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Yep, that “Correlation-Canada” appears to be another professional looking pseudoscience site.

I notice that the twitter post only linked to that website, but not to any supposed proof of anything. The failure to provide a link to the actual article is, of course, a huge red flag. Professional antivaxxers *never* want anyone to fact-check. It looks like, in this case, Bob didn’t even want the pseudoscience fact-checked.

Overall, this site seems to rely on the “correlation always equals causation” fallacy to make its point. I did find an article there which tries to link vaccines to all-cause mortality. Not to vaccine mortality, but to all-cause mortality. It shows a bunch of graphs of mortality data of different countries. They all show increased mortality when the pandemic showed up. These graphs also show vaccine roll-outs. Then it tries to make a correlation between vaccine roll-out and deaths.

There are multiple problems with this kind of inference in lieu of analysis. For example, the pandemic did not spread equally in all countries. In the US, where quite a number of people travel to and from China, the pandemic arrived fairly early on. Combined with the efforts of professional antivaxxers to redirect people’s fear of the pandemic to fear of countermeasures, cases and deaths in the US rose more rapidly than anywhere else in the world. But in other countries where people do not travel much to or from China, it took longer for the pandemic to arrive. Thus, a chart that shows vaccine rollouts superimposed over when people started dying from the pandemic is meaningless; it only shows that the pandemic started spreading in that country around the same time that vaccines arrived. No conclusion about vaccine safety can be drawn from that.

The only way to know about vaccine safety is through rigorous controlled trials and post-market surveillance. There are plenty of scientists who do those trials and analyze the data. What the scientists say is that the vaccine is comparable in safety to other vaccines, and that the risk of serious adverse events is orders of magnitude lower than the risk of serious adverse outcomes from catching Covid.

I’ve seen a graph that correlates the release of Nicholas Cage movies with increases in suicide. Does that mean that Nicholas Cage movies cause people to suicide? I don’t think so.

I like Malone.

The only two people I know who got Covid had all the shots and boosters. One is a friend who works as a caregiver, got Moderna shots. First time she got covid, she was very sick, second time not very sick.

And just this weekend, my daughter’s best friend, a good little liberal (horrors!) with tons of money and a great home came down with Covid. I had dinner at her house a few weeks ago and she was aghast when I told her my MD advised against shots and that the CEO of Pfizer got Covid.