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Lies, darned lies, and statistics

The Claim:

very, very, very long tweet citing a long video claims to reveal statistics about the harm from COVID vaccines in the U.S.: 26.6 million people injured, 300,000 people dead, and $150 billion in lost work time.

The Facts:

The tweet is based on a project staffed by a computer scientist and finance experts.

If vaccines were responsible for all these deaths during the pandemic, the communities with the highest vaccination rates would have a higher rate of deaths.  However, data shows that the opposite is true. The communities with the highest vaccination rates had lower death rates than the communities with low vaccination rates.

To come up with the injury statistic, the project incorrectly analyzes V-Safe data, which actually shows that over 90% of side effects were non-serious, short-acting, and self-resolving. It also relies on the infamous Florida paper, which also incorrectly analyzed data, this time from clinical trials.

It makes a number of other incorrect assumptions. For example, it claims “the emergence of milder and more contagious virus strains such as Omicron, it is difficult to argue if COVID-19 had a significant role in excess mortality.” Omicron, however, is far from benign and was associated with a large number of deaths.

COVID infection, however, has been responsible for over 1.1 million deaths and 6.1 million hospitalizations  up to 7.7 million cases of long COVID, with a cost of over $160 billion.

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