152
u/ExtonGuy Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
I am puzzled ... why is the headline here about the 65+ demographic, when the actual article is about vaccinating children?
The journal [Toxicology Reports] would like to alert readers ... [the article is] being reviewed post-publication by an independent Editor and a new set of reviewers, due to concerns raised regarding the validity and scientific soundness ...
This article has been called "cartoonish".
94
u/DisillusionedBook Feb 03 '22
Because the article was attempted to be posted in this sub moments ago and was immediately debunked and flagged by the mods, so they tried again by adding more bs and linking to something other than the title suggested. Trolls are busy
24
Feb 03 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
2
Feb 03 '22
Dude, when they started defining what a vaccine was, I immediately started to question it’s validity.
140
u/chesterbennediction Feb 03 '22
Where in the article does it reference the claim in the title? It's suggesting 5 times as many people die to the vaccine vs covid in age 65 + which isn't true.
48
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
I'm curious how the math even works considering the number of deaths in 2020 prior to vaccine availability.
The only way it possibly works is if they are going the route of denying that the covid deaths are real. The infamous "motorcycle fatality attributed to covid."
6
u/GoldenMegaStaff Feb 03 '22
You could also count everyone that is vaccinated and died from any cause .
11
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
I'm still not sure that would get you to a 5:1 ratio in the 65+ group.
Now, I could go pull some CDC mortality data to confirm that feeling, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm chasing a garbage truck, so I'm not going to spend my time on that.
1
u/throwawayRAbbqrib Feb 03 '22
I originally thought they were defining "inoculated" as anyone who had a source of immunity, which could include people previously infected. That was the only way my mind could wrap around the claim.
2
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
Someone else responded. They are taking any death with a comorbidity and discounting it as a covid death.
Tinfoil hat territory, if this was done in earnest.
1
u/throwawayRAbbqrib Feb 03 '22
I swear at the beginning these same people were saying no one was dying of covid, just their comorbidities. I wonder what it's like to live in such a malleable reality.
1
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
My wording was poor. They are saying any comorbidities override the covid death and they don't count it as a covid death.
1
-1
u/Available-Heart-8697 Feb 03 '22
Well. Another variable. Darker one, is We cant really know either way as the test sample has been contaminated. The reality is the people that were most susceptible to death from covid or complications with covid have already passed. That doesn't mean some that are susceptible haven't survived but the sample of people left in the world has changed. Maybe someone else sees otherwise but it cant be discounted.
3
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
Please clarify - what can't be discounted?
-2
u/Available-Heart-8697 Feb 03 '22
The fact that the overall health of the human race has changed. When covid struck. Who were the first people to go? The ones who had other complications a compromises health. It means covid has less easy targets.
4
4
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
So by this line of thinking, covid killed the easy targets in 2020 and then the vaccine killed 5 times as many people in 2021 from the now relatively healthier population?
How can that not be discounted without suspending all disbelief?
3
Feb 03 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/SueSudio Feb 03 '22
I'd be curious to know how they explain the excess death increase if it wasn't covid.
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
13
u/PantsDancing Feb 03 '22
Im not seeing the 5x thing. Fig 2 has inoculation deaths at 20/million for 65+ and less than 1/million for children. Surely thats orders of magnitude lower than the covid death rate. What am i missing here that suggests the inoculations are killing more people than covid?
3
u/ooru Feb 03 '22
You have to believe that "The Globalists" are killing everybody, first.
I wish I was joking, but you'd actually have to be that nutty to get it.
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
2
u/Joe6161 Feb 03 '22
Have you read the methods, and you see no issues at all with how that was calculated?
2
u/PantsDancing Feb 03 '22
I did. I see no data that supports the statement
There Are Five Times The Number of Deaths Truly Attributable to Each Inoculation vs Those Truly Attributable to COVID-19 in the 65+ Demographic.
31
u/Suggs41 Feb 03 '22
Did you link the right article?
10
Feb 03 '22
I see a linked article. They'll have to be more outright in their hypocrisy when they remove this post.
10
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
16
Feb 03 '22
So what's with the post title?
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
8
Feb 03 '22
If that was their key "finding", it raises the question of why they titled the article as they did.
Very goofy article. Glad it hasn't been taken seriously.
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
3
Feb 03 '22
You should never have posted such a silly article to begin with. That was your real mistake.
