As I wrote in my article on mass formation, there are basically 3 types of people:
Red pill: see what is really going on
Blue pill: see what they are told to see (“in the matrix”)
People “in between”
Al is a #3. He can be convinced, but requires “traditional” methods.
For example, he believes the Barda paper is correct but I said it was junk science due to Figure 3. It is IMPOSSIBLE for the vaccine to reduce your risk of many of these symptoms; there is no mechanism for that. Plus the VAERS data shows I’m right.
The VAERS data will never convince him. Instead, I have to find an error in the methodology of the paper, not just prove the paper is junk since the conclusions are nonsensical.
I suggested a middle ground where he issues a statement saying I’m not full of shit and there may be something to what I’m saying.
This would help advance our cause and get the parties to talk to each other.
Stay tuned…
Mark Reeder has shown how the dynamic matching methodology used by Barda and many other studies is seriously flawed because it employs informative censoring that can introduce bias. Matthew Crawford can explain it to you or to Al: https://zenodo.org/record/5243901
And then there is this paper from the journal Epidemiology showing that when an analysis of a drug shows an off-target benefit, that should be taken as an indication of bias/confounding: "Negative Controls: A Tool for Detecting Confounding and Bias in Observational Studies" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3053408/
The fact that the study censored people who died is problematic. That means if you die of a heart attack, you are censored out of the study rather than counted as a heart attack. So the rates of many AE's is likely undercounted. If the AE's are more likely to lead to death among the vaccinated than among those with COVID, then the method will misrepresent comparative risk.
Also you can't compare vaccine to covid risks without taking age into account. They issued a clarification later that broke the results down by some age groups, but the age groups were very large so still difficult to say. For example their younger age group was under 50 or under 40, but we know vaccine myocarditis affects very young men most frequently. If you don't look at that group then you end up either underestimating or missing missing the effect altogether. What this tells us is that we need the analysis broken down by age and gender groups for all AE's not just myocarditis and the AE's examined need to be expanded beyond the 20 or so in that paper.
Steve, bring this up with Al: The Barda paper included people aged 16 and older and lumped them all together in the charts, calculations and results which it should NOT do. All the data so far that I have read over these last two years shows:
1. Teens and 20-somethings have the high vaccine myocarditis risk and the low Covid risk,
2. Middle aged adults have Covid risk similar to influenza and increased risk of vax induced sudden cardiac death.
3. Elderly have high Covid risk, higher than influenza and possibly higher than vax induced risk.
These three age groups should NOT be lumped together in the conclusion. The data should have been presented with different charts for each age range. It's not surprising that averaging groups of high vax risk/low covid risk with groups of high covid risk/low vax risk will obscure the signal in the data.
People keep arguing in "all or none" fashion that the vax is either "good" or "bad" for everyone. We have to get back to the sensible argument that the mRNA vaccine has a favorable risk/benefit profile for the elderly and obese, a questionable profile for those in middle age, and an awful profile for those under 30. Several countries in Europe have banned Moderna in the under 30s because of unacceptable myocarditis risk. But they didn't ban it in elderly.
Berenson had a great line in his last post "It’s about risking the hearts of healthy kids to make morbidly obese adults feel a little better". I would modify to say "morbidly obese adults and the elderly ......."
If you concede that the risk benefit profile of the vax in the elderly and obese is favorable, than Al and other open minded individuals may concede that the risk/benefit profile is unfavorable in the young. And maybe we would be able to halt this injection in young people.