But journalists, too, need to be clearer. We are performing a public service: we hold governments to account; we inform the public. Despite the stereotypes, journalists in my experience are usually well-intentioned and public-spirited. We’re not just out there hawking for clicks; we pride ourselves on finding out things that other people don’t want to be known, or for explaining complicated things to our readers.
Often, though, journalists aren’t traditionally very good with numbers. One of the things I try to do with my columns for UnHerd is explain bad science stories. Often the numbers in these stories mislead not because journalists are doing it on purpose, but because they’re not scientists or statisticians. Questions like “Is that a big number?” “Are we still measuring the same thing?” “Is the study it comes from any good?” simply don’t occur to them. We’ve thought of a neat way to address this: a statistical style guide.
Most publications have style guides. At the Telegraph, the style guide was very concerned with the correct terms of address for aristocracy. (“The Duke of Bedford’s son is the Marquess of Tavistock. Lord Tavistock’s elder son, if he has one, can use the third title of the Duke, and he therefore is Lord Howland.”)
The style guide at BuzzFeed, where I worked after that, was much more concerned with whether or not to hyphenate “butt-dial”, “circle jerk” or “douchebag” (all thus).
The Sunday Sport’s style guide, meanwhile, is extremely particular about how to write “bellend”. (“BOLLOCKS: Full out in copy and in headlines. WANK: Full out in copy, w**k in headlines. BELLEND: One word, full out in copy and headlines.)
Having a consistent style is useful; it helps publications maintain a clear identity. But as far as we know, no publication has a style guide for numbers. Not just in terms of when to write 100 and when to write “one hundred”, but: how should you present statistics in order to avoid misleading your readers?
So we have put together a list of 11 points that we think will help. They’re in our book. We don’t pretend that they’re the final word, and we’re keen to find out how we might improve them. For instance, Evan Davis, the radio presenter, tells us that he thinks we should explain in words that there is uncertainty around an estimate, or that a study is not very robust, rather than explicitly including confidence intervals and sample sizes.
We do think, though, that if journalists follow our guide, we’ll end up with a better national discussion. People will have a better understanding of the numbers in the news, and therefore make more informed decisions. It might also prevent governments from making insane decisions about perfectly good vaccines, putting thousands of lives at risk in the middle of a pandemic.
Our Statistical Style Guide
1) Put numbers into context
Ask yourself: is that a big number? If Britain dumps 6 million tons of sewage in the North Sea each year, that sounds pretty bad. But is it a lot? What’s the denominator? What numbers do you need to understand whether that is more or less than you’d expect? In this case, for instance, it’s probably relevant that the North Sea contains 54 thousand billion tons of water.
2) Give absolute risk, not just relative
If you tell me that eating burnt toast will raise my risk of a hernia by 50%, that sounds worrying. But unless you tell me how common hernias are, it’s meaningless. Let readers know the absolute risk. The best way to do this is to use the expected number of people it will affect. For instance: “Two people in every 10,000 will suffer a hernia in their lifetime. If they eat burnt toast regularly, that rises to three people in every 10,000.”
3) Check whether the study you’re reporting on is a fair representation of the literature
Not all scientific papers are born equal. When CERN found the Higgs boson, or LIGO detected gravitational waves, those findings were worth reporting on in their own right. But if you’re reporting on a new study that finds that red wine is good for you, it should be presented in the context that there are lots of other studies, and that any individual study can only be part of the overall picture.
4) Give the sample size of the study – and be wary of small samples
A drug trial which has 10,000 subjects should be robust against statistical noise or random errors. A psychological study looking at 15 undergraduates and asking whether washing their hands makes them feel less guilty is much less so. It’s not that small studies are always bad, but they are more likely to find spurious results, so be wary of reporting on them.
5) Be aware of problems that science is struggling with, like p-hacking and publication bias
Journalists can’t be expected to be an expert in every field, and it’s hard to blame them for missing problems in science that scientists themselves often miss. But be aware of the various ways that scientists can chop up data to make it look as though there’s something there when there isn’t — or to quietly hide results that don’t support their hypothesis. Also, if a result is surprising, that might be because it’s not true. Sometimes science is surprising, but most of the time, not very.
6) Don’t report forecasts as single numbers. Give the confidence interval and explain it
A lot of the time, the media will report on forecasts and models of the future. For instance, each year the Office for Budget Responsibility will make an economic forecast for how much the economy will grow. Or in early 2020, statistical modellers made forecasts for how many people the Covid-19 pandemic would kill.
If they said “Without a lockdown, Covid-19 will kill 250,000 people in Britain,” they didn’t mean that it would kill exactly 250,000. Instead, that was a best guess, in the middle of a wide range of uncertainty: they might say, for instance, that they were 95% sure that the true figure would fall between 100,000 and 400,000. That is the “confidence interval”.
Often, though, when the media reports on forecasts and models, they just give the central, best-guess estimate, which makes them sound more precise than they are. When reporting on forecasts and models, make sure you give the confidence interval, not just the central estimate.
7) Be careful about saying or implying that something causes something else
Lots of studies find correlations between one thing and another — between drinking fizzy drinks and violence, for instance, or between vaping and smoking weed. But the fact that two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one causes the other; there could be something else going on. If the study isn’t a randomised experiment, then it’s much more difficult to show causality. Be wary of saying “video games cause violence” or “YouTube causes extremism” if the study can’t show it.
8) Be wary of cherry-picking and random variation
If you notice that something has gone up by 50% between 2010 and 2018, have a quick look — if you’d started your graph from 2008 or 2006 instead, would the increase still have looked as dramatic? Sometimes numbers jump around a bit, and by picking a point where it happened to be low, you can make random variation look like a shocking story. That’s especially true of relatively rare events, like murder or suicide.
9) Beware of rankings
Has Britain dropped from the world’s fifth-largest economy to the seventh? Is a university ranked the 48th best in the world? What does that mean? Depending on the underlying numbers, it could be a big deal or it could be irrelevant. For example, suppose that Denmark leads the world with 1,000 public defibrillators per million people, and the UK is 17th with 968. That isn’t a huge difference, especially if you compare it with countries that have no public defibrillators. Does being 17th in this case mean that the UK health authorities have a callous disregard for public emergency first-aid installations? Probably not. When giving rankings, always explain the numbers underpinning them and how they’re arrived at.
10) Always give your sources
This is key. Link to, or include in your footnotes, the place you got your numbers from. The original place: the scientific study (the journal page, or the doi.org page), the Office for National Statistics bulletin, the YouGov poll. If you don’t, you make it much harder for people to check the numbers for themselves.
11) If you get it wrong, admit it
Crucially – if you make a mistake and someone points it out, don’t worry. It happens all the time. Just say thank you, correct it, and move on.
And if you agree with all that, then join our campaign…
How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Stats in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) is published on Thursday.
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Subscribe‘But journalists, too, need to be clearer. We are performing a public service: we hold governments to account; we inform the public.’
Well that’s nonsense. The vast majority of journalists, for many years now. have existed primarily to misinform the public, or to push either their own agenda, or that of their organisation, upon the public. This is why so many of us have given up on the MSM.
And to suggest that journalists have held governments to account is just a sick joke. I can no longer distinguish between the government/state and the media, on subjects ranging from Iraq to Covid. Of course, the media has been handed millions in govt advertising due to Covid, which is why the media has fallen in line so abjectly.
When the MSM journalists spent 3 months obsessing about a drive from London to Barnard Castle – rather than raising incisive health and science-based questions, any case for their defence was utterly obliterated.
Would you have said the same if it had been Jeremy Corbyn rather than Dominic Cummings?
Without question – dreadful non-story from partisan goons
Yes and still would
Absolutely. Also there is the very heavy handed way in which his brother has been treated.
By the nature of you comment you clearly do not think this way
Piers Corbyn is a first class moron. It really is that simple. Moron is not my first choice of word though.
I am not sure that is fair. I suspect he is smarter than his brother. I fear his problem is that he is unable reconcile the changing political agenda of the left with his own longstanding political allegiances
I think he’s great. He has protested vehemently against lockdown, and I believe he saw through the climate change racket years ago.
He is only against climate because it entirely conflicts with his Marxist devotion to coal miners the coal industry.
As soon as you give any credence to the idea of man made global warming you have little choice but to sign up the elimination of coal as an energy source and wave goodbye to the storm troopers of the socialist movement.
I think he is right on climate change albeit for the wrong reasons
I know Piers Corbyn personally, I like his views of Climate Change rubbish,Carbon Neutral nonsense, Stop Lockdown ,but not his Anti-vax he is a good guy ,Although i disagree with his Marxist views
How very interesting, he may yet be ‘saved’. Thank you.
Stephen kinnock , A welsh labour Mayor,,Liverpool Labour councillor, A SNP MP aLL journeyed miles breaking lockdowns…but someone who Was a brexiteer and with an autistic child.shows was hounded & vilified, by these Warriors of @@truth” Not…Woke hypocrisy backed by stupid gullible mainstream Roll on GB news ..i WANT unbiased news like Al-jazeera & Russia Today NOT opinions usually wrong ..its ”Your Truth”!
What is your evidence that Cummings has an autistic child? That was a Twitter rumour at the time but I never saw anything to substantiate it.
Nyet Vladimir, too obvious again! Vodka ration docked for a month. Also report to re-education centre for remedial English punctuation.
“What is your evidence that Cummings has an autistic child? That was a Twitter rumour at the time but I never saw anything to substantiate it.”
you simply aren’t “friended” on the authoritative Facebook page.
The Cummings family were driven from their home by N London Corbynistas who drove and LED Truck repeatedly past his property.
make them squirm and double down on their prevarication…well done.
This was not necessarily a political comment, simply an observation of fact!
Yes though MSM journalists were rather less critical of Stephen Kinnock at the time and others according to their political persuasion.
The difference between you and most of the rest of us is that we would. Had Jeremy Corbyn been the father of a two year old child with autism and had Jeremy Corbyn had a wife who was showing signs of covid-19 infection, and had he been living in a house, picketed by hostile groups of @rseholes, yes – I would have encouraged him to travel to Durham to seek the support of family members. Of course in such circumstances, Jeremy would have been fully within the law.
Had Cummings not been, don’t think for a minute that, given all of the publicity and the repeated demands for punishment – even by the vile Labour place man Police and Crime Commissioner, that plod would not have handed him a ticket. If Corbyn was in the same position, he would have had every right to act as Cummings did.
The media in the UK has become utterly appalling in terms of quality. Partisan, driven by click bait and political to the last.
They completely failed to miss the fact that Cummings had not, as they asserted, weakened the adherence to lockdown rules. Rather, their coverage of it was the problem. If they had not been driven by some snidey, pseudo-political agenda and not reported it, no harm would have been done. So who was the problem, Cummings or the media? Seems clear to me which did the most damage.
And every day, reporting figures with no depth – no breakdowns of age groups, underlying illnesses – nothing but who can print the most salacious or terrifying headline.
Agreed. They could not resist the opportunity to damage to Cummings no matter the consequences while at the same time declining to question the basis of the lockdown because of the consequences.
Cummings is not a victim he is the author of his own demise.
What nonsense.
As far as I can tell he was not in breach of rules but the knives were out for him as though he had committed some appalling crime.
At the same time other politicians an d celebrities who could have been pilloried for lockdown breaches were given a free pass
So “one rule for the government and another rule for the rest of us” is fine so long as nobody finds out?
Ian – I agree about the Barnard Caste obsession, but feel inclined to take you to task about the horrible use of the MSM acronym, which is the mark of the hideously misled, conspiracy loons of the Trumpian extreme who think what is true is what they make up – that world of ‘alternative facts’, which of course are contrasted with actual facts and are hence, just made up. There are plenty of ‘MSM’ journalists who pointed out that Dominic Cummings had a very good reason to go to the North. It was the journalism of the left predominantly that made trouble over it and I presume that this is the ‘journalism’ that you object to.
The alternative to the MSM for news is not the mad world of invented, Qanon lunacy. and if I spelled Q Anon wrongly – good – I won’t waste the electricity involved in a google search to find out how they spell their madness.
I agree with you, however I actually believe that much of the MSM does this not out of any machiavellian desire to misinform, but because as Tom states they simply don’t understand. They can’t (as a collective) do anyalsis any more – they simply report things out of a desire to break stories and not be left behind.
Hole in one!
Well I think it is obvious that the BBC/Sky/ITV/Guardian etc are out to misinform. Some of the ditzier ones, as you suggest, might simply be unable to understand or analyse anything, not least because they are unable to place any information in any historical, geographic, social or scientific context.
Obvious? On what grounds do you say that? Actual studies of media output? (careful here: there are some).
Almost 40 years of reading the serious and not-so serious press. Over the last 20 years there has been a catastrophic collapse. There was a time when I would buy or fall upon any newspaper or magazine and read it for information and commentary. When I had a paper round I spent more time reading the papers then delivering them. Today, I don’t even look at them if they are put out for free.
Honestly, I trace it back the Y2K bug. That’s the start of it for me. It’s not just that countries that did nothing about it suffered no dire consequences, but it’s also that the companies who cause the mess profited off creating the problem and selling the solution. The subprime crisis followed the same pattern, but just expanded it. Notice also the interval for these events.
Thank God we survived that -near miss though!
You are so correct. And that 20 years is the internet era.
You clearly have no idea what the y2k bug was or the threat it posed but dont let that stop you ….
But we spent £20 billion and Italy spent a few million quid. Nothing happened in either country. It was very similar to Covid 19, a mass hysteria and over reaction.
what is the death toll in England from the SARS-CoV-2 virus? And Italy which is back in lockdown.
So I guess Johnson’s hospital stay was cover for a vacation?
Perhaps Italy’s businesses had been computerised more recently than the UK’s? If that was the case there would have been far fewer surviving examples of late seventies systems, written in COBOL and the like, all full of six digit dates and that WOULD have failed completely – such as the one I spent several months fixing. Had I failed, no planes would have fallen from the skies. But wrong interest payments would have been paid. It was not hysteria, apart from in a few press articles.
The other thing Italian businesses may have done was replace their systems with short dates with shiny new millennium-proof ones. That could have been accounted for as Cap Ex, not y2k fix costs.
I am sick of people with zero understanding of the y2k bug falsely using it as an example of a hoax or scam, when there are so many genuine examples to pick.
It was a huge exaggeration of the threat though and that is the nature of a significant amount of misinformation. I don’t believe the y2k scare was intentionally so, more out of careless ignorance with a degree of attention grabbing sensationalism which nonetheless cost a lot in time and money updating systems unnecessarily, but certainly an awful lot of exaggeration is deliberate in order to build a narrative to suit a purpose. I daresay it was something of a windfall for number of tech companies able to sell new systems and software updates off the back of it as well.
The y2k bug was a total invention, a pure scam.
It was not strictly an invention bit it was was a complete scam
your comment says more about you than print media.
Yes, it does. It says he is sensible and observant, unlike most of the MSM
Yep. Coincides with the press going onto the net. How advertising works drives click bait. Previously respectable publications are now just rubbish. The amount of internet traffic analytics that the media can review to determine what gets published next….
The MSM is largely staffed by left of centre, often far left of centre, people. It’s been the case for sometime that people with strong ‘social activist’ tendencies go into the media, as they see it as a platform where they can ‘do good’.
It’s a substantial issues across the entire public sector. Broadly speaking conservatives do not work in the public services, whereas Left wingers / socialist activist types do. That’s why you can often end up with a centrist / right of centrist government being frustrated by a public institutions that essentially unrepresented of the people they serve.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10235967/BBC-is-biased-toward-the-left-study-finds.html
Interesting article in the telegraph. It says that the BBC:
It bases its article on a right-wing think tank “report”, for which it fails to give any kind of health warning until the very end of the article. So much for following the standards it demands of the BBC.
The Centre for Policy Studies additionally points out that the BBC covered 7 out of 10 of the reports covered in the Guardian, and only 3 out of 10 of the reports in the Telegraph. No indication in the article of the time period they looked at, the number of reports involved, or whether it was representative of a longer period of output. Lots of issues of the sort pointed out in the UnHerd article in fact. Perhaps the remaining Telegraph-exclusive reports were as slight as this one.
Well it’s the BBC – institutionally woke.
Totally agree Fraser, took me 30 minutes to look up Ferguson after his 500,000 would die if we didn’t lock down claim, anyone else who looked him up would’ve asked the same question I did, i.e why on earth did they ask that guy? Not one journalist, politician could do this, then the fraudulant use of the PCR test, they have not investigated anything and just ask daft questions about locking down earlier, PPE, etc.
Unfortunately “500,000 will die” is better clickbait than “obscure Epidemiologist has dodgy forecasting record”.
It’s not that it’s better per se, just that a lot of subs and journos can’t spell Epidemiologist…
while you and yours can spell “Epidemiologist” you have no clue as to what they do and the science behind what they do nor the curiosity to find out.
When you don’t hide behind a stupid name and stop being a keyboard warrior, your comments may (probably not) be taken slightly seriously.
I am fairly sure you don’t need a biological sciences degree to be a journalist writing click bait.
I hold one and have a much better than average understanding of epidemiology. But you just warrior away, slinging out nonsense – it really helps the debate. <slow_clap>
Have you actually followed Tom’s suggestion and taken personal responsibility for the information you choose to view and in particular followed suggestion No 10 and gone to the source ? Have you read Imperial’s report No 9 from soup to nuts ? Do you know what assumptions underpinned the 550,000 figure and what the other scenarios in that report described ? and what the 550,000 actually referred to ?
What fraudulent use of the PCR test ? by whom ? how ? when ?
Have you read any of the scientific literature on the timing and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of NPI’s ?
If nothing else this last year was a golden opportunity to educate yourself in the basics of critical appraisal of data and to examine how science is done and critiqued (by other scientists). Tom’s new book sounds like as good a place to start as any.
Viewed from the Arno it may appear like that.
However for others Tom has been a classic male hysteric and lockdown fanatic, and as such his opinions are worthless. QED?
1 – 4 and 6 – 9 are statistics 101. No opinions there.
If ever you return to Alleyn Road you will find a certain rage against this nonsense is growing.
This is (C-19) the greatest “rip off” since the Resurrection.
LOL ! Well Alleyn Road was and I am sure still is a very particular type of ghetto.
Since I still have pals working in the NHS I don’t share your view that C-19 was and remains an overblown myth.
speaking of worthless opinions…Charlie you have a special talent in that regard.
You make a good point, Elaine, but the devil is in the details. In my experience much research looks good up close, but when you move away to take in a broader view, it’s not widely applicable. I’m actually studying this phenomenon in my doctoral study. My research professor strongly hints that too much emphasis is placed on research and not enough on actual common sense.
Orwell summed it up well: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
Here he wasn’t actually suggesting that intellectuals are stupid, but that they are too close to the subject matter to take a more objective view. It’s a good explanation for all the Crit Theory literature that currently abounds. It even openly states as such by claiming that objectivity is subordinate to lived experiences. Unfortunately, this kind of discourse is starting to infect other areas like medicine, education, and psychology. It is very difficult to find any people-related research that isn’t pursuing a political agenda of some kind. I suspect that this is the reason that many people, whether rightfully or wrongfully, are starting to harbor deep distrust of public institutions. Almost all institutions these days seem to want people to give up their critical thinking skills in order to do their thinking for them.
My take on all this is that there has been a strong coercive element to the vaccines. I’m not taking one, not because I am antivax, but because I feel pressurized to do so. I’d much rather suffer the consequences of my own actions than someone else’s.
clearly you are devoid of all understanding of what statistics provide.
Statistics are an invaluable instrument for measuring variables and comparisons, but often don’t provide a complete picture. One of the first things impressed upon me by my professors is to question the data. For any researcher to claim that their statistics are infallible is utterly spurious. There are always measurement errors with any given data set.
Why the hostility? Perhaps explaining your position would help.
“…suffer the consequences of my own actions …” – well just so long as you don’t block the bed my best friend needs for her chemotherapy.
Up to date Advanced Directives – as important as having a will in these days of a lean and mean NHS.
I’ve read all the above in detail, too much to go into here, but yes the assumptions were wildly disproportionate to reality making the 550,000 ludicrous, yet we’re supposed to be happy with being kept ‘safe’ by removal of all our freedoms? The scientist who developed the PCR test came out in public early on saying this was never meant to wholsesale testing – it should be used on those with symptoms only and testing well people can produce upwards from 90% incorrect false positives. The WHO did a large scale study last year showing that well people do not transmit the virus, unfortunately they were forced to remove the posting – not because it was wrong but because of government pressure (now I’m guessing here that it was Bill Gates). Go ahead and read Tom’s book if you feel like funding yet another media charlatan.
Where exactly did he make that claim? The only claim I’m aware of in this direction was in the by now rather well-known Report 9 which said “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour”. Not the same as “if we don’t lock down”.
We are past 120,000 with measures, so his estimate seems not so far-fetched.
Unless they were diagnosed with Covid and then got hit by a bus. That counts as a Covid death in most of the world. That’s journalists working with politicians to misinform the public.
And bearing in mind this article, where is your evidence for this claim?
I won’t comment on the British media but, in the US, all you need is a review of press coverage of Chris Steele, James Comey, the Intelligence Community and the Democratic National Community for the period 2016-2020. It makes for a sad story of mis/disinformation coupled with appalling ignorance. The best case is the mindless acceptance of an open letter from 50 former intelligence officials that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all of the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. Those who confronted the story were castigated for not believing the intelligence officials.
what is the “Democratic National Community”??
even more appaling is your willful ignorance that is crossing over into malign ignorance.
It’s worse ..they can’t add up.
And sometimes Journalists are just a bit thick. Take Anna Wintour editor of Vogue remonstrating with Sarah Vine about the use of the word “niggling” being racist in its context meaning only to find her magazine has been using the word too on more than one occasion.
Not to mention that it has nothing to do with a racist context. Sheer ignorance. Stick to fashion, Anna, and sustaining your helmet-like coif with no hair out of place.
I expect the budget at Vogue for science coverage is rather niggardly!
Not just on more than on one occasion but several hundred times. the Guardian used it more than 2000 times.
It’s interesting that you include the BBC and ITV but exclude The Telegraph. Is it possible that you are seeing things you agree with as information and things you disagree with as misinformation?
Not really. I gave up on the DT some time ago. I don’t think it’s as bad as the others, but it still describes Farage and Ukip etc as ‘far right’. And it takes a lot of money from Bill Gates, so damn the DT to hell!
I would also point out that I was once a Guardian buyer and reader. I always have, within easy reach, a copy of ‘The Hugo Young Papers’. There was a time when the Guardian was a (reasonably) serious newspaper, but that time has long passed.
I am currently reading ‘And The Weak They Suffer What They Must?” by Yanis Varoufakis. He is very much to the left and I agree with much of his analysis.
I believe Bill Gates (of hell) Foundation gives filtered funds to finance ,the declining ”Guardian”,”The observer ”,Just as Soros is believed to fund ”The new European” as hardly anyone buys these 60,000 daily sales of ”The Grauniad” it pains me i used to Read The guardian 1970-74 but its Unbiased views disappeared when Editor Alistair Hetherington left..
your bald faced lies are noted,
Google ‘Philanthropic partnership at the Guardian’. Its partnerships are clearly laid out on the Guardian website.
What’s wrong with you?
“The vast majority of journalists…push either their own agenda…”
Ha,ha, even this article is more about Tom Chivers pushing his own book at £9.50 a pop.
It is the members of parliament we elect who should be holding the government to account, including those MPs who are members of the party in power. It is their failure to serve the people who elect them that is the problem. Politicians only serve the party because they are only interested in power.
I’ll say it again, the news industry is just that. An industry. And its raw material is bad news – nobody’s interested in good news for the perfectly valid reason that it has no survival enhancement value. Threats are what we’re, quite rightly, concerned about. When bad news – properly bad news – is in short supply, then some, um, creativity is applied.
So don’t expect any change in MSM clickbait anytime soon. Personally I go for the least sensationalist headlines & try to get opposing views on any subject. Then it’s down to me as an adult to make an assessment.
To paraphrase Parkinson’s Law for our 24-hour news channel world: the news will expand to fill the channels available.
The coronavirus data gov uk website on 16 March 21 informs all of World that:
UK People vaccinated with First dose total = 24,839,906.
The Yellow Card reporting system means that EVERY reaction seen by any Medical Professional MUST be reported to MHRA immediately. I have not heard of any reports of Death or major reaction to the OX-AZ vaccine. Has anyone?
If you look at http://www.gov.uk you can find the latest reported Yellow Card fatality figures – 227-Pfizer/BioNTech, 275-Oxford/AstraZeneca and 6 unspecified. No one seems to check them, no one seems bothered. I am not taking an experimental vaccine for a disease with an IFR 0.2-0.3%. Why would any rational person do so?
Well, 500 out of 25 million is 0.002%, two orders of magnitude lower risk than the IFR – and this is without knowing how many of those fatalities were in anyway linked to the vaccine (remember, correlation is not causation).
So as a rational person, I will be having the vaccine.
And that is of course the distinguishing difference between you and Ian and his ilk…being rational.
A review of the yellow card reporting system a few years ago came to the conclusion that it seemed to be designed to obscure side effects rather than find them. Problem is it relies on self reporting more than on medical professionals. If your side effect is immediate then medical professional reports it. If not unless it requires hospitalisation hardly any chance of medical professional being involved. Even serious side effects may not be tied to the vaccine unless the hospital treating has a number of cases at the same time. Take the blood clots, as the article says they are common, but not evenly spread throughout the population. But common enough that even though for certain groups of people they are unusual the odd case in these groups isn’t remarkable. If a number of cases appear at the same place at the same time alarm bells may ring. But if these cases are spread out in location they are unlikely to be noticed!
How do you know that no-one checks them or seems bothered? That is a ridiculous statement.
I’m sorry you are suffering from acute Conservative ideology derangement syndrome.
Thoughts and prayers.
Spot on. Take for example the current onslaught by the Express about the The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Daily they are posting multiple articles of dubious content and quality. They are all sensationalist, biased headline grabbing tosh! So are they performing a public service?
The media and judiciary have become the real enemies of the people, because they all aid and abet criminal activity by the politicians. No one holds anybody to account any more.The mdia actively suppress the truth.
Indeed, thrombosis is among the conditions that the Covid19 itself was linked to spuriously and reported widely.
First, journalists are almost never impartial, give us some numbers on that Mr Chivers, start with your fellow Guardian writers. My guess is some Left-or-Right-o-meter would find 90% swing left, and are not in the ‘give the info and let the reader decide’ game, but are out to promote their agenda by which info they print. Hard to define, but like Obscenity, I know it when I see it, and the 90% is about correct.
The rest of your article is pretty much common sense in that a number is meaningless without context, which is all really needed saying, and we knew.
Take a man testing positive for covid and being hit by a bus and thus is a covid statistic. Take an illness which 95% (or some such number) only is lethal when occurring with comorbidity and tell us how many really died of it. Come on, the numbers cannot ever be quantified in those parameters.
The entire 2020 is pure voodoo statics. Then add in inflation (the insane basket of goods price), MMT (magic money tree) fiat currency printing effects, ‘Real Yields’ (bond yield – inflation), unemployment, business loss, cumulative collateral deaths from the NHS becoming the NCS, lockdown mental pathologies, lockdown costing the children a year of education which few will make up,, quantitative easing stock price inflation, and on and on, and then give us a ‘State Of The Nation’ number telling us how lockdown has effected it all. Can’t be done as the entire covid thing is based on lies, inferences, guesses, agendas, collateral damages, unintended consequences, fear, hysteria, The Great Reset, abuses of freedoms and rights, and politicians more afraid of losing votes than they worry about destroying the country.
Your numbers are meaningless in big pictures where a million equations need to come with a ‘Grand Unified Theory‘. But I know what the result is without a number, and it is criminal, what the politicians, with their lackeys the MSM, and their Globalist masters have done to us in the name of saving us. You idiots burned the house down to get rid of a wasp nest.
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You are right that much of the article is common sense but common sense is rather rare. (I don’t have the statistics!)
Yes and unfortunately “You can’t put in what God left out”.
You can in sex change surgery
When ‘Adam’ gives birth I’ll believe you.
Until such time it only scares the horses!
Very funny. Says it all.
you may not have the statistics but you can be certain Sanford’s bogeyman “…their Globalist masters…” have them.
Perhaps. It might come across as conspiracy theorist, but surely you can’t deny that there is a concerted effort among many different countries to push events down a certain path?
An economically left/right bias is unlikely to be the problem in the reporting of science (economics excepted, perhaps). Even the progressive/reactionary split, however you want to label it, will only affect the appeal of relatively few studies in the social science.
Speaking of numbers, I’d like to see a study that backs up your claim that 90% of journalistic outlets are economically left wing (since that’s what “left wing” means). Perhaps you have one that is broken down by sector (TV, Newspaper, etc), because the newspapers seem much more right wing than UK TV journalism – so far at least.
The other part of your claim, that journalists tend to advance an agenda, may be rather more true. I suspect that if statistics (or scientific studies) are being used in a political way, it’s likely to advance the interests of the media proprietors rather than those of the readers (so probably right wing, rather than the reverse).
In 2013, a survey by Lars Willnat and David H. Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana University, showed that out of 1080 American journalists interviewed, only 7% identified as Republican. The rest said Democrat or independent.
Mainstream US Democrats and Republicans are right wing, and the economics of most US news outlets have followed the right wing neoliberal consensus. A lot of the independents are libertarians, who also tend to be economically well to the right. True, there are people like AOC, Sanders and even Warren in the Democratic party who are more left wing, but it’s still hardly a majority in the party.
So journalist party affiliation in the USA ells you surprisingly little about whether they are left wing.
How nmany journalists (in total) are there in the USA ? what percentage of this total does 1080 represent ? Be aware of No 4 in Tom’s list
You’d expect a left-leaning newspaper to have a lot of left-leaning articles. Studies of the MSM, however, reveal a massive rightwing bias overall.
Yes, the covid death statistic is imperferct (as they would all have to be, no matter what the criterion). But crucially, plenty of people go on to die of Covid after 28 days, so it’s likely to balance out.
As for lies, inferences, etc, you should remember that history is not the history of plots and evil conspiracies, but mainly of c**k-ups. I don’t think anyone set out to destroy the country, because there’s no evidence for that. There is plenty of evidence that people got things wrong. People do. The point of the Chivers article is to show why and what might be done about it. Yes, I expect he hoped to sell a few copies, but as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction books I can assure you that there isn’t a lort of money in this, unless you’re very lucky indeed.
Ah, yes, the “mistakes were made” chorus.
Be a bit more curious! Ask why the “people who got things wrong” are the ones in power, whereas there are plenty of people who “got things right” who have been and are still being sidelined and quashed and deplatformed. If all were heard equally and their views about the features and treatment of covid-19 put on the table to discuss and weigh, we wouldn’t have these terrible outcomes that result from dunderheads such as Ferguson being given the reins, then to drive the chariot over a cliff.
Examples (names) please of prophets who “got things right”
I’m one of them. I’ve often been accused of slippery slope fallacies, but every single thing I’ve ever predicted has come true.
Excellent post! You’ve summed this whole criminal agenda so well. Bravo!!!
The one unarguable fact from your post is that “effected” should be spelt “affected”.
Amen
Well. Actually it is a great example of being one sided. Every vaccine death is a death “with” vaccine. Every Covid death is “of” covid. What you are hinting on is the difference between relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction. Big Pharma trumpted relative risk reduction to sell its vaccine and didn’t even publish the absolute risk reduction as far as I can tell. Like you say it is probably less than one percent. Tom doesn’t bring this part up about vaccine efficacy but to him it is a great example of how dying “of” vaccine isn’t a big deal. Any deaths under 40 are a huge deal as covid is such a low risk for them. With the expected life years this just compounds the error.
According to a Mr Cunningham writing a couple of letters to the BMJ in November the NNTV for the Pfizer vaccine to prevent “a case” (he doesn’t define what this is) = 256. For Moderna for “illness” NNTV = 176 and for “severe illness” = 1370. He shows his workings.
From the Voysey Lancet paper in December, looking just at the AZ phase III trial results NNTVs vary from 9 – 93 depending on what subgroup you look at which just goes to show how important it is to have Big Numbers in order to arrive at a realistic Numbers Needed To … anything
Anyways, this has always been all about freeing up beds in the NHS so that they can get on with other stuff, and in that respect, it seems to be working.
If these vaccines reduce transmission as well then there might be a stronger argument for vaccinating lots of younger folks to reduce the risk of the appearance of new, peskier variants.
Excellent article and good luck with the book.
I only have one issue with this article. The author states “Despite the stereotypes, journalists in my experience are usually well-intentioned and public-spirited.” He also asserts that journalists “… are performing a public service: we hold governments to account; we inform the public.”
Isn’t that the problem? Journalist should be performing a public service and informing the public, but I honestly believe most no longer do that. Worse, in many publications they are not allowed to do that even if they want to because the publications are no longer traditional news outlets. They are agenda-driven propaganda machines.
The author’s excellent advice regarding presentation and explanation of statistical data is only relevant if journalists want to use it and are allowed to use it. Sadly, I think many journalists must now tow their employer’s ideological line and fudge the numbers if that’s what it takes to present a certain warped version of reality.
I don’t mean to criticize the author’s excellent article, but he seems to be attempting to preach morality and restraint to the invading hordes.
If journalists are as said above, then we do not know what the word journalist means.. I mean look at the Daily Mail and Harry and Megan in which half the paper is journalists reporting on them, and the cosmology they dwell in. I naturally look to the classics when ever I find myself lost in concepts and find Lewis Carroll is excellent in this instance:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Excellent quote! Especially applicable these days…
It’s an excellent list, but the most forgiving spin I can put on this article is that journalists are “thick”.
You don’t need to be a statistician, you just need an enquiring mind.
Couldn’t agree more on your last point, but it seems to be forgotten by many that the vast majority of journalists’ primary purpose is to provide a product that sells in an increasingly competitive, oversaturated market rather than to be the purveyors of truth that some rather loftily like to assume they are about.
Unfortunately, these two aims so often conflict for obvious reasons and when they do ‘the truth’ is inevitably the casualty to a greater or lesser degree, hence the reason why ‘we’, the audience, should always question what we see, read and hear and, as you say, keep an enquiring mind.
Hear, hear! Out with the odd courageous, honest hack. Most journalists these days have little journalistic integrity and now dwell at the bottom of the toilet pan in my opinion! The profession is utterly compromised. I mean, who really gives a rats ar$e about Harry and Meghan?
How is it that millions of members of the public have been able to figure out that positive PCR tests are not “cases of covid-d19,” but no journalists have been able to figure this out? Are journalists stupider than the public, or what? Or were they told promulgate this PCR test scam by their editors? If so, the public has a right to know this. I wrote to the editor of my local paper that postiive PCR tests are not cases of covid-19, but he ignored me . . . I fugured perhaps the paper’s owners were telling him what to print on this. Meanwhile the local hospital screamed headlines every day: “2 more cases! Governor extends lockdown!” etc.
As I understand it, a positive Covid-19 PCR test confirms the presence of viral genetic material, which would indicate an actual infection. What do you think it means?
But if the test is run at too high a CT level, it will detect virtually anything including dead viral fragments in recovered infectees. The WHO waited until the day of Biden’s inauguration to clarify that anything above a CT of 15 would lead to too many false positive results and therefore be misleading.
PHE has consistently refused to disclose what CT level is being used in UK testing but it is rumoured to be over 30, maybe even in excess of 40. So, our high “case” numbers – used to justify every public health policy decision and lockdown – is based on a flawed test and has led to all the finger-pointing and sneering about Britain being the sick man of Europe.
Even PCR’s late inventor – Kary Mulis – rejected its suitability for viral detection. But we have used it wrongly to dreadful effect. An increasing number of scientists have said we are being played. The Federal Prosecutor in Germany is suing Peter Drosten, who advocated its use in Europe to the EMA. But the MSM shows neither interest nor understanding of this scandal so central to the hysterical and irrational response to this virus.
Add the illogical way deaths are recorded in the UK and the entire distorted use of data to ruin lives and livelihoods is laid bare.
As and when there is a public enquiry, multiple heads should roll.
2 posts because you seem to be very confused.
As of Mar 16 for the Pillar 1 testing : “Guidance and standard operating procedure COVID-19 virus testing in NHS laboratories” any sample with a Ct value of < 40 = “positive” even though people are proably not meaningfully infected and shedding virions until the Ct drops to <24. I don’t know whether this guidance still applies.
Couldn’t find anything useful about how the Lighthouse labs for Pillar 2 testing (the testing done at testing stations) carry out their procedures or what Ct cut off they use to designate a positive sample. HOWEVER with their super splendid 3 primer testing mechanism a sharp eyed minion in Milton Keynes did spot the B1.117 variant in September (?).
The Mullis comment is a misattribution. The quote is actually from an article written by John Lauritsen in December 1996 about HIV and AIDS, not COVID-19. Lauritsen, at that time, didn’t believe that HIV caused AIDS. This particular notion didn’t age too well.
Peter Drosten – is this part of the Fuellmich circus ? It seems to me that in order to prove question No 2 posed by Dr Fuellmich to the WHO he will have to come up with some sort of credible model that will show that doing nothing would have produced less harm (definition ?) than what they actually did in Germany to mitigate their Covid disease burden.
As far as the PCR test is concerned, yes, at the tail end of an infectious episode it will be picking up just bits of chopped up RNA not viable virus. For 1-2 days before someone displays symptoms and for 7 – 10 + ? days after (depending on the robustness of your immune response) you potentially have enough virions up your nose to infect someone else in favourable circumstances. Either way, if you have a positive PCR test (operational false positive rate we know from when the prevalence was very low in summer 2020 – 0.08% according to the ONS random survey, 0.9% from Test and Trace ) it means you either currently have, or have recently had a Sars Cov 2 infection.
The main PURPOSE of testing all along was to act as an early warning mechanism for your local hospital / adjacent hospitals within respiratory ambulance driving distance – do they need to magic more critical care beds + trained staff in the next 5 – 10 days out of thin air ?
” …has led to all the finger-pointing and sneering about Britain being the sick man of Europe…” Absolutely correct according to Richard Horton in the Guardian in October (although he is a bit of an Eeyore)
ONS death stats are the most reliable because they are based on death certificates :
1. Certificates can only be completed by doctors who looked after the patient in the lead up to death and knew the full facts of the case.
2. Doctors have a clear statutory professional duty to complete certificates to the best of their knowledge and beliefs.
3. Falsifying certificates would be a serious offence with serious sanctions.
4. Certificates are checked by an independent medical examiner of deaths.
Ask yourself – what do doctors gain by lying ?
Thank you for your comprehensive and considered response, but it appears you are as much in the dark as the rest of us until PHE opens up about prescribed CT levels. You are technically correct re Lauritsen but the inappropriateness of PCR tests for Viral detection in general and Covid in particular still stands scrutiny – not least in light of the lack of transparency in a Pillar 2 tests and the gap between the belatedly publicised WHO recommendation of 15 and the rather vague <40 level you cite. Anything above 20-25 is straying into dangerous territory. Bottom line, neither of us really know and we have a right to!
As for death certificates, I’d want to agree that there is no incentive for our GPs to not be utterly truthful. But you cannot escape the point that deaths from comorbidities such as cancer are outranked by attributing them as primarily due to Covid and that other countries record deaths very differently from the UK, much more conservatively and prima facie objectively / common sense. Comparison is odious, to paraphrase the late Dr. Johnson (as opposed to the altogether inferior Johnson we have to tolerate in our times).
Our default attribution is Covid. Strange that if one dies less than 28 days after a vaccine, that death is either brushed off as due to natural causes or even as….due to Covid.
I am not so sure about the reliability of death certificates. Doctors have said that they received instructions from the BMA to err on the side of attributing deaths to COVID, and this seems consistent with the number of complaints by next of kin about Covid appearing on the death certificate even though they knew that this was false. I believe the requirement in England for two doctors to sign the death certificate was waived by Government fiat when the pandemic struck. It is not so much the question “what do the doctors gain by lying?” but “who would stand up for a doctor who refused to do as expected?”
The most high profile example was the death certificate issued for the father of Bel Mooney, the journalist. She wrote about it at length in the Mail (sorry I don’t have the precise date for the article).
Indeed, journalists and the media tend to regularly produce headlines and articles designed to sell papers and push their narrative. I don’t think this is a modern invention, hysteria sells.
The idea that journalists are out to make the world a better place based on truth is laughable. If one spends 5 minutes reading actual facts around race and sex outcomes for example in the UK, then huge chunks of the mainstream narrative falls apart. The stats around these issues are bent, perverted and where required wholesale ignored and replaced with ‘feelings’. Journalists are not the good guys.
And on the vaccines, the blood clot issue is not complex. Its a relatively common medical issue so the data is quite easy to compare. As others have pointed out the whole Covid debacle has involved lots of poorly informed guesses being presented as facts, with numbers used to make them sound scientific. Sadly a lot of these people are in positions of power
J Bryant you are echoing my thoughts. Can we say that on the intentionality of journalists at large, reality is somewhere between the author’s overly optimistic view, and your own far more pessimistic one? But it’s true that the onus of objective opinion-making has become much heavier for us news consumers.
Some journalists have been out and out liars, of course. One well-known one even lost his job for it. Does anyone know what happened to Boris Johnson, by the way?
He was later sacked by Tory leader Michael Howard. That was for lying, too.
The problem is that not nearly enough journalists do these days. Especially during the last presidency it became normalized for journalists who lie to be protected from consequences providing they bat for the right team. Whatever you think of their politics, the effect has been devastating on media ethics, which is almost completely nonexistent now.
Oh dear, another one. The only line you tow is one attached to a boat. It should of course be “toe the line”.
Shame Mr Chivers didn’t write and promote something like this a year ago. He could covered the statistics of Covid victims, such as their age and comorbidities. He could have delved into the statistics of false positives with mass testing and low prevalence of a disease, not to mention the dodgy mortality statistics being peddled, in relation to Covid. A little education of the politicians and public on this would go a long way.
Instead, we get a thinly disguised “Ra Ra” piece for vaccines, and a plug for his new book
Indeed, a terrible dereliction of duty.
You beat me to it Nick. By-the-by, if people want to see the percentage of overall excess mortality, due to COVID, broken down by country, the CEBM have a good post on it. Once again shows no link between lockdowns and excess mortality.
Shame ON Mr Chivers
Shame on him for writing a perfectly good and timely article now? Just because of something he (and many others) may or may not have written ages ago?
I think we need more voices speaking out for scientific accuracy and rigour in scientific reporting.
We have been manipulated with numbers all the way through this pandemic and it will continue, i do not believe our commentators or our politicians are stupid they have done this for one purpose only to heighten fear and gain control.
Thank you I find the response by certain countries to the Astra Zeneca jab is simply more of the same from all governments. As millions of people have had the jab in the UK including my son in law who is on an anti coagulant it might have one interesting and unintentional side effect that some of those people that have swallowed the fear narrative will begin to reevaluate all government offerings including their own.
If these countries can pause their rollout based on a lack of context or comparison what else is government, any government mis representing may grow more in peoples mind. I will not insult you by offering a rather long list of how this kind of thinking to pause has crossed into so much policy. We know about context (both historical and in relation to), cross comparison, cost benefit analysis and most certainly we know who has suffered the most. Those that do not understand and live close to poverty and our children.
I wouldn’t rule out stupidity as a confounding factor!!
I have a 12th suggestion. Present graphs in an honest manner.
I mention this as there was a survey comparing risk of death from Covid based on occupation and sex. This showed differences by occupaion, but also that working age men died at rate double that for women.
The Guardian however presented two graphs for men and women with different scales which unless you looked closely at the numbers on the axis appeared to show the same level of risk for the most risky occupation for each sex.
What else would you expect from the Guardian? Its writers are as deceitful as they are dumb.
Indeed, I can easily foresee the Guardian lobbying to prevent publication of Tom’s book, as it clearly represents an attempt to impose a patriarchal definition of “truth” which doesn’t represent their lived-experiences.
Fraser, this is a genuine question. Why do you assume that people with an pinion differing from yours, hold their opinions as a result of moral and/or character defects?
Because I have observed the moral and intellectual collapse of the MSM over the last 20 years or so. Just last night, Jeremy Clarkson tweeted that he no longer believes a word of the BBC’s new output. Well, some of us reached that point a long time ago.
Moreover, there was a time when I held at least some of the same opinions as those I disagree with. I get frustrated by their inability to change their mind in response to emerging facts and changing circumstances, or to cling to policies and beliefs that have clearly failed.
I thinks it’s generally the media organisations themselves that are morally defective (egregious disingenuousity being the main flaw)
The paid “journalists” who contribute are presumably playing the Nuremberg card as a means of justifying their complicity.
Thank you!
I always thought that the BBC was supposed to be impartial or at least apolitical. The Laura K piece on the news last night seemed like a party political broadcast to me.
I didn’t see it because I can’t bear to watch her or Queen Emily for the reason you just outlined.
Sounds like your one-person in-depth research over a 20 year period and a dataset of one has yielded just the result you were looking for.
I wish they were dumb in the strict sense of the word, that is to say, unable to speak, rather than unintelligent.
This is very common.
I also remember they were very selective in which figures they discussed.
They revelled, when Sweden had an upsurge in cases over a 7 days period. They totally ignored that low death rate and low rate of cases over the entire period.
But the Swedish policy of not locking down showed the pointlessness of lockdown, and so were always the enemy.
Sweden is indeed a good example, but it’s more accurate to say that “the Swedish policy of not locking down showed the pointlessness of lockdown in Sweden“.
We need to control for all the ways in which Sweden is different from other countries, and especially national culture. So maybe Finland would have benefited from a Swedish style non-lockdown.
But without actually drilling down to the underlying reasons for the success of the Swedish non-lockdown there is no way to determine which lessons are applicable to other countries.
Plucky little Switzerland didn’t go for draconian Lockdown either. Their pragmatic Cantonsl/Federal system just wouldn’t stand for it.
Thanks to the ‘Third Man’ we have been culturally ossified in thinking of Switzerland only it terms of Cuckoo Clocks and Skis.
I might add a few more characteristics, cheese, crooked bankers, chocolate, yodelling and William Tell.
No dispute over Cheese, Chocolate Yodelling or even William Tell, but for ‘crooked bankers’ I would say EC2 gives them a “good run for their money”.
In fact EC2 probably takes the Victor’s Palm for this event.
You forgot custodians of Nazi looted art from Jewish victims….
Nor did Japan.
By the way – for the fools that I have often heard trying to be intellectual and stating that of course Sweden has a very low population density – they have a higher urban population than the UK. It’s just the same logic as if you looked at a map of Australia and assumed that the entire population is living equidistant from each other across the entire landmass. (Australia has an even higher urban population than Sweden and the UK!).
My apologies I had complete forgotten about Japan.
Like many Englishman of my generation Japan was cast into the pit of eternal stench, by the 1922 Washington Conference and the near concurrent abrogation of the 1902 (4?) Anglo – Japanese Naval Treaty, and thus, along with 1941-5 sanitised from ‘our’ collective memory.
Personally I think inter country comparisons are almost a complete waste of time, but just for fun, these stats might be more pertinent :
In Sweden, 40% of households are single person households. By way of comparison in 2019 according to ONS UK average was 30% range 35% (Scotland) – 24% (London)
Sweden has the smallest average household size in the OECD (1.99)
Largest age group in Sweden : 25 – 34 years (in 2019).
A 2017 study by Statistics Sweden found that more than 55% of 16 to 24 year-olds don’t socialise with any close relatives.
Agreed, but that is the world we have made and must now live in.
How the Romans would weep at our stupidity and ignorance.
It does seem strange that we now associate Switzerland with such things, not to mention Roger Federer. In the late medieval / early modern period they did – you would think rather surprisingly – have the most kick ass mercenaries that could be bought. Francois I of France put that to bed at the battle of Marignano.
Isn’t the same true of the once ferocious Vikings, and one or two others who it would too impolite to mention?
The interesting question is do we call this decadence or civilisation?
Yes indeed. Also consider Sweden – in the late C17th / early C18th, a warrior king of a militaristic society indeed in Charles XII who duked it out with Peter the Great of Russia. And what do we associate Sweden with more latterly? Bjorn Borg and Abba.
What! the Guardian misrepresented data in order to push their agenda? That’s actually quite advanced, last week the Telegraph presented the ‘fact’ that the lockdown has been hardest on women, revealed by a survey of women.
You think maybe the women were lying, or that we men have secretly been doing all the housework and homeschooling?
A pity you didn’t and still don’t adhere to your own standards in that regards.
Otherwise, you would have debunked the sheer need for a vaccine against Covid on the basis of a 0.4% infection rate of the roughly 40.000 trial participants in each of them, and on the even lower absolute risk reduction of these trialled ‘vaccines’ aka gene therapies.
You would, of course, also know that the ‘vaccines’ have not been shown to confer immunity or eliminate transmission, as would be required from a proper vaccine.
0.4% during the trial period.
And they are not “gene therapies”, that’s a distortion coined by anti-vaxxers and Russian trolls. Or shall we pretend that there really is a Father Christmas, and Russia isn’t pushing vaccine scepticism in the West?
Read the Mercola article I posted below on that, and then come back to me and claim again that these are not gene therapies.
And I am neither an anti-vaxxer, nor a Russian troll.
Mercola: “SARS-CoV-2 has not even been proven to be the cause of COVID-19.”
So, he’s a nutter, and if you believe him, you’re a fool. The vaccines are not gene therapies, since they don’t involve changing the recepient’s DNA : https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/what-gene-therapy-how-does-it-work
Russia! Russia! Russia!
Give me the Sputnik V anyday over the mRNA shots.
And, BTW, we really do not need Russia to push vaccine scepticism. All of the smart people are NOT in Russia.
Mr. Chivers! A charming book-plug (note hyphenation) combined with talking-your-fellow-journalists book all in one article? Bravo!
That being said I shall certainly buy your missive as I have a weakness for that that kind of thing having owned a data analytics business in the past. I would add a few points to your list:
Correlation does not imply causation. Ensuring your independent variable is truly independent is the hardest thing of all. Avoid confirmation bias. Wherever you can do a meta-analysis. Avoid survivorship bias. And lastly a single data point can father an infinity of lines of fit (which is why I get so irritated when people grind on about their ‘lived experience’ in the context of wider society).
I’m fairly sure “lived experience” is shorthand for: “ignore well researched and undisputed data that contradicts or puts my arguments into context, instead listen only to my cherry picked arguments”.
See also “speaking their truth”
I’d add, “if you want a straight line graph, take only two measures” – and “if reproducibility is a problem, just take one”.
Isn’t the whole problem, that we have lost the ability to measure risk.
The very low risk of catching and dying from covid 19 for the vast majority of the population. Basically lockdowns were not necessary and don’t even work. They may even help create more dangerous variants.
The risk from blood clots is lower than the risk of covid 19 for high risk groups.
Low risk groups – those under 65 and healthy, don’t even need to take the vaccine.
We are statistically illiterate.
The benefits of the vaccine for us lower risk groups are: far less chance of passing the virus on to some who is vulnerable, prime your immune system so that if you do meet Sars-Cov-2 in a few years time when you are vulnerable you’ll stand a better chance of fighting it off.
There’s also the benefit of a massive reduction in catching a nasty bug that 99.99%+ of middle aged people won’t die of, but would still rather not have. Most otherwise healthy people I’ve known catch it – wouldn’t recommend it. In this sense, rather like the flu (ok the flu is more likely to kill younger people). Serious, best avoided – but not worth locking everyone down and tanking the economy for.
The vast majority of people who catch covid 19 are not even sure if they have had it. That’s how big an over reaction the whole lockdown has been to this, and that’s before the undiagnosed cancer deaths start rolling in, and of course the economic damage. The vaccine is probably best taken by a higher risk elderly people with pre-existing conditions, the rest of us could have kept on going to school, working and living our lives as normal.
If you choose to have the vaccine and the vaccine works – you are safe – no matter what the rest of the population does. If that isn’t the case, and you see the unvaccinated as a risk to the vaccinated – well that means you have a vaccine that doesn’t work.
It would appear your contention that vaccination is protective may in fact be incorrect see: https://doctors4covidethics.medium.com/ if what these doctors are concerned about regarding the danger posed by mutant strains turns out to be true, then we should all be extremely worried that mass vaccination may turn out to be anything but safe. Lets us hope they are wrong but the ferret incident during trials does not bode well.
“The vast majority of people who catch covid 19 are not even sure if they have had it” is simply not true. The asymptomatic rate is debated, but it’s certainly not the vast majority – otherwise we’d have already reached aquired herd immunity.
If we don’t have naturally aquired immunity it means that with this endemic virus you’re likely to catch it at some point. At the moment the ‘best’ place to catch it is when you’re in hospital or a carehome. If I’m in a hospital with another serious condition one day soon, I don’t want to then remember that Covid is more dangerous to those with other serious health conditions.
“the undiagnosed cancer deaths”
Undiagnosed because hospitals are swamped with Covid sufferers who can’t breathe and will suffocate to death in the car park if not given a hospital bed with oxygen on tap.
So if you let the virus rip, and even more people turn up at the hospital gasping for breath, would you expect the number of uninvestigated cancer cases to (a) decrease (b) increase?
Whatever nonsense fantasies people indulge in online, when people with Covid turn up at hospitals, they can either be admitted or they can be allowed to die. If you were a doctor, what would you do?
Brilliant points. Thank you
Quite few of those who don’t know if they had the infection are dead. Can you explain what was filling up our ITU’s in the last two waves? There are many more secondary deaths from hospitals being unable to offer treatment for other serious illnesses because they were so full.
It does not stop transmission, so the “passing it on” does not apply. Natural immunity is always better than a vaccine, something the media does not report.
The vaccines appear to significantly reduce transmission.
Just rubbish, Angela – sorry to be abrupt
Can you share where you discovered “natural immunity is always better than a vaccine”. I have always understood that vaccines generate a much stronger immunity than an infection but I have no evidence to hand to support it. If you have seen evidence to say infections produce a stronger immune response than a vaccine it would be good to see. Thanks.
And… what are the statistics that underly those assertions?
It’s all out there if you take the effort to look.
Agreed. Also it is clear from observation and logic that if restrictions are effective the disease will unfortunately become more contagious as only the more contagious will overcome the restrictions. Plus if you restrict all as in Lockdown then unfortunately you lose the natural event of the disease becoming less harmful where the more incapacitated leave the arena and those remaining active pass on their milder circumstance. Plus are we ever going to get a milder pandemic where most have to be tested to know they are actually ill and the average age of death by the disease is higher than the average age of death from all other causes and total deaths for the year remain around average? For sure history will regard our panic response to the mildest possible pandemic as the most pointless self inflicted wound of all time. It so shows how little we know about what we are doing medically. We have the illusion of being gods and knowing all because we know so much more than we used to but the amount we still do not know remains vast and actually well beyond even our imagination.
Great piece Lindsay
“It so shows how little we know about what we are doing medically.”
Well, that is the narraitve. The truth could well be that someone does understand perfectly well that lockdowns weren’t necessary and in fact were pointless *to curb the disease.* So, next question: What is the point, then, of general lockdown? To prevent and buy time for a general economic crash? Or perhaps to bring one about under “controlled” conditions?
I heard the Illuminati organised it with their orbital mind-control lasers. I elaborate on this in my monograph Elvis Shot Kennedy: Freemasonry’s Hidden Agenda.
Extending your assertion, guess what will happen if the whole population is not vaccinated, in terms of viral evolution.
I can’t be sure but my money is on you not having a qualification in Virology or Immunology. Happy to be corrected.
You seem very confused. This isn’t how respiratory viruses evolve. The more transmission that occurs >> the more (very different) immune systems the virus is exposed to >> the greater the selection pressure on all its random mutations >> the more likely it is that a variant that is better at surviving will appear. The virus has already done this quite successfully 4 times – D6104G early last year and then the B1.1.7, B 1.351 and P.1. This is the rationale for reducing transmission rates by people not meeting one another and by vaccination (Pfizer, Moderna and AZ all showing some evidence of reduced transmission).
The average age of death argument is a red herring – this is the expected age of death AT BIRTH. According to the Actuaries (you know, those people who deal with death and destruction every day) calculate that during this pandemic 80 – 89 year olds in the UK with 2 long term conditions could expect to live for another 5 years at least – provided they didn’t get Covid. They are the toughies.
As for death stats, the only measure worth looking at is all cause excess mortality becasue it includes everyone – covid, covid free people who succumbed to dementia at home instead of in hospital, heart attacks who didn’t make it to hospital in time, people who DIDN’T die of flu, people who DIDN’T die in a road traffic accident because they didn’t go out etc.etc. We are at about 100,000 excess (compared with the same period over the last 5 years) counting from March 2020. (PHE and ONS).
Plenty of medical imagination on tap over the last year – like repurposing an mRNA anti cancer drug as a vaccine.
There is another factor as regards the vaccine: What risk does it avert? It does not have to be very harmful to be more dangerous than the minute risk of dying from Covid.
A minute risk which has killed 125,000 people.
Two of whom are known to me. I bumped into an old colleague this morning and he told me of three other people known to him.
When you compare things statistically you have to make sure you are comparing like for like. If you apply the logic that yielded your 125000 number to vaccines, you can be certain the result would have been similar. If dying after being vaccinated doesn’t count as a vaccine death in every instance, then neither should dying after a positive PCR test.
Dying after being vaccinated doesn’t count if people die at the rate you’d expect anyway. Same goes for dying after a positive PCR test. However, people die after a positive test at a higher rate than you’d expect, and the ONS’s stats (based on death certificates) for dying of COVID19 give similar numbers to that death rate, so a death after a PCR test is a good proxy for dying of COVID19.
And that’s with lockdowns. Imagine what the death toll would have been had it been left to run wild. And once you add politics into the equation, nobody was going to let that happen.
You would need an authoritarian government with full control of the media and a collectivist society to squash this quickly. Hello China.
That “minute” risk is around 0.5% of dying within three weeks of infection. If the vaccination risk was anything like that, it would have caused about 200,000 extra deaths in Europe, half of them in the UK, since January. It didn’t.
The writer certainly sounds like an advocate for everyone taking the vaccine. Research these numbers and be wary of this writer. Lots of numbers and comparisons used to justify taking the vaccine. No mention at all about the comparison of the success rate of the vaccine compared to the success rate of the bodies immune system. The fact is that 99 plus percent is the survival rate for persons under a certain age. For my age group the survival rate is about 94 plus percent. No mention that way more than half the people being strongly encouraged to take the vaccine have zero need for it. Lots of numbers in the article used to achieve an agenda driven outcome. How about giving us numbers about the survivability rates for the various age groups. This article is misleading. Not everyone needs the vaccine. I am 76 years old and in good health, no pre existing conditions of any type. Wash your hands, keep hands away from face. I take vitamin D3, 25mg zinc, and Quercitin, an ionophore for the zinc that helps it get into the cells. Ask yourself why the incidence of the seasonal flu has greatly decreased? Ask about the test being used for COVID19. Stop worrying about the number of new cases. The more people that get the disease the better. That number is not accurate and is not meaningful. It is a propaganda tool used to push an agenda.
Totally agree about follow the money and that Big Pharma and Bill Gates have a record of turpitude to make Old Nick blush. But at 60 i still took vaccine #1 and have #2 coming up mainly because i want to travel, but also because it looks as though stats wise AZ vaccine is relatively risk free. If it were a risky vaccine i guess i’d have to decide not to travel. We bought Chloroquine on medical advice once the scamdemic started and though it cost $2k for 2 courses its got a 2024 date. So if myself and wife get Covid (again*) despite the vaccine we at least have some back up. 3 out of the 6 in our household have tested positive for Covid/SARS – CoV2 without any symptoms. Plus read the small print on the UK NHS leaflets: “having this vaccine does not mean you cannot catch Covid and you may still spread it” Calling Dr McCoy !!! “its a vaccine, Jim, but not as we know it”
After reading your post, my question is why would you take it then? Baffling.
I totally agree Chuck. All that has been created during the past year is wild hysteria over a virus that most people will survive. Today, it seems many want a vaccine for every thing that shows up. This has been pushed heavily over the last 25 years or more. Maybe we could become more inspired to eat better, supplement as needed (I take the same supplements as you indicate), exercise, get out in the sun, walk, care about the one body you have been given. In other words, put care there instead of an experimental jab.
Flu has decreased, obviously I would have thought, due to lockdowns, face coverings, social distancing and most people not commuting nor working in an office.
You also don’t seem to have considered or understand evolutionary pressure on a virus when only sections of the population are vaccinated.
I am also seventy six, and agree wholeheartedly with you. I also take Vitamin D, and C, Zinc and Quercetin. Many people lost their sense of smell after getting Covid – and the reason is likely to have been that their body was depleted of Zinc. Where allowed, Front line doctors are using Hydroxychloroquine + Zinc or Ivermectin very successfully. Quercetin can have a similar effect. as HCQ. Ivermectin looks to be a virus zapper and a variant blocker. So why don’t we hear about this on the main stream media? In fact, in the UK, why is it always the same incompetent’s on the corona TV show – all, it appears, pimping for Big Pharma and Bill Gates. They are into wealth, propaganda and control.. When most people want Health, Truth and Freedom
I am glad for your comment!
Having read several Tom Chivers articles, he’s probably the last person on earth from whom I would seek advice on vaccine safety.
Spot on ! It’s all blah blah blah and on he goes !
I am still convinced that long term the vaccines won’t work. The mutations and variants will continue and the vaccines will stop working. Luckily this is such a minor disease. 2.66 million dead from a population of 8,000 million plus. And 95% of the dead with pre-existing conditions. In places like the UK, the average age of death from covid 19 older than the average age of death, and very dubious allocations of deaths to covid 19. It will be remembered as the biggest hysteria of all time and baffle people for hundreds of years to come.
And wait until the undiagnosed cancer deaths roll in and economic disaster hits.
The vaccines will surely be required every year. This is a cash cow for the manufacturers & associated industries .
Taxes are on the rise.
If the vaccine were that safe we would have been released esp those vaccinated!
We will already begin to hear more of such cases- Sarah Harding ( a singer) ignored her cancer warning signs during Covid and was now told that it had progressed too far and is untreatable . The bottom line is that you CANT save all the people in the world.
And I agree, there might be a boomerang style economic boom in the short run but when the economy of the world is put together, a year of loss might have a snowball effect. These & other unintended consequences will remain with us for years to come.
Logic tells you they have no faith in the vaccine. The vaccine does not work. Otherwise they would say that once everyone has the chance to have the vaccine, everything will be open to all whether you have had the vaccine or not.
Those who don’t take the vaccine would only be a risk to themselves and others who didn’t take the vaccine.
…and those needing the NHS for something not related to COVID…
I think ‘they’ have every faith in the vaccine.
I agree its like “tulip mania” crossed with a UFO cult and a great way to demonstrate to future generations the notions of pseudo science and cognative dissonance. Not that this in anyway absolves BJ, Gates, Imperial College or Macron etc for using disease and health care as mechanisms of conflict. The Geneva convention is pretty pithy on the subject of illness or healthcare used as weapons and we must make sure the actors names and actions are never forgotten, along with Halabjah ( Saddam) Falujah ( Blair Bush) the Somme etc.
Well said, it will even outdo the most baffling question in History so far, what caused The Fall of the Roman Empire?
A perfect example of statistical obfuscation (or, less politely, ignorance) – you can’t take the death number and divide it by the planet’s population. They haven’t all been infected. The only figure of relevance is deaths in known cases of infection. That may still be quite low in percentage terms, but multiply it by your 8 billion, if everyone was left to get infected.
1% of 8 billion is 80 million people. Would that change your perspective?
No, off course not, but 99% survive, a great outcome!
On the night of 23/24 March, 1944, 20 Halifax bombers set off from RAF Breighton to drop some not very “friendly” bombs on Berlin.
By the time they returned 6 had been shot down, killing about 40 of the crew, a chop rate of 30%, and a lot of Squadron dogs to rehouse.
You may also recall Comrade Stalin’s opinion,
“One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic”.
Incidentally world population growth is staggeringly over 80 million per annum!
What seems to have been missed with the main stream media is the potential danger of pathogenic priming from these vaccines. It happened in all previous animal trials where animals were given a vaccine, they developed antibodies, but when exposed to the wild virus, grew sick and many died. These current vaccines are in phase three of a trial, (emergency use). the vaccine makers most of whom are convicted felons over the years have no liability, and simple preventative protocols like Ivermectin, Vitamin D, Hydroxychloroquine + Zinc have been ignored or demonised. And as for “who benefits” and “follow the money” certain entities will make billion and billions of pounds. And the vaccine is there as a method of control through vaccine passports. They could hardly impose an Ivermectin tablet passport. It’s amazing how history repeats itself – the same people tried this with swine flu, but there were enough alert investigative journalists to bring it to the public’s attention. This time around Big Pharma and Bill Gates and corrupt Govt have bought the media. https://twitter.com/i/status/1368176438873100288
Not so much bought as gratefully received the tongues of the lickspittle media and their govt allies. Big Pharma and Bill Gates have a record of turpitude to make Old Nick blush, but myself and others took the vaccine because i want to travel. Chloroquine will end up like Cannabis where the number of demonisers dwindles but never completely disappears. Given H-CoV and SARS CoV ability to mutate Chloroquine and Remdesiver may be the only solution.
Good luck with the vaccine. Having broken the spirit of millions in the UK and filled them with fear, the despicable entities behind this vile Agenda won’t give up their power easily. The problem with Variants will be “overcome” by yet more profiteering vaccines to suit Eugenicist Bill Gates and Big Pharma $$. My research shows that Remdesivir which costs a fortune doesn’t work, except on one pathway while the very cheap HCQ works on four pathways. (It needs to be used early and best with Zinc. Big Pharma set up trials to make it fail by overdosing patients and using it late) Both Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine would stop the variants – but they are both unprofitable for Big Pharma and can’t be used as weapons of control:. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soIAcI3QhTw
Those drugs have not been ignored or demonised. They just down work! They have all been tried and failed. Pathogenic priming is a known phenomenon and has been thoroughly excluded as a problem with these vaccines. Sorry to burst your little bubble.
That Twitter link is meaningless garbage.
Interesting question about putting some context into the numbers.
Let’s please do similar with Covid deaths.
Check out the EUs own website euromomo full stop eu.
All cause mortality across the whole of Europe is showing NORMAL for the time of year.
If mortality stats are same as every year is anyone really bothered what someone died with. The flu didn’t get them but Covid did. Maybe.
So if no extra people are dying overall how can this possibly be a pandemic. Except under the WHO’s recently amended definition.
Some people may still be asleep but so many are waking up.
If you go to the website mentioned in this comment, one of the first things you see is the following:
This is not consistent with the idea that “mortality stats are same as every year” or “no extra people are dying overall”.
Stats are only useful if they are correctly recorded. My mum had the astra zeneca jab and 10 days later had a mini TIA. This was put down to age and was not flagged on any yellow card system.
What’s a “mini” TIA? A bit like a “very quick” instantaneous event
Stroke.
The problem with this article is that it conflates the possibility/probability that 37 otherwise healthy people developed clots and died soon after being injected with an experimental drug of limited provenance and compares that to the unknown ‘many’ who might die as a result of contracting the Wuhan Sniffle by not being vaccinated. The problem of manipulating statistics in this way is that WS deaths almost only kill the very elderly who already have other morbidities and serious health problems. If you are under 70 and in good health you don’t need this unnatural substance injected into your body. I am 76, in good health and will refuse to be vaccinated for a minor ‘pandemic’ that kills less people than the common flu. I lived and worked overseas for years and counted a total of 18 DIFFERENT vaccinations I had, so I am not anti-vax, but I am anti-panic and the totalitarian control being imposed for no good reason.