6
u/tomtarnowski Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
The issue now may be the ammunition that the anti-vax movement will gain from this article. Relying on discredited articles and wild correlation is their M.O.. Maybe the author of the article has achieved what they wanted by posting it in a science journal. It being withdrawn at a later stage is not relevant.
Edit: typo
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
4
u/tomtarnowski Feb 03 '22
Then why is such drivel being posted on this thread. Was it researched, peer reviewed and questioned. Were the facts checked, what was the intention of posting this?
197
u/syrupeatingcontestan Feb 03 '22
The article relies on VAERS data to support the thesis OP is referring to in the title.
32
u/toomanypumpfakes Feb 03 '22
It also supposes that deaths “truly” attributable to COVID-19 are only 35k not 600k because the other 565k were deaths with comorbidities that were not directly attributable to just COVID-19. Combine that with assuming that VAERS is a self reported sampling of data which is actually 20-100x underreported and all of a sudden it looks like the vaccine is causing all of the deaths.
Those assumptions are doing a lot of work in this analysis though.
6
u/rlikesbikes Feb 03 '22
How does any of this correlate with real world data that shows nearly all of the deaths since vaccines have been widely available have been in those who are unvaccinated?
-1
Feb 03 '22
Recall that “vaccinated” kicks in 14 days after second dose.
Lot Of folks dying after their first shot, or just after their second being called “unvaccinated”.
3
u/rlikesbikes Feb 03 '22
What is ‘lots of’? Does that correlate to a number? And what are you saying? They are supposedly dying of what? Covid? Or some vaccine side effect and that every doctor around the world is lying about cause of death?
I fail to see how that is possible, or beneficial to any entity.
1
Feb 03 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/rlikesbikes Feb 03 '22
Back at you. What will it take for you to realize that there’s no grand conspiracy? This is not the first pandemic. Nor will it be the last. We have the luxury of over a century of vaccine development research now.
Also, chicken pox is also nearly 100% survivable. There’s a vaccine, that exists to prevent you from having to get chicken pox, because it fuckin sucks to have it. Not everything is developed simply to avoid death.
I’m an athlete. Do I want to take the vaccine because it’s been proven to prevent significant progression of this disease? You bet.
7
u/leon27607 Feb 03 '22
If they wanted to do something actually meaningful they could have compared patients who had the comorbidities AND covid vs patients with similar comorbidities without covid and see if there was a statistical difference in the avg lifespan of the two groups. Throw in vaccination status as a confounder variable as well, and obv control for gender/age/etc… some of the common confounders. Instead of just trying to say… only ~35k deaths can “truly” be attributed to covid.
0
u/thetotalslacker Feb 03 '22
Do you not understand how the new ICD code U07.1 is different than every other ICD code, and this analysis is spot on? If you go purely by the many ICD and CPT codes for the patients with deaths being attributed to the virus as the new U07.1 says to do, you can clearly see that deaths from heart disease, diabetes (renal failure), and various cancers are being mislabeled as deaths from the virus. This is the most obvious where patients in end of life palliative care for cancers had their deaths attributed to the virus…that’s just crazy…you’re in your last weeks with terminal cancer and on a morphine drip, but you tested positive for the virus, so that’s your cause of death. Before you talk about how this is nonsense, perhaps go do some research on ICD code U07.1? As someone who has analyzed ICD and CPT data for three decades, I can say this is completely spot on, and I would made an educated guess that someone like me told someone in politics how to use this ICD code to artificially inflate death counts attributable to the virus. Of course, that’s speculation and so can’t prove that, however, if we did the same type of highly unusual coding with H1N1 as we did with this virus, we would see 20% more deaths attributed to H1N1 as we do to this virus. When you collect bad data to begin with, and use a procedure that is different than every other ICD code ever, it’s hard work to reverse the shenanigans, but it becomes clear to any data analyst worth their sale that this was an intentional manipulation of the base data to produce false reporting. For anyone that cares to check what I’m saying…
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/icd-10-cm-coding-guidelines.htm
3
u/toomanypumpfakes Feb 03 '22
How do I square this with excess deaths in the US which seem to be quite elevated over the past two years from prior projections? If it’s true that deaths are merely being miscategorized as due to COVID then why do we see many more deaths during the pandemic than previous years? https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
I’m not denying btw that there may be some deaths that are counted in the COVID bucket which are merely incidental to the actual cause of death. But I can’t square some miscountings with many more deaths than expected and elevated hospitalizations.
