Bad Science, Bad Journalism Used to Argue Against Concerns about the Safety of the Vaccines

Here's the video about vaccine deaths in Israel that I linked in my previous post about HCQ, after which it was taken down from You Tube for "violating [their] terms of service," by which of course they mean violating their politics.   

Fortunately these days we do have some other options for presering such censored information, such as, in the case of videos, Rumble or Bitchute.  I've only recently become aware of hem, but I found out immediately that they are dismissed by liberals as "right wing conspiracy" bastions, at least Rumble is, and I encountered that attitude toward Parler some time ago.  It's not that the sites are aimed at conservatives, just that conservatives go there because they are getting banned on the familiar social media.   Ah well, at least some censored material is available.   So this one was reposted both at Rumble and Bitchute.  Since a liberal friend treated it as "disinformation" because it was on Rumble (sigh) I'm glad to know it's also on Bitchute, although for all I know that will be dismissed in the same way.  ANYWAY, here it is on Bitchute.

Many Dying in Israel Following the Experimental Pfizer COVID mRNA Injections (bitchute.com)

This is an Israeli Christian man presenting a radio news broadcast in Israel on which the news announcer, Mordechai Sones,  reads a list of people who died soon after getting the Pfizer vaccine.  He reports names, ages, and whatever is known about their medical condition when they got the vaccine, and the circumstances of their death afterward.   The idea is to warn people that the vaccine can be dangerous for some people despite the general hyping of it by the government.

 Although the information is pretty straightforward, just a list of facts, as I say above it can be dismissed by a liberal mindset for being on a "rightwing" platform or for other reasons.  The host of the video comments after playing the radio broadcast that Bill Gates who is a major promoter of the vaccines, has said he thinks the world population needs to be drastically decreased, and this has led to suspicion about the safety of the vaccines he's promoting.  Which the video host mentions.  And that of course is a "conspiracy theory" which somehow becomes a reason to dismiss what the radio announcer said although there is no connection between the two.  (sigh).   Gates certainly isn't going to be advocating something he knows to be lethal (I assume) but he does manage to say things that make people nervous.  Anyway, again, it's irrelevant to the content of the radio broadcast.

The main argument against it is that somehow people who connect the deaths to the vaccine have failed to take into account that the people would have died anyway.. I was sent an article in response to the video that insists that is the case. 

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-conspiracy-theories-undermine-peoples-trust-in-covid-19-vaccines    How Conspiracy Theories Undermine People’s Trust in COVID-19 Vaccines 

The article is presented as if it's a reasoned  discussion of objections to the vaccine, but it's the usual leftist hit piece that attacks persons rather than the argument, and then when it finally gets around to offering some evidence it's addressed to a complete misrepresenation of the objection.  This is propaganda and it's distressing that many treat it as objective.

Vaccine-hesitant groups are exploiting the deaths of people who died of old age or underlying health conditions after receiving the COVID-19 shot to undermine trust in the vaccines. WesScientists say some deaths will occur during the COVID-19 vaccination rollout, but these deaths would have happened for other reasons and are unrelated to the vaccine.

 What does "vaccine-hesitant" mean?   A personality disorder?  A genetic disease?  What if it's an evolutionary adaptation that would benefit the "species" if  the less fit types don't wipe them out? (Yeah I know that by definition they can't be evolutionarily superior if they could be wiped out, but the fact is that it could happen and the ToE  just gets things wrong all the time.)   But I'm being silly.  Sort of.  The point is why are they talking about people at all, either groups or individuals?   

A credible approach would be to address the facts presented as evidence against the safety of the vaccine, not the people raising the doubts.. The whole thrust of this piece is to smear those who believe the vaccines can be dangerous, but in reality they believe this not because they are somehow defective personalities but because of the evidence as they perceive it.  If they are wrong it's because sometimes people get thigs wrong, including scientists, so deal with their evidence.  This kind of writing is nothing but character assassination, a kind of "journalism" that used to be condemned, but it seems to be standard practice these days in the service of a particular ideology.

And it goes on to tell us that these obviously defective "vaccine-hesitant" human beings have scurrilous motivations, as they are exploiting the deaths of people who died of old age or underlying health conditions after receiving the COVID-19 shot to undermine trust in the vaccines

Wow.   "Exploiting?"  Wow.  And exploiting with the intention of "undermine trust" as if they just have some predetermined need to exploit and undermine trust.  What sleazy "reporting."  I wonder how long it took to select the terms with which to construct this picture of obviously horrible people.   