Please don’t take an NHS bed if you get seriously ill with Covid, like so many hundreds of thousands of people have done (remember, the number in hospital with Covid has been close to 40,000 at some points, with those being discharged and others taking their place, so the total is into the hundreds of thousands). Do the decent thing and suffocate to death at home. A relative of mine is having cancer surgery shortly – I don’t want her hospital bed taken by someone who is just suffering from obstinacy.
Sentimentality and cruelty often go hand-in-hand.
Hilariously, Tom’s lockdown cheerleading over the last year seems to have failed pretty much all these tests.
What is striking today is that vaccines are untouchable, they are always safe and always work. I know people who research their face creams more than vaccines. And the mainstream media constantly pushes them, it has to give people pause. I feel like all of America has failed math. Everyone preaches “follow the science” but if they did, they would unearth quite easily that the number of deaths is inflated, the chance of death from Covid is shockingly low and masks and lockdowns are ineffective.
Pity the results of the vaccine clinical trials are not using absolute risk ratios as the ABPI Code of Practice says they should instead of the relative risk ratios , which make a medicine appear more effective than it actually is – has anyone reported the vaccine producers for the promotion of exaggerated effectiveness?
Perhaps the clots happening very quickly are still caused by the vaccines in people who would not have otherwise been prone to clotting incidence. The number of deaths are growing but the MRHA states these are not related to the vaccines – even though autopsies are not being done so how can they confirm what they state? Funny that it is a Covid death, what ever kills you if you have a positive test up to 28 days before, but the vaccine can’t be responsible if you die the day after it is administered?
Some countries are doing the exact opposite: if a death can conceivably be ascribed to another cause, however unlikely, then it’s not a COVID death.
Why would anyone choose to take a vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) which has such a low level of efficacy (less than 1%)? The calculated Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) is about 0.75% which is extremely poor. The media has been publishing the mostly meaningless Relative Risk Reduction of 90-95%. Read through both Pfizer and Moderna’s submissions to the FDA and you can then calculate the Number Needed to Treat (NNT) The NNT is about 120, meaning that you will need to treat (vaccinate ) 120 patients in order to prevent one adverse outcome ( one case of Covid19). That’s unacceptably poor – for this vaccine or any therapeutic drug. Of course, trying to sell a population on accepting a jab of the vaccine-of-the-month doesn’t go very far when your told it will reduce the chance of you testing positive (from SARS CoV-2) from 1.8% to 0.9%.
I’m quoting from the review in the British Medical Journal: “First, a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%. Second, these results refer to the trials’ primary endpoint of covid-19 of essentially any severity, and importantly NOT the vaccine’s ability to save lives, NOR the ability to prevent infection, nor the efficacy in important subgroups (e.g. frail elderly). Those still remain unknown”
According to a Mr Cunningham writing his 2 letters to the BMJ in November the NNTV for the Pfizer vaccine to prevent “a case” (he doesn’t define what this is) = 256. For Moderna for “illness” NNTV = 176 and for “severe illness” = 1370. He shows his workings.
From the Voysey Lancet paper in December, looking just at the AZ phase III trial results NNTVs vary from 9 – 93 depending on what subgroup you look at which just goes to show how important it is to have Big Numbers in order to arrive at a realistic Numbers Needed To … anything
Anyways, in the UK this has always been all about freeing up beds in the NHS so that they can get on with other stuff, and in that respect, it seems to be working.
Severe disease = more likely to expire from it.
Doesn’t matter if you are immunised and then get infected – the data from Israel in particular is pretty clear = minimal or no severe disease and death due to Covid in crinklies.
It seems almost surreal to read a journalist exhorting the public to use statistical comparisons and context to assess the potential side-effects of a vaccine, when that vaccine is being pushed almost unquestioned on an entire population for a disease that causes death in roughly 3 in a thousand when infected, with clearly defined risk factors, with an average age of death above that of all-cause. There is even a serious push to coercively vaccinate young adults and children, who have a risk of one in several thousand, perhaps lower if they are not already sick. This does not mean the vaccine is not justified, or that it is – but it raises the truly curious situation in which journalists have been reluctant to report on COVID-19 impact, lockdowns, and now vaccination in context, but are able to see the light of rationality when possible harms of vaccination are raised.
Yes, we need to take post-vaccination deaths in context. Old people die at a significant rate, irrespective of just having had a vaccination or a walk in the woods. Both may be irrelevant to their unfortunate death. Yet a death from stage 4 cancer or dementia a month after a positive COVID19 PCR result, with no relevant symptoms, has been obediently listed as a COVID19 death by journalists for 12 months, often accompanied by denigration of those who seek to keep this significant disease in context (they were called ‘idiots’ in an Unherd article yesterday).
We need to be grown up about lots of things in life, not just those that we perceive will bring us the approval of our peers.
.
I would like to see something written on the program the Government has in place to track the vaccinated in regard to deaths and adverse events.
From what a number of science-medical experts have said, problems are likely from a few months to a few years down the track. Will all possible negative effects in the vaccinated by tracked and assessed? Who is responsible for that and what system has been put in place to monitor and report?
Call me cynical, but it appears to be countries who have been struggling with their vaccine rollout that day they are having safety concerns.
Stopping their rollout for safety reasons gives them a handy excuse for lagging behind countries such as the UK, as they can then it was down to them being cautious rather then general incompetence that large numbers of their population still haven’t been vaccinated.
Because they want to lag for experimental jabs, where there is no emergency. I think they are letting the UK population be the lab rats and they’ll wait and see. Expect something to happen after next Resp Virus Season…..
I would add some.
Firstly, if you receive a press release making a hullabaloo about a new study, find someone from a different institution, and ask them to read the paper and comment without showing them the press release. Better still don’t show them the abstract or discussion – just the methods and results. Ask them to rate it in terms of importance. Never report on the press release if the paper itself hasn’t been published.
Secondly, if you get a report from any party with a direct interest in the report they are sharing – think tank, campaigning organisation, NGO, government, PAC, business – then they are guaranteed only to be showing you a selected set of data. Also look at what the organisation is not saying and what and how much data they left out. Why did they choose to omit the other findings? There is a story there.
Thirdly, explain scale when writing using comparisons. An incident that affects “One person a day in the UK”, turns into 350 people a year, which is 1 in 200,000 people in the UK. So the same number can also be reported as “a city the size of Bristol would expect to see one incident every six months” – somewhat less scary, (and, for comparison, below the murder rate in Bristol).
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, as well the AZ one, are now being called into question in terms of whether they are likely to cause a hitherto non-existent possibility of thrombosis, and the line widely peddled by proponents amounts to, ‘unlikely, but even if this were the case, the risks to the few are far outweighed by the benefits to the many’.
I do find it bitterly ironic that the previously generally applied, inherently less than ideal but harsh but fair cost/risk benefit analysis that should have informed this sorry process from the very beginning was summarily jettisoned, almost universally, in favour of simply saving those relatively few lives of those who might die from covid and who were mostly readily identifiable as being at risk from it, is now suddenly back in vogue when it comes to the administering of these vaccines.
“those relatively few lives of those who might die from covid and who were mostly readily identifiable as being at risk from it”
How many hundreds of thousands would that be?
If you really have good statistical skills, look at:
Then consider that because the early vaccine trial data we have used other vaccines as placebo, we really have no data to discredit the myriad of reports from people whose experience of the vaccine was way worse of covid.
We also don’t have the data to prove satisfactorily that the rise in deaths during the vaccination campaign wasn’t caused by the vaccine. I know you’ll say we do, but we don’t.
Hydroxychloroquine has been trialled and found ineffective. The only reason to keep favouring it is that Trump referred to it approvingly, therefore his cultists try to keep the HCQ flame alive.
You’ll find every single HCQ study here. – https://c19study.com/
Actually what happened is that it was shown that LATE HCQ treatment didn’t work, and that information was misused to withold EARLY HCQ.
EARLY HCQ treatment was shown to work great – just like doctors always claimed.
Learn how to spot deliberate fake science used to favour profitable drugs over generics.
Not correct.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/03/04/hydroxychloroquine-for-covid-lifesaving-or-useless/
All the studies of early use have too many flaws to make any conclusions that HCQ is any benefit.
NO. What you have posted is propoganda.
Read the link I posted.
LATE HCQ doesn’t work.
EARLY HCQ works.
You’ve fallen for propoganda. HCQ had to be discredited because you can only get Emergency Use authorisation for a vaccine if there are no effective treatments.
I would agree. Personally I have no idea whether HCQ or ivermectin really work, although anecdotal evidence suggests that given early they are of benefit. However, both drugs are extremely safe and have ben in use world wide for many many years and given to literally billions of patients. So, in essence on has a choice: upon first developing symptoms you either do nothing until you get so bad that you have to be hospitalized, or one tries to be a little proactive and take something that may lessen the odds of going to hospital. Even if the decrease in odds is small, personally I’d prefer being proactive.
In the case of HCQ it was also interesting to hear all about cardiac arrhythmias and bad retinal conditions, despite the fact that people with lupus had been taking the same dose recommended for COVID for 10 plus years with only a very very low incidence of any side effects.
See http://www.c19ivermectin.com for real-time analysis of every single study. HCQ is linked from there too.
I wouldn’t bother wasting your money :
Effect of pre-exposure use of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 mortality: a population-based cohort study in patients with rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus using the OpenSAFELY platform Rentsch et al November 2020
Aaah ! smoke and mirrors ! and the best firehosing I have ever seen. You only have to look at the Forest plot for “Early Studies” and the size of the boxes and whiskers to know that this is a complete waste of time.
I could go on and on but I can feel myself drowning in all this crap.
They have a comments box, it is open to peer review, talk it through with them. Meanwhile, I know several people who got HCQ – sometimes illegally – and had very rapid positive results. Don’t be an unwitting vaccine salesperson, and part of the unnecessary destruction of the economy.
Anecdotes are useless as evidence of benefit – evidence based medicine 101.
There are treatments that have been properly tested and do have benefit when used appropriately namely monoclonal antibodies, cheap as chips dexamethasone, Tocilizumab (with steroids), appropriate anticoagulation therapy.
I reserve the right to advocate evidence based treatments for this endothelial, thrombotic, multi organ disease just as you advocate your religious beliefs.
Again many front line doctors are using this with tremendous success. It has nothing to do with a love for Trump. You can be very derogatory.
Come on do the hard yards, you’ve got to read a lot of undergrad level of human biology to get it – but its not impossible – you may have to look the odd term up. In March 2020 our doctor advised we buy Choloroquine and Remdesivir if we were worried – bought the first, $2k – Ouch! didn’t bother with the second as by then SARS-CoV2 showed a low CFR as it does today. Some poeple are suckers for disinformation. When did the R0 number become known as the R number when its a ratio? The Gini Co-efficient became a measure of inequality when its a method of describing difference factor or ratio between two stats produced by standard deviation?
That’s patently false: https://hcqmeta.com/
That’s not quite accurate. There were many HCQ trials that were basically designed to fail. There were also some well done retrospective studies, for example out of the Henry Ford Clinic, which indicated significant benefit if given early, up to 50% decrease in death rate. The issue with HCQ and for that matter ivermectin, together with Zn and either doxycyline or erythromycin, is that treatment really needs to be started at the onset of symptoms. i.e. on day 1. Note on day 3 or 4 by the time a positive PCR test has come back, and certainly not at the time when the patient is hospitalized by which time it is basically too late. (Exactly the same is true of tamiflu in the case of influenza).
A retrospective trial can’t show benefit. That isn’t what it is designed for :
A retrospective study design allows the investigator to formulate hypotheses about possible associations between an outcome and an exposure and to further investigate the potential relationships.
This is clinical investigation methodology 101.
Perhaps you are an academic MD. I don’t know. But the issue with a situation such as the COVID one is that one really can’t wait for the niceties of double-blind trials, especially given that these are not necessarily well designed. The fact is that a large number of frontline physicians have had great success with both HCQ and ivermectin. Perhaps neither was responsible for the observed rapid turnaround. But when you observe a phenomenon a sufficient number of times you don’t need a double blind clinical trial. That’s why medicine is known as the “Art of Medicine”. Lucky that in WWII academic physicians were not so worried about the niceties of doing proper clinical trials as otherwise penicillin would never have been given to our troops with disastrous consequences. Indeed, penicillin played a big role in the allies winning the war.
So my advice to you is to obsess over clinical trials in the current situation. When sometimes develops symptoms or is picked up as a positive on asymptomatic testing, there is absolutely no harm administering a course of ivermectin with doxycline and zinc, or for that matter HCQ/azithromycin/zinc. Any effect, including a placebo effect is better than doing nothing.
We ask people to isolate after a positive test, or after exposure – even before symptoms arise.
Treatment should start then. Anything else is medical negligence.
I’m in complete agreement.
Blood clots and their breakdown and prevention are complex processes. A balance exists between the processes that protect the body from clots in blood vessels leading to the death of the organs they supply and those, which prevent us from bleeding to death.
If you go to the government website which lists the adverse reactions to the vaccines being administered at present, in annex 1 you can find a table categorised under each body system such as blood as well as various more general categories such as fatigue.
I went through the tables for AstraZeneca when the deaths from blood clots were reported. I went through each system and generality not just the blood because blood clots can occur anywhere in the body.
Given the age of the vaccinated, these could have happened at any time. You would need a proper statistical analysis to ascertain whether these blood coagulation related events were more frequent than you would expect in this age cohort.
These were the clotting related events I found. There may be more that I failed to spot.
coagulanopathies 2,anginas 25,myocardial infarctions 25 including 12 fatalities,myocardial ischaemias 6 including 3 fatalities,there were 39 fatalities from cardiac disorders in total.
retinal vascular thrombosis 1,Ischaemic colitis 1subdural haematoma 1,brain stem infarction 1 fatal,brain stem stroke 1 (could be clot or bleed),cerebral haematoma 1,cerebral infarction 1,cerebral thrombosis 1 fatal,cerebrovascular accident ( could be a clot or a bleed) 41 (6 fatal),embolic stroke 1,ischaemic stroke 9,cerebral small vessell ischaemic disease 1,cerebrovascular disorder 1 (could be clot or bleed),Transient ischaemic attacks 25,Pulmonary embolism 13 fatal 1,pulmonary infarction 1 fatal,haematoma 8,embolism 1,thrombosis 3,blue toe syndrome 3,Deep Vein thrombosis 14,pelvic venous thrombosis 1, thrombophlebitis 1,superficial thrombophlebitis 1,phlebitis 2,varico phlebitis 1
It is only today that there has been a report of bleeding disorders occurring after administration of the AZ vaccine. In Norway there has been a death from thrombocytopenia which means too few of the cells that bring about clotting as well as 3 hospitalisations, according today’s Guardian. There are plenty of adverse reactions connected to bleeding in the table, I just have not had time to list them. Strokes can either be due to clotting or bleeding and can be disabling and fatal.
Perhaps there was nothing unusual about these clotting and bleeding events to alert anyone over here. After all these were all very old people expected to have heart attacks and strokes. There is of course nothing to say that these events were connected with the vaccine but some people have taken the trouble to use the government’s yellow card system to report them.
Keeping the blood flowing is a balancing act for the body especially in those with less mobility and it is possible that for some elderly people this balance has been disturbed by the vaccination process
I would argue for more sensitivity in administering vaccines, taking a case history and having a discussion with the person about how they feel about it might help reduce adverse reactions
This rushed industrial style roll out is not suited to delicate people. From reports I have had many adverse reactions are going unreported and with care they could be avoided.
I am a retired health sciences lecturer.
As Arlo Guthrie said so appositely a few years ago, “whoopee we’re all gonna die”.
that is Country Joe McDonald you are thinking of.
Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag
And it’s 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We’re all going to die
There are adverse event reporting systems in the UK and the USA. I don’t know about other countries. They exist for our safety and should be taken seriously. It is not just blood clots, there are other issue, even death. The problem is that we do not know who to believe anymore. I have seen any investigations of issues raised by the reporting system and if people have multiple existing diseases how will a postmortem detect the effect of a vaccine?
My concern is that these types of vaccines have not been tried on humans before and they have not been successful in animal trials. There is the same fear mongering about the animal trial since some animals died, but no evidence that it was linked to the vaccines. The vaccines were rushed to the market and are authorised for emergency use only by governments in panic in my view. The trials were shortened, and it is impossible for them to detect any long-term effects. Those in the placebo group were apparently given a measles vaccination. There are no published reports of the trial results and they have not been subject to independent review.
It is interesting that the article refers to absolute and relative risks. Pfizer presented their results as relative, ignoring the number of people in the trial and produced an efficacy of 95% but when the absolute risk is calculated it is 0.84%, making the vaccine pointless and so any adverse effects could be more relevant than the almost zero benefit. I have not seen trial results for the Oxford vaccine. I believe when our government was asked to publish trial results their response was that they would not be helpful.
It is the government and big pharma that I do not trust.
And it’s a prime example of how numbers go wrong, and how important it is to present them fairly.
you mean like numbers of those who died WITH covid vs those who died FROM it? Numbers like an average of about 80? The incidence of other factors being involved?
Few things make the media look more foolish than stories that rely on numbers. Whatever else journos are, comfortable with numbers is seldom in their skill set.
I feel the whole abandonment of rational assessment of the past year can be summed up by something I have seen on at least a dozen occasions in the past 12 months.
Someone wearing a mask walking down the pavement finds that someone without as mask is approaching from the opposite direction. As they get near, the mask wearer jumps into the road without any regard as to traffic.
I haven’t seen anyone killed due to this room-temperature IQ behaviour, but that appears to be due to the alertness of car drivers rather more than anything else.
On the other hand, I think it is perfectly fair to record any such deaths as caused by Covid with complete stupidity being a highly correlated factor.
I’ve seen that happen too and it makes me laugh! These people, outside yet with their masks on, would rather be run over than run the tiniest little risk that they will catch covid from walking past someone on the pavement.
We have, finally started to see mainstream media give the context for the alarming-looking Covid-19 death numbers. Thus, for 2020, the death rate for the UK increased from slightly less than 1% to slightly more than 1%. Excess mortality for 2020 was about 13% above the 5-year average, which puts 2020 on par with 2003 (once you adjust for population size) and lower than every year before 2003.
In that context, quarantining the entire healthy population and destroying a significant number of jobs doesn’t look like such a brilliant idea after all.
Most people have no idea how many people die on any average day, so they had no way of placing the scary propaganda in context and the journalists were quite happy to simply copy and paste the official communications which were deliberately designed to create fear and drive compliance. The misuse of statistics is one of the most obvious ways in which the British public has been misled by SAGE and the government in the past year.
Your guide to the numbers is a year too late. It would have helped immensely if you’d explained all of this in the Spring of 2020.
In December 2020, there were 52,676 deaths registered in England, 10,594 deaths (25.2%) more than the five-year average (2015 to 2019) for December; in Wales, there were 3,941 deaths registered, 1,075 deaths (37.5%) more than the five-year average for December.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) was the leading cause of death in December 2020 for the second consecutive month in both England (accounting for 20.8% of all deaths registered in December) and in Wales (27.4% of all deaths); dementia and Alzheimer’s disease was the second leading cause of death in both countries, with COVID-19 accounting for more than double the second leading cause in England and more than triple in Wales.
The age-standardised mortality rate of deaths due to COVID-19 in December 2020 was 233.6 deaths per 100,000 people in England and 374.4 deaths per 100,000 people in Wales; the COVID-19 mortality rate significantly increased for the fourth consecutive month in England and the third consecutive month in Wales.
Good God, a sensible reply at last! Well done, keep it up!
Good God, a sensible reply at last! Well done, keep it up!
Of course significantly more people die in a winter peak than on average. Deaths rates are always much higher in the winter. See comment above with reference to Euromomo figures.
There have been plenty of complaints about the misuse of statistics since the beginning of the Covid saga – so no one with an enquiring mind would have been in ignorance. But it did not halt the tsunami of misinformation put out by SAGE and the Government.
However, the figures you quote are outcomes with lockdown. They would have been worse without lockdown, but we will never know how much worse. If we used years of life lost (using expected life spans for different age groups) rather than deaths, we would have a different picture again – and one that I am sure would not be as alarming.
Human beings are not statistics, they are complex bodies. Understanding SARS-CoV-2 or health in general through number crunching alone is not necessarily a useful path. Socio-economic facts – such as those deliberation found in The Lancet’s promoted concept of “syndemic” – are also relevant.
That said, numbers are fun to play with and probably reveal more when you have more of them. Euromomo numbers, which are gathered from 27 European countries, including the UK, reveal the spikes of COVID-19 infections quite well.
Without bothering to calculate in much details, but just shooting from the hip, they look like they are a little more than twice that of a normal flu season peak.
For instance:
In other words, in a good summer week close to 50k people die across 27 European countries. In a normal winter peak with flu and other respiratory infection around 65k people die every week. By comparison, the two pandemic peaks were (respectively) approx. 81k and 91k.
A pandemic peak of 85k minus a normal low of 50 = 35k
A normal peak of 65 minus a normal low of 50 = 15k.
What does that mean? It will mean different things to different people. To me it suggests that it can, to some, be slightly miseleading when you are told that across 27 European countries 90k people died during the worst week of the pandemic, since 60k to 70k of those would have died anyway.
Life is a cycle and comes to an end. The pandemic can either cosolidate the death denying cult of modern culture or it can bring perspective.
Oh, so now we want to examine the figures “properly” and interpret them “correctly.” It didn’t matter when data was manipulated and decontextualised to feed into the propagandising machine justifying the complete loss of our democratic rights and freedoms. One covid death is one too many, but untested gene therapy injectables maim, cause illness, and possibly kill, well that’s alright, a necessary sacrifice even. Given that covid has a 99.8% survival rate (and often better) I can’t see that most healthy people even need a “vaccine” (if that’s what it actually is). It’s the lack of trust and complete suppression of any discussion or argument wot’s done it for me.
enjoy your victimhood snowflake
How safe is the AstraZeneca jab?It’s obvious reading this article & others at this site that the Author is basically advising to not question taking the jab. Pretty dangerous advice as it’s an experimental untested & rushed out new type of Vaccine.
Herein lies the problem for anyone who questions the official COVID-19 narrative. We are living in a time where rational inquiry itself is under attack. It seems that to question the validity of COVID-19 is verboten.
Yet clearly, there are justifiable reasons for doing so. The fake moral outrage of the mainstream media, fact checkers and professional “debunkers,” is a defence mechanism and a propaganda technique.
It isn’t designed to combat the claims of a relatively small group of sceptics; its purpose seems to be to stop the much larger group of somewhat sceptical people looking at the evidence.
The most amusing example of the media’s innumeracy came last year when a US ‘journalist’ decided that instead of spending $500 million on trying to become president, Michael Bloomberg could have simply handed everyone in America one million dollars, with change left over. The journalist subsequently appeared on TV to make this claim. Nobody checked it. The journos have become as dim and useless as the politicians.
