Does the crowing of a rooster cause the sun to rise?
Harry: A follower of this blog, recently wrote to me about the experience of his senior friend, Harry. With permission, I relay the story here and add some thoughts.
Harry was 80 years old and living a healthy, robust life. He did his own home improvement projects, he was mobile and drove everywhere--he lived an active life. His only health concern was a bit of a problem with high blood pressure (who doesn’t at his age?) that was well controlled with a statin drug.
But, soon after his third shot (booster), his shoulder in the non-injection arm began stiffening. After that, one side of his groin became very painful and the pain migrated to the other side and then began shooting into his legs. Within weeks, he was unable to walk, relying on a walker or wheelchair. He became home-bound. His painful arm is now useless—he needs to hoist it with his other hand to get dressed. Same with both legs. Harry gets by each day on pain meds, but he is reluctant to take a higher dosage to fully control the pain as it makes him too groggy, so he only sleeps an hour or two at night due to the pain, then catnaps in his recliner throughout the day.
This sudden and quick decline began about a month after his booster shot so he was convinced his new maladies were a consequence of the vaccine.
VAERS: Harry’s case is the sort of case that is reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting Site or VAERS. When someone begins experiencing untoward health problems soon after vaccination they or their doc can easily report it on the VAERS site, which has served as an early warning system for identifying rare side effects of vaccines since 1990. Thousands of people have reported post-vaccination symptoms, and the site is accessible to anyone. Hence, there is a CDC database listing thousands of reports of health problems following COVID vaccination that you can pull up after a few clicks.
The CDC uses this uncorroborated raw anecdotal information to look for patterns that could point to previously unknown side effects of vaccines. This is common practice for all medicines after they have been approved for use. Data from clinical trials that form the basis for approval or rejection of a new medicine or vaccine only include results from ~40,000 test subjects. That is enough to discover very significant and fairly common side effects. But, after the medicine gets on the market, patient data still are collected in order to see if there are serious side effects that only appear in, say, one out of 250,000 people and that would not be found during the clinical trial on just 40,000 subjects. Remember the COX-2 anti-inflammatory drugs that were widely used in the 90s but were pulled because they were found to cause rare, but serious cardiovascular problems? This was found by collecting post-approval data from a few million people who had taken the drugs. Evaluating data collected after a medicine is on the market is referred to as post-market or Phase IV research. This is what the CDC uses the VAERS database for.
The CDC then digs into the raw VAERS reports to make sense of them. They first confirm the reports and then to see if they are just correlations or causative. Scientists look at further health data on the patients, and look for similar recurring problems in other patients. This also means that the raw data reported on the VAERS site are just that—raw. The raw data you can see on the site have not been confirmed or determined to have actually arisen from a vaccine side effect. In fact, the VAERS web site carries this clear disclaimer:
“VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.”
The task for the CDC then is to separate health complaints that are just coincidental (i.e., that would have happened anyway without the vaccine) from those that are causal (i.e., that were caused by the vaccine). The fact alone that someone vomited a day after being vaccinated cannot be taken as proof that the vaccine caused the vomiting. There is a big difference between correlation, i.e., when two unrelated things happen together, vs causation when one thing leads to the other thing.
But, this is what the vaccine naysayers are doing—they look at the VAERS site and believe that all those raw reports are causative reports showing that the vaccines harm people. In other words, they completely ignore (or do not even read) the CDC disclaimer that the VAERS data are very incomplete and require further investigation before any conclusions can be drawn. When you hear someone on social media, TV, or the radio claim that tens of thousands of people have been seriously hurt by the vaccines, they are basing that claim on an incompetent (and possibly dishonest) use of the raw, uncorroborated VAERS data. I know this because every time I ask someone to back up their claim that the vaccines have injured tens of thousands of people, they eventually cite the VAERS database. When I quiz them further, most clearly have not even looked at the complicated VAERS web site, but are reporting second hand what they have heard elsewhere.
The truth is that few of the VAERS reports have been confirmed to be related to vaccination. Furthermore, the side effects mostly are of the “sore arm” variety, while serious health effects are vanishingly rare. Only about 200 people have actually died from the vaccines. All this compares to the almost 900,000 deaths (and counting) from COVID, and the ~20 million (and counting) cases of long term debilitation from long COVID. Remember, both the deaths and long COVID are prevented by the vaccines.
Back to Harry: Harry developed his debilitating conditions shortly after his third shot and attributed his woes to the vaccine. That is a temporal correlation—the debilitation happened shortly after the vaccine. But, is there anything that proves the vaccine caused Harry’s debilitation? Well, a deep dive into Harry’s medical condition, like the CDC does into the data in its VAERS data, proves the vaccine did not cause Harry’s condition.
Sadly, a couple of days ago my blog friend told me that recent scans showed a mass on Harry’s lung. He has end-stage lung cancer that has spread to his pelvic bones and shoulder causing severe bone lesions and the pain. He will soon die from untreatable advanced cancer. It seems that Harry has a 50+ history as a smoker. But, he, as well as folks who abuse the VAERS system, totally ignore that kind of history and jump on the less-likely correlation between vaccination and diminishing health as proving a cause and effect relationship between the two. In doing this, people must assume that there could be no other causative factor for any malady that appears shortly after vaccination. Harry himself, ignored his long history of smoking, which is, by far, the leading cause of lung cancer, while the vaccines have been associated with zero cases of cancer.
This is a sad example of the mental gymnastics anti-vaxers resort to in order to confirm their bias against the vaccine. Real data be damned once they see a simple correlation that fits their bias.
Bottom line: Just as the vaccine did not cause Harry’s cancer, the crowing of the rooster does not cause the sun to rise. Both are correlations of events only temporally, not causally related.
Do not buy into the claims that the VAERS shows that people are suffering by the thousands from the vaccines. It is not true.