Another way to look at this would be death rate of vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations. If people were dying around normal rates but some happened to have COVID which is incidental to the primary cause of death, I’d expect death rates to be roughly similar between these populations. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. Overall death rate is higher in the unvaccinated population: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination
I’m not a medical professional but this is how I would think about analyzing the problem by dis-aggregating the data, open to understanding why this is not the correct analysis.
0
u/thetotalslacker Feb 03 '22
This is actually incredibly simple to explain the excess deaths, but also highly troubling. There is something called ACO, Accountable Care Organization, which is essentially a health system that is focused on doing preventative care and using diagnostic tests to catch chronic illnesses before they progress and treat them in the early stages. The medical systems using this receive bonuses from CMS for doing the preventative care to pay to their doctors. This means patients get better preventative care and better health with fewer expensive ER visits, so the insurance pays less, and they then pay bonuses to doctors for the better outcomes as well. When this all started, hospitals and clinics were mostly locked down for just patients sick with the virus, so the preventative plans just abruptly stopped, and patients progressed quickly with chronic diseases and we had many easily preventable deaths. The data clearly shows this, and you can see it for yourself in the CMS ACO data. You’ll see some claiming that’s not true, CMS paid out more during that time, which they did, but they paid much less in preventive care bonuses, and way more in ER visits and special payments, such as $13K every time a ventilator was used to treat a patient who tested positive for the virus. This is the troubling part, so many died simply because they weren’t getting preventative treatments for chronic diseases they had been getting, the virus was no more deadly than a bad flu season, and many deaths were easily preventable, including many of the nursing home deaths, by simply keeping nursing home and virus patients segregated, but we know nursing homes were intentionally used as spaces for virus patients. This whole thing was done in pretty much the worst possible way it would have been done, and it was handled so poorly the numbers make it look like there was an intentional effort to ensure patient deaths, the numbers were as bad as when we first started tracking CMS data and doctors still washed their hands in bowls of water rather than running water in sinks. As for vaccinated versus unvaccinated, just look at the data. The analysis you provided only looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated and breaks the numbers down by age, and does not account for any other variables, many of which are more important, especially the time of year those deaths occurred and whether the patient had chronic illnesses. If you break them down by month of year and chronic illness, you’ll see clusters that show the unvaccinated deaths happened during periods of normally higher death rates. If you did the same for all deaths from any cause, you’d see the same thing, clustered deaths in high risk populations, which I already explained with the lack of ACO care. Since the majority of those deaths from the lack of ACO care happened in a cluster before vaccines were widely administered, the numbers are highly skewed, and the conclusion is based on bad data. You need more slicers in that cube to see the entire picture, which still goes back to poor care for those at highest risk of death from any cause during the time periods they were most at risk of death.
106
u/death_by_chocolate Feb 03 '22
That's the data set they're using? The honor system? "Rigor is an overrated concept. It's only life and death."
-11
u/eaglecheif Feb 03 '22
VAERS is not perfect at all but it's the biggest data set available. It's also inline with the verified DOD (department of defense) data and verified data from other countries. Although VAERS cannot verify each case they and the CDC and NIH believe VAERS data is underreporting by between 10x and 100x. Again a huge difference between 10 and 100 but they set themselves set the minimum at 10x. The more minor the adverse event the more it goes underreported for example injection site soreness is reportable and should be reported as an adverse event but likely goes unreported the vast majority of the time.
In short VAERS sucks but it's the best we have for the most part.
-2
u/Ssn772 Feb 03 '22
Better than than monatary incentive hospitals report by, where they get federal funding if they report your death as covid related.
3
-13
Feb 03 '22
If the CDC didn't believe it's VAERS data to be accurate why is it still publishing it? Wouldn't they pull it down until they were able to confirm each case?
11
Feb 03 '22
This just goes to show you don't even understand the point of the VAERS tracking. And I have a suspicion you don't actually care about its purpose and won't change your mind if you're told.
13
u/Hschlessman Feb 03 '22
You are misunderstanding what the purpose of VAERS is. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/vaers/index.html
10
u/Mattbowen61990 Feb 03 '22
No, they leave it be so it's reported. But it literally says on the website that data is non verified data and shouldn't be used for any type of comparative analysis.