This discussion is about perceived risk vs actual risk. The world of public opinion is ruled by the emotional component of perceived risk. There are millions of parents who refuse to let their child ride a bike mask less but don’t require they wear a helmet. Perceived risk trumps actual risk every time. Go figure…
I think that Tom may be missing a little nuance here. The issue is not whether the number of clots observed is within the normal range, but whether there is a temporal relationship in incidence of such clots (and in this instance a rare type associated with low platelet counts) following vaccination.
For example, if 1-2 days post-vaccination some rare sequelae appeared to a greater extent than that expected based on pure chance, one might conclude that the vaccine was in some way implicated.
Bottom line: there is more to this than Tom is taking into account, and it does need further careful investigation. The last thing one needs is to deny the existence of certain bad potential side effects (i.e. lethal ones) related to certain vaccines in a younger (< 65 years) population where the risk of death upon contracting SARS-CoV2 is really very very small.
That’s an interesting point, but actually as long as the total time period during which the blood clots occur is taken into account, whether they were clustered into a particular time window (chosen with hindsight) doesn’t make any difference. X people per million would have had a blood clot without vaccination, X people per million had a blood clot after vaccination, so net effect of vaccination on blood clots is zero.
With rare effects anyway, it’s easy to overinterpret data (I was a professional scientist for 33 years). For example, where there’s a nuclear power station, there might be no difference in the number of a rare type of childhood cancer within a 360-degree circle around the plant and a radius of X miles, compared with a comparable circle in an area without a nuclear plant. However, if you are only talking about three cases in total over a period of ten years, you could probably narrow the circle down to a 180 degree or 240 degree arc to contain all three, and then describe that as “2x / 1.5x as many cancers as would have been expected”. Similarly, by narrowing the ten years down to “2001-2005” (again with hindsight) allows you to claim that the cancer rate was 2.5x as high as random – again, with hindsight. Combine those to “South of the plant in 2001-2005” and you can claim the rate is 5x as high as random. What goes unmentioned is the abnormally LOW number of cases North of the plant, or in 1999-2001 and 2005-2009. This kind of cherry-picking of the data is a godsend to scaremongers.
Everything you say is true (and I’m still an active professional scientist, although my screen name is a pseudonym), but recall the blood clots in question are not just any clots but a particularly rare type associated with low platelet counts (at least that’s what I read somewhere but could well be completely wrong here).
Further, the temporal aspect is still important as are the characteristics of the patients who are getting the clots. i.e. somebody who is 80+ with some end stage conditions (e.g. chronic renal failure, congestive cardiac failure, etc…) cannot be considered in the same category as say a healthy, fit, non-obese, non-smoker 40 yr old. With respect to the temporal issue, what one would have to do is look at the incidence of blood clots within say a 2-6 week period from the time of initial vaccination, with the day of the first shot counted as day zero, versus that in the general population from that particular time point (or better still with a group chosen at random from the general population to match as closely as possible the characteristics of the vaccine group in terms of age, co-morbidities, smoker/non-smoker, fitness level, etc…..). (The reason I say 2-6 weeks is that 2 weeks would be 2 weeks from the first shot, and 6 weeks would be 2 weeks from the 2nd shot, so sufficient to cover short term effects properly).
It’s a tricky issue of course but a very important one, especially if a heretofore perfectly healthy and fit person experiences a fatal clot which they would otherwise not have done.
You are correct. Reports from the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Germany state that there are now 8 cases, of which 3 have died, of cerebral sinus vein thrombosis in 20-50 year olds all within 16 days of vaccination. In that population in that time they would have expected to see 1 such case. Apparently such thromboses are more common in people < 50 but if they are being triggered at 7x the normal rate then this makes the vaccine cost benefit ratio worse when they are at less risk from severe disease from the virus compared to the elderly.
I am all for better presentation of statistics and less sensationalist use of these numbers to sway folk. However, the whole premise of this article being about blood clots and vaccines is bogus. The main reason the Danish health authorities reacted was the “the unusual course of illness” and what they described as ” higly unusual symptoms” as per quotes below.
“COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A 60-year old Danish woman who died of a blood clot after receiving AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine had “highly unusual” symptoms, according to the Danish Medicines Agency.
The woman had a low number of blood platelets and clots in small and large vessels, as well as bleeding, it said.”
“Norway said on Saturday that three people, all under the age of 50, who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine were being treated in hospital for bleeding, blood clots and a low count of blood platelets, which were labeled “unusual symptoms” by health authorities.”
Unless you investigate how “highly unusual” these particular types of blood clotting symptons are then saying you are looking at the numbers in context is utterly meaningless bias, just like every one elses.
I thought the article was about the abuse of statistics. However, you are right that sometimes the base data itself is not what it is purported to be.
The whole Covid-19 crisis was developed and is being propagated by misusing the numbers. People have been scared to death and forced to submission by the numbers of cases and deaths. Why no journalist picked this up and put things in perspective?
Follow the money. Media is controlled by pharma (same with universities) in the US. If people aren’t afraid, they wouldn’t feel the need to get the vaccine. Interesting fact, back in 2019 I was doing some research on stocks, and pharma was saying 2020 was going to be “all about vaccines.” Hmmmmm.
somebody’s been Qing again.
Why has no journalist picked this up?
Some have been saying little else for a year, as I suspect you’re very well aware.
The age-standardised mortality rate of deaths due to COVID-19 in December 2020 was 233.6 deaths per 100,000 people in England and 374.4 deaths per 100,000 people in Wales; the COVID-19 mortality rate significantly increased for the fourth consecutive month in England and the third consecutive month in Wales.
“Without a firm grasp of statistics, bad decisions are inevitable “, you state boldly at the top of your article. That’s one good summation of the collective response of nearly all Western governments to the Covid pandemic in the last 12 months.
Your 11 points at the end highlight some of the elementary kinds of mistakes made, whether unintentionally or otherwise.
Add to that the blind faith in the wildly inaccurate pseudo science of modelling (and a good dose of scaremongering) and we find ourselves in the self- inflicted catastrophe we’re in today.
My understanding is that it isn’t to do with the statistical probabilities of blood clots after AZ vaccination, but doctors saying that there is something clinically odd about the appearance of these particular cases and the only link is the vaccine. The similarity is with children, aspirin and Reyes Syndrome.
Quite. It’s not the fact that the numbers are “what you would expect anyway”, it’s the proximity of the cases to when people had the jabs. Me? Well it’s an experimental vaccine which has not been properly tested; nor are any of them anywhere NEAR completing clinical trials. Quite clear recipients have NOT been warned of all the possible complications – least of all the quite terrifying possibility of ADE.
I do not consent to being part of a medical experiment.
You are misrepresenting the development process and approval process for the vaccines.
But whether you like it or not, you are actually “part of a medical experiment” because you may get Covid, you may end up with long Covid if you do (BTW, long Covid is spread fairly evenly across the age distribution, don’t imagine you are immune), you may infect others who suffer badly even if you don’t, and you may act as a petri dish where random mutations of the virus occur making it even more dangerous. You are a member of a community, not an anchorite living on a rock beyond the Hebrides. And if you get seriously ill, you will be taking an NHS bed from someone who has a genuine reason for needing it rather than just obstinacy.
Many of us are naturally immune. I’m 69, hardly ever get a common cold, and if I do, it’s a few sniffles. However many pandemics I have lived thru’, I have never suffered from them. Nor have I ever had ‘flu. Why get vaccinated for something that if I get it, will not be a problem. I am immensely fit for my age, eat very well, have been supplementing Zinc since day 1 and spend a lot of time out of doors. I’m not broken. I don’t need fixing.
All previous attempts at coronavirus vaccines foundered on ADE happening regularly in animal testing. None of these new vaccines have been tested on animals. None on people who might be at risk; indeed, 10 years is often cited as the period required from conception to public use.
I’m not an anti-vaxxer; indeed, I had the PPV shot a few months back. That’s simply a soup of Pneumonia bacteria and a few neutral adjutants. Fine by me. And indeed, if you are happy to be a part of a medical experiment, I have no problem with that.
Remember, they have not yet isolated the virus you are going to be vaccinated against. And if ADE is a problem, we won’t see it until months down the line. Go do some research maybe?
Link following. May take hours or days to be moderated…
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/are-the-coronavirus-vaccine-candidates-safe.pdf
Thanks for that .
Do you also have a regular ECG?
It’s mandatory for Commercial Pilots over the age of 50.
“You are misrepresenting the development process and approval process for the vaccines.” Really? Your are PRO vaccine all the way. You fully believe the process and approval of them. Some of us do not. I listened to a vaccine researcher and expert (his words) and he cautions people against these experimental jabs because of the pathogenic priming aspect that was seen in the ferrets when previously trying to get a vaccine for SARS. When people like that step forward, knowing their life, livelihood, and reputation is on the line, I want to listen to what they have to say.
If people were good with statistics they would quickly realise that most of them don’t really need the vaccine at all or that covid does not pose any real danger to them. But they don’t, do they? Including yourself Tom Chivers
Guess that applies to the 125,000 who have died.
Most of whom were either geriatric, obese or both.
Unlike you 58,000 dead in Vietnam who were young, hale and hearty.
Get a grip!
If journalists would have applied those guidelines right at the outset of all this when first reporting about the new coronavirus we probably wouldn’t be talking about vaccines at all.
Pity politicians are all non mumerate.Even with such an excellent approach if you have no feel for numbers the use of them fall on infertile ground. The manipulation of politicians by SAGE and Imperial College has been a travesty. The media also have no numerate people so cannot take the decisions to task. These days when someone speaks numbers I check their background….and most you wouldn’t tust to serve on a market stall. So journalists in mainstream are a waste of space in this activity because even if someone explained the meaning of numbers they would be so innumerate that they couldn’t write sensibly. Even worse of course it is only spun numbers presented and media do not see the opportunity to attack the flaws and ommissions to get at rthe meaning.
I was about to make a similar point. Chivers writes about journalists and the public not understanding statistics, but it’s when our leaders are functionally innumerate that things get dodgy.
That’s what you get when you have “professional politicians” instead of people who go into politics after having achieved something.
No, it is NOT good for society that our politicians are all so young.
Journalism died in Feb 2005, when Hunter S Thompson signed off for good. Many would argue politicians have not been morally “alive” for a few hundred years. The above plus the puppets in academia are setting us all up for a nasty reset. Hopefully it’s going to be more like USA in 1776 & France in 1789. So a nasty reset which does drive reform and sets up mechanisms for future resets, OK, not going so well after 300+ years but compared to Russia 1917, Germany 1933 or Cuba 1957 its been a good ride. History suggests the yeoman class that pays for the extractors does have limits to it patience. Politico-journo-academics etc can only extract from the body politic as long as their parasitism is hidden or very dilute. At the momnet its neither and the internet holds a mirror up to these characters which the rest of us can see.
If you want an example of numerate journalism in the mainstream media, check out the BBC’s “More or Less”, which is also available as a podcast. They analyse the figure behind many news stories.
Figures cannot tell the whole story, clinical expertise is indispensable. Case reports are also an invaluable research tool and in the case of medical research essential.
It is naive and condescending to imply that the Health Departments of the countries that have suspended this vaccine are less capable of interpreting statistics than we are. If these clinicians thought there was an unusual presentation with these blood clotting and bleeding events then it was their duty to report it.
Until these cases can be investigated then it is in accordance with medical ethics to suspend the administration of the vaccine, which is associated with them. The doctor has to be guided by the principle of “first do no harm” or “primo non nocere.”
What is more disturbing is that in the UK similar cases may possibly have been over looked and we urgently need to look at all those adverse reactions related to blood coagulation or the lack of it that are present in the tables recording adverse reactions for both vaccines.
I am a retired health sciences lecturer
Decision makers in those countries are not that innumerate.
I don’t think there are any numerate decision makers in any western countries. All decisions are taken on the basis of feelings, media pressure, or political correctness.
The decision makers in Russia and China, and probably Japan, do seem to be numerate. Thus they will succeed as the West slides into the pauper’s grave of history.
Maybe. I can’t help thinking there is something cynical behind it though.
Yes, there is something very cynical behind it all.
The presentation of statistics and conduct of journalists during the past year would shame a banana republic. Media outlets appear to have glorified and exaggerated the bad news, using every and any, so called, expert to prove whatever point they wanted to make that day. The tv media outlet journalists / presenters have been disgraceful, more intent on making the news and tripping up people than genuinely informing the public. Part one of journalism school should be that the role is to enquire and inform. Clearly many failed to attend or failed the course.
For the most part, I skip the articles in Unherd and go straight to the comments which are often much more lively and stimulating.
… and apparently the functionality to do the Comments review will be re-instated in the coming weeks …
I treat them much as our forebears must have regarded a trip to Bedlam to see the antics of the inmates. You feel a bit sorry for them, but some of them are quite funny.
We’re living in an age where the understanding or risk – of the jab, or dying from Covid, of getting murdered as you walk down the street – is simply beyond the ability of many people to understand so we fall back on ‘feelings’ which isn’t much of an alternative/
It’s hard to know whether the problem is ignorance or bias. I complained recently about a Newsnight piece on why western countries were not doing more to send vaccines to Africa, which in my view failed to give any meaningful statistical context. The report noted, for example, that Ghana was receiving 600,000 doses in total, which was not much more than had been given in the UK in one day earlier that week. But it did not add that at the time there had only been 600 covid deaths in Ghana throughout the pandemic – a figure beaten by the UK on many individual days during the pandemic, and well under 1% of our total deaths. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, seems to have been relatively unaffected, even if one makes allowances for under-reporting of cases and deaths. Had this context been explored, the report would probably have been dropped, or at least re-focused to look at other relatively poor parts of the world. The reply I got was very defensive and did not accept that the report was fundamentally misleading. I have complained again, but without much hope of success. I should add that this is the first time I have ever complained about BBC journalism, although I am sure there are many other examples that are equally egregious.
“is that true, or did you hear it on the BBC?”
“I am sure there are many other examples that are equally egregious.”
On an almost daily basis when it concerns climate – and previously the EU.
“Because it shows us a simple, but common, way, in which numbers go wrong in the news: the failure to ask “Is this a big number?” After all, 37 people getting sick sounds really bad, on its own.”
But, Tom, this is how the whole covid “pandemic” has been played. With contextless and often outright wrong numbers. Such as that a positive PCR test = “a case of covid-19.”
So, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Especially since this blood clotting is the first problem that was called out by a group of doctors recently who called the alarm on mRNA shots.
How about applying all this wisdom to the coronavirus phenomenon? One might come to the conclusion that the disruption of the last year was induced more by bad public policy than by the virus itself.
And how about applying some statistical literacy to such manufactured crises as the “climate emergency”? Data from the Vostok ice core series (which goes back more than 600,000 years) indicates that carbon content has been driven by warming — not the reverse. And, yet the orthodoxy tells us that artificial contributions to carbon content will drive catastrophic warming. And, of course, the catastrophe is always 10 years away. Hmm …
Well put. I get sick of the alarmists masquerading as journalists that we are subjected to these days. Ignorance layered over incompetence is unbeatable as a hysteria inducing act. I’m so sick of Journalist’s views being offewred up as news. They should be more accountable to the publications they “create” their fictions for.
Politicians and journalists, in general, “use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost – more for support than for illumination”
Sorry – one more thought. Should we give an annual Ancel Keys Award for egregiously misleading, deceiving or outright fraudulent presentation of data?
no such thing as too much sugar…
Unbelievable! This last year has been a disproportionate use of numbers to scare us! Now, this new disproportionate use of numbers against vaccines is deemed wrong! Where have you been for the last year?
do tell…what do you consider to be a proportionate use of numbers?
asking for a friend.
How many people have died of Covid, as opposed to those who died with Covid? How does the number of positive tests for Covid compare with the number of people who have tested positive for Covid? How does the number of deaths in Sweden in 2020 compare with its five-year average? How much have you examined the Covid stats, Tom?
According to ONS, the answer is
Data.. Facts.. or Truth? I paraphrase: A lot of people had coughs and fever, did not associate them with corona or anything at all… Until the moment the media magnified their bullying with a new virus but.. surprise! with identical symptoms of flu and common cold and of dozen other illnesses. Do we have statistics about this please? Many, turned or rather were pushed to ask for help from the Nhs, mostly for reassurance but that was enough for their plan; how else they could justify the shutdown of our lives? How else they could play with words of the necessity to voluntary imprisonment? Has any statistician dared to measures those facts? The media spread the narrative of defaming everyone as contaminated and dangerous.. and establish the guilt of being healthy, at all times..! Their venom must go to the bones of our society and thus a bit of corruption in the form of £500 bribery, to isolate.!!.. When influenza kills 32,000/2019/UK is this a big enough number to call for imprisonment? Why not? What is that number or statistics, that tells us.. ta-ta! pandemic! You must fear! Are we not in a pandemic always? How much illness remains uncured all over the world? and how many innocent people die everyday? What are the statistics? That can still go lower.. it is the same people who are threating us with hallucinations of zero corona deaths, ..but 37 dead from clots or vaccines, that is okay.. according to this article ‘is in fact too little’ .. And I could reverse the question: is it not too much to expect zero deaths?.. and why for corona only.. why not zero deaths of youngsters from cannabis and drugs? zero deaths from cancer?.. zero deaths from influenzas perhaps? ..What kind of scientists/politicians/journalist etc, is this? To die from corona is terrible but to die from clots or a car-cyclist accident is okay.. Why the specific 37 deaths from the vaccine, has been chosen for this article whereas the truth is that any example would suffice to make its point? Throughout the article The People are being insulted as not educated enough for democracy etc.. What an irony! Meanwhile the political class and many others are making hefty livings due to the people’s vote.. The experts make models and predictions identical to the astrologers. The only difference is instead of looking to a shiny ball they look and graphs and data.. The massive difference with fortune tellers is that we might get good predictions as well !!.. whereas the experts have one common aim: pushing to the inevitability of one-size-plan for all.. the inevitability of a dreadful future with no alternative… That is no truth. There are infinite futures. Will the politicians and all those helping them, admit they were wrong, correct themselves and … move on?.. in many countries there is already the conversation about crimes against humanity..
I would humbly suggest that astrologers are probably more reliable than the model experts practising the poorest form of ‘science.’
Not correct. The various symptoms are tabulated here.
whereas.. science is doing only bad and inhumane job.. they are the ones embarrassing themselves.. What sort of doctor and scientists would ever impose imprisonment as the only cure?.. what sort of politician would ever justify tortures as science and well being?.. what sort of business would ever accept to receive benefits!!..
As an advert for a book fair enough. However understanding numbers implies understanding risk.For most people a study of the numbers will tell them personal covid risk is between nonexistant and minimal. The risk from any vaccine is minimal but higher than non existant. The at risk groups in the UK are vaccinated so why should all those not at risk be encouraged to take the risk of a vaccine that will not benefit them. They aren’t encouraged to for flu. The at risk groups are broadly the same, the flu vaccine to those most at risk and normal infection immunity are deemed to give sufficient protection from flu to those at risk who are unable to take the flu vaccine. Yet covid needs everybody to take a vaccine. Why, it isn’t usual, though we are encouraged to believe it is. The covid vaccine is the first ever vaccine being pushed onto people who have no personal benefit from taking it. If it doesn’t stop you catching or spreading the illness the fact it reduces serious infection is of little use to vunerable people who can’t have it. So regardless of the spin those not at risk aren’t actually benefitting anyone. The whole thing is a social experiment. If you are likely to be at risk from covid you probably should take it. If you aren’t then there seems little reason why you should and even less reason why nobody mentions the small but real risk of adverse reactions to any vaccine. If this is in the region of 1 in a million (and getting accurate figures is impossible because no one publishes them, they just claim vaccines are as safe as possible and serious side effects are very rare) the risk is low enough to be of no real concern but for anyone under 40 greater than the risk of covid!
Well, Tom Chivers, you write: there is no good reason to THINK that astra-zeneca is linked to blood clots. I don’t believe ‘thinking’ something is the case is very good science. How much did you say astra-zeneca is paying you to write this?
I’ve seen that in the style guide for postgrad dissertation submissions.
But the point that most journalists are not numerate is well made. Maybe science correspondents should have some scientific training, and an understanding of statistics?
Makes me think many decades back to Chemistry and physics and i, or the square root of minus one (the answer to X(2) + 1 = 0), loved those imaginary numbers, I need a number style guide which fits them in. (and there is even a -i, which is getting harder for me to recall)
I recommend “An Imaginary Tale. The story of sqrt(-1)” by Paul J. Nahin. A nice mix of history and maths.
Imaginary numbers are not, in fact, Imaginary. But they are not Real numbers either.
Nearly, but how about all journalists instead? Lots of them merrily quote biased or poorly understood numbers all day long. Headlines would be a little less exciting though and agendas much harder to push.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/01/10/are-the-covid-vaccines-safe-and-effective/
AZ data was always the worst of the three.
And he omits to point out that 46% of the trial participants developed Neutropenia, which is of particular concern for the already sick, old and immuno-compromised for whom this ‘vaccine’ sh/would make the most sense and be the safest.
And that leaves the dubious dosage discovery by error aside.
As quite a few people and regulators (CH) have stated: “This should never have been approved”.
Was that not 46% in a subgroup of 54 vaccine participants who developed transient or mild neutropenia? What does this mean for the trial cohort as a whole? Surely, although significant, we can’t just extrapolate this to assume that 46% of those receiving the AZ vaccine will develop some neutropenia. Without additional explanation this is unnecessary scaremongering. There are always risks, getting life back to some sort of normality will require us to take some.
“As quite a few people and regulators (CH) have stated: “This should never have been approved”.”
Please provide evidence for that assertion.
By your calculation 8.5Million people in the UK should now be suffering from Neutropenia which plainly they are not.
One regulator is not “quite a few” and of others belonging to that “quite a few” how many are politicians who, by definition know nothing, and how many are medically qualified? Commenters on here do not count as qualified!
Since Italy has rejected AZ, have they now agreed to release the 250,000 doses for Australia that they blocked?
Probably given it to the Mafia by know.
Old habits die hard.
Tom Chivers, you are an excellent number navigator but your information is misleading!
The calculations in your article may well be correct but this is not relevant as your starting point is not correct.
These “blood clot cases” are not normal cases of blood clots (which occur relatively frequently in the population). This is most likely a far more seldom diagnosis called “immune thrombocytopenia”.
Symptoms include blue marks on the skin, low blood platelet level, bleeding and multiple blood clots.
It is therefore not relevant to calculate the risk of blood clots in connection with safety of the vaccine.
Blue marks and low platelets – are these the symptoms being seen in these disputed cases of vaccine-related blood clots?
“far more likely” – so how do you know and what is the probability?
Hardly an enlightening post.