Eventually some evidence is offered:

...latching onto reports of real deaths following the shot, blaming the vaccine and disregarding medical information that other causes are to blame...

“Older people in nursing homes are being prioritized for the vaccine [and] that’s a group of people who are dying at a higher rate already.”

Ignoring that important context is a strategy ...  

"...[people] should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility.” [Moore said]

But there was more to Moore’s statement that the meme left out, Reuters reported. She went on to say, “That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes.”

The additional context clarifies that Moore is saying deaths in nursing homes that have nothing to do with the vaccine should be expected. 

Is this convincing?  For starters, why would people who distrust the vaccine be employing a "strategy" to discredit it?  It's a very strange idea that people just have this irrational need to fnd fault rather than that they honestly believe there is reason to consider the vaccines dangerous.  Instead of smearing the people who have such concerns, shouldn't the aim of such an article be simply to prove them wrong with real information?  The fact that elderly people die in greater numbers than others anyway is not exactly evidence.  Where are the statistics showing that they normally die at the same rate they are dying after being vaccinated.  OK, so they go on to offer some statistical support: 

According to [The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook],, “if we vaccinate 10 million people and the vaccine had no side effects whatsoever, then over the following two months we can nonetheless expect that 4,025 of those vaccinated will have a heart attack, 3,975 will have a stroke, 9,500 will have a new diagnosis of cancer, and 14,000 will, unfortunately, die.”

“The key is that statistically bad things will happen to a small percentage of people after vaccination even if the vaccines are perfectly safe,” Dr. Robert Wachter, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Healthline in an email.

Yeah, plausible enough in the abstract but you still have to show that this is in fact what is going on.  We need the number of deaths that have occurred after taking the vaccine to compare with these averages.  Are the numbers the same or not?   There is a dearth of examples of the thinking of the so-called "vaccine-hesitant" people in this article, all we get is these claims that they are attributing deaths to the vaccine that would have occurred anyway.  Lots of innuendo, no actual evidence.

Perhaps the video I posted above is unusual among the "vaccine-hesitant" but the radio announcer gives quite a bit of specific information where it's available.   I went back and counted:  28 deaths were listed and he stopped because he didn't have time to include more.  For some of them he says only that the person died "after receiving" the vaccine, giving no time frame, but for 16 of them he says how soon they died, and most died within days, a couple a week, one a few weeks, two "immediately after."  Most were elderly but there were a few in their forites, and two in their twenties.  Underlying conditions were mentioned in a few cases, but many were described as completely healthy before getting the vaccine.   While it's possible a few of the deaths were unrelated to the vaccine, it's highly unlikely given the facts that any more than that were coincidental.  The circumstances point to the vaccine as the cause.

The article was sesnt to me as an answer to the video's associatio of the deaths with the vaccine.  It should be quite clear that the people on the list did not die of old age but of the vaccine.  For one thing the deaths occurred very close to the time the shot was given, so the two months range of the article's statistics is not applicable.   And if you're talking about the normal frequency of deaths in elderly people -- or those with underlying conditions -- they don't just up and die all of a sudden as these people did.  The statistics are irrelevant.  This is just propaganda based on plausibe-sounding insinuations, not science despite the usual invocation of science as what makes their thinking superior and trustworthy.  No, it's all just "narrative" buttressed by word salad sprinkled with denigrating words for the doubters and references to credentials and "experts" and sciencey terms for the good guys in the story.   It's a shoddy piece of propaganda that should never have been published, and wouldn't have been in saner times.

I think this quote from  Robert F. Kennedy, a "vaccine-hesitant " "activist" nails it:  

“Coincidence is turning out to be quite lethal to COVID vaccine recipients,”

They actually called this an "emotional" argument.  No, it's just a very funny way of saying how shoddy their reasoning is.

The reasoning is as bad as those many studies of hydroxychloroquine I've mentioned.   They did the studies on hospitalized patients who are normally too sick to benefit from HCQ plus zinc; in some cases they administered the HCQ without the zinc which is useless since it's the zinc that kills the virus while the HCQ is the means of its delivery;   they also failed to distinquish between the low-risk patients who would have recovered without any treatment and the high-risk patients who die in the greatest numbers, and would certainly die even if given HCQ and zinc, because it was given too late to benefit them.  Science has been takinjg a beatinjg lately, in these ridiculous studies and in this ridiculous article that's supposed to prove the vaccines are safe and objectors are idiots.  Politics seems to kill off IQ points.

It's been hard to write this post because I kept wantinjg to answer the endless errors in the article.  Choosing a few to make the point was quite a chore.  I hope I succeeded and didn't leave out anything essential.