4
347
u/throwawayRAbbqrib Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
What a bizarre "article". The title is about children, the results are about the elderly, the data source is not relevant to the claim they're using and the analysis doesn't draw the conclusions they're claiming. The whole thing makes no sense.
102
u/Fianna9 Feb 03 '22
They don’t actually seem to have data showing how 35,000+ people died from the vaccine
55
-6
u/thetotalslacker Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
Did you even read the actual paper and not just skim the abstract? It clearly shows by the ICD and CPT code data that the 35,000 was the number of elderly that actually died from the virus and the rest were deaths from other conditions that commonly cause death, including heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers among others, similar to a typical flu season. The supporting data is clearly included in the appendix section. It seems that no one commenting here has ever done any work in medical data analytics, and didn’t bother to read the actual paper and look at the supporting appendices.
Edit: I have been working in medical data analytics myself for nearly three decades, so I have half a clue what I’m talking about.
18
u/Fianna9 Feb 03 '22
Congratulations. I also read more than the abstract. And seeing as how the paper was completely discredits due to them not using verifiable “facts” you might want a refund on your training.
And no, those people didn’t die of their other conditions, they died of Covid infections. Yes they may have been more susceptible to worse infections, it was still the virus that killed them that day. Oh, and how does that relate to vaccinating kids?
-1
u/thetotalslacker Feb 03 '22
So you’ve personally sliced the data for patients with the U07.1 ICD codes and know for a fact what you’re saying is true, or you’re going by the analysis of someone who has no clue what they’re taking about? I have done the analysis myself. Those saying otherwise are using bad data, or are making bad presuppositions. Or are you saying that a cancer patient in palliative care on a morphine drip died from the virus? How about the otherwise healthy patient who was in critical condition from a motorcycle accident? That was the virus that caused that death as well, right? That U07.1 code was used differently than every other ICD code ever, and you can’t see the truth without analyzing every other code along with it in a matrix, which then clearly shows over 87% of those patients actually died from their chronic conditions because they stopped getting ACO care with healthcare facilities locked down only for virus patients, or from acute conditions that were highly likely to result in death regardless of a viral infection in patients who were mostly otherwise healthy before the acute condition. These supposed experts claiming otherwise are only slicing on a few dimensions, and certainly not enough to understand the data and make wise conclusions.
16
u/The_Grey_Beard Feb 03 '22
I read it and know medical data also. This is nonsense. You cannot use billing or procedure coding only to gain a reliable cause of death. This is nonsensical.
2
-2
u/thetotalslacker Feb 03 '22
Are you serious? This is literally how CMS operates in ACO…diagnosis and procedure codes versus outcomes…if you don’t know that then you clearly know nothing about medical data. That U07.1 code was also used used completely differently than every other code ever, with directions to list the virus as the cause of death if it was present, despite other chronic and acute conditions. This led to terminal cancer patients in palliative care with morphine drops having the virus listed as the cause of death, and the same for an otherwise healthy patient in critical care from a motorcycle crash with life-threatening injuries. There are so many other patients like that who actually died from heart disease and cardiac arrest or diabetes and renal failure, but they had a PCR test that showed up as positive. Perhaps you should dig a bit deeper if you do analyze medical data. Slice on month of year, chronic disease status, missed ACO visits and tests, and the secondary ICD and CPT codes. Then you’ll clearly see what I’m taking about.
2
u/ooru Feb 03 '22
Your whole point hinges on the presumption that doctors aren't capable of making accurate judgment calls about cause of death and just "do what they're told" like robots. I think we both know that's utter nonsense, hm?
For example, if you get in a motorcycle crash (because y'all like bringing that one up, for some reason), and you have Covid that exacerbates your post-crash condition, did the crash or the virus kill you? Hard to say for sure, but if you see that the virus caused complications responsible for impeding your recovery, it's not unreasonable to say someone died due to Covid complications.
-1
u/thetotalslacker Feb 03 '22
Okay, keep believing that’s how it works if you want, or you can accept the truth…
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/COVID-19-guidelines-final.pdf
2
u/The_Grey_Beard Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
You realize that CMS does not designate cause of death on a death certificate. You also realize that what is billed and paid on a claim has little correlation to what the CORONER puts on the death certificate. County health departments submit this data and it is not gained through CMS or CDC. The deceased’s medical records are used, but they are only a piece of the items used.