The most important part of statistics is often missed in questions like this: Data validation. Many journalists start off with the mistaken assumption that data is data, and that statistics is everything that follows. In fact, statistics is rather straightforward and mundane, comprising simple, reliable processes. When you bake a cake, recipes are dime a dozen, and many variations will yield similar results. But it doesn’t matter how good the recipe is, if you are working with bad ingredients, the result will be disappointing. You cannot approach problems like these ignoring issues with the data handling and coding. Just because you have one case of X in one pile and one case of Y in another does not mean there are equal numbers of X’s and Y’s when inconsistent coding thresholds are applied. Your first port of call should be check for such artefacts. Only then can you start considering things like context.
I don’t really expect journalists to be numerate, but their blind regurgitation of “positively framed”, as the SAGE minutes described the strategy, propaganda disguised as statistics has been pretty shocking. A year on the propaganda campaign is still in full swing. A couple of recent examples:
When announcing the roadmap on 22 February, to justify the slow release of the lockdown in England a graph showing hospital numbers was presented. Instead of showing actual numbers in English hospitals, it showed the 7 day moving average in the UK, thus inflating numbers from 14,000 to 23,000.
Only two days ago the ONS published a report saying “COVID-19 caused more deaths in 2020 than other infectious diseases caused for over a century”. Which is true only if you assume that flu and Spanish flu are not infectious, but has been slavishly reported without mentioning that assumption.
… and as the graph published immediately below that comment shows, the peak in 1919 due to Spanish flu was indeed over a century ago. And yes, flu has not caused more than 75,000 deaths in any year for the past 100 years. So the ONS statement is correct as it stands.
Probably is correct. But we cannot really know, as the definitions sued to record the deaths are quite different. Which is the context that needs to be given with such numbers.
It also has to be borne in mind that the Spanish Flu was not the only killer. Doctors prescribing the ‘new wonder drug,’ there we go again, Aspirin, apparently were responsible for the deaths of millions.
And the Spanish Flu rode on the back of a terrible World War, much destruction and higher levels of poor living conditions than we see today.
Nor is “deaths” the proper measure. Years of expected life lost would be a better indicator. On that measure, Covid19 would lose its terror.
All vaccines carry risks and in recent decades, as they become more and more experimental, particularly genetically, many unknown risks given the still poor understanding science-medicine has of immune function in particular and the human organism in general.
And when vaccines or genetic treatments, ‘geccines’, are involved, which have been rushed and poorly tested, the risk potential rises dramatically.
For any vaccine decision, a sensible person will gain some understanding of immune function, disease history and risk, and then weigh that up against the need for, often nonexistent, and the risk of, any vaccine or ‘geccine.’
Given the low risk to the vast majority from Covid-19, logic and common sense would decree that no vaccine or ‘geccine’ would be accepted. At least not for 3-5 years when long-term outcomes in those who have been vaccinated can be properly assessed. And, by which time, Covid-19 will have passed into the mists of history anyway.
“Our Statistical Style Guide”…amazing how clear you can all be about the vaccines. Why then can’t you apply the same to COVID death numbers etc?
Check out this article on the BBC: Vaccine side effects: My experience of them and what they mean.
The article is by James Gallagher, presenter of Inside Health on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC’s health and science correspondent.
Gallagher was “over the moon to get vaccinated”, but then said “But I’m going to be open and honest with you: the vaccine floored me”.
The article discusses vaccine side effects, with the end goal of ultimately defending the vaccine. Same thing with most of the comments on the article (and also interesting to see how many have been ‘removed’). In the main, everything must be done to defend the blessed vaccines.
But here’s a quote from the article interesting to consider:
“…side effects vary massively from one person to another. Some will not notice a thing; others will feel groggy, but good enough to go to work; others will need to ride it out in bed.
“A really important component, and this might be relevant for you James [I am in my mid-30s], is age,” Prof Andrew Pollard, who led trials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, told me.
“The older you are, the less the side effects – the over-70s have almost no side effects.”
So that’s interesting isn’t it…the younger you are the more likely to have side effects…
But why are young people, people not in the risk category, being vaccinated?
These are ‘COVID-19’ vaccines…but if you’re not at serious risk with ‘COVID-19’, why should you be vaccinated, why should you be made to submit to annual, or potentially even more frequent, vaccination throughout life against a virus which currently isn’t a serious threat to most people?
Meanwhile, the blodclotting issue has been traced back to the AZ vaccine. It’s extremely improbable that it’s not the vaccine causing this issue in otherwise you and healthy people. See article below from Norway. Norway by the way dissented from the EMA decision to declare the AZ product “safe” again).
So you say the risk of serious adverse reactions is low? Well, so is the risk to most people from COVID19. It’s probably fair to say that if you are young and in good health, you’re better off braving the risk of a mild COVID19 infection rather than the unknown and potentially hazardous effects of experimental gene therapy. Remember that these products only have an emergency use exemption, the clinical trials that will enable a permanent “approval” will finish in 2023. Thus, taking the vaccine is a de-facto participation in a medical experiment.
Not gene therapy you say? the standard definition of gene therapy begs to differ (see link 2 below).
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyGv2G/professor-says-cause-of-rare-bloodclots-in-people-vaccinated-with-astrazeneca-has-been-found
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy
The article is completely misleading. I remember reading a previous article that was on the same topic, “take the jab, don’t believe numbers. Numbers can only be understood by those who share the same opinion about the jab as the author. Why are you injecting people who do not need it? Why are you injecting healthy people? The overwhelming majority of people do not need the injection. Tell us what the survivability numbers are! How about 99.7 percent survival rate from the human immune system alone. “You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from the disease”.
An article about safety of an injection still in trials until 2023 is conjecture. Unbalanced article as usual from this author.
“…Lots of studies find correlations between one thing and another… two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one causes the other; there could be something else going on…”
It is precisely phenomenon that is counterintuitive that should be studied closely. Such things can be indicative that your entire base of assumptions, said and unsaid, is flawed – and that is not something that is ever going to be welcome if you have the lack of tact to point it out. I got a good one from my nerd-world of coders – no rhyme or reason why the phenomenon exists.
Programmers who use spaces in their code make a *lot* more money than those who use tabs. Moreover, the phenomenon persists across nations, age groups and different programming languages. There are no convincing explanations why.
In line with Paul Chivers’ recommendation to always give your sources, here’s one below, although there are lots.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/
I’m off for a quick Jynnan tonnyx after thinking about this oddity yet again. Or perhaps I’ll have some Ouisghian Zodahs instead.
I have always used the example that “ice-cream vans cause hay-fever”.
This must be the case, because as soon as ice-cream vans start driving around the countryside, people start sneezing.
(This must be surely be true, as the converse argument that sneezing causes ice-cream van drivers to start their engines is clearly absurd.)
To be honest, it shouldn’t be written off without scientific investigation.
Haha – I can just imagine the question on the Opinium survey of Ice-cream van drivers:
“Do you start your engines when you hear anyone sneezing in the vacinity?”
My mother had double glazing installed so we could not hear the ice cream van – bit of a tight wad my mother.
Nice – I can hear the great Les Dawson delivering that as a Mother-in-law joke.
How have we got to a place where I can’t enjoy this without being at risk of a Scottish jail sentence ?
Did it stop you getting hayfever?
Now you’ve ruined my morning with that reminder of the prime evil of software development (most evil of all, the editors that default to changing spaces into tabs).
But there is another possible variable that hasn’t been considered: house style. i.e. despite personal coding style preferences, code is more maintainable if everyone on the project uses an agreed style. Could it be that tab-using projects pay poorly?
Interesting questions and I’m now going to waste my colleagues’ time by sharing that link.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/15/when-it-comes-to-vaccines-suddenly-from-vs-with-matters-again/
Another example of staristical double standards.
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/16/mrna-vaccine-gene-therapy.aspx?ui=c9e6f918d64140ab9ffc66dfce8c4c03fe9ef2c9607b5ca673888e51f429ba9d&sd=20201112&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20210316&mid=DM823364&rid=1108056843
These ain’t no vaccines.
This affirms similar reviews I have evaluated. NO ONE wants to talk about this, at least not in the USA, where I reside. If you even utter a word that you question these therapies, you are labeled a malcontent and met with raised eyebrows and worse. Are we talking “placebo effect” to pacify the panic instilled by our “fearless” (LOL) leaders?
Posting links to the fringe website of “Dr Mercola, natural health advocate” is not a great contribution. If I wanted advice on carrot juice, I might consult him. But not when vaccine experts and epidemiologists are available.
A poor ad hominem, typical lefty identity politics.
Mercola has published more thorough stuff on this than all the MSM combined.
The problem with Mercola’s site is that many of the treatments advocated, especially the ICU protocols include much standard treatments, like steroids and heparin as well a cocktails of other substances like Vitamin C, which have no established scientific basis, only the belief of the practitioners. It is a common feature of doctors to have absolute faith in what they are doing. That is the rationale for following only evidence based medicine. Mercola does not do this.
Actually he cites all his sources and exposes a lot more than MSM and Tom Chivers.
I agree and will be having my second AZ vac as soon as it is offered to me.
BUT
All discussions of this matter that I have read or heard skate over the question of how reliable is the number of thrombotic events there have been. How solid is the assertion that her have only been 37?
As Mr Chivers writes:
On that basis, it’s hardly surprising that we might see 37 thromboses over a few weeks of vaccination. In fact, it’s surprising that there aren’t quite a lot more, although that’s probably because a lot of people had blood clots and didn’t associate them with the vaccine.
Without proper knowledge of how many thrombotic events there have been it is rather hard to judge the risk.
These are the notes I made from the MHRA data to 28 February published last Thursday:
“Escalating numbers of reports for the Oxford vaccine: 1 in 179 doses up from 1 in 196 last week (Pfizer 1 in 322 both weeks). Consistently, for weeks, Pfizer has been around 2.9 symptoms per report and Oxford 3.6-7, but now Oxford has more than double the listed symptoms (201,622 vs 94,809 despite fewer doses (9.7m vs 10.7m). Again the Oxford record for fatal reactions is worse (275 vs 227) despite fewer doses. Oxford has 54,180 Yellow card reports vs. 33,207 despite fewer doses. Last week the Oxford reports went up by 11,490, this week by 11,363. The Oxford vaccine generates 2.34 times as many recorded symptoms as Pfizer per dose.”
The distinctness of these profiles makes it virtually impossible we are dealing with random noise.
Quite likely. As the MHRA website points out
So it very well may be that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is more likely to give you a sore arm or a headache, say, than the Pfizer vaccine. Is that something to be concerned about?
More to the point, what kind of moronic leadership hinges their whole COVID strategy on rushing through a vaccine and then panics when some people have side-effects and then suspends the vaccine deployment.
Wasn’t the whole point of this that 500,000 were going to die of COVID? Maybe, they are not so worried about “the ‘vid” after all.
Bell-ends!
Well,..this is the first Unherd article that I thought was worth printing. Tom Chivers has given a good checklist for detecting a very common problem.
I started a thorough study of medical literature about a year prior to the Covid outbreak. I had a technical background, so found analysis of statistics pretty straight forward. I was frankly amazed at the shoddy work I found in many medical papers, especially those associated with diet. Many papers were selling a narrative. But, the data told a different story.
The pandemic seemed to cause an explosive outburst of misleading research and news reporting — all focused at fear-mongering, preventing the widespread use of effective non-vaccine treatments and defeating Donald Trump. As a result, I no longer trust the ‘medical authorities’ or ‘news media’ or politicians. I do my own research.
Getting rid of Trump was clearly part of the scamdemic, but the HARKers, salami slicers and Texas sharp shooters of medical research are leaving very well documented evidence of what they have done. Like their predecessors in 1930s Germany their obsession with their made up rules, records and lists could become their undoing if the public at large catch on.
Oh Dear, Tom. ‘We are performing a public service: we hold governments to account; we inform the public. Despite the stereotypes, journalists in my experience are usually well-intentioned and public-spirited. We’re not just out there hawking for clicks; we pride ourselves on finding out things that other people don’t want to be known, or for explaining complicated things to our readers.’ Not on this planet. The science, technology, transport, aviation, defence, health, and most other editors and reporters in the ‘quality’ newspaper I read don’t have a single qualification, and no knowledge, experience, or expertise in the topics they are covering. In every case it’s just a ‘beat’, and their beat will be fashion week, court reporting, or slebs in LA next. Their standard modus operandi is to take a press release which they don’t understand, cobble together disjointed bits of it, and pick out a headline grabbing phrase to post it under. The comments they attract reveal that readers are even less well-informed after reading than before. The traditional model of journalism worked 50 years ago, but now it’s rather incompetent hunter-gatherers wandering around supermarkets and GM crop farms.
Statistics depend on good data, as others here have commented – so I don’t totally believe the conclusion that the clots we are seeing are no more than expected. I think the clotting problems need some investigation simply because the virus itself can cause strange clotting issues. This isn’t well understood but some scientists have suggested it is an autoimmune response while others have suggested it might be to do with free-floating spike proteins attaching to ACE2 receptors. Either way, a vaccine targeting the spike protein could then cause clotting problems. Firstly, it will induce a similar immune response and secondly it will generate free-floating spike proteins. If this is what we are seeing, we need to acknowledge it and assess the risk – give it a number e.g. 1 in 10,000.
I don’t have definitive sources but these are examples …
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7644431/
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/11/17/can-autoimmune-antibodies-explain-blood-clots-in-covid-19/
My sister was vaccinated (In the US). Shortly after her first shot she had blood work done for a non-COVID related issue and it was found her d-dimer was elevated. She had tests to rule out possible causes and no explanation was found. Granted it might not be related to the vaccine, but it is suspicious in my opinion taken with these reports of blood clots. I wonder how many people might have elevated d-dimer levels after vaccination and have no idea since they are not specifically looking/testing for it.
As so many commentators here would seem to agree, I find even an elementary numeracy to be lacking in journalists. Take 200% less instead of, presumably a third. A rise in interest rates from 1% to 3% described as a rise of 2% rather than 200, both commonplace today. As for covid they are only interested in trapping politicians instead of interrogating the data for meaningful probing. I have come to the conclusion it is because they are statistically incapable. Had they been otherwise, much of the data and many of the graphs used at the early government briefings would have been, justifiably trashed and the course of events very different.
Is it ‘correct’ that a rise from 1% to 3% should be described as a 200% rise, not 2%? I’ve always thought both descriptions ambiguous and best avoided!
I would always describe it as a rise of 2 percentage points to avoid ambiguity and confusion. I would never describe it as a 200 per cent rise nor 2 per cent.
I was not able to find answers to these questions quickly, maybe someone could help:
There are plenty of articles out there which put the thrombosis question into proper perspective. I have a feeling EU politiians were just looking for any excuse to damn a UK-orignated vaccine.
“Despite the stereotypes, journalists in my experience are usually well-intentioned and public-spirited. We’re not just out there hawking for clicks”. I don’t see much evidence of that on the TV or in the papers.
Wow, This is ripe. Hey Tom, how about we look at risk reduction for vaccines? The guidelines are to report both to the public. What is the one everybody is reporting? 90 some percent right? Is that RRR or ARR? Does anybody even know the ARR?
Without a firm grasp of statistics, bad decisions are inevitable2) Give absolute risk, not just relative
If you tell me that eating burnt toast will raise my risk of a hernia by 50%, that sounds worrying. But unless you tell me how common hernias are, it’s meaningless. Let readers know the absolute risk. The best way to do this is to use the expected number of people it will affect. For instance: “Two people in every 10,000 will suffer a hernia in their lifetime. If they eat burnt toast regularly, that rises to three people in every 10,000.”
It might also prevent governments from making insane decisions about perfectly good vaccines, putting thousands of lives at risk in the middle of a pandemic.
Since the vaccines and genetic treatments have been so rushed and therefore poorly tested, it is impossible to categorically state they are ‘perfectly good vaccines (or genetic treatments)’ and that is the key issue.
And since this is an invented pandemic, sourced in inferior modelling systems and poll-driven politics, the lives have been put at risk by lockdowns and masks far more than Covid-19.
How far away is the data on deaths and sickness caused by lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing? Is that data even being collected?
You have evidence for that? Please tell us where we can find it.
Dare anyone apply this sort of analysis to all of the other issues of the day -prevalence of racism, sexism, homophobia etc… we might discover, as most of us know perfectly well, that daily life isn’t filled with these things after all -as MSM constantly tells us it is.
Could I suggest you examine the UKs mortality figures, since there is no pandemic, see ONS annual deaths and mortality rates, 1938 to 2020. Mortality levels have not varied significantly, being at their lowest 0.90% and highest at 1.12% over this period, being in the 1% range, from 1990 until 2020.
ONS Short hyperlink: https://cutt.ly/KkYWqnY
In fact, mortality levels were actually higher from 1990 until 2000 and compatible from 2001 until 2003, if compared to the 2020 ONS provisional figures?
I do not recall a UK pandemic from 1990 until 2003, do you?
Technocrats are just increasing the percentage attributed to coronavirus, while reducing others to compensate.
So, in effect government propagandists are manipulating mortality numbers by reallocation, that’s why the flu and other diseases are in decline while coronavirus deaths increase.
We hear this sort of thing a lot. As the table linked to shows, death rates per 100,000 were on a downward trend from 1945 (and indeed from 1900 if you strip out two world wars) to around 2010 with a slight drift up since then: except for 2020, for which the rate (1016/100,000) was last seen in 2003 (1020/100,000). This sort of improvement is what one might hope for, even expect, as a result of improving medical treatment and rising standards of living (there are other factors too of course). In other words, for some reason, 2020 saw us lose nearly two decades of improvement. That reason, of course, is that there has been a pandemic.
That reason of course may well be because of the Government reaction to what it called a pandemic, rather than there ever being a viral pandemic.
It has already been said many people did not seek medical treatment when they should have done because of lockdowns; suicide rates increased; mask-wearing increased bacterial respiratory infections and general level of misery would drive down immune function and make more people, of all ages, prone to disease and perhaps death. And that is not even taking into account accidents in the home and outside of the home due to increased levels of anxiety – all the result of the Government reaction and its practices and not the virus.
An interesting theory. It requires the assumption that something like 140,000 death certificates were filled out incorrectly by doctors who for some reason chose to assign, incorrectly, a virus as underlying or contributory cause of death, rather than the correct cause which would have been suicide, accident, bacterial infection, cancer, stroke, heart attack, etc. — this being a virus which according to the theory does not even exist.
(Oh, and please don’t mention the “with”/”of” nonsense. These are numbers from death certificates filled in after diagnosis by a medical professional, giving the cause of death in their professional opinion.)
So this theory would require thousands of medical professional to suddenly become incompetent, negligent or corrupt.
It is true that there has been and undoubtedly will continue to be a serious effect on people who are not getting the diagnosis and treatment they need. We can already see that in the figures: during April-May 2020 there was an excess in the non-Covid numbers too. For the rest of the year, non-Covid-attributed deaths followed the ten-year average reasonably closely.
I really hope this style guide takes off. As a scientist by training the poor quality of science reporting and the failure to ask the critical questions (is that a big number, what are the confidence intrervals, how are you defining that, does this correlation have a plausible basis for causation etc) regularly has me hopping mad!
Mr Bailey may well be statistically accurate with his observation of the rate of thrombosis occurring being insignificant, however, perhaps a closer scrutiny of the issue shows that, in a particularly rare form of thrombosis (CVST), the incidents associated with the vaccine appear to have some statistical significance which would indeed raise understandable concerns. According to the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Germany:
‘This very rare coagulation disorder occurred more frequently among those vaccinated than would be expected numerically based on the rarity of this clotting disorder without vaccination.’
Although there is no proven link with the vaccine at this time I don’t think that this should be dismissed as a simple misunderstanding of the numbers?
JR
The only basis for determining how safe these experimental vaccine candidates are is a long term safety trial. The first of these (Pfizer’s), investigating the safety of this first use in humans of the novel technology they are based on, is due to be issued in 2023. Any statement about their safety prior to then is limited to their short term harmful effect. Any statement about their long term safety prior to then is, by definition, speculation.
Meanwhile, the UK Government has granted legal indemnity to manufacturers of experimental COVID-19 vaccine candidates protecting them from civil lawsuits due to any unforeseen complications arising from participation in the experiment. One practical consequence of this is that our claim for any harm arising is capped at the £120,000 provided under the Government’s scheme.
I have therefore invited my health board (NHS Lothian) to sign a legal Vaccine Injury Liability agreement acknowledging that, in vaccinating me, the long term safety of these candidates is currently unknown and that they are therefore taking a potentially fatal risk. Under that agreement, I have required them to accept full medical and financial liability up to one million pounds.
I am awaiting their reponse. As they are confident enough in the safety of their trial to invite me to partiicpate in it, I assume they can have no objection.
My God, Interesting article about how to look at data and then a mass pile in from various sides trying to prove their world view right irrespective of the actual content of the article. I particularly liked the comments on the prof ferguson forecast death number which ignore point 6 of the article.
If these principles had been applied by journalists and government – particularly #11, we wouldn’t even be needing a vaccine.
We don’t need a vaccine. If the Government looked at the risk numbers it would never be pushing experimental vaccines and genetic treatments.
Unfortunately, if you follow these rules closely, you deprive sub-editors of one of their most compelling ways to create a lurid headline.
But it might make those of us who have some understanding of statistics and experimental methods more willing to read the article below. Personally, the first thing I do is subject the headline to a smell and sanity test.
After the European Union’s abject incompetence in vaccine procurement was exposed in a very public spat with AstraZeneca, sour grapes and defensive instincts to protect “the Project” by Europhiles put AstraZeneca on a hit list for European politicians and media.
It didn’t take long for the false Handelsblatt story to appear, based on anonymous German government source, that the AZ vaccine had only 8% effectiveness among over 65s. Unsurprisingly the story was allowed to spread throughout European and world media before it was quietly corrected by the German government.
Although the standards of reporting, particularly with regard to science, is appallingly bad, I don’t doubt there is a good deal of purposefully deceptive reporting and wilful misunderstanding by European politicians in order to discredit the AstraZeneca vaccine.
It’s horrendous to think that there are people so inhuman that they would engage in a smear campaign against AstraZeneca, that they must know will cause the loss of many lives, just to save face for the European Union.
“they must know will cause the loss of many lives, just to save face for the European Union”.
Is that really surprising when you consider who runs the EU?
I think not, we have been there before.
Figures lie and liars figure. A nice reminder to check for relevance.
It is no doubt just civil good manners of PC not to mention even once the accusatory words ‘European Union’ in this context – but the fact remains: having commited the dreadful fiasco in the first place, they doubled-down on it, and are now doubling-down yet again on the double-down. Has no one ever mentioned holes and digging to this political class?
