There is absolutely a scientific way to test that.
You find 100 people who have COVID who are vaccinated, and 100 people who are unvaccinated. Then you record which people get worse.
If the unvaccinated group suffers from more severe COVID symptoms than does the vaccinated group, then you can safely say that the vaccine appears to reduce the severity of symptoms in infected individuals, and therefore, based on these results, "it would have been worse if you were unvaccinated."
That's how you'd test it scientifically. The hypothesis is either correct or incorrect, and through observation and data, you can reach a conclusion.
Is there any data comparing the severity of COVID infection between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations?
Saying you don't trust the tests or the data that exist is not the same thing as it being impossible to scientifically test your hypothesis. And thank goodness, since a testable, falsifiable hypothesis is the only kind that can be considered researchable.
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.
There is absolutely a scientific way to test that.
You find 100 people who have COVID who are vaccinated, and 100 people who are unvaccinated. Then you record which people get worse.
If the unvaccinated group suffers from more severe COVID symptoms than does the vaccinated group, then you can safely say that the vaccine appears to reduce the severity of symptoms in infected individuals, and therefore, based on these results, "it would have been worse if you were unvaccinated."
That's how you'd test it scientifically. The hypothesis is either correct or incorrect, and through observation and data, you can reach a conclusion.
Is there any data comparing the severity of COVID infection between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations?
Saying you don't trust the tests or the data that exist is not the same thing as it being impossible to scientifically test your hypothesis. And thank goodness, since a testable, falsifiable hypothesis is the only kind that can be considered researchable.
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.