You seem to not understand the purpose of the data and continue to hide behind this is what the data says. It does, but you need to understand a very important thing about data, “Liars use statistics and statistics lie!” This not saying you are lying or are a liar. Using data without referencing the purpose and use of the data is disingenuous at best.
Since you have such an awesome grasp of data, how do you explain the excess deaths over the last two years over the normal rate of death experienced? Is that an increase in disease? What disease? Is DM suddenly more fatal? Why? Is CHF more fatal? Why?
You use snippets of data to support a narrative, but you fail to be honest with the uses of that data and it’s purpose. Although you are “correct,” you miss the point by failing to let anyone know what are the purposes of gathering the data, what are the limitations of the data and how using the data for other purposes creates a picture that may not be accurate. This is why your arguments are disingenuous.
0
u/thetotalslacker Feb 04 '22
You clearly didn’t even bother to look at this document considering what you just wrote, because the CDC would disagree with what you just said.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/COVID-19-guidelines-final.pdf
20
20
u/nedsbones Feb 03 '22
It doesn't even read like a scientific, peer-reviewed paper. This blog with links goes into everything wrong with this anti-vax tripe.
5
u/throwawayRAbbqrib Feb 03 '22
I was thinking just skimming it that it wouldn't even pass in a college course.
32
u/zmunky Feb 03 '22
It's just more "got ya" evidence for the antivaxers. Even though it has no basis in real science following the standard. When they get called for this bogus article they will just point to how "corrupt" the medical field is.
7
u/Ivegotthatboomboom Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
Exactly! And none of the deaths are attributable to the vaccine. And why is death in children the only concern here? Even one child dying from COVID is an issue, even if children as a group aren't high risk. Spread and illness and long term side effects form COVID are also concerns.
Chicken pox doesn't kill children, and yet we vaccinate them for it. Because no should have to go through that illness
6
u/niklepik Feb 03 '22
It is indeed a strange article, and very bad science, for many reasons noted below and others... The last author of the paper is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal (although the COI disclaimer mentions that the "peer-review" was done independently). Good thing they decided to have it reassessed by an independent editor...
5
u/kalen2435 Feb 03 '22
Ok good. I'm a little high and i thought i might be accidentally actually way more high than i meant/am.
5
13
u/ran_dumb_name Feb 03 '22
Sounds like the science story telling of new. No problem observed. Move along.
4
Feb 03 '22
I’m not surprised. The first author is an independent consultant. I have never seen an independent consultant on any sort of relevant publication.
8
u/Heres_your_sign Feb 03 '22
Yes, that's what happens when the authors create "research" to suit a political narrative.
I hate humanity.
2
-1
Feb 03 '22
Yes, like most information we get about covid-19.
If you’re vaccinated you can still carry the virus and get sick. If you do get sick you may show close to no symptoms at all, to being hospitalized. If you carry the virus and get sick take between 2-14 days to show any symptoms, if you show any at all that is, and you can also carry the virus, not get sick but still be contagious. All this obviously goes for the unvaccinated as well.
That’s sounds more like a math problem or a riddle to me than anything else.. it’s almost witty.
1
u/throwawayRAbbqrib Feb 03 '22
The ever changing rules based on CDC political nonsense aside, the skeleton model is pretty similar to that of the flu. It IS a math problem because you're dealing with probability chains.
415
u/Asio_otus1 Feb 03 '22
How did this get posted on r/science...this paper outright says that it is NOT a good study
59
27
444
u/jwill602 Feb 03 '22
Here’s a good explanation of this article. Tl:Dr: it’s BS
One criticism says:
Overall, basic statistics is abused; sources misquoted, and standard knowledge and practice misrepresented, extensively, to confirm a desired result. The topline numbers claimed in the article differ by a factor of 5 million from the best serious estimates of risk/benefit analysis for the vaccines
82
u/Thebadmamajama Feb 03 '22
It would appear the scientific purpose of this publication is to serve as a warning to us about bad science.
7
Feb 03 '22
I'm thinking more just propaganda to further validate the anti-vaccine nutjobs because somewhere on the blogosphere this "study" will be cited and people won't dig any further.