The most comical aspect is the mouse-squeak apologists who present a facade of evenhandedness but are in fact quietly pushing agendas, eg: https://mobile.twitter.com/jillongovt/status/1371553477911011333
The most serious aspect is another thing PC tactfully avoids mentioning: that it’s not just the political class doing this, they are doing so in cahoots with the scientific and technical community and the question is: why? I’m not hearing large numbers of scientists from Europe shouting this is nonsense – just the odd one.
Wise words, if they double down twice where are the EU leaders now- lying in the gutter begging Putin for help, that’s where. My parents always said we should have left them to it in 1939, though my Grandfathers both fought. Sadly i am now coming round to agreeing with my parents after many years of banging the “universal duty to fight evil” drum.
You could sum all this up in two words Context and Perspective.
Unfortunately MSM seldom bothers with either as they are not conducive to their misleading, click bait headlines.
I wonder if these rules will every be applied to stories about “man made global warming”? I suspect not!
There is the same degree of obstinate refusal to accept facts, and preference for conspiracy theories and cut-and-paste from fringe websites, for the reality of manmade global warming as there is for the reality of Covid.
125,000 dead within 28 days of a positive test for Covid. Hospital ICUs where five people die during an 8 hour shift. Having been unable to breathe. No, they didn’t die from falling off their bike or any other of the “clever” “I’m so sophisticated that I don’t believe anything I read in the MSM” excuses offered by the Covid deniers, they died of Covid. Like two people in my circle of acquaintances, and three more people I heard about from a former colleague I met by chance this morning.
Just becuse 125000 people died within 28 days of a positive test does not mean they died because of covid -one documented case the chap fell off his motorbike. If you can’t see a failure of syllogy like the “died within x days” versus “died from” its no wonder you believe in warmism. I lost an in law to SARS -CoV2 -aged 48, single mum too, and several friends over 60, so am no “Covid” denier but think your trivialisation of the complex issues involved in the scamdemic and the warming scam is a poor way to honour those we both lost to what is highest number of excess deaths since 2003. By diverting attention from dumping of plastics, antibiotics, inorganic chlorides and phenols into the Biosphere warmists are doing more harm to the planet than most anything else.
“chap fell off his motorbike.” – did you gain sight of the death certificate ? what did it say ? :
1a (cause directly leading to death) 1b and 1c (causes leading to 1a) and 2 (causes contributing to death but not directly related).
So the doctor who knew this bod and filled in the certificate lied ? why ? what did the doctor get out of it ?
There are two sets of figures in use in England. The NHS does indeed record the numbers of all deaths of Covid-positive patients in hospital who have died for whatever reason (including motorcycle accidents). This is a figure they need for bed management purposes. Because they keep it up to date daily, it’s a convenient figure to use for news media purposes. The ONS, on the other hand, go by death certificates, and those figures are usually published with a week lag, so of no interest to the 24-hour media cycle. It so happens that the two figures keep pretty well inn step, so it’s convenient to use one as a proxy for the other.
Sticking to one means of measurement would also help. A statement like “of 10,000 people tested 50% were blue, five hundred and twelve were purple and 256 were green” confuses everyone but, I suppose, increases the word count of the article (five hundred and twelve getting you 4 words whilst 512 would only get you one!).
All Universities push research done by their staff due to the pressures of demonstrating its relevance to the real world etc. And only a minuscule number of these findings is worth publishing to a broader audience. Universities publicity offices should read these Rules and we will have fewer misleading reports in the popular press.An example of which thousands abound that violates many of these Rules is this one: Staring at seagulls makes them less likely to steal your food, new research shows. Its hilarious: ” The researchers attempted to test 74 gulls, but most flew away or would not approach – only 27 approached the food, and 19 completed both the “looking at” and “looking away” tests. The findings focus on these 19 gulls.” Complete statistical innocence! : https://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_728549_en.html
Great article, although I think the author is being a bit too kind on motivation, I think a lot of statistical misrepresentation is deliberate.
One of the most irritating traits that I pick up on is a kind of inverse reporting.
A fairly recent one was when the IFS reported on the autumn budget -“There is a 1 in 3 chance that the budget forecasts will be wrong!” Surely the good news is that there is a 2in 3 chance that it will be right!
“Great article, although I think the author is being a bit too kind on motivation, I think a lot of statistical misrepresentation is deliberate.”
As shown by most of the comments on this Unherd thread, clearly posted by those with no professional standing in the area but access to a keyboard.
This is more about the endless media sensational hype than about realities, and what really surprises me is the lack of ‘Side Effects’ reports from the likes of the BBC’s endless supply of special advisors who only get paid for doom and gloom.
Countries have a perfect right to exercise caution as they wish but what is puzzling is why now, and are they really prepared to sacrifice thousands to Covid on the basis of an unproven statistic? I don’t think so.
My belief is that the countries in question are hiding an unparalleled truth behind fibs. I believe the real reason for this senseless caution is possibly that they don’t have the vaccines to treat the population and they now realise the consequences of that.
Italy for example is permanently Locked down and the consequences to life and economic recovery are catastrophic.
They need their failure to procure vaccines to be hidden and what better than an overrated technical hitch.
On their political heads be it, but how my heart goes out to the people of these countries who at the end will pay the real price.
Seen a lab whiteboard “47.3% of statistics are made up on the spot”
… and 31.4159% of the rest are quoted to spurious levels of accuracy.
Governments are all too aware of how poorly the general public interpret numbers and risk. They relied on this to raise pathological levels of fear and apprehension so as to intimidate the general public into acquiescing to prolonged lockdowns. The mainstream media seemed to propagate this fear and ignorance, perhaps by ignorance but also possibly because they thrived on this narrative of fear.
Kindly publish my comment. My earlier one has not appeared.
Is the REAL reason for the Astra Zeneca pull back?? https://www.bitchute.com/video/i1zYyr24c2Na/ (42mins).
There is also an interpreted version (for non scientists) on The Highwire with Del Bigtree on Bitchute “Vaccine Disaster Ahead”, which starts at 57mins in (approx.)
lunatic fingers going to be crazy…the Unherd protecting readers from bull goose luny fringers is appreciated.
I wish I shared your optimism about reporters’ motives. In my experience, in the US at least, there seems to be in fact a taboo on providing context in many situations. For instance, when reporting the number of police shootings of black men they almost never mention that we are a nation of 330 million where 70 people a year are killed by their lawnmowers.
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/impf_debakel_noch_eine_hiobsbotschaft
The next disaster is already underway.
The toxicity and death rate of the mRNA gene therapies is already 20-30x as large as that of normal, proper vaccines, which will rise to 100x if extrapolated, as an analysis of the actual US CDC data shows.
It is particularly irresponsible to ‘vaccinate’ anyone healthy below the age of 60 with them, as the deaths due to them are practically not offset at all by Covid deaths.
And that’s before the yet unknowable medium and long term side effects, like ADE or cancer, occurred.
This alarming toxicity of mRNA vaccines no doubt explains why Israel is largely denying them to Palestinians.
They are now giving them to non-Jews but the reason for Israel’s embrace of the mRNA genetic treatments is because they did a deal with Pfizer.
To non-Israelis who work in Israel, mainly. I’m sure they’re quite capable of cancelling or reneging on a deal if they thought mRNA vaccines were deadly, and some would say they’re quite capable of deliberately using them to kill Palestinians if that was their belief. Instead, they’re basically reserving them for Israelis and denying them to Palestinians, which seems to clearly indicate they think they are beneficial and work.
A classic example is the one used to negate the Ref result – ” hate crimes have risen due to Brexit ” it was peddled by most of the pro EU media and is still used by some cretinous friends of mine to justify why they still don’t accept the validity of the result .
Bravo – such a great topic. Can I add one more suggestion Tom, as we were taught at Insead: Better to be Vaguely Right than Precisely Wrong. I look forward to the book. You and Tim Harford both, doing a great job with this.
Tom asks in his Statistical Style Guide under “Beware of rankings”: “Has Britain dropped from the world’s fifth largest economy to its seventh?” Well, yes it has, but that happened long ago, and based on the IMF projection for GDP on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis it is in ninth place, just ahead of France, and just behind Brazil, but will overtake Brazil next year, to become the world’s eighth largest economy. I can only assume that Tom is referencing nominal GDP estimates that are exchange rate adjusted to determine his rankings, which is a cardinal sin. I suggest he change that rule to “Always base economic rankings of countries on GDP on a PPP basis”. Also, it should be clear what source is used, since while the IMF, the World Bank and the CIA World Factbook estimates are all similar, they do give slightly different rankings even for the same year. I am quite fond of rankings myself, and use them a lot. If you want to know why the UK is forecast to overtake Brazil as the world’s eighth largest economy next year, the answer comes from another set of rankings: the Bloomberg estimates of COVID-19 vaccine doses administred per 100 people. Among the countries of the world as of March 15, the UK ranked in sixth place, with 39.52 doses, just behind Palau, while Brazil was in 54th place, with 6.44. (For reasons best known to itself, Bloomberg chooses to include four South Pacific nations, including Palau, that were formerly US dependencies in its table for the US. My rankings include these small Pacific nations, so they may differ from others, also based on Bloomberg data, that exclude them.) The differences here are not trivial. They should be a source of pride for the British and of shame for the Brazilians. Similarly, Canada’s pathetic rank of 47th, with 8.27 doses, should provoke anger within the Canadian electorate. The poor vaccine rollout is likely partly responsible for why next year we are projected by the IMF to be overtaken by Spain as the 15th largest economy in the world. Spain’s ranking in the vaccine rollout was 29th overall, at 12.14 doses, substantially better than Canada’s.
Many thanks for that, it’s good to hear the voice of wisdom.
“…there is absolutely no good reason to think that the Oxford vaccine is linked in any way to blood clots.”
And yet several [half a dozen?] governments have been unexplainably persuaded to think “…the Oxford vaccine is linked … to blood clots.”
This mystery leads one to consider the bare knuckled competition in every realm of capitalism and particularly so in the realm of BigPharma.
Given the Oxford vaccine is priced at $3 [US] per dose while Pfizer is priced at $20 and Moderna at anywhere from $10 to $50 depending on quantity purchased it is easy to see an economic incentive for Pfizer and Moderna to create mischief.
Why should I have to be dragged into this endless debate about the quality of “the science”? I have better things to do with my life.
I’m a moderately health-conscious, but mainly ethical vegan. Many vegans have ethical/humane problems with vaccines and prefer to opt out of them. Okay, I’m “lunatic fringe”. Too bad. That’s my right. I don’t know if or how safe vaccines are in general, or how safe or dangerous this one is. I’m not qualified to know, even if I read and thought my brains out about it. I’m 62 and I haven’t had a vaccine since, I don’t know, maybe about 8 years old. The last time I had the flue was when I was about 17. Since then I might have had the flu, but it might’ve been food poisoning. It lasted a few days.
I’m not an animal on a wildlife reservation you have to tag and vaccinate for my own well-being. I’m not a little poodle dog and you’re not my veterinarian. I know I’m a stupid, ignorant prole, but I assert my rights to make my own non-violent decisions. If you have a “scientific” argument that my refusal of a vaccine endangers society and my fellow herd beasts, will you have one for another vaccine, or some other restriction or obligation on me, for the good of “society”? When will your “scientific” arguments for controlling me end?
I’m an American, anarchist-leaning libertarian. I don’t care about democracy. I don’t wear a bicycle helmet, even though it’s required. (I was fined $54 once.) If I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t wear a seat belt, but getting pulled over for that is more likely than being stopped on a bicycle and more of a hassle.
So please. All of you good little science nazis just leave me alone and let me live my life as a modern savage. I’m a live and let live kind of person. I’m not going to hurt you.
Can we have the following stats please for perspective:
It’s not the numbers. It’s the proximity to having the jab. Nice bait and switch. Do you have an elderly m-in-law, with an enlarged heart thanks to lifelong high blood pressure (and unable to take medicine for this as it makes her really sick), awaiting this jab?
I do.
But none of the vaccines or genetic treatments prevent infection it has been said so it is rather pointless. These treatments may reduce symptoms but the majority who test positive have no symptoms and those who do, and who get very sick, are probably too sick to be vaccinated. So, again, rather pointless.
Bottom line. COVID does not worry me in the slightest. If I have not been exposed to it over the past year I’d be amazed. It’s quite clear many have natural immunity (as for example, is the case with the ‘flu) and hence have no need for a vaccine, even one that is “risk free”. I don’t need the jab. I’m not going to have it. I am more than happy to rely on my own auto-immune system doing what it should do.
… by whom? The initial studies were designed to determine whether the vaccines were safe, and whether they were effective at preventing people from becoming seriously ill with the disease. Those tests did not address the question as to whether they reduced infection, and so it was simply not possible to say whether or not they did that. A recent working paper in the Lancet uses data from vaccinated health-care workers to suggest that vaccination with Pfizer does indeed reduce the spread of infection as well.
If you get it wrong, admit it.
And when those who question anything are reviled and dismissed, how on earth can you know you have something wrong?
Be aware of problems that science is struggling with, like p-hacking and publication bias
And publication bias is a particular problem with vaccines.
Urgent Open Letter from Doctors and Scientists to the European Medicines Agency regarding COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Concerns
Doctors for Covid Ethics. Emer Cooke, Executive Director, European Medicines Agency, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
28 February 2021
Dear Sirs/Mesdames,
FOR THE URGENT PERSONAL ATTENTION OF: EMER COOKE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE EUROPEAN MEDICINES AGENCY
As physicians and scientists, we are supportive in principle of the use of new medical interventions which are appropriately developed and deployed, having obtained informed consent from the patient. This stance encompasses vaccines in the same way as therapeutics.
We note that a wide range of side effects is being reported following vaccination of previously healthy younger individuals with the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines. Moreover, there have been numerous media reports from around the world of care homes being struck by COVID-19 within days of vaccination of residents. While we recognise that these occurrences might, every one of them, have been unfortunate coincidences, we are concerned that there has been and there continues to be inadequate scrutiny of the possible causes of illness or death under these circumstances, and especially so in the absence of post-mortems examinations.
In particular, we question whether cardinal issues regarding the safety of the vaccines were adequately addressed prior to their approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
As a matter of great urgency, we herewith request that the EMA provide us with responses to the following issues:
1. Following intramuscular injection, it must be expected that the gene-based vaccines will reach the bloodstream and disseminate throughout the body [1]. We request evidence that this possibility was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.
2. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that the vaccines will remain entrapped in the circulation and be taken up by endothelial cells. There is reason to assume that this will happen particularly at sites of slow blood flow, i.e. in small vessels and capillaries [2]. We request evidence that this probability was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.
3. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that during expression of the vaccines’ nucleic acids, peptides derived from the spike protein will be presented via the MHC I — pathway at the luminal surface of the cells. Many healthy individuals have CD8-lymphocytes that recognize such peptides, which may be due to prior COVID infection, but also to cross-reactions with other types of Coronavirus [3; 4] [5]. We must assume that these lymphocytes will mount an attack on the respective cells. We request evidence that this probability was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.
4. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that endothelial damage with subsequent triggering of blood coagulation via platelet activation will ensue at countless sites throughout the body. We request evidence that this probability was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.
5. If such evidence is not available, it must be expected that this will lead to a drop in platelet counts, appearance of D-dimers in the blood, and to myriad ischaemic lesions throughout the body including in the brain, spinal cord and heart. Bleeding disorders might occur in the wake of this novel type of DIC-syndrome including, amongst other possibilities, profuse bleedings and haemorrhagic stroke. We request evidence that all these possibilities were excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.
6. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on platelets, which results in their activation [6]. Thrombocytopenia has been reported in severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection [7]. Thrombocytopenia has also been reported in vaccinated individuals [8]. We request evidence that the potential danger of platelet activation that would also lead to disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) was excluded with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.
7. The sweeping across the globe of SARS-CoV-2 created a pandemic of illness associated with many deaths. However, by the time of consideration for approval of the vaccines, the health systems of most countries were no longer under imminent threat of being overwhelmed because a growing proportion of the world had already been infected and the worst of the pandemic had already abated. Consequently, we demand conclusive evidence that an actual emergency existed at the time of the EMA granting Conditional Marketing Authorisation to the manufacturers of all three vaccines, to justify their approval for use in humans by the EMA, purportedly because of such an emergency.
Should all such evidence not be available, we demand that approval for use of the gene-based vaccines be withdrawn until all the above issues have been properly addressed by the exercise of due diligence by the EMA.
There are serious concerns, including but not confined to those outlined above, that the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines by the EMA was premature and reckless, and that the administration of the vaccines constituted and still does constitute “human experimentation”, which was and still is in violation of the Nuremberg Code.
In view of the urgency of the situation, we request that you reply to this email within seven days and address all our concerns substantively. Should you choose not to comply with this reasonable request, we will make this letter public.
Since “Doctors for Covid Ethics” feel free to “demand” things from other people, no doubt they will be equally happy to acquiesce to demands made on them. What is the status of this group (company, charity, legally registered association, informal club, etc.) ? Who are its members? Who are its leaders, governors, directors or trustees? Who are its scientific and medical advisors and what are their professional qualifications and fields of expertise? Where does its funding come from? What are its aims and objectives? When they have the information they demand, what do they propose to do with it?
Surely it is the questions they ask which have most relevance? Either they are asking valid questions or they are not. They appear to be sensible questions.
Nitpicking about who is asking the questions is a distraction.
You ask your questions, I’ll ask mine.
You articulate exactly what is wrong with the Government handling of this viral outbreak and much that is wrong with modern science and medicine. Selective choice for questions.
Since science can only ever understand what it can measure and since it is humans making the decisions as to what can, should or will be measured, we can be confident that when it comes to asking questions they fall into ‘your’ questions and ‘my’ questions.
None of that is good science or safe medicine.
You will have noticed that I nowhere stated that the questions that “Doctors for Covid Ethics” ask were bad, or should not have been put. I’m not the one trying to suppress questioning here. The long list of questions by “Doctors for Covid Ethics” include several claims of fact or authority (there are various things they claim “must be expected”, for example) and it is legitimate to call into question who they are and what their authority is for making those claims.
When you say “Nitpicking about who is asking the questions is a distraction.” you implicitly assert that there’s a right thing to talk about and a wrong thing to talk about, that you know, and should control, which is right and which is wrong, and that you have the authority to say whether a question is or is not legitimate. When you say “Selective choice for questions” this is exactly what you are trying to impose on the discussion — with you selecting the questions that may or may not be asked.
An Informative and on point article. It is time for serious journalists to reassert themselves if they are to continue as a credible profession who perform a public duty, hold governments, other public servants and those in a position of power, to account and inform the public. Indeed if Piers Morgan and the Daily Express are examples of journalism little wonder many have given up on the press. BBC Breakfast is simply a joke these days too.
37…. Come on . People will soon start to hear of the government campaign to silence the families of the deceased due to the Az vaccine, with massive lump sums of cash, because people aren’t great at keeping these things secret.
I think the other aspect of risk communication is to spell it out for not doing something. For example, there may be a small risk to using x-rays to determine whether a person has cancer; however the risk of not doing it is even greater. The same thing applies to vaccines and viruses!
There have been escalating concerns surrounding everything said and actually done about the pandemic. It all needs investigation.
I’ve made a petition – will you sign it?
Click this link to sign the petition:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/577292/sponsors/new?token=zG5Q79r6lCB1hWuFlR6W
My petition:
Parliament to launch a judge-led public enquiry into the Covid Pandemic.
There has been much debate about every aspect of the covid 19 pandemic and as such it is entirely right that a comprehensive public enquiry should review all the evidence from the end of 2019 right through to the delivery and effectiveness of the current vaccination program.
No enquiry will be effective if requests for information are ignored. Accordingly, it is right that the enquiry should have wide-ranging judicial powers to order the production of all evidence requested with appropriate sanctions for non-compliance. That must include by definition total access to medical research papers, medical records at treatment centres and full access to supply contracts for testing and the supply of all services surrounding the covid 19 pandemic generally.
That’s a very long article to pretend, without any proof(have autopsies been done? Is there any history of clotting in the people who have suffered?) that it’s just statistics. Interesting too that you promote the “correlation isn’t causation” idea yet when people die shortly after vaccination it’s because they were frail and elderly, but when that same cohort have been dying after a positive PCR test (now within 60! days, regardless of other factors) twas the virus with dunning. My sceptical module is at peak scepticism at how quickly any correlation with vaccine is dismissed in this blood clotting issue. Why don’t you read the UK vaccine injury reporting site and you will find there have been quite a number of “adverse events” including blindness, cerebral haemorrhage, facial paralysis and other impacts after vaccine, do you dismiss all those too? There have been thousands, not just with the Astra Zeneca vax either; this with a reporting system which is acknowledged is likely massively under reporting.
The global journalists have lost the plot in the main. The first thing you don’t seem to get is there is no new virus, there is no actual pandemic of anything but fake PCR tests invented by Professor Drosten without any virus to test for. Digest that and you will realise you have been peddling brainless propaganda for a whole year based on nothing at all.
Without a firm grasp of risks and what constitutes real health bad decisions are inevitable. Actually. It’s not that many don’t understand what is going on with the vaccine, but that they have a different conception of what is worthwhile for them, their health picture, their particular attitude towards risk, ill-health, and frankly death. The latter being the western world’s number one phobia. Exampled perfectly by vaccine mania, lockdown mania, mask mania. The fear of this virus is out of all proportion. It is exactly what will kill more people than the virus eventually. If you try to stop-up all healthy life to ‘prevent’ so called ‘untimely’ death you bring devastation anyway.
You are right – up to a certain point. We need the incidence from the whole population, BUT you talk about blood clots – the condition we are talking about here is the possibility of VIT (vaccine induced trombocytopeni).
To my knowledge this is something very different, and at least in Denmark we don’t have comparable figures from non-vaccinated persons regarding thombocytopeni combined with internal bleedings and blood clots. This is what the authorities are working on now, and I feel confident that we will get a reply in a short time. Better safe than sorry – particularly now that we have vaccinated the most vulnerable persons with mRNA vaccines.
What is particularly worrying, in the UK at least, is that this very important caution and investigation is being pilloried and dismissed.
Interesting as this story is, its irrelevant. The media aren’t interested in the truth. Any apparent event, number or idea will be reported as truth as long as it supports their crazed woke agenda. The Mao excrement repeated many times: “Political truth is the only truth.” And political truth is all the red media of the west is concerned with. Covid is a political event for its woke hacks. Accurate statistical reporting isn’t relevant.
If one looked at the most critical numbers then they would reject these experimental vaccines and genetic treatments immediately.
Covid is no threat to 99.9% of people. Why take a risky treatment when there is no need, and worse, which does not even prevent infection?
