You’ve probably all seen the arguments on Twittocks (Twitter𝕏). I’m not sure what we’re supposed to call Tweets these days, 𝕏eets maybe? But you’ll see things like
Tweet 1 : I know 7 people who had heart problems after taking the vax and 1 of them died
Tweet 2 : I have a large circle of friends, all vaxxed, and none have suffered any adverse effect
Both of these pieces of anecdotal evidence could be true. The problem is always in the “therefore” part that follows. Twitperson1 might say therefore, the vax is dangerous. Twitperson2 might say therefore, the vax is safe.
You may find the story of one person to be compelling, you may not, but when you have a large number of people saying a similar thing it’s certainly grounds for taking a closer look.
Except when it comes to alien abductions, of course. I think I’d need a number of anecdotes approaching infinity to convince me there’s a bunch of intergalactic little grey things who travel across the vast reaches of interstellar space just to find out what’s up a human’s backside. But that’s just me. Presumably these extra-terrestrial super beings can warp the hell out of spacetime, but haven’t yet figured out how to construct an MRI-type machine and still need to do it the old-fashioned way. Or maybe they queered their alien societies a long time ago and survived the experience.
The truth, as they say, is definitely “out there”.
My X-files story, and definitely not one for 𝕏, is one I’ve mentioned before.
A family member is a Church of England vic thing. Actually he’s moved on up the hierarchy a bit since this anecdote happened. He’s a cool dude and a wonderful person. Anyway, Father T (he was high church and liked the appellation “father”) used to perform the occasional ‘blessing’ for some of his parishioners who’d got a bit freaked out by watching things like The Exorcist one too many times.
From time to time these parishioners would think their house was possessed, or something like that. Father T would head on over and perform a ‘blessing’. The blessing was genuine - he sincerely blessed the house and the people in it, according to his beliefs - but he never thought it was doing some kind of “magic” demon-dispelling thing. It was just a way of helping his parishioners get back to normality and less frightened.
That is, until one night when Father T encountered something he couldn’t explain. He entered one place and immediately felt “off”. As he entered the room where the focus of this (he was told) was, he felt cold and terrified. He started the blessing and, as he did so, the ornaments on a sideboard started to shatter into pieces, one by one. I can’t now remember the actual words he used when describing his feelings, but I think something along the lines of “I nearly shit myself” probably encapsulates it accurately enough.
Was Father T trying to pull a fast one on me? No - I don’t believe that. That’s just not him - and it arose in the context of a pretty serious discussion we’d been having about exorcisms and the like for a couple of days when I was staying with him. Was Father T misremembering things, or hallucinating? Maybe, but I don’t think either of these is very likely. Did the family play a trick on Father T? Again, maybe, but to what end? It seems like they went to a lot of trouble, if so, to fool one vicar in a medium-sized Northern town in the UK1.
This single anecdote, if true and not some hallucination or prank, would be good evidence that there might be something “out there” not easily explicable with our current understanding of science.
But far less “out there” than my single second-hand encounter2 with the (allegedly) supernatural, are the many anecdotes we hear about vax damage. At what point does this collection of anecdotes become substantive evidence?
One of the most useful probability distributions for getting a handle on these kinds of questions is the Binomial Distribution (BD). The BD is the “pass/fail” distribution. If you’ve got two outcomes (pass or fail) that occur with some probability, then you can model n ‘trials’ using this distribution.
The classic example is a coin toss. You can think of a head, H, as a ‘pass’ and a tail, T, as a ‘fail’. You might want to know, then, what it the probability that in 10 tosses of a coin I will get 3 heads in total? And similar kinds of questions.
So, if you know 100 people (all vaxxed) and the probability of vax damage is, say, 0.01 which is 1 in a hundred, then what is the probability none of your 100 acquaintances have been damaged by the vax? You’d need the BD to get a first-pass answer at this.
There are several online tools for calculating the BD. I like this one from Matt Bognar of the University of Iowa because it gives a nice graphical output. Here’s the result for the numbers above
The n here is the number of ‘trials’ (the number of people you know). The p is the probability of ‘passing’ (the probability of vax damage). The probability that you know zero people who have been damaged is the pink bit of the graph. With these numbers it means that you’ve got about a 1 in 3 chance (a bit more than this at about 37%) to have no vax-damaged people in your circle of 100 acquaintances.
Now, I’ve described this as a “first-pass” approach. Why? Because when we use any probability distribution we make some assumption about the population we’re sampling and how we do the sampling is also important. For example, one person might be young and so his circle of acquaintances is drawn mostly from that age group. Another might be elderly and her 100 acquaintances might be more elderly. So we’re not randomly sampling the population here and it may well be that 100 young, fit, and healthy people are less susceptible to vax damage, for example.
If the probability of vax damage comes in at 1 in a thousand (p = 0.001) then you’re much more likely to know nobody who has been vax damaged using this first-pass approach. It comes in at around a 90% likelihood.
So it’s no surprise at all to me that you will have a lot of Twitperson2’s out there; people who do not know anybody who has been vax damaged.
Twitperson1’s case is more complicated. Here, there is an assignment of causality. How do we know that the observed ailments in these anecdotes are caused by the vax?
Obviously, there’s a reasonably suspicious temporal correlation. If you know a bunch of people who were previously healthy and only start to have serious health problems after taking the vax, then you’d have some strong suspicion that the vax was a causative agent here.
