3 ms·

VAERS is a flawed data set, because it is pure correlation, not causation. Quoting VAERS: "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any

VAERS is a flawed data set, because it is pure correlation, not causation. Quoting VAERS: "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event." You could get the vaccine, and then days later, you get diarrhea, or a headache, or a charlie horse in your calf, and you reason "oh, it must have been the vaccine", and boom it goes into VAERS: garbage in, garbage out. VAERS is best realized as a regulatory capture of the personal injury lawyer industry.

hunterb123 5y ago
It's not perfect, but there's some use to it, are you saying we should not collect and analyze adverse reactions after vaccination? The reported adverse reactions are very serious and only occurred after the vaccine a lot of times in an otherwise healthy individual. It should be used as a canary of safety and each report should be evaluated to see if the vaccine is the causation, especially when the individual was healthy. Ignoring reports of adverse reactions is not proper science. Sure, we could dismiss ALL of the reports as coincidences, but is that right? VAERS also states the data is under-reported, because not all side effects are reported to VAERS. This means for all false reports there could be true side effects not reported, this evens out the cases to some extent. > You could get the vaccine, and then days later, you get diarrhea, or a headache, or a charlie horse in your calf, Look at the side effects listed, it's full paralysis, death, miscarriages, etc. These are serious events that should be looked into. Those are much more rare cases than a "headache", or "diarrhea". Headaches are not reported to VAERS.
- mapme 5y ago
  You have to compare it to the background rate to tease out signal from noise. That said any intervention (including a vaccine) carries non-zero risk. Taking aspirin, Zantac, laxatives, NyQuil etc., all can destroy you, but it’s rare. The safety monitoring is actually pretty good as well. We caught a 1 in ~100k issue with AZ/JnJ vaccine very early on in the rollout. We caught mild myocarditis (though COVID risk > vaccine for myocarditis). There was even a massive preprint today from Israel around vaccine side effects. Few were concerning. Link to study + summary https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1430636357626466307?s=21 https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1430636357626466307?s=2... > “ Bob Wachter of UCSF had a very good thread on Twitter about vaccine rollouts the other day, and one of the good points he made was this one. We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway”
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    > We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Exactly, that's why I said when you scale up you will get more absolute deaths and critical conditions. There's no point for those very few deaths or reactions to occur if those people had better natural immunity through previous infection.
    - mapme 5y ago
      I think you misunderstood the quote. It is saying that if you take 10 million people the background rate of death, disease, stroke etc., (unrelated to vaccine) will be high and a confounding issue, even if you didn’t give them the vaccine. Edit: I think you have a point about whether those who have previous infection truly need the vaccine, but the way you are using VAERS data diminishes your point
- XorNot 5y ago
  There is literally a scam based on this statistical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Baltimore_Stockbroker_/_Psychic_Sports_Picks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Balt... In short: in a large enough population with a random distribution of outcomes, you'll eventually have one member of the population who sees "you" (who is picking results at random, but mutually exclusively to individuals) pick the correct result of a sportsgame everytime. This is the VAERS dataset: because it records any event proximate to vaccination, eventually every event is proximate to vaccination on a long enough timeline with a large enough population. It exists because, yes, they should be looked into...but only if they're occurring at a statistically higher rate then the average rate for the population over the time after vaccination. This is, for example, how AstraZeneca's clotting risk was identified and how the Pfizer myocarditis risk was identified.
lamontcg 5y ago
With half the population vaccinated, around 1/6th of the disorders diagnoses across the entire population in a year can be expected to happen 4 months after vaccination and be reported in VAERS. There's about 16,000 new cases of Lupus ever year, there should be around 2,500 cases of Lupus following vaccination that could be reported into VAERS.

hunterb123 5y ago

It's not perfect, but there's some use to it, are you saying we should not collect and analyze adverse reactions after vaccination? The reported adverse reactions are very serious and only occurred after the vaccine a lot of times in an otherwise healthy individual. It should be used as a canary of safety and each report should be evaluated to see if the vaccine is the causation, especially when the individual was healthy. Ignoring reports of adverse reactions is not proper science. Sure, we could dismiss ALL of the reports as coincidences, but is that right? VAERS also states the data is under-reported, because not all side effects are reported to VAERS. This means for all false reports there could be true side effects not reported, this evens out the cases to some extent. > You could get the vaccine, and then days later, you get diarrhea, or a headache, or a charlie horse in your calf, Look at the side effects listed, it's full paralysis, death, miscarriages, etc. These are serious events that should be looked into. Those are much more rare cases than a "headache", or "diarrhea". Headaches are not reported to VAERS.

mapme 5y ago
You have to compare it to the background rate to tease out signal from noise. That said any intervention (including a vaccine) carries non-zero risk. Taking aspirin, Zantac, laxatives, NyQuil etc., all can destroy you, but it’s rare. The safety monitoring is actually pretty good as well. We caught a 1 in ~100k issue with AZ/JnJ vaccine very early on in the rollout. We caught mild myocarditis (though COVID risk > vaccine for myocarditis). There was even a massive preprint today from Israel around vaccine side effects. Few were concerning. Link to study + summary https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1430636357626466307?s=21 https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1430636357626466307?s=2... > “ Bob Wachter of UCSF had a very good thread on Twitter about vaccine rollouts the other day, and one of the good points he made was this one. We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway”
- hunterb123 5y ago
  > We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Exactly, that's why I said when you scale up you will get more absolute deaths and critical conditions. There's no point for those very few deaths or reactions to occur if those people had better natural immunity through previous infection.
  - mapme 5y ago
    I think you misunderstood the quote. It is saying that if you take 10 million people the background rate of death, disease, stroke etc., (unrelated to vaccine) will be high and a confounding issue, even if you didn’t give them the vaccine. Edit: I think you have a point about whether those who have previous infection truly need the vaccine, but the way you are using VAERS data diminishes your point
XorNot 5y ago
There is literally a scam based on this statistical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Baltimore_Stockbroker_/_Psychic_Sports_Picks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Balt... In short: in a large enough population with a random distribution of outcomes, you'll eventually have one member of the population who sees "you" (who is picking results at random, but mutually exclusively to individuals) pick the correct result of a sportsgame everytime. This is the VAERS dataset: because it records any event proximate to vaccination, eventually every event is proximate to vaccination on a long enough timeline with a large enough population. It exists because, yes, they should be looked into...but only if they're occurring at a statistically higher rate then the average rate for the population over the time after vaccination. This is, for example, how AstraZeneca's clotting risk was identified and how the Pfizer myocarditis risk was identified.

lamontcg 5y ago

With half the population vaccinated, around 1/6th of the disorders diagnoses across the entire population in a year can be expected to happen 4 months after vaccination and be reported in VAERS. There's about 16,000 new cases of Lupus ever year, there should be around 2,500 cases of Lupus following vaccination that could be reported into VAERS.