti vax evidence who will simply make up those anecdotes on the spot. This happens all the time. There is one long term boards user for example who - almost regardless of the topic - always just happens to know loads of people who all just happen to agree with him. Discuss sex work he happens to know loads of sex workers. Discuss homelessness he just happens to know all these homeless people. Discuss transsexuals he just happens to know all these transsexuals.

The Open Vaers systems are no better. We can draw zero conclusions form things submitted there until the evidence is processed. For all the same reasons as above - and other reasons too. On another thread a clearly anti vax user did nothing but cite the number of submissions that system has had. As if this number tells us anything at all. It does not. At all. Not even a little bit. The quantity of submissions that system has is - on it's own - a non statistic. It. Tells. Us. Nothing. When I pointed this out he just screamed that I was "arrogant" and ran away from the thread.

All that said however - I am not aware of anyone who is claiming vaccines do not cause issues. Of course they do. We know they do. Any medical intervention across an entire society is going to cause adverse effects. This is an absolute 100% given. And not just in medicine either. If you create any wide spread intervention on any major issue you are going to cause adverse effects. The goal is to ensure the cost is worth the benefit and the negative effects are far out weighed by the positives. And anecdote is not anyone's friend in that endeavour. Again for all the reasons I laid out above.

What the anti vaxxers are failing to do is show that these negative effects are anything other than barely significant statistically - and so their reliance on anecdote real or imagined or invented becomes a crutch for them. Scroll back up to the two videos I responded to today for example. There is nothing whatsoever linking that to vaccines. It is just a video of a sick old man to which the user appended a commend about questioning vaccines. You might as well show a photo of a random eviscerated chicken corpse and say "What about that meat industry huh?". It's absolute desperation nonsense.

But look at some of the anecdotes on the Medscape link you cited. One person got sick months after receiving one and declares they "just recently linked it to the vaccine". That's hardly evidence is it? Not days, not weeks, but months after receiving it they developed an issue which for no reason they indicate in any way whatsoever have simply declared is caused by the vaccine. Talk about making my point(s) for me :) This is _exactly what I am talking about _.

There has been noise over the last week suggesting confounders in Israel's data: