I don’t know a single person who was any more inconvenienced by the vaccine than a day of nausea and a sore arm, and I work in places where vaccination is required. We were all vaccinated pretty early on last year, and we are all doing fine.
My story doesn’t matter any more than yours, because we only have one perspective and determining vaccine efficacy by simply observing whether things look weird around us isn’t scientific.
VAERS has a “how to use this data” page that directly states it doesn’t verify a single report in it. That database cannot be used to prove the vaccine harms anyone. It’s a starting point for clinicians to examine isolated lots and demographics that might spike from the baseline.
When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.
VAERS does not know the difference between a vaccine injury and a coincidence. VAERS cannot confirm it holds data for even a SINGLE vaccine injury, and it states this openly. You simply are incorrectly interpreting VAERS data under the mistaken assumption that some fraction of the cases must be legitimate. No, they don’t, and VAERS can’t help you prove otherwise.
Which is why no researchers who understand what VAERS actually is (just a tip line) are freaking out about it.
I'm not certain how you're defining the word "anecdote" in the context of your answer. My statement discourages believing worldviews based on informal observations and "what I remember to be true" rather than formal data collection.
Anecdote is "I'm looking around me and I don't see anyone dying of COVID. I don't know anyone who died of COVID. The people I know who had COVID said it was just a flu."
That's an anecdote. It's just a story you heard. You didn't collect formal data on it. You didn't verify anything. You establish and compare demographics or classify variables. You just are suggesting that you hear a lot of stories, and you assume you'd know a bunch of people who died if COVID was so dangerous. You can't use that data to establish whether or not COVID is actually dangerous, because you don't know anything except your subjective interpretation of what you informally observe.
If you were taking data and formally entering it into a database and running algorithms on that, then you weren't using anecdotes to draw conclusions about the world. You were formally turning anecdotal reporting into formal data and then doing math on it.
It's not a problem just because data comes from an anecdotal source. That's how surveys are collected. It's a problem when you try to suggest a reality about the world based on your informal observations and connections you build based on what YOU notice and what YOU happen to remember. That's not useful scientifically.
The problem is in your fundamental assumptions about VAERS, which again, go against what VAERS itself says about its own data.
Yes, the data is underreported, but that doesn't suggest that the underreported data is filled with legitimate vaccine injuries. That is an assumption you make because of your already-established conclusion that they're trying to hide something.
This is what it's saying:
VAERS wants a LOT of data. It literally wants to know about every single medical problem that happens within a few months of a vaccination for EVERY SINGLE vaccinated person in the country. Every case of the sniffles. Every headache. Every tooth that falls out of a child's head (just in case). Every time someone has to update their glasses. Every time someone gets food poisoning.
EVERYTHING.
This is why everyone is allowed to submit a report, and why doctors are required to submit a report. Because if a 98 year old alcoholic with liver cancer dies three weeks after a vaccine, VAERS wants to know about it. JUST IN CASE.
The reason that the data is considered underreported is because VAERS does not get all of this data. In fact, when you consider that it wants to know every time you have an allergy attack to pollen randomly after getting the vaccine, then yes, it absolutely makes sense it's only getting 1% of the data it wants.
Because it wants to know fucking everything. JUST IN CASE. Because that's the point of VAERS. It's just a tip line so that researchers can establish a baseline, and the more of these random aches and pains they can record, the more stable and robust that baseline will be.
There is nothing in VAERS to suggest that the underreported data consists of even a single vaccine injury. VAERS cannot confirm it's ever registered a single vaccine injury. It asks for data that it knows can be 100% comprised of unrelated coincidences, and it still wants that data. Because that's what VAERS is for.
Your fundamental assumption about the data you're using and what it represents (and therefore, how you can work with it) is incorrect, and this confirmed by VAERS itself.
If you think you can build an empirical picture of confirmed vaccine injuries from data that is incapable and unwilling to take any measure to confirm that ANY vaccine injuries exist within its dataset, then you are trying to do magic, not math.
The plural of anecdotes is not data.
I don’t know a single person who was any more inconvenienced by the vaccine than a day of nausea and a sore arm, and I work in places where vaccination is required. We were all vaccinated pretty early on last year, and we are all doing fine.
My story doesn’t matter any more than yours, because we only have one perspective and determining vaccine efficacy by simply observing whether things look weird around us isn’t scientific.
VAERS has a “how to use this data” page that directly states it doesn’t verify a single report in it. That database cannot be used to prove the vaccine harms anyone. It’s a starting point for clinicians to examine isolated lots and demographics that might spike from the baseline.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html
VAERS does not know the difference between a vaccine injury and a coincidence. VAERS cannot confirm it holds data for even a SINGLE vaccine injury, and it states this openly. You simply are incorrectly interpreting VAERS data under the mistaken assumption that some fraction of the cases must be legitimate. No, they don’t, and VAERS can’t help you prove otherwise.
Which is why no researchers who understand what VAERS actually is (just a tip line) are freaking out about it.
I'm not certain how you're defining the word "anecdote" in the context of your answer. My statement discourages believing worldviews based on informal observations and "what I remember to be true" rather than formal data collection.
Anecdote is "I'm looking around me and I don't see anyone dying of COVID. I don't know anyone who died of COVID. The people I know who had COVID said it was just a flu."
That's an anecdote. It's just a story you heard. You didn't collect formal data on it. You didn't verify anything. You establish and compare demographics or classify variables. You just are suggesting that you hear a lot of stories, and you assume you'd know a bunch of people who died if COVID was so dangerous. You can't use that data to establish whether or not COVID is actually dangerous, because you don't know anything except your subjective interpretation of what you informally observe.
If you were taking data and formally entering it into a database and running algorithms on that, then you weren't using anecdotes to draw conclusions about the world. You were formally turning anecdotal reporting into formal data and then doing math on it.
It's not a problem just because data comes from an anecdotal source. That's how surveys are collected. It's a problem when you try to suggest a reality about the world based on your informal observations and connections you build based on what YOU notice and what YOU happen to remember. That's not useful scientifically.
The problem is in your fundamental assumptions about VAERS, which again, go against what VAERS itself says about its own data.
Yes, the data is underreported, but that doesn't suggest that the underreported data is filled with legitimate vaccine injuries. That is an assumption you make because of your already-established conclusion that they're trying to hide something.
This is what it's saying:
VAERS wants a LOT of data. It literally wants to know about every single medical problem that happens within a few months of a vaccination for EVERY SINGLE vaccinated person in the country. Every case of the sniffles. Every headache. Every tooth that falls out of a child's head (just in case). Every time someone has to update their glasses. Every time someone gets food poisoning.
EVERYTHING.
This is why everyone is allowed to submit a report, and why doctors are required to submit a report. Because if a 98 year old alcoholic with liver cancer dies three weeks after a vaccine, VAERS wants to know about it. JUST IN CASE.
The reason that the data is considered underreported is because VAERS does not get all of this data. In fact, when you consider that it wants to know every time you have an allergy attack to pollen randomly after getting the vaccine, then yes, it absolutely makes sense it's only getting 1% of the data it wants.
Because it wants to know fucking everything. JUST IN CASE. Because that's the point of VAERS. It's just a tip line so that researchers can establish a baseline, and the more of these random aches and pains they can record, the more stable and robust that baseline will be.
There is nothing in VAERS to suggest that the underreported data consists of even a single vaccine injury. VAERS cannot confirm it's ever registered a single vaccine injury. It asks for data that it knows can be 100% comprised of unrelated coincidences, and it still wants that data. Because that's what VAERS is for.
Your fundamental assumption about the data you're using and what it represents (and therefore, how you can work with it) is incorrect, and this confirmed by VAERS itself.
If you think you can build an empirical picture of confirmed vaccine injuries from data that is incapable and unwilling to take any measure to confirm that ANY vaccine injuries exist within its dataset, then you are trying to do magic, not math.