I doubt a single one of the COVID conspiracy theory nutters out there could even answer this quiz, and this is just the basic level.

@freemo it's false to suggest that you need to understand the technical details of the human immune system to understand that a heart attack induced by vaccination is not a good outcome

@skells Except they arent saying simple things like "A heart attack from a vaccine is a bad outcome".. they are saying things that actually do require understanding like "There is a good chance you will get a heart attack from the vaccine"... or "heart attacks from the vaccine are common" neither of which is true and requires some understanding of the data to assert about.

@freemo I can't speak to what other people are saying but swelling of the heart seems to be a very common symptom and historically has extremely bad clinical outcomes in the long term.

my point is that being unable to answer the questions on your test (hands up, I had no fucking clue) doesn't mean I can't look at the numbers of clinical outcomes and decide against.

@skells 0 people have died of swelling of the heart from a covid vaccine, 0 people have been perminantly injured from it. Full stop.

Yes a few (40 per million) have mild swelling of the heart and survive just fine. But 40 per million is not anything even close to "common", thats a fraction of a fraction of a percent (0.004%).

And the fact that your sitting here calling something that has caused no harm to anyone and has a 0.004% incident as "common" suggests that, in fact, you **are** in capable of looking up numbers of clinical outcomes and making decisions on it.

@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.

@skells

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

Wrong, no one has died of swelling of the heart and even more generally thousands have not died due to covid. Please stop making up shit to convince yourself your right.

VARES is NOT an indication of who has what reaction to the vaccine. It is a report of **all** incidents within 14 days of a vaccination including those **known** to be unrelated to the vaccine. Doctors are required by law to report to VARES any medical condition, including those not related to the vaccine, that occur within 14 days of taking the vaccine.

See this right here is you proving exactly why your inability to understand the basic facts int he quiz make you incapable of drawing conclusions. You dont even understand things like what the VARES numbers mean.

So yes, in this very conversation you have proven, quite well, why you are incapable of making assertions about COVId if you cant even pass the basic test.

@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.

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