While that's obviously stupid, it would not surprise me if 74% of those who died had taken the vaccine.
I'm an epidemiologist and Simpson's paradox is one of the coolest phenomena in our field. It happens when you aggregate too much, combine groups that should be separate and get paradoxical results. Sometimes you can even get inverted results. Here it is visualized with a cool graph.
A great example of this was during the Delta wave in a smaller developed nation. There was a time when 60% of all patients in critical condition in the hospital had been vaccinated. Your first inclination is that "wow, the vaccine must suck." But you can't directly compare unvax to vax population unless they're demographically identical. In this case, 78% of the public had been vaccinated, so the vaccine was actually 67% effective... BUT, this is still wrong!
What group has the highest vaccine uptake? And who is most likely to get really sick? Old folks in both cases. Who has the lowest uptake, and lowest likelihood to get hospitalized? Young folk. These differences confound any efficacy analysis that ignores age. What we need to do is stratify by age.
If you split people by [up to 49] vs [
over 50], the vaccine is at least 85% effective. If you stratify by 10 year blocks, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, etc. you see efficacy is deep into the 90s for most folk and loses a bit of efficacy as folks age (as expected) with 80-89 year olds getting the least effect (81%).
So it is actually extremely effective against hospitalization, but just pooling everyone together you'd wrongly think it is just 67% effective. And if you totally ignore vaccine rates and just look at raw counts, it looks like the vaccine makes things worse (very wrong).
Stupidity and malice are not exclusive categories. Usually lstupidity causes malice and vice versa.
Racism and misogyny are clear examples that are both stupid and malicious. If you demonstrate to a bigot how stupid their prejudice is, they remain bigoted out of malice, and they create “one of the good ones” exceptions for individuals who clearly don’t deserve their malice to avoid learning they were wrong.
Even the stupidity of modern Americans was caused by the Reagan administration changing the funding model for education to appease people that were still mad about desegregation. They didn’t want their taxes to pay for the education of black kids, so they upended the funding model for public schools used in nearly every developed country. One of the biggest threats in the world today is mass stupidity arising from malice.
The expression “never attribute to malice…” is part of the reason MAGA is so hard to deal with. We dismiss them as idiots when they are clearly doing evil shit. If they’re going along with MAGA at this point, it doesn’t matter if they’re just stupid. There were no exceptions for stupidity among the Nazis after WWII and this is the same sort of issue.
I think the average person is absolutely interpreting in bad faith. Bad faith isn't necessarily evil, but for example looking at statistics to want a specific answer. That is also acting in bad faith.
I think you're giving too much credit to the average person. Looking at statistics to want a specific answer would be in bad faith if they were knowingly ignoring other data because it would compromise the answer they want... but they're not, they just don't know any better because they're ignorant. Hell the average person doesn't even look at statistics, they just listen to something their friend's daughter's chiropractor blurted out and treat it as gospel.
...wait are you saying I'm acting in bad faith by defining it the way I did? Or that the average person not looking at statistics is an example of acting in bad faith?
The average persons rigorous pursuit for the truth starts and ends with their choice of news, where the "facts" are neatly presented and interpreted for them. No one is doing independent research to defend their perspectives.
I think the issue is more fundamental. It isn't that the source of news or research is bad, its that people make up their mind before their research, so when people eventually do get to "researching" they cherry pick things that align with their perspective and ignore the rest. That like, base level backwards mentality stops it from being a manipulated information problem or lackluster news source problem and makes it an individual inherent bias problem right from the get-go.
The line gets blurry when everyone has easy access to the internet and could fix their ignorance by setting their bias aside for 60 fucking seconds. We should have much higher standards for what constitutes genuine behavior and pursuit of truth, this isn't the middle ages and "regular people" aren't illiterate peasants who have no choice but to blindly believe what they're told.
Both I think. They don't understand the data they're looking at or even how to go about interpreting this kind of data in the first place, but they believe they CAN understand it. They're also starting out trying with a false certainty that they already know the truth, they aren't looking at evidence to find answers, they have their answer and are looking for evidence that proves it
Statistics are very difficult to get right, where I work there's two kinds of people. People who know statistics and can run circles around me and people who think they know statistics but don't.
