Can you point me to someone saying the COVID vaccines have killed hundreds of millions of people? I haven't heard anyone say such a thing, and I cast a pretty wide net in my media consumption.
Let's say you're in a comment thread discussing these results and someone tosses this out there:
> "LIBERALS believe cops KILL MORE THAN 10,000 unarmed black people PER YEAR!!"
Would it be pedantic to respond with something like:
> "Actually, the poll indicates that only about 22% of highly liberal people believe that cops kill 10,000 or more unarmed black people per year, whereas 62% think the number is between 100 and 1,000, and 15% get it right by estimating the number is closer to 10."
Personally, I don't think so. It's just setting the record straight so that conversation can continue calmly on the basis of factual information. We're talking about order-of-magnitude level quantitative errors in both cases (not mere rounding errors), which are highly likely to negatively impact the tone of subsequent discourse.
Thanks. So all I'm saying is it's basically the same situation here. Misrepresentation of another person's views using an exclamatory tone and misquoted statistics that are off by an order of magnitude or more.
It is equally ridiculous to say "the vaccine killed 10 million people" as it is to say "the vaccine killed 100 million people" despite the order of magnitude difference. The claim is so wildly unrealistic that it's in the same category of ridiculous nonsense, and pedantry about the numbers will change absolutely nobody's mind about any of this. Now I'm feeling like a hypocrite because this conversation is also meaninglessly pedantic.
Someone in a comment below said that "monsters" had forced "hundreds of millions" of people to take the Covid vaccine. I would assume the person you're talking about was referring to that comment, perhaps mistakenly attributing the phrasing to someone else making a different point.
Fair enough. Still worth correcting I think, if many readers would infer the message that there are influential people out there claiming that hundreds of millions were killed by the vaccines - a claim that's so easily refuted as to be absurd on it's face (I mean, did 100 million people even die of *all causes worldwide* in the last year?).
"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated against Covid, if you think the vaccines are deadly then surely you must think hundreds of millions have died from them.
Now this comment is an outlier in terms of hysteria levels, but there are certainly plenty of conspiracists who claim that all excess deaths since Covid are down to Covid vaccines, or attribute every sudden death to vaccines (the 'died suddenly' meme). Most of these people aren't numerate enough to quantify their claims but they are implicitly claiming that the vaccines have killed millions of people, and even though there are various different types from different manufacturers, they all happen to be deadly, and presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it.
Cutting more to the chase, I think the people who claim many millions of deaths from the mRNA vaccines are probably wrong. But I also think that the people claiming negligible deaths from those same vaccines, to the point that the risk/reward ratio is still favorable even in healthy young people, are also probably wrong.
I think a lot of the world's health authorities have reached this same conclusion, such that the following statement
> presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it
is inaccurate. Look up the official policies of European countries with respect to these specific vaccines and you will find that many of them have stopped recommending them below some age threshold. Denmark was the first, which stopped recommending the vaccines for healthy people under 50 in 2022. Why would they do that other than an estimation that in this cohort the vaccine posed a potentially higher risk than the infection it was intended to prevent?
An analysis of Pfizer's own clinical trial data published by Peter Doshi et al in 2022 [1] found an excess rate of 1 in 800 for "severe adverse events of special interest" (read: disability, chronic conditions, things you definitely do not want to have) in the treatment arm of the trial. This was around the time that European countries started curtailing their recommendations. I would argue they have done their job, and it is the US FDA and CDC, now outliers on the world stage on this issue, who are in dereliction of duty.
OK I see the comment now. I think there are a few steps of interpretation of the author's intent, especially the interpretation of the meaning of "deadly" as "something that kills a fair percentage of people that were exposed to it".
A lot of people called COVID-19 "deadly", a lot of them with much farther reach than Alex Jones - the president of the United States for example. Given that the population-wide infection fatality rate was known to be most likely in the ballpark of 0.2-0.3% from seroprevalence studies as early as May 2020, and that these same studies found a still much lower IFR in young people (all of which is borne out repeatedly in later more comprehensive studies) [1], you must therefore logically think that either:
A) it was unwarranted or alarmist for these people to describe the virus as "deadly" beyond the middle of 2020 since it did not appear to "kill a fair percentage of people exposed to it"
Or B) 0.2% is "a fair percentage of people exposed to it [COVID-19]". Accounting for age, 0.05% is a fair percentage of people under 70 exposed to COVID-19, and 0.01% is a fair percentage of people under 30.
Which one?
