A friend asked about anti-COVID vaccine signs urging people to “check the numbers” on its supposed unreported death toll to find out “who’s really dying.”
There are >5,000 hospitals and 1 million physicians in the US. In Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial they vaccinated 44,000 people at 150 clinical trial sites in 6 countries and 39 US states. Since then >225 million Pfizer doses have been given in the US and >398 million doses in the EU. Now consider what it would take to convince the physicians, nurses, coroners, public officials, etc. across all these countries to cover up and continue participating in killing on the scale claimed by anti-vaxxers. Wouldn’t even 1% of the physicians in these countries (1% = 10,000 in the US alone) have a pang of conscience and leak the story to a real news outlet? Couldn't even 5 physicians with credible evidence of this plot get an interview on Fox News? And what motive would pharma companies have to snuff out customers with a free shot instead of profiting from them for decades to come, especially when they hit Medicare age and gov't foots the bill for their sundry maladies? Business 101: Don't kill your customers (unless it's very slowly as with tobacco).
A fundamental principle in science (and life) is that one event can be followed by another without the 1st event causing the 2nd. It’s uncanny how often it rains the day after I wash my car. This doesn’t mean I’m making it rain by washing my car (though this is how superstitions get started). Common events having nothing to do with each other will inevitably occur together now and then solely due to chance. While on vacation I once ran into the manager of a pizza place near my Springfield, MO, apartment in a sandwich shop in Pensacola, FL. What are the odds? Well, the odds of something that unusual happening to us every 25 years are surprisingly high. Humans are notoriously susceptible to being fooled by randomness, which is why God invented statisticians.
“Correlation does not equal causation." In 2018, there were 54,600 US deaths per week, for the usual reasons: natural causes, cancer, heart disease, etc. Suppose we have 55,000 such deaths this week. With 70% of Americans at least partially vaccinated, we can expect vaccinated people to account for >70% of this week’s deaths (38,500), including some who were vaccinated in the past week or two. With 6,310,000,000 doses given worldwide, the probability is essentially 100% that we can find people who died the day after their shot. With people dying all the time, how do we know if a medical intervention contributed to their death?
Once the intervention is in wide use it’s hard to tell. This is why we run clinical trials first. If an intervention gets past Phases I-II, we run a Phase III trial, where participants (in these vaccines' case, tens of thousands) are randomly assigned to receive the intervention or a placebo. Researchers follow them for months, tracking any adverse events, including death. Then we compare. If 5% of the intervention group reports a rash but only 0.1% of the placebo group does, we can list “rash” as a potential side effect of the intervention. If there’s an unexplained death in the intervention group, or a suspiciously high number of severe adverse events, the trial can be halted due to safety concerns. This is what happened in May 2020, when the WHO was testing hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment. (Yes, researchers in multiple countries were studying this drug, hoping it would work. No one was suppressing anything. Physicians are just funny about prescribing potentially dangerous drugs that fail to prove effective in multiple studies.)
Now, with the vaccines approved, we do surveillance. By law, physicians are required to report certain post-vaccine adverse events to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). A rare side effect affecting 1 in a million people might not be detected until, say, 25 million people are vaccinated. Of course with 1/3 of the planet now vaccinated, effects like that aren’t likely to go unnoticed: a 1-in-a-million adverse event would mean 3,400 cases out of 3.4 billion people vaccinated, raising the question, Why can’t we find even one person willing to go on America's Got Talent to show the world their newly magnetized forehead? 🙂
I asked someone who claimed she'd known 3 people who'd perished from the vaccines. I said, "Do you mean a physician entered this on their death certificate?" No response.