Not conclusive proof - but definitely something that should be triggering a few alarms.
The problem here is that you need someone with far more statistical chops than I possess to figure this out. That’s when it starts to all look a bit like technical mumbo-jumbo. And that’s when unscrupulous individuals, or those with confirmation bias, can wheedle their way in and bamboozle everyone whose statistical toolbox consists only of a hammer and a screwdriver.
This is why full data transparency is the only way forward here. Let the stats folk at it - and see who emerges victorious from the squiggles and mathematical arcana.
You can access the full UK data - but only after you’ve signed some form of NDA which I suspect has a clause preventing you from saying anything negative about the vax (some argument about vaccine hesitancy being a bad thing for public health would feature, I imagine). Access is tightly controlled and only after you’ve signed your soul away, in blood, and in triplicate.
This is not acceptable. One argument centres around the anonymity of data. If the full data is revealed, it is claimed, then personal health information could be revealed. Funny how vax status itself is not considered to be protected, personal, health information isn’t it? But it oughtn’t to be all that difficult to provide sufficiently anonymised data.
There was some recent interesting research done. The study consisted of giving a bunch of folk from different universities the same data to analyse. These different groups threw their stats packages at it all and managed to come up with a variety of different conclusions. They weren’t wildly different, as I understand it, but sufficiently different to warrant an eyebrow raise or two.
But we can trust the govt stats people, like the ONS, to get it right when playing with the data nobody else can see (except the lucky few who are granted access under NDA)?
Yeah, right.
Stats is hard. Very hard. That’s why a lot of uni math departments have a separate stats department. It’s a highly technical discipline all of its own. If you’re a bit of an amateur like me, then chances are you’ll cock things up - and I have done so far more times than I’d care to admit to, when it comes to using and interpreting stats.
Just to illustrate how easy it is to get all befuddled and confused let’s go back to tossing coins. Suppose you toss a coin 7 times, then what’s the probability you’ll get 7 heads?
This is not too difficult to work out. The probability of getting a head (with a fair coin) on a throw is 1/2. The probability of getting 2 heads on two throws is, therefore, going to be 1/4 (a half times a half). Getting 3 heads in 3 throws its a half times a half times a half - which is 1/8. And so on. So, it’s not too difficult to see that the probability of getting 7 heads in a row is going to be 1/128 (which is about 0.0078). That’s quite low.
So, armed with this knowledge, we now ask a different question. Suppose you toss the coin 40 times. What’s the probability of getting 7 heads in a row now? Well, the sequence of 7 heads doesn’t have to occur on the first 7 throws - just somewhere in the 40 throws.
This is much harder to work out and it turns out to be around 0.13 which means that in any sequence of 40 coin tosses you’re going to get at least one sequence of 7 heads 13% of the time.
You might be tempted to think (erroneously) like this. Let’s suppose I have a 40 coin toss sequence and the 7 heads occur on throws 11-17. If I had stopped at throw 10 and asked myself “what’s the probability of getting 7 heads in the next 7 throws?” then it would be approx 0.0078. So this answer of 0.13 can’t be right.
Probability can really mess with your head.
Until we have full data transparency we’re (sort of) at the anecdote level; trying to piece together elements of a detective story3.
But, remember, until we have full data transparency, that’s all the vaxx junkies have, too.
And they must have been pretty good actors to have fooled Father T. He described them as being really frightened and distressed. So the ‘prank’ hypothesis would entail this normal family being both good actors and decent engineers. This might still be seen as more likely than any ‘demonic’ type explanation, though.
Actually I have 2 such second-hand encounters. The 2nd is a bit weaker. This involves a friend (A) who was with her brother (B) in an Essex town one day. Her brother unexpectedly meets an old friend he’d not seen for years (and who was visiting from Liverpool). With this old friend was a guy whom neither A nor B had met before. Random guy then proceeds to “pass on a message” from A and B’s dad who’d recently passed.
Random guy was a ‘medium’, you see. The content of the (short) message was highly specific and accurate - none of the usual flimflam you get from TV mediums, for example. The message was “your dad wants his watch back”. And that was it. It turned out that in the weeks before their dad had passed away brother B had taken dad’s watch to be fixed. When his dad went rapidly downhill, he’d forgotten all about it and the watch was still at the jewellers. Weird one that.
Did random guy just do some research into A and B on the off-chance he’d bump into A and B on his trip down South? Was it an amazing cold read? Probably - but it was one hell of a cold read (although if random guy had picked up on some sadness in A and B and correctly attributed it to a death in the family, he might have thought it highly likely that a family member had some keepsake. From then on it’s just playing the odds).
Did random guy just accost everyone he met that day with 99% of his ‘messages’ being crap and just managing to get it right for A and B? Was random guy delighted that of the 100 times he’d used the “your dad wants his watch back” line before, this time it actually worked? All of these seem more plausible than A or B’s dad actually passing on this message.
And there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that has has piled up to suggest the vax is guilty as hell, in my view.
It's funny you'd post this today, because I mentioned that I knew 8 people who developed cardiovascular issues within a week of being vaccinated to Steve Kirsch yesterday and he decided to highlight that part in his article (https://kirschsubstack.com/p/evidence-supporting-100000-excess).
I know this is off topic but I really wish there were extra-terrestrial super beings, doesn't matter what colour grey, pink or stripes, I would be first on their spaceship asking for asylum.