[1] see seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara county CA by Bhattacharya, Ioannidis et al, similar follow-up study in LA county.
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I guess a very generous interpretation of that comment could be that he thinks the vaccines have тАШonlyтАЩ killed millions of people. Obviously thatтАЩs still batshit and Covid is much more dangerous than the risk of very rare fatal side effects from the vaccines. I get the impression that youтАЩre some kind of anti-vaxx whack job so I will not be discussing this further.
So you do not think it's fair to make blanket statements which scaremonger about the virus to the general population. I agree.
And I also don't think it's useful to scaremonger about the mRNA vaccines. But I do think it is not unreasonable to estimate that the risks they pose to healthy young people outweigh the risks the virus poses, in agreement with many health authorities around the world, and on the basis of Pfizer's own trial data as analyzed by Doshi et al in 2022 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332).
A 1-in-800 rate of serious complication *does* lead to a reasonable conclusion that at least millions globally were seriously harmed by the mRNA vaccines, though not necessarily killed.
If that makes me a "whack job anti-vaxxer" then I don't know what to tell you, other than that your communication style is probably counterproductive to your goals.
Folks casually claiming that Covid vaccines killed hundreds of millions of people as easily as saying the sky is blue. Wild stuff
Can you point me to someone saying the COVID vaccines have killed hundreds of millions of people? I haven't heard anyone say such a thing, and I cast a pretty wide net in my media consumption.
The claim is that millions were killed by covid vaccines. Here for example is tech bro Steve Kirsch, his substack has 234,000 subscribers:
"Data from Health New Zealand confirms that the COVID vaccines have killed over 10 million worldwide"
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/data-from-us-medicare-and-the-new
Just to be clear, I believe this is absolute nonsense.
Also, to be clear: I'm aware of the "17 million" claim. And I too think it is too high to be believable on the evidence. If you want to hear it fairly adjudicated in long form I would recommend this debate hosted on Jay Bhattacharya's substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/illusionconsensus/p/watch-now-vaccine-death-debate-steve
The claim was that someone was saying *hundreds* of millions were killed.
Do you expect to persuade anyone of anything with this style of pedantry?
Here's another scenario.
There is a poll showing that liberal-leaning Americans greatly estimate the number of unarmed black people have been historically killed by police: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
Let's say you're in a comment thread discussing these results and someone tosses this out there:
> "LIBERALS believe cops KILL MORE THAN 10,000 unarmed black people PER YEAR!!"
Would it be pedantic to respond with something like:
> "Actually, the poll indicates that only about 22% of highly liberal people believe that cops kill 10,000 or more unarmed black people per year, whereas 62% think the number is between 100 and 1,000, and 15% get it right by estimating the number is closer to 10."
Personally, I don't think so. It's just setting the record straight so that conversation can continue calmly on the basis of factual information. We're talking about order-of-magnitude level quantitative errors in both cases (not mere rounding errors), which are highly likely to negatively impact the tone of subsequent discourse.
No, that would not be pedantic.
Thanks. So all I'm saying is it's basically the same situation here. Misrepresentation of another person's views using an exclamatory tone and misquoted statistics that are off by an order of magnitude or more.
I think the difference is that it's not really any more ridiculous no matter how much the actual believed number is inflated.
I'm not sure I follow.
It is equally ridiculous to say "the vaccine killed 10 million people" as it is to say "the vaccine killed 100 million people" despite the order of magnitude difference. The claim is so wildly unrealistic that it's in the same category of ridiculous nonsense, and pedantry about the numbers will change absolutely nobody's mind about any of this. Now I'm feeling like a hypocrite because this conversation is also meaninglessly pedantic.
yes, I do think we should try to state the views of people we disagree with accurately, even anti-vaxxers.
"An unreasonably high number." That's all they mean. That's why I used the word pedantry.
I'm not trying to persuade, just to ensure accuracy.
Someone in a comment below said that "monsters" had forced "hundreds of millions" of people to take the Covid vaccine. I would assume the person you're talking about was referring to that comment, perhaps mistakenly attributing the phrasing to someone else making a different point.
Seems like an honest mistake to me.
Fair enough. Still worth correcting I think, if many readers would infer the message that there are influential people out there claiming that hundreds of millions were killed by the vaccines - a claim that's so easily refuted as to be absurd on it's face (I mean, did 100 million people even die of *all causes worldwide* in the last year?).
