skells @skells@qoto.org

expanding
the horizons
and
expanding the
parameters
expanding the rhymes of sucker M.C. amateurs

@Nyctalop 6

@vriska @augustus have you considered launching trained honeybadgers at the moon

@freemo @s8n

@freemo ~7000 people in the US die every day.

If every death has to be reported then one would expect, as a back of an envelope calculation, ~50 thousand VAERS reports of deaths.

Either VAERS does not require all deaths to be reported or the vaccine reduces your chances of death to 1/3 of the normal rate. That's one helluva drug.

This assumes :

- The rate of death of the average vaccine recipient is similar to the average citizen
- That one can use an ensemble average in place of the time average to account for the different times at which vaccines were administered.
- That we don't count multiple doses of the vaccine (an extremely conservative assumption)
- That 50% of the population has been vaccinated (another conservative assumption)

Both these assumptions may be flawed, they appear reasonable for a rough and ready argument over social media.

Clearly not every death is reported to VAERS, thus the 14,925 deaths that have been reported implies that there is some sort of selection going on: either the people making these reports have some sense that the death was likely caused by the vaccine or they are simply ascribing it to the vaccine because of recency bias.

The conclusion in either case is that the VAERS system, and likely the similar systems we use in the EU, is not a well calibrated form of data for making these claims.

Begging the question:

How do we know the vaccines are safe if the tools we use to do the research are either plausibly deniable or broken?

A prudent individual would be more hesitant to receive a vaccine inversely proportional to his confidence in the instruments used to measure safety.

In any case, weaving sophistry with insults is a shoddy way to conduct yourself in such a debate.

That being said, it's an extremely noisy subject, in terms of data and discourse, and it's very easy for anyone to find the data to fulfil their biases, on every side.

I'm willing to agree to disagree here.

@11112011 oh lawd they comin

@freemo if death counts as permanently injured then several thousand at least seem to have been permanently injured.

using the phrase "common" was lax of me - I just had a (brief) look at openVAERS and pericarditis and heart attacks seem to be ~20 in a million.

the question is relative though, what is my chance of dying from covid compared to my chance of having a negative reaction to the vaccine?

If you're at risk then it probably makes sense.

If you're young and healthy without co-morbidities then you can make a decent numerical case that the vaccine still makes sense - but in this case it appears to be very much in the noise.

if you then add that the potential for long term risks are completely unknown, the decision not to get vaccinated is perfectly reasonable.

My failure to answer your quiz has no bearing upon any of the reasoning I have used here.

I appreciate there are many people making wild claims on many sides - this doesn't justify sophistry.