The three types of anti-VAERS arguments

Dumb, dumber and dumbest

After doing data analysis on VAERS for a few months, I have come to the conclusion that the biggest obstacle to serious and thoughtful analysis of vaccine safety is not the pro-vaxxers, but the folks who are anti-VAERS.

In my opinion, if you look down upon VAERS analysis (for example referring to it as “dumpster diving”) - even though it is the only open source vaccine injury database - you are anti-VAERS.

And from what I can see, there are only three types of anti-VAERS arguments.

Dumb: The Incredible Hulk anecdote

These are the arguments which use the “Incredible Hulk” example as a way to avoid thinking about the issue.

There are still many such examples on Twitter.

What is interesting is that the grand poobah of the anti-VAERS community David Gorski himself has already quietly slithered his way out of this particular argument (emphasis mine).

Note the implied straw man. No, no one is claims that VAERS is unreliable primarily because lots of people are reporting fake AEs such as being turned into fictional monsters and superheroes. Rather, we point out these examples merely as part of the discussion of how VAERS reports represent raw, unadjudicated data, with no ability to demonstrate causation. Antivaxxers leap to the assumption that any AE entered into VAERS must have been caused by the vaccine, but that is simply not the case. As I’ve discussed time and time again, raw VAERS data cannot establish causation, as, by its very nature, it cannot establish reliable estimates for the incidence of a given AE.

Source

Well, then why would anyone waste people’s time on this argument?

All you really need is an off-the-shelf Machine Learning model to figure out if a VAERS report is not fake/crazy, and then use that as a starting point.

I did some analysis on this, and my estimates say that only about 1% of VAERS reports are “crazy”.

Quantifying "crazy" VAERS reports

Hopefully, the anti-VAERS community will move past that argument soon and ask:

“OK, I did not know that. So is there any signal in the not-fake reports?”

Dumber: Appeal to authority

Obviously, some folks in the anti-VAERS community will not be satisfied, so they start looking for other ways to continue their argument.

The first thing they reach for is usually an appeal to authority¹, never mind that the primary accusation is that the authority is either too incompetent or too corrupt.

Link to tweet

Given that there is actually a lot of data fudging going on, it did take a while to prove that the CDC was not doing its job properly.

But eventually, after collating data from multiple sources, it is possible to prove it. For example, once you start doing some very basic cross-verification, you can see that there isn’t any realistic way for someone to actually defend “CDC data”.

CDC's v-safe text mining is laughable

Once you prove that the CDC is fudging numbers, some people become quiet and may be even introspect about what is going on.

There are a few who are still not willing to give up :-)

Dumbest: Using All Cause Mortality as the yardstick

Once the anti-VAERS’ers have exhausted these two options, they will eventually move to All Cause Mortality.

Link to tweet

First of all, people should take a step back and think about what is going on here.

And I am now including the folks on the “vaccine skeptic” team.

Looking for vaccine-related deaths to show up on all cause mortality is actually frightening once you see how they do this analysis.

Should we accept the "background death rate" explanation at face value?

It sets an extremely low bar, and even worse, it now makes this an acceptable bar for future vaccine rollouts.

I am not sure if the vaccine skeptics realize how hard it is going to be to push back against unsafe (compared to previous generations) mRNA vaccines in the future, once they start making their arguments based primarily on all-cause mortality.

I am aware that some folks are now writing articles about how even these statistics are not looking good for the mRNA vaccine.

New Zealand's 2022 Data is out...

But I can state quite confidently that this is a losing battle because there are too many confounders, and the debate opponents² know that increasing the confounders is the easiest way to avoid arguments³.

For example, just look at this paper that the CDC published recently based on US VAERS data:

Source

Notice the difference between the observed number of VAERS reported deaths and the expected number based on All Cause Mortality. Do you notice that the difference is actually a factor of 10 (and sometimes more) in nearly all age groups?

Now compare this with the one published by New Zealand:

Source

Notice that the factor is usually only about 2-3x for most age groups.

There are many reasons for this difference, and you can go and read the New Zealand study to understand the full details.

A primary reason is that New Zealand does a more honest comparison (all cause mortality after vaccination based on expected person years vs all cause mortality before vaccination), while the CDC is publishing what can only be called complete garbage (VAERS reported mortality vs all cause mortality). The fact that these horrific CDC papers are able to pass peer review should tell you something about the peer review process in the healthcare field.

But unlike New Zealand (smaller population, more organized healthcare system), the CDC has a ready excuse of having a very large population and much more chaotic healthcare system to explain why it cannot do the same kind of analysis that New Zealand did.

Good luck trying to adjust for all the confounders and doing this estimate for the US - I am guessing you cannot even find all the data you need, let alone have any kind of confidence that it is accurate.

The vaccine skeptics get around this issue by citing the 1% adverse event reporting rate. This is almost certainly not true for something as serious as death, and I agree with the pro-vaccine team when they say that the vaccine skeptics are conflating AE under-reporting for mild symptoms and AE under-reporting for severe ones.

Summary

It is better to set a higher bar and expect the vaccine to meet this bar than to allow the regulatory agencies to set the terms of this debate.

One way to do this is to keep the VAERS analysis going.

Not only will it irritate all the anti-VAERS’ers, it might even shine the light on previous Pharma coverups.

1. This isn’t even a good argument for being anti-VAERS. It simply means there are multiple ways of analyzing the VAERS data, and you prefer the CDC’s analysis over the analysis of neutral outsiders. Even if the CDC is right, that still does not mean people should stop doing VAERS data analysis. And if the CDC is wrong, it makes an even stronger case why people should be doing more VAERS data analysis.

2. Here I am not talking about Pharma shills. I don’t know who is and isn’t a Pharma shill. I am in fact referring to people who honestly believe the mRNA vaccine is extremely safe. They often utilize confounders as the primary mode of argument, not realizing that most of this confounding is only happening because of the refusal of governments to transparently publish all the data they collect.

3. I do mean “avoid” arguments and not “win” arguments. Because in the current inverted reality, the vaccine manufacturers are not required to provide overwhelming evidence that the vaccine is safe, but rather the critics are required to provide overwhelming evidence that the vaccine is unsafe!