Here in this comments section Bill Rice Jr says:
"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated against Covid, if you think the vaccines are deadly then surely you must think hundreds of millions have died from them.
Now this comment is an outlier in terms of hysteria levels, but there are certainly plenty of conspiracists who claim that all excess deaths since Covid are down to Covid vaccines, or attribute every sudden death to vaccines (the 'died suddenly' meme). Most of these people aren't numerate enough to quantify their claims but they are implicitly claiming that the vaccines have killed millions of people, and even though there are various different types from different manufacturers, they all happen to be deadly, and presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it.
Source:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/bret-weinstein-sure-has-a-lot-of/comment/50130394?r=r7kts&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&open=false
Cutting more to the chase, I think the people who claim many millions of deaths from the mRNA vaccines are probably wrong. But I also think that the people claiming negligible deaths from those same vaccines, to the point that the risk/reward ratio is still favorable even in healthy young people, are also probably wrong.
I think a lot of the world's health authorities have reached this same conclusion, such that the following statement
> presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it
is inaccurate. Look up the official policies of European countries with respect to these specific vaccines and you will find that many of them have stopped recommending them below some age threshold. Denmark was the first, which stopped recommending the vaccines for healthy people under 50 in 2022. Why would they do that other than an estimation that in this cohort the vaccine posed a potentially higher risk than the infection it was intended to prevent?
An analysis of Pfizer's own clinical trial data published by Peter Doshi et al in 2022 [1] found an excess rate of 1 in 800 for "severe adverse events of special interest" (read: disability, chronic conditions, things you definitely do not want to have) in the treatment arm of the trial. This was around the time that European countries started curtailing their recommendations. I would argue they have done their job, and it is the US FDA and CDC, now outliers on the world stage on this issue, who are in dereliction of duty.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332/
OK I see the comment now. I think there are a few steps of interpretation of the author's intent, especially the interpretation of the meaning of "deadly" as "something that kills a fair percentage of people that were exposed to it".
A lot of people called COVID-19 "deadly", a lot of them with much farther reach than Alex Jones - the president of the United States for example. Given that the population-wide infection fatality rate was known to be most likely in the ballpark of 0.2-0.3% from seroprevalence studies as early as May 2020, and that these same studies found a still much lower IFR in young people (all of which is borne out repeatedly in later more comprehensive studies) [1], you must therefore logically think that either:
A) it was unwarranted or alarmist for these people to describe the virus as "deadly" beyond the middle of 2020 since it did not appear to "kill a fair percentage of people exposed to it"
Or B) 0.2% is "a fair percentage of people exposed to it [COVID-19]". Accounting for age, 0.05% is a fair percentage of people under 70 exposed to COVID-19, and 0.01% is a fair percentage of people under 30.
Which one?
[1] see seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara county CA by Bhattacharya, Ioannidis et al, similar follow-up study in LA county.
In 2021 a systematic literature review by Ioannidis confirmed a reasonable estimate of 0.27% population-wide IFR and 0.05% IFR in the under-70 population (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7947934/).
Similar findings in a November 2020 paper in Nature surveying data from 45 countries(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0). IFR estimates from that paper summarized in a table here: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatality-rates-sex-and-age-15163
*I* didnтАЩt describe Covid as тАЬdeadlyтАЭ so this gotcha doesnтАЩt work. ItтАЩs dangerous if youтАЩre in a high risk group but I wouldnтАЩt say itтАЩs a deadly disease for most peopleтАж. тАЬPotentially fatalтАЭ would be a better description.
I guess a very generous interpretation of that comment could be that he thinks the vaccines have тАШonlyтАЩ killed millions of people. Obviously thatтАЩs still batshit and Covid is much more dangerous than the risk of very rare fatal side effects from the vaccines. I get the impression that youтАЩre some kind of anti-vaxx whack job so I will not be discussing this further.
So you do not think it's fair to make blanket statements which scaremonger about the virus to the general population. I agree.
And I also don't think it's useful to scaremonger about the mRNA vaccines. But I do think it is not unreasonable to estimate that the risks they pose to healthy young people outweigh the risks the virus poses, in agreement with many health authorities around the world, and on the basis of Pfizer's own trial data as analyzed by Doshi et al in 2022 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332).
A 1-in-800 rate of serious complication *does* lead to a reasonable conclusion that at least millions globally were seriously harmed by the mRNA vaccines, though not necessarily killed.
If that makes me a "whack job anti-vaxxer" then I don't know what to tell you, other than that your communication style is probably counterproductive to your goals.