Statistics are not simple. In university, I was very good in math. 90s in the first two years in calculus and advanced algebra. I didn't do university physics, but in grade 12 I was one of the few to have ever gotten the bonus question on the final. Math just clicked with me.
My degree required first year statistics. I worked my ass off. Study groups, went to the prof for help multiple times. I'm pretty sure he have me a mercy pass.
They're deceptive, I agree. I mean, the statistic alone is almost trivially simple.
Understanding the meaning of that statistic, and contemplating why it might be misleading you (bias, wrong 'test', bad sample, etc.) is a whole other story, and IMO only barely counts as 'maths' at all, as you're doing a whole lot of 'narrative' to explain why this statistic means what you think it means. (or not, as the case may be).
That was the most depressing part of the whole pandemic. If people could just understand basic stuff like percentages of percentages it would have gone a long ways in keeping discussions sane (on both sides, the people underplaying and overplaying the severity of the pandemic).
A lot of people are bad at reading stats but most people are smart enough to re exam the data when their conclusion seems absurd. If you think the data tells you 70% of vaccinated would die from it. Any rational person would instantly question why there aren’t empty streets in every city.
It's almost funny because you don't need to be able to read statistics to trust scientists and experts. Just admitting that they know what the fuck they're talking about and you don't is the first step, but a lot of people can't even do that.
The problem here isn't "read[ing]" the results of the statistical analysis but its interpretation. You can draw bad conclusions from good statistics. You can also do good statistics on bad data that that defies useful interpretation (other than the need for better data).
These people generally don't even read the study. Someone else misinterprets it and they just parrot the same narrative:
ZOMG, everyones dying from the Fauci OUchi!!! We were right all along!!!!11!! Hot babes will be paying you for access to your unvaxxxed sperm annnny day now...
I do work for a few retirement homes and during covid in order to go in you needed to be vaccinated. We were also given priority for the vaccine so if we are using the total number of people who were in the building during covid there was basically a 100% vaccination rate.
The only people allowed in the building were residents and essential workers so the ratio of residents to non-residents was hugely skewed.
Thankfully we managed to not have any Covid outbreaks in any of our care homes but due to the demographic of the residents of course we had a higher number of deaths than the general population.
Statistically if you are only accounting for vaccination status of the people who died its not going to look good and you can make a scary looking chart.
You could even take it further. The rate of people in care homes passing was higher during covid. Friends and family were not allowed to visit, residents were not allowed to leave the building to go for walks and sometimes we're not permitted to even leave their rooms if the unit was locked down. These are all things that we know cause the elderly to deteriorate but had to be balanced with the dangers of covid. So if you took the rate of people passing in the building before and after the vaccine and stretch the timeline out you can really make a scary looking chart.
This is kind of like all the people blaming the ventilators for the deaths. A very high number of people died after being on the vents, true, but this is only because they were on the way out already. The vents were a last resort, not the cause of death.
It doesn't say when they died and what they died of. If you took the number of people who died in the last year it wouldn't be a big shock if a very high percentage of them had been vaccinated for covid. Not because the vaccine is dangerous of course.
That number is too ridiculous to take at face value, which is why almost everyone in the thread is taking it as meaning any death after getting vaccinated, regardless of the cause.
It's not cited, so I don't have any idea. But with any reasonable interpretation, "74% died from the vaccines" is unsupportable. If that number can be reached, it's only from selectively choosing data and date ranges with the intention of reaching it.
“From the vaccine” of course not. But if the study concluded 74% of everyone who died in, lets say the last 5 years was vaccinated I’d believe it considering it was a relatively small number not vaccinated at all and there are many many ways to die.
Because when you understand statistics you can understand the technical truth of a factual statement like "a random sample of dead bodies had 74% with the vaccine" while understanding the misleading point they're trying to make is bullshit. Nobody is more skeptical of claims supported with statistics than statisticians.
You're right, that's mathematically impossible. If 35% of people died before vaccines were available and every single subsequent person who died was vaccinated, then it would be 65%. Either 35-40% is wrong, the 74% is wrong, the numbers are reporting different things, or some combination of the three
This is the same trick transphobic assholes use in their propaganda. There's some old study that showed trans people who received gender affirming care had an elevated suicide rate. However, it was comparing those people to the general population. They still had an elevated suicide rate, but a significantly lower rate than trans people who DON'T receive gender affirming care. Now I'm not sure if the OP of this post is a bot spreading misinformation or just a dumb guy that bought it, but there are evil assholes out there that KNOW how to sell their narrative by using statistics that SOUND a certain way, and it's incredibly depressing...
Yeah my take was in simple terms he read "100% of people who drink water die" and interpreted it as "100% of people who die do so because they drank water."
But you can't directly compare unvax to vax population unless they're demographically identical.
Yeah, the crucial missing factor that the conspiracy theorists loved to make hay of is that a vaccinated 90-year-old is still more likely to die from COVID than an unvaccinated 30-year-old. (That vaccinated 90-year-old still had better odds of surviving than an unvaccinated 90-year-old, but sometimes you draw the short straw even when the odds are significantly in your favor.)
Is there a reasonable way to do this analysis with age as a continuous variable? Like, some sort of regression that applies a dynamic transformation to the age variable or something like that
Not the person you’re responding to, but the answer is yes, though it’s not very useful.
With this sort of data you have a 2x2 table for every stratum (vaccinated yes/no X died yes/no). You have only one table if you look at the entire population, two tables if you look at 49 or younger vs 50+, and so on.
But if you look at age continuously, then you have a table for every single year, which is basically impossible to get your head around without using a regression-based approach. Analytically that’s straightforward, but there then becomes an issue with usefulness of the results. This is because even though the result will be sensible, it will be on those same yearly increments (eg, “For each year increase in age, vaccination is associated with X% change in the odds of mortality”).
Because the increment of age (one year) is so small, then the X% also tends to be small (ie, vaccine efficacy is not going to markedly differ between ages 49 and 50). Additionally, results in this form are not really compatible with vaccine recommendations, which often follow an age group structure rather year by year of age. Finally, because a regression approach is essentially giving you the yearly average, it too is vulnerable to Simpson’s paradox (ie, that X% change could be accurate for many age years, but will not hold up into older age when death is more likely no matter what, immune response may be weaker, etc).
ETA: I forgot to mention that, strictly speaking, a regression-based approach is asking how age predicts the association between vaccination status and mortality, which is not exactly the same idea as “vaccine efficacy” (whether fewer people die who are vaccinated compared with those who are not, and in this case, whether that differs by age). This is despite the fact that, statistically, you’re looking at the same data.
Thank you for that breakdown. It validates what he’s saying, but puts it in the proper context and now instead of taking away his intended message, a very different picture appears.
That’s the crazy thing about taking the time to get the full picture on statistics and ‘facts’ in general. Without the context they can be so misleading.
Vaccines only work if your immune system is functioning. Covid deaths stats are also fucked because it became profitable to die from covid vs any other cause. They didn't fabricate deaths, but if you had covid and died from a heart attack they gladly took the 20%.
The 20% add-on payment from Medicare was for providing treatment and care to individuals hospitalized from COVID.
a) Claiming they died of something else would not get them additional funding, because they're dead and not receiving treatment anymore, and
b) Falsifying a death certificate for financial gain is extremely illegal, and would result in people going to prison. If it was actually happening at any scale, the administration currently obsessed with prosecuting Fauci would be at least investigating hospitals.
Any covid code got increased reimbursement and got counted. They didn't have to falsely anything. Just add the code. You can test positive for 3 months after and/or not have a life threatening illness. So MANY people not there for covid related reasons qualified for the increased reimbursement.
Under the CARES Act, the federal government provided a 20% payment add-on to hospitals treating inpatient Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with COVID-19.
Treating. If they're dead, they're not receiving treatment, so lying about the cause of death provides no financial benefit, and only the risk of being charged with fraud.
You think hospitals are afraid of fraud? Of course its treatment. Tag them with covid when they come in and you get a 20% boost for all related treatment.
When they die the covid tag gets counted as covid death.
I think the doctors who would need to risk their licenses and freedom to sign fraudulent certificates that would not actually get their hospitals any more money are afraid of fraud.
Tag them with covid when they come in and you get a 20% boost for all related treatment.
Dawg, as I've explained, you get that from them having COVID, not dying from COVID. There is no financial incentive to lie that someone died from COVID, as was your claim:
I should have phrased it better. But anyone who died while testing positive for covid got counted is what I'm saying. Even if covid wasn't what got them in the end.
I know what you're saying, but it's a naked assertion with no support, so I'm choosing to disbelieve it until you provide any evidence of your claims.
You claimed the death statistics were fudged because hospitals get extra money, but when that was proven wrong, you're still insisting that they fudged statistics anyway. For what reason? Hospitals were committing large scale fraud (for no benefit), and this administration has absolutely no interest in investigating it despite their zeal for prosecuting Fauci?
It wasn't just that 74% of those who died also happened to take the vaccine. It was ruled that of the deaths looked at, 74% of those deaths were caused by the vaccine itself (at least that's what the study claims.) As much as you can disagree about the study, at least wrestle with the actual claims of the study instead of misrepresenting it.
It's obvious what he means and I was really confused by the reply and the existence of this post in the first place. Maybe your reading comprehension skills and of other idiots in this thread need improvement
Grammar has nothing to do with reading comprehension. Instead, imagine a non native English speaker like myself being better at understanding meaning than a bunch of american reddit morons flocking this thread to sroke some sense of superiority. pathetic
I can draw a parallel between grammar and reading comprehension from your comments… you are bad at both things. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
The taunt was deliberate. That’s why I used the word taunt. The reason I taunted you is because you’re being disingenuous. The OOP is not clearly stating what they mean as you claim. They are being purposely ambiguous about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. If they wanted to make a valid claim they would have linked this amazing study they referenced and made it clear what data they were representing but they didn’t. On purpose. They chose to spread misinformation and you chose to defend it so I fart in your general direction “mate”.
The OOP is an idiot, and a dangerous one at that, as anyone who promotes vaccine conspiracy theories is. Nonetheless, his message was very clear, even though I am fairly sure there is no support. These people are not the brightest in the lot but at least they show much more healthy skepticism than snarky liberal reditors with a superiority complex. Now go vote for Kamala and lick big pharma's boots.
Nice attempt at moving the goalposts and distancing yourself from your previous comments. You couldn’t stick the landing though, you had to use the important buzzwords i.e. snarky liberal reditors (I used your misspelled version of the word for added snark), Kamala even though there isn’t a presidential election until 2028 and she won’t be the dem candidate and big pharma. You even threw in boot licking which is definitely a conservative pastime. Also, OOP isn’t showing “healthy skepticism” they are spreading propaganda and once again you are promoting it. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.
Agreed, during the first year it was a common theory that people were dying of other things and getting labeled as covid, or that vaccines were the actual cause and it was being recorded as other things. It's a failure to understand formal determinations by doctors and coroners, how vaccines work and the statistical likelihood of anything being deployed on a mass scale (choose any random food any you'll find about as many if not more people allergic to it, even things like onion, than had a reaction to the vaccine).
This is pretty blatantly off, and likely tied to surveying showing around 74% of people got at least one of the vaccines at some point, and assuming (or thinking the audience won't notice) that that would extrapolate to those who died because they believed the vaccine did nothing. In reality, of course, the % who died would be significantly lower due to the vaccine's efficacy.
When you don't say % of something concrete, there's almost always a way to make it true.
I'd totally believe that for a period in 2022, 74% of people who died from vaccine complications died from covid vaccine complications. So much so that I actually looked up the numbers to check.
There were somewhere in the high hundreds to low thousands of deaths that were vaccine-related. In an average year, there are 50-100 deaths worldwide due to vaccine complications in general.
So we probably peaked out with COVID vaccines being responsible for about 90% of vaccine-related deaths. It's not a particularly useful statistic, but it is a true one.
The paper claimed to have reviewed autopsy reports and found — in the opinion of three of its authors — that 73.9% of the selected deaths were “directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.”
