A Phallus of Fallacies
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Fancy Latin which broadly means “you’re being a dick” - or at least that’s the intended usage, quite apart from the correct Latin translation. It’s one of those fancy phrases that gets trotted out by those who consider themselves to be amongst the intellectual elite to dismiss a line of reasoning.
It’s one of a sizeable list of logical “fallacies” that the non-intellectual, non-elite allegedly commit all the time. You can slide your glasses half way down your nose and superciliously peer over them whilst in the most disappointed tones inform your listener that they have fallen victim to the fallacy of X - where X is some suitably impressive sounding term.
The meaning of post hoc ergo propter hoc is that if event A comes before event B we can’t assume that A caused B - it would be a fallacy to do so. In the hypothetical Boris quote above we would say that just because the unfortunate (or fortunate depending on your point of view) swelling occurred after getting some covid Goo we cannot assume it was the Goo wot dun it.
Argument dismissed.
Well, not quite. You see, whilst it is certainly wrong to assume a linkage between A and B based on a temporal sequence, it would be equally as wrong to assume no linkage.
The problem isn’t in the linkage, or lack of linkage, it’s in making the assumption. You might be committing the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but you might not be!
Just because you call something a fallacy does not necessarily invalidate the supposed conclusion. Just because you call something a vaccine does not necessarily confer the properties of safety and effectiveness.
Arguing that something can be dismissed because it is one of these supposed fallacies is an upmarket version of labelling someone an “anti-vaxxer” or a “conspiracy theorist”. The idea is to simultaneously make yourself look super-smart whilst making your opponent look like an imbecile.
You will all doubtless have seen the argument that because covid infections came down after lockdowns were imposed it implies that lockdowns ‘worked’. The problem is the word implies. It might be true that lockdowns resulted in the turnaround, but it also might not be. What post hoc ergo propter hoc is really telling us is that the temporal sequence of events is not sufficient evidence to draw a conclusion - either way.
But if you’re arguing that the Goo-fest has resulted in a ton of adverse reactions, you have the same problem. Just because some adverse health event occurred after getting Goo’ed up does not necessarily mean the Goo caused the problem.
And stripping away all of the fancy schmancy technical jargon this is the issue in a nutshell : how do we show that event A caused event B?
It’s often very clear. Hammer hits hand. Hand hurts. But with other data it’s not at all clear, so how do we go about figuring out causality?
If you want to see how it’s done in relation to databases like the VAERS system, or the Yellow Card reporting system, then I recommend the excellent Jessica Rose explaining it all here. It’s quite a challenge to “prove” causality with this kind of data and, of course, the best that can be done is to “prove” within a whisker. Jessica provides sufficient evidence/analysis to demonstrate to me that we’re well within a whisker away of “proving” the vaccines have caused significant problems at a much higher rate than other vaccines.
The issue is that we have a complex, and ‘noisy’, data set to work with - and it’s not always clear exactly what factors are going into the mix. You’ve also got the problem that individuals vary so that one person may experience Goo joy and another Goo harm.
The detailed statistical analyses are very important, but I think we can draw reasonable conclusions from the data without having to do anything fancy.
If you look at the reported deaths in adults from ALL vaccines administered in the UK between 2011 and 2020 you will find that for this 10 year period there is an average of 8.3 reported deaths per year. In little over a year, after the covid Goo fest, this figure has risen to over 2,000.
This difference, to put it somewhat mildly, is quite alarming. It can’t wholly be attributed to the number of shots - in 2019, for example, about 15 million flu jabs alone were administered in the UK. So whilst there has been more covid Goo administered than all other vaccines combined (in a typical year) we’re not talking an order of magnitude difference. Hard to know what the factor is but I would suppose a reasonable estimate to be 4, so that there have been 4 times as many Goo shots as all other vaccines combined.
This would mean that the rate of death reporting for the Goo is about 60 times higher than for ALL other vaccines combined.
If you’re being super disingenuous you would argue it’s because the Goo is novel and people are more aware and so report more. That’s a possible factor, but 60 is a helluva factor to explain away like this. Besides, there are numerous anecdotal reports of doctors being somewhat cautious (once again using something of an understatement) to report any side effects at all.
This alleged over-reporting is something the UK’s scheme might be more susceptible to, but we see a similar large increase in reported deaths in other vaccine side effect monitoring systems. VAERS, in particular, seems to require a little more time, effort and expertise to file an incident than the UK’s Yellow Card scheme.
One other common “explanation” is that the stonking great tumescence of reported deaths for the Goo is merely picking up a “background rate” - and coincidentally being attributed to the Goo. In other words it’s a case of
is that a post hoc ergo propter hoc in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
It’s kind of hard, for me, to even take this assertion seriously. If you’re going to go down the road of a phantom tumescence like this you would have to explain why we don’t see a similar thing when we look at ALL other vaccines combined. Is every other vaccine, other than the Goo, a coincidence suppressor?
But in some ways analysis of the adverse event reporting schemes is missing the point. It’s critical to realise these schemes are not intended to be a complete picture - they are our canaries in the coal mine. They are intended to pick up a safety signal. They’re a warning mechanism to indicate when things are (potentially) going tits up.
We’ve taken the canaries along with us, and several have died, but the pit managers are telling us to keep going because those canaries would have died anyway - it’s just coincidence.
The other weird criticism I’ve seen is that the various reporting systems are unreliable - anyone can fill out a report, apparently - and those pesky anti-vaxxers are just clogging things up with their propaganda. Right. OK. So the official monitoring schemes put in place to give us an early warning are not fit for purpose and never have been? We should just ignore them?
The various contortions that have been introduced to “explain” away the data are themselves something of a signal. They are kind of difficult to believe. No, dear, I’m not feeling horny, I didn’t have space in the shopping bag for the cucumber, so I popped it into my pocket and forgot about it.
Yeah, right.
That’s the problem I have with the various “explanations” of the Goo death spikes we see in the reported data. They induce rather too much of a yeah, right reaction in me.
It’s true that post hoc ergo propter hoc can be a logical trap, a fallacy, but when the explanations for the correlation are themselves somewhat contorted and fallacious it’s time to get Occam’s razor out and slice the hell out of that cucumber.
Well that was really entertaining while making some excellent points! Such a frustrating time. There is something wholly wrong about using language to confuse rather than enlighten. But here we are. Tower of Babelish.
I had a college professor who is an absolute expert on fallacies. We are friends to this day and he will sometimes drop in on my social media to critique one of my meme or posts by pointing out the existence of a fallacy and ask me to identify it. He does the same thing to other former students and I honestly appreciate his tenacity.
However, his dedication logical argument has a shaky track record in the area of (my many) "slippery slope" (aka thin end of wedge or bad precedent) arguments. The problem is not that his logic is flawed, but that human beings are, unless otherwise instructed, human beings not logical, at all. Especially in the realm of politics where people are fooled as easily as children are by shinning objects and/or irrational fear.
One of Tommy Lee Jones' lines in Men In Black perfectly sums up the vast majority of human beings. He says "A Person is smart, people are dumb, dangerous, panicky animals, and you know it." If anyone doubts that assessment I'd appreciate it if they could rationally explain the run on toilet paper two years ago.