I don’t think this article has aged well. It assumes homogeneity amongst blood clots, whereas the concern here is the rare CVST version. It also assumes clotting is equally likely amongst all age groups and both sexes; in reality this seems to be a problem, predominantly amongst women under 50. To date very few women under 50 have had the AZ vaccine (the early healthcare workers got Pfizer) so once we know the denominator of the probability calculation it may turn out that the risk/benefit calculation is very different for this group, which is presumably why it is not going to be used for the under 30s. The devil is as ever in the detail but unfortunately not enough information is freely available to make those judgements.
Quite
What are the odds of vaccine killing me ?
What are the odds of the Covid killing me ?
Please jab here.
very very little for both
also ask, whats the chance of dying if i don’t take the vaccine at all and break the lockdown – still probably nothing at all, but you get to live your life
And maybe infect someone else. But why care about anyone other than yourself?
If the vaccine works – then someone who hasn’t taken the vaccine is not a risk to them.
Having perused most of the comments below I am struck by the apparent consensus that journalists are lazy, ill-informed, expedient in their writing and whose ‘opinions’ are unduly influenced by confirmation bias. So what’s surprising about that? Nothing since their output has no other single objective than to sell newspapers. And what sells newspapers? Well, you don’t need a MENSA intellect to work that out! Nevertheless, I admire Tom Chivers and applaud his initiative in attempting to encourage critical thinking when presented with stats and figures. Whether it will have any impact upon the way in which journos present figures in support of their contentions in the future I very much doubt. I am mindful of the maxim, attributed to Mark Twain, ‘Figures won’t lie but liars will figure’.
Explain “regression to the mean”. Small trends above and below the mean normally are meaningless.
Chivers = vaccine apologist and pharma tool.
pathetic.
I know it looks that way but i think its more co-incidence than correlation. His piece is about the jab and the EU reaction to it, though no fan of the guy i am sure he could easily give us a cogent 1500 words on the vicissitudes of honest science in the legal drugs industry. Note the illegal drugs industry seems to have much less of an issue here – los leyes narcos are obviously more up to the job as a legal system.
As purveyors of so much information to the public, journalists are in a position of great influence. However, they are not much interested in facts, but stories. Drama stories sell copy and generate advertising revenue.
Purveyors of high moral principle they are not- for if they were how could Piers Morgan have ever got another job after turning a blind eye to illegal phone tapping, or Martin Bashir with his underhand tactics?
The European politicians on the other hand are more interested in saving face. The more they trash the Oxford-AZ vaccine the less bad they think they look amid the vaccination debacle of their own making.
Spot on – “if it bleeds, it leads”. We’ve got the necro-masturbatory circus coming round again as the copper is tried for the murder of the marketing woman this Autumn. I expect Piers Morgon will be back in the saddle by then, megaphone in one hand and i’ll leave you to imagine what’s in the other!
This problem has been much worse in the last year in that preliminary scientific data always appears within days on the front page of tabloids rather than being released after the process of peer-review. I do not know whether this is the fault of scientists or journalists but it’s very regrettable.
Since peer review became a cavalcade of back scratching and log rolling this is no bad thing IMO…
One London cycle journey in every 10 million ended in tragedy.
That sounds like a serious under-estimate, as tragedy encompasses more than just death.
The statistics point is valid but there is also another key factor which has nothing to do with maths but it is to do with politics. Just look at the countries that have actually raised issues with the AZ vaccine (from the start) and particularly on this topic. The Italian health authority said today that the decision to suspend using the AZ vaccine was political and had nothing to do with health. So perhaps, states are deliberately misusing statistics to achieve a political aim.
As Mr Bailey points out below journalists must share equal blame with their masters in govt for promoting statistical illiteracy and its evil twin, innumeracy. That said the stats style check is very helpful, but then Unherd is not typical MSM. Its very hard to work soft stats eg qualititave v quantative risk as there is scope for differing value assumptions. Eg risk from dying from single dose of MDMA or AS Covid vaccine depends on how much you enjoy MDMA or fear Covid. Formal, probability based stats used in Aero and other dangerous industries for Safety Integrity Level analysis are pretty dry but based on values agreed by the FAA, IEC, IMechE etc. Many stats can be falsified by mathematics ( EG Guardian headlines) and some by observation (Global Warmist predictions). Either way an anti-vaxxer is faith based, far right/left and though their deaths are technically avoidable they are unselfishly accepting their Darwin award. The anti Brexit anti Vaxxers are a different thing entirely. The sort of childish spat that characterised the cold war and North/South Korea. To see Germany, France and Spain involved is concerning. If they want to behave as they did in the 1930s we should warn their population what to expect next. The deaths that their anti-vaxx campaigns cause are avoidable because they are manslaughter. If their populations have any sense they’ll elect parties who promise to apply to join the Commonwealth.
I really appreciate this article and hope that more journalists join the effort that Tom proposes. I don’t think anything irritates me more than the misuse of numbers in the media.
And here you will find out how statistics are manipulated to misrepresent the benefits of the vaccine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsBjrjRmyZM
…
Also Canada has restricted the vaccine to over 65s.
Great article – thank u – ignore the hecklers!
The coronavirus data gov uk website on 16 March 21 informs all of World that:
UK People vaccinated with First dose total = 24,839,906.
The Yellow Card reporting system means that EVERY reaction seen by any Medical Professional MUST be reported to MHRA immediately. I have not heard of any reports of Death or major reaction to the OX-AZ vaccine. Has anyone?
The MHRA website has a summary of Yellow Card reporting. They report
In summary:
Of course the wonderful thing is the EU is making a complete arse of itself over the whole thing and can’t seem to stop.Even some British europhiles are starting to see this. I have a couple of friends who are very pro EU and they are in despair as they can now see the chances of us rejoining are now nil
Well said Tom Chivers. Rational discussion, at long last, on MSM.24,839,906 UK People vaccinated with First dose on 16 March 21
I note that coronavirus_data_gov_uk website reports on 16 March 21
The Yellow Card reporting system means that EVERY reaction seen by any Medical Professional MUST be reported to MHRA immediately. I have not heard of any reports of Death or major reaction to the OX-AZ vaccine.
Tom, has anyone that you are in contact with?
I find it ironic that the author’s argument rests on the idea that 1 out of 1000 people suffer a thrombosis each year (a dubious claim, as the majority of people with a thrombosis likely don’t seek medical treatment), linking to the NIH study, which itself states that it gets its numbers from a 25-year long study published in 1998. So we’re going on a false premise to begin with here, largely based on 30-50 year old data, not a great start to the article and the argument.
If more than one in a thousand suffer a thrombosis each year, doesn’t that add weight to the author’s argument?
yes it does and absolutely so, sadly so many on this thread are never going to swayed by rational thought.
Another sane answer, well done!
I don’t know if its more or less. Sounds like neither does anyone else.
What’s truly interesting, is the release of a report from Germany this morning, stating that the *kind of* thrombosis that these people have died of, are *extremely* rare, and what they’re seeing are completely unprecedented numbers. Hopefully the author admits his mistake as his Statistical Style Guide suggests he should. Better yet, perhaps he waits until he gets *all* of the information before deciding to come to the rescue of the Oxford/Astra vaccine.
Everybody’s favorite American reporter wonders why they are focusing there… why not on the other vaccines. It actually appears to be a lot worse.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1371486125756407808
A very helpful article. When numbers from models are quoted, such as the possible 500,000 deaths from Covid without a lock down, I never hear anybody ask “If each of your asumptions changed by + or – 5% in turn, what would be the effect on the outcome?
You are absolutely right, common sense demands that we look at the number of reported adverse effects from the Astra Zeneca vaccine in the context of the number vaccinated, and the comparable number of events one would expect in an unvaccinated population.
So why does Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, Dubai, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, Denmark, and some others I’ve missed, who have stopped rollout of the A/Zeneca vaccine, all seem to lack that common sense?
Is it a kneejerk fear of reprisal if they get it wrong, simple political bashing of Astra Zeneca, or do they know something you are not telling us Mr Chivers?
I have to say you are a little one sided with your plea for treating ‘numbers’ fairly. On the one hand you want us to accept that, though 37 is a large number of thromboembolic events, you don’t want us to be scared when we don’t need to be and put ourselves at risk of Covid if we don’t get vaccinated.
As you haven’t stated the parallel ‘absolute’ risk (as opposed to the ‘relative’ risk) of catching Covid – risks you encourage us to distinguish between in your identkit toolkit further on, how can we make the judgement which is the better of the two evils?
A little even handedness applied to ‘numbers’ instead of fear mongering to support your implicit prejudices would not go amiss.
Regrettably, they might. The “fundamental confidence fallacy” https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-015-0947-8 is a common error. Don’t thank me, just pleasantly surprise me with an acknowledgement and correction this time, Tom. 😉
Mr. Chivers, I usually shudder reading your contributions which leave me the impression you’re an propagandist of Big Pharma. This piece is an exception to the rule. That said, why have I never seen you follow all these guidelines putting COVID-19 into global perspective, like the inconsequential 37 vaccine-coincidental deaths you write about here? I would be indebted should you apply your own guidance to your writings, and share it with us in those writings. It’s all about perspective.
A timely piece even though it’s so obvious it should not need to be said. But journos and politicians are mostly innumerate and pushing a particular line anyway, so this will be like water off a duck’s back.
Thank you, interesting & useful.
If anybody can be bothered to check the government’s figures please do the following: http://www.gov.uk then enter ‘vigilance’ in search box. Scroll down to ‘Coronavirus(COVID-19) vaccine adverse reactions’ and there you have the latest report dated 16th March. AstraZeneca Total Fatal Outcome Reports 289, Pfizer-BioNTech – 237. So Mr Chivers why are you writing about ‘37 people have suffered potentially life-threatening blood clots’?
All good stuff Tom, but ….. little chance of this style guide being adopted in these times because:-
I have read through all the comments below and I think it is important to go off topic for context.
We are in a narrative which is the consequence of how we see/perceive the world/nature. In the modern world this is very much driven by numbers-science. These numbers will be used for various explanations but never reflect the reality of life and nature. Any number is a reduction defined in a context but this is never the whole truth. The truth will be different depending on the sensitivity of each person and or group.
What I can see is that we have swapped life (with all its complications and variability which includes death) for some sort of rational way of being or living. The clash between the nature of life and rationality is constant so we make choices. The narrower the rational (one line stories) the more likely it is distant from the reality of life. The broader the view the closer we come to something to do with the reality of life.
In this sense I do blame the journalist who willingly stick to one to three liners of news, and the politicians who are afraid of them as responsible for the mess we are in. I also question the scientific world where the battle for obtaining funds for research tends to distort things. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext?rss%3Dyes
The discussion below is interesting as it shows the different sensitivities between the various people posting, all coming up with good or less good arguments for how they feel and what they consider to be valid.
Plenty – if not quite everything – in the article that makes perfect sense. The vast majority of the comments that follow seem to have been written by people who failed to read the article. Makes yuh fink!
“Be aware of problems that science is struggling with, like p-hacking and publication bias” is the least solvable problem.
All valid argument. Only one can make more profit selling snake oil than advancing working solutions. The problems are even worse. Big Data/Bayesean Probabilities converge to idiosyncratic noise, purchasing credibility as in obtaining majority stock control. “The answer” to the pandemic was “vaccine” (ala Bill Gates, medical ignorant). Now, predictably vaccine is not protecting us from the new bugs. Convince the victims to continue their social isolation and masks, ban physical contact; all of which have demonstrably not made any difference. Cholecalciferol, what is that?
Sick patients are not cared for by primary care doctors in the United States. Family Practice is the former General Practice re-labeled. We further use the Physician “Assistant” or Family Practice “Nurse Practitioner” to collect profit just fine. These are neither trained Doctors nor experienced Nurses, just Certificated individuals much like Medics in the Military.
Those of us who can interpret statistics more accurately are rare, and when available and vilified in the social or corporate medias. I am a trained doctor and researcher. I offer Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise”.
aa says “predictably vaccine is not protecting us from new bugs”. How good is the evidence for that assertion? Also what is meant by”new bugs”? It’s arguable that even SARS-COV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is not actually a new species but only a variant of SARS. However, the criteria for distinguishing between species of virus are not nearly as clear as they might be in the case of animals – yet virus populations undergo continual mutation driven by their environments. As Tim Yeadon pointed out early last year, what we can reasonably expect with SARS-COV-2, based on our experience with related viruses and other respiratory diseases, is that it will become more infectious but less deadly. It does not need any intelligence to follow a better strategy than killing all its hosts!
Being over 70, I judged that it was worth taking my chances with a vaccine rather than the admittedly tiny risk of getting a serious case of COVID-19. I was not offered a choice of vaccine, but it turns out they administered the Pfizer-BioNtec not the Oxford-Astrazeneca. I guess that having a National Health Service means you are less likely to get a choice; oddly this has the one benefit that a panic like they had in Germany is less likely to happen here. As against that, the German insurance-based model of health funding ensures there are plenty of ICU beds, unlike in the NHS!
It’s a great article, and I look forward to reading the book. But I think the “context” in which results are presented should not only include the fact (where it is the case) that there are numerous other publications that may not support them. Take Tom’s example of the discovery of the Higgs boson: I think any report should really say they discovered a signal which they claim to be consistent with the decay of a Higgs boson (or something like that), and that the report should also mention two other things (a) the dependence of the “experiment” upon prior computer simulations, and (b) the fact that in order to make the observation at all the scientists have to throw away a huge amount of data which the system itself judges not likely to include events of interest. Now, all this is not easy to get one’s head around, but I think it shows that discovering the Higgs boson is not like most instances of discovering something, even in science. And it certainly isn’t the kind of experiment that can be readily replicated by other scientists – which used to be customary when new discoveries were made.
“10) Always give your sources”
Okay, Mr Chivers, here we go:
““A physician cannot predict whether a particular child will suffer an adverse reaction to a vaccine and, therefore, vaccine-related injuries or death are extremely difficult to prevent.”
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9453695/Davenport%2C_Katherine_NVICP.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y&fbclid=IwAR0-j2RppEYfyaMAFuZ2a_XueLcwC8e12gTuaKv1pJCIf34pmft-fOxW9H4
“Is it possible that some of the extensive organ, tissue, and cellular damage done by SARS-CoV-2 is due to viral antigenic mimicry with human tissue?
If the answer is yes, then we may face an increase in the rates of autoimmune disease in the future, because any factor that causes chronic inflammation in the body can potentially induce AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246018/?fbclid=IwAR2NX05sjnfl2zLEyNpUZhBMiX3I3PIU9Zk5Bsu8y6VdjhQsGrhnLdvjYQQ
“”One theory suggests vaccines could be associated with autoimmune phenomenon, which is thought to occur via either mimicry of host molecules by the vacci.nal antigen or bystander activation of dormant autoreactive T-cells
“This finding signals a potential safety phenomenon and suggests inaccurate reporting of basic epidemiological context to the public.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00076-1/fulltext?fbclid=IwAR2jxSNszsS3e-nOR01cuwiqy0Apnky4XtwlvDV4crwcc2xkkWP7w2E4XmY
Merck discontinues development of COVID vaccine:
“This decision follows Merck’s review of findings from Phase 1 clinical studies for the vaccines. In these studies, both V590 and V591 were generally well tolerated, BUT THE IMMUNE RESPONSES WERE INFERIOR TO THOSE SEEN FOLLOWING NATURAL INFECTION”
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-discontinues-development-of-sars-cov-2-covid-19-vaccine-candidates-continues-development-of-two-investigational-therapeutic-candidates/?fbclid=IwAR0SScg48lkw7Ol5WAXmxvYvgihByMowPT9bi5S1y_qQsvq-2D0lrrrDvQk
People who struggle with and get alarmed by the number 37 when11 million AZ jabs have been done will not be reading your book I’d say.
I totally agree with your point about context. This context in terms of numbers and risk of Covid has been consistently lacking with a corresponding lack of proper investigation by journalists who have not asked pertinent questions about actual risk of serious illness/death to the majority of people. Instead we have been subject to fear mongering, as seen in the BBC stating, wrongly, that there were ‘wards full’ of children with Covid. But it is not just about numeric context. Here questions should also be asked about the type blood clots – if it is just a statistic normality then it is unlikely to be caused by the vaccine, but if it is a type of blood clot that is unusual, or an anomaly then it is quite right that this is investigated properly before inviting everyone to have a vaccine which is still in its early stages of development.
What a tough assignment! To write an essay that will convince readers that a vaxx is safe (and effective) and that journalists are to perform the public service of holding governments to account before the public. (Even government is helping with this, for we have Prince Harry here to combat the harms of the social media as he has become a part of Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder to study misinformation and disinformation in America. Note “social media.” Not MSM, which, IMO, needs no study, it openly sprawls before us, gets in our way in public life no matter how hard we try to avoid it.
Okay, deaths from AstraZeneca. Another element for the statistics game: how many very healthy and relatively young people drop dead so shortly after taking AstraZeneca, and how effective is it in preventing or curing CV -19? Then ask how many healthy and relatively young people drop dead shortly after ingesting zinc and hydroxychloroquine for the first time. And after many times and how effective is it?
The problem with this article is that it takes absolutely no account of the potential long term damaging effects of the Astra Zeneca jab… the thrombogenic events are a red herring… it was clear from the start that these were not statistically different from the natural event rate for such…. what about the potential dangers of infertility? ….what about the increase in autoimmunological events found in animal trials of similar rNA vaccines?
How can anyone talk about long-term effects when we don’t have long-term realities? Some people take months or even a year to recover from a bad bout of the Flu. Covid has not been around long enough to qualify as long-term and until studies are done sifting out psychosomatic symptoms, very common where there is fear, it is ridiculous to claim that long-term even exists.
Of course; a very sensible article. I am a physicist so I not only can do the mechanics of numbers and analysis but I inherently get an immediate feel and understanding from even imperfect initial data presentation.
I think that the fact that we all have been given a full year of imperfect data and descriptions of actions and policies on one very narrow subject has highlighted the analytical incompetence of Govt, Scientists turned administrator, media in general and electronic media in particular.
The general population of friends and acquaintances have learned more maths and science than all the media pack put together in that year. I hear more probing questions about the rubbish , biased and sometimes downright untrue data published by the Govt and its incompetent cohorts of PHE and NHS, from postmen, delivery drivers, factory workers, stay at home mums etc than are raised by the “media”.
It is enlightening to Wiki the CV of any presenter or media person and then you find that they are historians, did PPE, English, etc etc and are pontificating about the meaning derived from imperfect data.
The Govt should be ashamed at delivering data NOT information and the media similarly should be ashamed for not giving a voice to reporters with appropriate knowledge and education to enable them to challenge the comfortable smugness of the Govt so called scientists
Useful article. But I miss the question: Are the number of Covid-related deaths a high number?
First, of course, “covid-related” should be split on “dying with” and dying from”. But even if the number of “dying from” is higher than neglible, the question remains: how many died a natural death?
The latter is more of a philosophical question than a medical one. However the apparently medical question “How many died from?” also pertains to philosophical questions. As we know, more than the infection itself is relevant to the occurrence of “death from Covid”.
In the Spanish Flue in 1919 people who died from the flue, also died from the health situation, nourishment situation and other circumstances caused by the First World War. To-day I believe we have the “opposite” problem. Thanks to science and improved health service we have a larger population than ever which is “fragile”. They live now, but under the health service available some decades ago, they would have died already. They seem to risk, however, dying from a flew.
This may be what’s new in 2020-21 and not the characteristics of the Covid 19 virus. But should we deprive our youth of a normal education for this reason? If you asked the fragile people themselves, I guess that at least those who are fragile primarily because of old age, would say no.
Useful article. But I miss the question: Are the number of covid-related deaths a high number?
First, of course, “covid-related” should be distributed on “dying with” and “dying from”. But even if the number of “dying from” is substantial, the question remains: did they mainly die a natural death?
The latter is more of a philosophical question than a medical one. However the apparently medical question “How many died from?” also pertains to philosophical questions. As we know, more than the infection itself is relevant to the occurrence of “death from Covid”.
In the Spanish Flue in 1919 people who died from the flue, also died from the health situation, nutrition situation and other circumstances caused by the First World War. To-day I believe we have the “opposite” problem. Thanks to science and improved health service we have a larger population than ever which is “fragile”. They live now, but under the health service available some decades ago, many would have died already.
They seem to risk, however, to die from respiratory disease. General health level and good health service may be what’s new in 2020-21 and not the characteristics of the Covid 19 virus. But should we deprive our youth of a normal education for this reason? If you asked the fragile people themselves, I guess that at least those who are fragile primarily because of old age, would say no.
This is an interesting article, whose unfortunate prime purpose seems to be to sell a book. The only “fact” missing from this piece is the name of the publisher, how much it costs, and where you could buy it.
The author doesn’t point out that, for instance, there’s not necessarily any causal relationship between the measurement of two distinct, often random, events. I don’t believe there’s been a study of how many people had blood clots after having eaten Rice Krispies for breakfast. Will there be a link to be found there? Who knows?
Correlation does not equal causation. Proof of causation can only be established when the dependent variable (DV) is fixed and where under controlled experimental conditions the effect of the independent variables (IV) on the DV can be accurately measured. Even so there is always the realistic possibility of the results being invalidated because of unforeseen confounding variables which nullify the observed effect. You mention that the author doesn’t point out that there isn’t necessarily any causal relationship between the measurement of two distinct, often random events. Quite so for the reasons above there won’t be.
Well, there has to be some benefit to the authors here. AIUI, they don’t get paid for their contributions (and many don’t deserve to, in my estimation)
Well done!!
Keep poking the bear Tom.
The enthusiasm Conservative ideolougues have for dislaying a disturbing amount of willful ignorance never gets old nor does their enthusiasm for displaying an utter lack of self awareness.
Anyone interested in this thread might also like an essay by Sinead Murphy, entitled “Measure, Case, Health”. It interestingly probes some qualitative issues behind Covid policy and statistics.
Don’t be put off by the fact that she takes the title from a Continental philosopher (Gadamer). Her argument is rational, insightful and incisive.
Here is the link:-
https://lockdownsceptics.org/measure-case-health/
President Trump had the best foreign policy record of any president since the end of the Cold War. Discuss. The MSM didn’t.
Chivers is in a different league on this subject the the vast majority of his peers in Journalism. In fact, he is so much better than them, that it is wrong to call them his peers.
The reporting on this is so bad, that it will have done a lot of damage to the vaccine programme, Anecdotally, I know it has done. My partner is a GP, and she is currently working on the vaccination drive. Since the bad publicity (Macron would be delighted) there have been many ‘no shows’ and there has been a lot of time wasted by people turning up and either, demanding the Pfizer vaccine (not on offer and not available there) or by turning up and requiring a lot of hand wringing encouragement. One woman after wasting the time of three GPs one after another in succession, walked out saying it was too dangerous. God knows what she thinks the risks are. She was a fifty year old classic case of someone who really needs the vaccine; big, breathless already, and likely to do rather badly if she caught the disease.