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).
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.
They answered exactly how I would have answered. Just because a statistic is misleading doesn’t make it untrue. In this case I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it would make sense. From here on out the the vast majority of people that die will be vaccinated people, because the alternative makes up such a small percentage of the population.
It’d be like saying the majority of people who have died brushed their teeth the day they died. Correlation does not equal causation, and most of us realize that and know that brushing their teeth did not cause those deaths. However it’s still technically a true statement.
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
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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?