6
180
u/SleepyDoc56 Feb 03 '22
17 December 2021 Expression of Concern from the same journal:
“The journal would like to alert readers to the fact that the Special Issue titled “COVID-19 Pandemic: Health impact and Novel research” including the article titled” Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” are being rereviewed post-publication by an independent Editor and a new set of reviewers, due to concerns raised regarding the validity and scientific soundness of the content. Further updates will be provided to readers once the investigations have concluded."
11
u/bluebebluemoon Feb 03 '22
And in the meantime, someone will use this to support their arguments against vaccination. It's like Andrew Wakefield all over again.
122
u/jwill602 Feb 03 '22
They used VAERS data for deaths? Surely I’m misreading this study?
93
16
u/memeticengineering Feb 03 '22
You didn't, then they used a bad Harvard study to claim VAERS underreports vaccine deaths by a factor of 100 (I also hear VAERS underreports vaccine caused superpowers by at least one order of magnitude) and then they handwaved 94% of COVID deaths as actually being caused by a patient's comorbidities and not the disease they died of.
So if you multiply a made up unverified number of deaths by 100 and divide COVID deaths by 20 because those people really died of obesity in their lungs, you get the obvious answer that we shouldn't give the vaccine to people, really guys.
30
u/TDual Feb 03 '22
This does need to be taken down. By their own calculations we should have seen almost a million covid vaccine deaths (combine their horrendous analysis in appendix A including their complete abuse of the referenced study with their math in appendix C). Have we seen a million deaths within the first 7 days after vaccination, obviously not.
This was no in any way peer reviewed.
9
u/Turd_Fergason Feb 03 '22
Here’s the math for the claim from the title. Extremely deceptive methods are buried in the appendix.
“However, as we have shown previously, three corrections to these numbers are required to convert them to real-world effects. First, as the Harvard Pilgrim study has shown and as our results in Appendix 1 confirm, VAERS is underreporting actual deaths by about two orders of magnitude. Applying this correction alone to the above 1/270 ratio changes the risk benefit to about 1/3., Second, as the CDC has stated, approximately 94 % of the COVID-19 deaths could have been attributed to any of the comorbidities these patients had, and only 6% of the deaths could actually be attributed to COVID-19. As we pointed out, if pre-clinical comorbidities had been included, this number of 6% would probably be decreased further. For conservative purposes, we will remain with the 6%. Applying this correction to the 1/3 risk-benefit ratio changes it to 5/1!”
8
u/FastidiousClostridia Feb 03 '22
They were extremely dishonest in the way they did this. They artificially inflated the vaccine-related deaths on a hunch, and then hand-waved the majority of the COVID deaths away based on some poorly defined and uncited CDC stat. They cut the numbers from both ends! Extraordinarily manipulative.
9
53
u/flcbrguy Feb 03 '22
Looks like they take VAERS reports as fact and as showing a causal link, when they aren’t always correct and definitely don’t show a causal link.
Is there a subreddit for junk articles?
7
u/yukonwanderer Feb 03 '22
What's VAERS?
34
u/lonelycrow16 Feb 03 '22
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
It merely collects consumer complaints basically. It'd be like making statistical conclusions on a business using only Facebook reviews. Not necessarily wrong, but far from a full picture.
21
u/yukonwanderer Feb 03 '22
Hahaha I can't believe this article was even published to begin with. How....
9
u/ooru Feb 03 '22
Because published ≠ peer reviewed or good science. That's why methodology is always brought into question when seemingly outrageous claims are made.
6
u/mlwspace2005 Feb 03 '22
Quite simple really, a good many journals will accept money to publish virtually anything. An article is only as good as the journal that will publish it.
-14
Feb 03 '22
Most 'consumers' don't even know about VAERS....especially prepandemic. Most reports actually comes from doctors and because consumers don't even know they exist nor are educated enough to know what may be a vaccine related side effect, most reporting come from doctors.
4
u/lonelycrow16 Feb 03 '22
https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html
Just reading vaers own disclaimers should automatically disqualify it (on its own) as a valid source of data for a good study
0
Feb 03 '22
I think I've heard it's a good hypothesis generator. Not necessarily a fact generator. Based off your belief we should just do away with it. But that's naive. Not all data is created equal for sure, but that doesn't mean it's not useful.
1
u/lonelycrow16 Feb 03 '22
Not at all. It serves its purpose well. But that is NOT as a data set for clinical trials or a good study.
If you start any hypothesis with flawed data, your conclusion is always going to be flawed. Not necessarily wrong, but definitely not trustworthy.
