how to lie using statistics: ontario edition

here's a fun little master class in obfuscation

a lot of people seem to be misreading this data from ontario on the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis (serious and potentially fatal heart conditions) from covid vaccines.

i have a sneaking feeling that this is because it was designed to be misread. see for yourself:

take a casual read here. you’re drawn to “all gender, all doses” or perhaps to “males, all doses” or “females all doses,” no?

but what does that really mean? not much actually. it’s just the weighted average of dose one and dose 2 of any given category.

it tells you little that you are likely to care about.

but it SOUNDS like it should be an aggregate.

so you fixate on “males, all doses 18-24” and you think, aha, 103.9/mm is their risk of myo/pericarditis from vaccine.

but this is wrong. that’s the weighted average per dose.

the real risk is the sum of dose 1 and dose 2 because these kids are not getting one average dose, they are getting 2 doses to complete the course and the sets do not overlap. if you got myocarditis from dose one, no way are you going on to dose two. no doctor is going to give you dose two after such a severe adverse reaction to dose one.

so your chance is not 103.9, it’s:

42.2 for the first dose PLUS 173.3 for the second dose = 215.5 cases per million 18-24 year old males fully vaccinated.

that’s more that twice the number most people seem to be presuming represents total risk. (males 18-24: all doses)

that’s a nasty little sleight of hand.

and this is not exactly higher math…

anyone seeking to actually portray full risk from multi-dose vaccination would be presenting sums, not averages.

i very much doubt it was an accident.

this is also an extraordinarily high number compared to other vaccines. the MMR (measles, mumps rubella) vaccine had 168 reports of “serious adverse events” to VAERS in a decade. 17 per year.

there are 30 million 18-24 year olds in the US. the myo/peri ratio above would imply that these two reactions alone would be predicted to generate:

3233 cases in males + 770 cases in females = 4003 cases reported in the US from vaccinating our college age kids.

these are all serious AE’s, far more so than most for MMR which includes things like “headache.”

assuming the reporting rates are at all similar to VAERS and this alone is over 200X the rate per year of MMR, and this far from the only side effect.

so many of us trust existing vaccines because they are astonishingly safe and effective. they provide real, sterilizing immunity to disease so you do not catch it and do not spread it. they represent stunningly low risk of severe reaction. it’s below 1 per million.

prior to 2020-1, vaccine deaths had been VANISHINGLY rare.

that hard won trust in the concept of vaccines is being abused around covid as the false equivalence of “this is a vaccine, so you should trust it” gets trotted out to compare it to products it looks little like.

any other vaccine in modern history would have been pulled for this myocarditis issue alone.

the pandemrix vaccine (for h1n1) in the UK was taken off the market because it was found to be causing narcolepsy.

the rate was about 1 in 18,400, roughly 54 per million.

according to VAERS, which is certainly undercounting, these vaccines have, despite the boiler plate handwaving KILLED ~43 people per million.

i am not aware of another vaccine that even kills 1 per million.

in 2009, pandemrix was a scandal because such a massive safety issue was missed. the US never even approved it.

my, how things have changed…

the covid vaccines do not stop spread and may actually be making it worse.

and their side effects are extreme.

we have never had an FDA approved vaccine, especially for kids, that was within 1/10th and more likely 1/100th of this.

the risk reward for most adults looks iffy.

for kids it looks appalling.

and VAERS is literally off the charts.

yet instead of trying to address this and produce an honest accounting upon which people and physicians alike could base their decisions on risk and benefit, global health agencies find endless ways to cheat the data, lie with stats, mislead their citizens, and launch fusillades of faux moralizing rooted in claims that these vaccines will stop a pandemic when they know full well that they don’t.

how is anyone to sustain faith in “experts” through all that?

public health runs on public trust, and that trust has been violated.

at a certain point, all the lying and braying admonition has the effect opposite of its purported aim.

it’s amazing watching these selfsame deceivers then cast around apportioning blame for their actions onto any and all save themselves.

but the reality is simple: