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    Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of February 15, 2024

    Is the COVID vaccine more dangerous than COVID?

    The Claim:

    video featuring a cardiologist claims that only 120,000 Americans have died from COVID while 550,000 have died from COVID vaccination.

    The Facts:

    The cardiologist claims only 10% of deaths listed as COVID deaths are primary causes of death; therefore of the 1.2 million deaths due to COVID, only 120,000 are legitimate COVID deaths. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how death certificate data is filled out. Some (approximately 6% of cases according to this CDC interview) were filled out with COVID-19 listed as the primary cause of death. However, “the cause of death section on the death certificate is designed in a specific way . . . to elicit a sequence of events leading to death.”

    The cardiologist gives the example of a case of COVID-19 where respiratory distress was the cause of death, but  “respiratory distress” is the primary cause of death, followed by what caused that distress (possibly viral pneumonia) followed then on the 3rd line the cause of that viral pneumonia – COVID, which would have occurred first in the sequence of events. Without COVID, this person would likely be alive.

    The claim that side effects are underreported by a factor of about 30 comes from this analysis by a famed anti-vaxxer, starting with the false premise that the reporting rate for adverse events to VAERS after vaccination is proportional to the actual incidence of adverse events.

    This assumption has several problems, namely that VAERS reports are not proof of causation. In fact, any death after COVID vaccination was required to be reported by law as a function of the EUA, regardless of causation, meaning deaths not caused by the vaccine are included in these reports. Attempting to use that percentage of deaths that occurred after vaccination, regardless of cause as proportional to the number of deaths caused by the vaccine, is false.

    These claims wildly underestimated the number of deaths due to COVID by misunderstanding death certificates and wildly overestimated the number of serious adverse events by misusing VAERS. Is it poor math or lying with numbers? You decide.

    Disclaimer: Science is always evolving and our understanding of these topics may have evolved since this was originally posted. Browse the latest information posted in Just the Facts Topics.

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