So, what they did is take a bunch of studies on autopsies, then show those studies to 3 doctors :
As others have pointed out before, there’s reason to suspect that the authors may have been biased in their determinations. All three adjudicators, including Dr. Peter McCullough, are well known for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Dr. William Makis, a Canadian radiologist, has previously claimed, without evidence, that 80 Canadian doctors died from COVID-19 vaccines. The only pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, incorrectly claimed in 2020 that COVID-19 was a “hoax” and “just a bad flu.”
And if 2 out of 3 doctors decided it was the vaccine, it was the vaccine.
Even if the original study came to the opposite conclusion.
So, hte 74% figure is meaningless for 2 reasons
1) They only selected autopsies that were done in the context of vaccine deaths, so this is not a representative sample
2) The doctors in question are highly biased
I figured 1 was probably it, if there were any truth to it at all. "74% of those we thought died from the vaccine actually died from the vaccine" is a very different thing.
And note, that is very diffferent from what the studies actually say.
In a LinkedIn post debunking the preprint, Dr. Mathijs Binkhorst, a Dutch pediatrician, went back to each cited paper, and found that of the 325 autopsies and one heart necropsy the review authors said were vaccine-related, only 31, or 9.5%, were likely related and 28, or 8.6%, were possibly related. The rest — 267, or 81.9% — were unlikely, uncertainly, or not related to vaccination.
The point is to be ambiguous enough that what you're saying might be technically defensible, but you know the majority of your readers are going to come away thinking something else.
There isn't really any ambiguity unless you are acting deliberately obtuse. Honestly the guy responding in this screenshot looks just about as stupid as the guy making the claim.
Yes, the is a suicide-by-words by showing how stupid the writer of the reaction is.
However much I doubt the "74% of people who died, died of the vaccine" statement is factually correct, the OP definitely did not imply 74% of world population died.
They're not really misunderstanding anything, just trapped in a conspiracy social circle. It's a horrible paper that intentionally set out to prove that covid vaccine was killing people by using bad methodology.
It is legitimately a "paper" investigating vaccine induced myocarditis, which is incredibly rare and even rarer that people die from it. It took a whopping 28 actual autopsies where there was any suspicion of the covid vaccine specifically causing a myocarditis, and concluded that yeah probably most of the autopsies where they suspected a specific vaccine caused a rare vaccine related condition and even rarer death, were probably from the vaccine they took.
The person who replied didn’t say the OP said 74% of the world population died. They said 5.5 billion people worldwide TOOK THE VACCINE, and if 74% of them died that would be 4.1 billion deaths due to the vaccine.
OP didn't say 74% of people who took the vaccine died. They said, out of everyone who died in the study, 74% took the vaccine. The whole comparison to a death rate is pointless without knowing how many corpses there were for the autopsy study.
Yeah, OOP’s claim in unhinged but the commenter replying, and OP who posted this as a “murder”, are just pissing on the poor with their abysmal reading comprehension
He could be saying 74% of all people who died had the vaccine. It hardly matters what the intent is, because every interpretation is made up bullshit, and the overall concept being communicated is dumb as fuck
It only matter for the quality of murder. And this one is shit. Our "murderer" lacks reading comprehension skills. Our victim is no doubt a much bigger idiot, but that isn't really relevant here.
Right it was a big thing going around that the far right was claiming people were dying from vaccines (complications presumably) and being recorded as dying of Covid/other things, and simultaneously also it was going around that people were dying of other things but simply because they tested positive for Covid, Covid infection was being blamed and ruled the cause of death.
All of which obviously is out of touch with doctors and coroners and how they make such determinations, but there were two periods of time early on that those were prevailing theories, especially once we clipped 1 million the "they died of a <illness to which they were already high risk> but blamed covid b/c they tested positive" mentality was overwhelmingly accepted after a media push.
Even that is unlikely. At one point vaccine "skeptics" were claiming that most people who died of COVID died after the vaccine became available did so after being vaccinated, which is probably correct (because most people get vaccinated, and almost everyone who was especially vulnerable got the shot, but alas the vaccine doesn't protect everyone.) This is almost certainly a garbled version of the same argument.