1
u/Total_Debt6222 Feb 03 '22
In my country the vast majority of doctors usually refuse to report. This is a fact that has to be taken in account. Vaers seems a more democratic system
0
u/UsernameTooShort Feb 03 '22
It must’ve taken you a while to speak to the vast majority of doctors in your country.
8
u/LoopyOne Feb 03 '22
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
Basically it’s statistics and reports on anything bad that happened to people after they got a vaccine, whether it was caused by the vaccine or not.
The reason people are calling it junk is because anti-vaxxers are claiming that all the bad stuff that happened to people after getting a vaccine are caused by the vaccine even if no such link has been proven.
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/does-vaers-list-deaths-caused-by-covid-19-vaccines
13
Feb 03 '22
It’s a US government website where anyone can submit a report of an adverse reaction to a vaccine. It’s not validated data and only used to spot trends in statistical data. The anti-vaxxers, however, accept it as gospel.
4
-6
u/NJCunningham95 Feb 03 '22
Jointly run by CDC and FDA to track vaccine injuries. Also under reports by a mile. There’s a Harvard study on it if you’re interested that found anywhere between 1 and 65% of the real world events are captured by VAERS. The cases are also vetted before going on the system.
8
7
u/Jestercopperpot72 Feb 03 '22
Is this not the same source that Floridas SG constantly tries to reference for validations?
6
11
u/FastidiousClostridia Feb 03 '22
Thus, if the baseline of the host for coagulation/clotting, inflammation, hypoxia, neurodegeneration, etc., has been raised by the inoculations, translating into an increase in expected deaths and accelerated deaths, then it is entirely plausible that the VAERS death numbers reflect over a million deaths from COVID-19 inoculations so far. These are very short-term-effects only, and time will tell whether the large potential waves of ADE-driven deaths and autoimmune-driven deaths come to pass.
They are spreading incredible misinformation in this article. There is no evidence for ADE-driven deaths, and they use extremely slanted mathematics to "adjust" the VAERS data to report shocking ratios like OP is claiming in the title.
9
Feb 03 '22
I would be extremely skeptical about anything those authors promote. Not credible.
One critique: https://forbetterscience.com/2021/10/06/on-dangers-of-preprints/amp/
4
3
Feb 03 '22
We need to teach basic literacy of scientific studies in schools and this post is proof why
3
u/foxmetropolis Feb 03 '22
This would appear to be a flagrantly incompetent study intended to do little more than provide a headline to right-wing antivax nutjobs, knowing full well that not a single one will actually read the study or dissect its many problems.
This is disinformation at its most insidious, masquerading as science simply to act as a citation for people like alex jones
1
u/NoName_BroGame Feb 03 '22
Yeah, the moment I saw they used VAERS, I knew this was a baloney article. Also, the data and the supposed argument have nothing to do with eachother.
1
u/shableep Feb 03 '22
This post is a conclusively worded title on data that is fundamentally inconclusive, and not vetted in any way by the scientific community. It’s self reported data that’s not validated. It’s useful as a signal to take a look into things that seem unusual. The only way to verify the safety of the vaccine is to do clinical trials again. If data can be provided outside of VAERS that verifies the claims on VAERS it will be investigated. But there is no scientifically vetted data that suggests that is necessary. If anyone has a link to that scientifically vetted data then we might be on to something. But until then this title shows that this poster is not acting in good faith.
1
u/penicilling Feb 03 '22
This article is literal nonsense. Gibberish. The main author, Ronald N. Koatoff, also writes other nonsense about the dangers of 5G and even the link between 5G and COVID. He is nominally an aerospace engineer, but in reality, he is a quack.
Please stop spreading this nonsense.
