Re:What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity
by throwawayboise on Thursday February 03, 2022 @04:18PM
(#30199010)
Other vaccines e.g. the common "childhood" ones are uncontroverisal and given on a rather steady basis as people reach the appropriate ages. The COVID vaccines were pushed to everybody in a time window of months, and with a huge amount of controversy and media attention. Given that, I would expect a spike not only in the raw number of adverse reactions, but also a higher proportion of them actually being reported.
Re:What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity
by ceejayoz on Thursday February 03, 2022 @04:45PM
(#30199401)
> All this is to say: yes the data are noisy, but we'd need to erase/explain away the numbers by at least an order of magnitude to erase the spike we are seeing, and that seems like a tall order.
That's fairly easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
This is 100% true, but it leaves out some context.
Prior to covid, it was thought that vaccine side effects were statistically underreported by a significant amount in VAERS. For the signal we are seeing in VAERS to be totally spurious seems highly unlikely, given this fact. It's also worth noting that effects which have a significant time-delay are unlikely to be captured.
All this is to say: yes the data are noisy, but we'd need to erase/explain away the numbers by at least an order of magnitude to erase the spike we are seeing, and that seems like a tall order.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232983/