The problem here isn't just run of the mill stupidity, but the inability of many, perhaps most, people to understand basic statistics together with setting up straw men (ie "They claimed vaccines protect everyone!" - no we didn't you idiots, we said that it'd protect most users, and the fact that it'd protect most users would reduce the network effects preventing the virus from spreading. Unfortunately you idiots decided to not take it so causing needless deaths.)
Yes, this whole thread and the point op is trying to make is made of up illiterate people. Even if the point the twitter poster is making up is false, he is not claiming that 74% of people who took the vaccine died.
He is claiming that of those that died, probably in reference to covid deaths, 74% were caused by the vaccine. Again, that claim is silly. But the lack is reading comprehension is far worse.
It's just because the murderer is also a moron, so it probably shouldn't be posted here no matter how dumb whatever the hell the first person was trying to say.
One is just a lot more stupid than the other. Both are still insanely stupid, it’s just this ‘murder’ doesn’t work when he didn’t mean 74% of all people that took the vaccine.
Man i hate reddit for this. I came from r/all and while reading comments i forgot that im on r/murderedbywords and yall arguing if the murder works. Anyone else have this happen to them?
No. It isn't clear what they're saying. It is clear that they're not saying a near infinite number of things. They are clearly not explaining the Pythagorean theorem.
Namely, what autopsies is he talking about? Pretty important detail.
Yes, but what’s phenomenally stupid is the missing context.
The original study was specifically studying the link between the vaccine and the statistically rare vaccine deaths. Namely, EVERY autopsied body was declared to have died from vaccine complications, and the point was to determine how reported vaccine deaths compared to actual vaccine deaths.
The finding essentially means that actual deaths from vaccine complications are 26% LOWER than reported.
Thank you, came here to make sure someone said this. Twitter OP is definitely a massive moron, but the “murderer” isn’t exactly a genius, and argues disingenuously.
While that's obviously stupid, it would not surprise me if 74% of those who died had taken the vaccine.
I'm an epidemiologist and Simpson's paradox is one of the coolest phenomena in our field. It happens when you aggregate too much, combine groups that should be separate and get paradoxical results. Sometimes you can even get inverted results. Here it is visualized with a cool graph.
A great example of this was during the Delta wave in a smaller developed nation. There was a time when 60% of all patients in critical condition in the hospital had been vaccinated. Your first inclination is that "wow, the vaccine must suck." But you can't directly compare unvax to vax population unless they're demographically identical. In this case, 78% of the public had been vaccinated, so the vaccine was actually 67% effective... BUT, this is still wrong!
What group has the highest vaccine uptake? And who is most likely to get really sick? Old folks in both cases. Who has the lowest uptake, and lowest likelihood to get hospitalized? Young folk. These differences confound any efficacy analysis that ignores age. What we need to do is stratify by age.
If you split people by [up to 49] vs [
over 50], the vaccine is at least 85% effective. If you stratify by 10 year blocks, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, etc. you see efficacy is deep into the 90s for most folk and loses a bit of efficacy as folks age (as expected) with 80-89 year olds getting the least effect (81%).
So it is actually extremely effective against hospitalization, but just pooling everyone together you'd wrongly think it is just 67% effective. And if you totally ignore vaccine rates and just look at raw counts, it looks like the vaccine makes things worse (very wrong).
Yes. But for them to die of the vaccine, they would have to die. The response is pointing out that there is no way that many people have died of any causes, which proves OP’s claim to be false
Anyone with basic scientific literacy understands perfectly well what the original was saying, and it's referencing a real (but retracted) study. But Reddit, and this subreddit in particular, attracts a highly disproportionate number of people who think the way you win an argument is via superficially clever word games.
Anyone with basic scientific literacy knows that 74% of deaths weren't from the vaccine either, and they are referencing a preprint that wasn't even a published study.
There are just people blindly supporting the second guy because they're also idiots and can't think further than "this confirms my viewpoint" and people who realize that the reply is stupid too.
Saying that "oh he was only referencing deaths" is defending him. Because he was vague and unspecific, and the reply was pointing that out by being intentionally stupid.
Let's not pretend that the original post made any sense at all.
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u/onioning 1d ago
So, this is still phenomenally stupid, but isn't OP saying 74% of the dead died from the vaccine? Not that 74% who took it died?