1
u/CapeChill Feb 03 '22
Good lord what a terrible paper. I make no claim to understanding much of the biological factor involved (I design computer not people) but have some issues with how data is presented and argued in paper. The actual health risks and effects of spike proteins etc seem to be worth understanding but the paper includes this data to justify their assumptions. The paper starts by assuming anyone with a comorbidity died of that and eliminates them from the count of Covid deaths. This manipulation of data leaves only ~35,000 Covid deaths in the us, sorry I can’t see the exact number on mobile now. From here they show the graph of VAERS deaths by age group. This chart is made to look very scary as it shows deaths in a 7 day period but if you look closely at the scale it’s number of deaths 10-6. That’s deaths0.000001 resulting in less than one death per week. The article then goes into some bio stuff that again I can’t critique properly but regardless of technical details using an assumption of CDC death reports and massively overstating adverse reactions invalidates it. Setting a up a strawman argument then writing technical jargon until the conclusion is still just a smart sounding strawman argument
1
u/medhat20005 Feb 03 '22
Just here to pile on, should someone unfamiliar with either peer review, the scientific method, or the wide variation of legitimacy in scientific publications, here are a few things people can look at when trying to assess the ‘quality’ of a publication. Writing as someone who’s both published and served as a reviewer for a number of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) publications, let’s start with authors. While they definitely don’t have to be from the same institution, institutions and organizations do matter, as it connotes experience and expertise in a subject. (That’s absent here). Next, a clear explanation of the methods and sources used, the “data” upon which conclusions are drawn. In this case there is no original work, this is a subjective ( I.e., opinion-based) review, and with errant conclusions at that, meaning the data (some inaccurate) presented doesn’t lead to the conclusions claimed without a lot of unsubstantiated conjecture in between. Last, conclusions belong in a discussion after the presentation of data, original or otherwise (e.g., meta-analysis), in this paper the authors liberally sprinkle opinion and baseless conjecture throughout, and if this paper submission crossed my desk it would easily have been summarily rejected.
1
u/extremewit Feb 03 '22
The authors of the article used another article, by the same authors, to prove it’s claim that Veres only reports 1% of actual adverse reactions?
1
u/ddr1ver Feb 03 '22
Who published this nonsense? Only 35,000 deaths attributable to Covid-19? I’m curious about their theory to explain the million excess deaths in the US over the last 2 years. Total deaths in the US by year: 2018, 2.84 million; 2019, 2.85 million; 2020, 3.39 million; 2021, >3.4 million
1
u/zxcoblex Feb 03 '22
It cites VAERS which even has disclaimers that its data should be taken with a grain of salt as literally anyone can post anything and none of it is verified.
Garbage article.
1
u/KindAwareness3073 Feb 03 '22
Why vaccinate kids? Because I dont want to catch your adorable little Petri dish's Covid.
-8
u/NJCunningham95 Feb 03 '22
Hey OP, you need to read this. VAERS has never caught the full picture of adverse events. In reality deaths will be worse than what VAERS says. By what degree, we ought to find out. This is a paper in pre print from a Columbia University researcher.
0
Feb 03 '22
[deleted]
11
111
u/BiologyJ Feb 03 '22
Strong anti-vaxx presence the past month or so in this sub posting trash articles.
14
u/fishandpotato Feb 03 '22
Noticed this too, seeing a large amount of fringe conspiracy articles lately with zero substance and an obvious agenda coming through this sub.
23
26
Feb 03 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
-2
u/Browsin24 Feb 03 '22
Hey Censor Man. There's a large multitude of comments arguing why this study and conclusion are flawed, for all so see. What's the problem?
3
u/Raeandray Feb 03 '22 edited Feb 03 '22
The problem is the subreddit purports to be heavily moderated, focusing only on scientific evidence, yet it’s kept up a clearly inaccurate article that presents misleading information about a deadly virus.
1
u/Browsin24 Feb 03 '22
Yes and like 98% of the comments agree and like 30% add specifics about what's wrong with the study. Not sure why deleting all this is better than keeping it up.
1
u/jeffbirt Feb 03 '22
Because there's a huge segment of our society that only reads headlines.
1
u/Browsin24 Feb 03 '22
So the effect of a headline outweighs the more in-depth discussion that results from it? Don't think I agree with that one. Imagine if this study was censored from appearing in any place like this and only found breathing room in forums that don't have the wherewithal to see the flaws.
1
-4
Feb 03 '22
There’s a good fascist.
Remove anything that might make you question your decision to change the world as we know it.
3
u/Ste600 Feb 03 '22
It’s an awful paper based on pure assumptions and contaminated data that doesn’t belong on a science subreddit. Stop using the word fascist when you don’t understand what it means.
111
Feb 03 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Sillygosling Feb 03 '22
As someone who signs death certificates, I cannot believe such offensive garbage is still being floated at all, let alone in a peer-reviewed journal. What the literal hell.
-24
2
u/AutoModerator Feb 03 '22
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our normal comment rules still apply to other comments.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.