Today we explore the difference between ‘after’ and ‘from’! Because it concerns a famous fallacy called “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc“. So what does this cool-sounding Latin phrase mean? As per Wikipedia, it means: “after this, therefore because of this”. It is the interpretation that something happens after an event to something from it. Take the example of the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Adverse Event Reporting System
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States uses VAERS as a system to monitor adverse events following vaccination. The data was meant for the medical researchers to find patterns and, thereby, potential impacts of vaccines on human health. Naturally, the system gets scores of events ranging from minor health effects to deaths. And a section of the crowd interprets and propagates these events due to vaccination. So, where is the fallacy here?
What happened in 2020
The number of people who died in the US due to heart disease in 2020 is 696,962, which is about 2000 per million population. The figure is 1800 for cancer, 500 for respiratory illness and 310 for diabetes. So, roughly 4610 per million per year due to these four types of diseases.
Thought experiment
Let’s divide 20 million Americans into two hypothetical groups of 10 million each. The first group took the vaccine over one month, and the second did not. What is the expected number of people from the unvaccinated group to die of the four causes mentioned previously? About 3840. But they do not report to the VAERS.
On the other hand, imagine a similar death rate to the vaccinated group. If 10% of those 3840 people report the incident in the system, it will make 384 reports or about 4600 in the whole year.
The first case will be forgotten as fate, whereas the second will be celebrated by the media as: “vaccine kills thousands”!
References
Diseases and Conditions: CDC
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS): CDC
