Vaccines

Cremieux, one of my favorite statisticians, posted this on X

More than 5.6 BILLION people took the COVID vaccines. If there was a mass dying wave, miscarriages and stillbirths, cardiac issues, or anything else, we have more than enough data to show those things. But they never happened!  They're not real, they're a neurotic delusion.

 The person who sent it to me further observed

I’m enjoying reading some of Alex Berensons stuff but this continues to be where I get hung up. He just had a whole thing about how maybe getting 3 or more shots is slightly changing the life span of those with pancreatic cancer. No. If there was any major effect we wouldn’t have to subgroup it out that much.

The word subgroup should jump out at you. It refers to p-hacking, slicing the data in many different ways until you find - or more properly create - something that looks significant.  When a particular supplement has been shown to be associated with fewer bunions in Hispanic women over fifty, but all other categories show no effect, you can tell you have come across a statistical accident, or at most, a very weak effect that should prevent you from spending your money. 

Conservative sites that have been very critical of government responses to Covid - often for good reason - also fall into this reporting studies that mean very little or nothing at all.  They have small sample sizes.  They haven't controlled for some important variable. There is an association with no indication of causality.  Up against this is 5.6 billion injections, a devastatingly large sample size. Pregnant women were worried about get the shots, and it's very much worth being cautious. Other women were worried about future fertility, and again, it's good to get all the information you can in that situation.  It's a big deal. They had every right to resist pressure because there was little data on pregnancy and none on long-term fertility at the time. 

But one site linked to a study that showed that one version of the vaccine disrupted menstrual cycles in a small percentage of women. From that the site (though not the study authors) concluded that fertility was obviously affected but it was being covered up because of Big Pharma. The commenters agreed even more loudly. That would clearly be something worth studying further. But because of the huge number of women who were pregnant or are in age-bearing years that did get the vaccine, it would now be blindingly obvious if their miscarriages were up even 10%.

I suppose one could have called mRNA vaccines "experimental" at the time, and complained that we hadn't done enough research to put the shots out there, but now that ship has sailed.  It's not experimental anymore, it is one of the most widely observed treatments in history.