The “99% survive COVID” argument is deceptive and completely misses the point

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Fallacy Man

covid vaccineThroughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the argument that “99% of COVID patients survive” has been repeatedly used as an excuse to oppose public health measures including mask mandates, lockdowns, and, more recently, vaccines. It asserts that because COVID has a ~99% survivorship, is not really that big of a concern and vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc. are not needed.

There are many issues with this argument, but before I talk specifically about COVID-19, I want to discuss a hypothetical disease. Imagine that the majority of people who become infected with this hypothetical disease are fine. Roughly 70% of people are asymptomatic. Really serious consequences that could alter the rest of the victim’s life only occur in about 0.5% of cases, and over 99.5% of patients make a full recovery. Actual mortality is even lower. The exact number varies, but even on the high end, over 99.9% people survive.

Now, when I present this hypothetical disease like that, it probably doesn’t sound that bad. Simply giving you those numbers without any additional context makes the disease sound pretty benign, and you might be tempted to use this “>99% live” argument and argue that we don’t really need a massive vaccine push and should just wait for natural herd immunity.

Here’s the thing though. I lied when I said this was a hypothetical disease. Those are the stats for polio (CDC Pinkbook), a notoriously horrible disease that was once a scourge on our planet causing thousands of cases of paralysis and even death. It is a disease that, thanks to vaccines, we very rightly sent into oblivion in nearly every part of the world. If, however, instead of using vaccines, we had listened to this “99% live” argument, we would still have polio in countries like the USA, and children would still be getting infected, paralyzed, and even killed by this disease. Ninety-nine percent survival is not as high as it sounds, nor is it the only factor that has to be considered, but it can sound very persuasive when it is presented without the other necessary pieces of information.

Please, keep this in mind as we now turn our attention to COVID. If you are tempted to dismiss the severity of COVID or the necessity of vaccines because COVID “only” kills 1% of patients, keep in mind that polio “only” paralyzed 0.5% of its victims and killed less than 0.1%.

Note: The actual COVID case fatality rate is affected by many factors (e.g., age). As such, it is far more complicated than a simple “99%,” and you should not confuse that number with the notion that you personally have a 99% chance of survival. Nevertheless, 99% is the number I keep seeing people use, and it is a rough approximation of an average for many parts of the world, so for simplicity, I will continue using it here.

Infection prevalence matters

One of the key problems with the “99% survive” argument is that it completely ignores the importance of transmissibility and infection prevalence (i.e., how easily a disease can spread). You see, a disease can be a serious threat to a population (in terms of mortality) either by having a high case fatality rate (i.e., killing a large percentage of patients) or by being highly contagious (i.e., infecting a large number of people), and case fatality rates can be very misleading by themselves.

Consider, for example, two hypothetical diseases (A and B). A has an extremely high case fatality rate of 100%, but it is not very contagious and has a very low prevalence in the population. Only about 1 in 1 million people will catch it.  In contrast, disease B has a much lower case fatality rate (1%), but is extremely contagious, and about 1 in 10 people will catch it.

This means that in a population of 10 million people, disease A will kill 10 people, whereas disease B will kill 10 thousand people! So, which of those diseases should you be more concerned about? Obviously disease B is more concerning, right? You are at a higher risk of dying form disease B, even though 99% of patients survive. Why? Because it is so common.

If you admit this basic fact, that disease B would be more concerning than disease A, then you have just admitted that case fatality rate is not sufficient in and of itself to tell you how concerning a disease is. If we had relied only on case fatalities, we would have incorrectly concluded that disease A was the bigger risk. This clearly demonstrates that the “99% survive” argument is not a good argument, because we have to look at other factors besides just survivorship (the opposite of case fatalities), and even a disease with a 99% survival rate can be very dangerous to both populations at large and you personally if it is highly contagious.

To put it simply, when considering risk, you need to consider both how likely you are to be infected, and how likely you are to die (or suffer serious consequences) if you are infected.

In the case of COVID19, a large part of why it is so dangerous is its high rate of transmission, with new variants like the Delta strain making the situation even worse. That is why it has been able to kill over 4 million people world-wide, with over 600,000 deaths in the US alone.

Those are sobering numbers, which should really make you stop and think long and hard about the veracity of the “99% survival” argument. To me, it seems self-evident that a disease that has already killed over 600,000 people in the US alone is a serious problem that merits something like a massive vaccination campaign, and the argument that the disease is not dangerous/doesn’t merit vaccines is clearly flawed.

Indeed, in 2020, COVID was the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA, behind only cancer and heart disease (Ahmad and Anderson 2021), and in early 2021, it spiked to the #1 cause of death in the US (a situation that is no longer the case thanks in part to vaccines). That’s what COVID looks like when it is not controlled by measures like vaccines, and it should be abundantly apparent from that situation that simply having a 99% survival rate does not mean that a disease isn’t a serious threat. Indeed, if you are going to argue that we don’t need to be that worried about COVID 19, then you had better make that same argument about literally every other cause of death, because when allowed to spread, COVID kills more than any of them (or if you want to arbitrarily restrict yourself to the 2020 data, you’d better make that argument about every cause of death other than cancer and heart disease).

To put all of that another way, a 99% survival rate is only comforting if the spread of the disease is being controlled by something like vaccines. A 99% survival rate without vaccines still results in hundreds of thousands of people dying. That is a simple fact.

Natural herd immunity is a misnomer

Proponents of the “99% survive” argument often say that we will eventually achieve natural herd immunity, at which point people will be protected even without vaccines. Let me briefly explain why that is a terrible idea.

The term “herd immunity” really only makes sense within the context of vaccines. Vaccine-induced herd immunity = a population that is protected from a disease. “Natural herd immunity” = a survivorship bias in which the survivors of the outbreak are protected from future infection and many previous herd members died. “Natural herd immunity” is a bloodbath. It’s a nonsense term.

Estimates for what it would take to achieve herd immunity to COVID vary, but even at the (probably) unrealistically low end of 60% immune, getting there in the US without vaccines would involve the deaths of roughly 2 million Americans! At what is probably the more realistic threshold of 90% immune, without vaccines, we are looking at about ~3 million dead Americans.

That’s not herd immunity; that’s herd culling. Alternatively, we can achieve actual herd immunity with vaccines without killing 2–3 million people.

Disease risk is more than just death

One of the many deceptive aspects of the “99% survive” argument is that it acts as if COVID infection is a strictly binary situation: either you die or you are totally fine. That is, however, a completely false dichotomy. Since when is death the only outcome we care about? Many people who catch COVID live, but still undergo tremendous suffering physically, mentally, and financially. When we are considering the risks and benefits of something like a vaccine for COVID, we should not just look at whether or not you are likely to die. Things like time off work and physical suffering matter.

There is a vast spectrum of responses from “totally fine” to “alive, but extreme suffering (and in the US, often financial difficulty).” Good estimates of hospitalization rates are a bit hard to come by, and are usually expressed in terms of rate per population size, not rate per infection, but by taking the cumulative overall hospitalization rate per 100,000 people from the CDC, the US population size, and the cumulative cases in the US, we find that roughly 5% of COVID cases result in hospitalizations. A scientific study using more sophisticated methods provides a similar estimate of 4.5% (Reese et al. 2020) [note: as with the case fatality rate, these are crude rates for the whole population and actual rates vary by age group]. Indeed, COVID is so rampant, that roughly 0.5% of the entire US population has been hospitalized for it. That’s actually an incredible number. One out of every 200 people in America has been hospitalized for COVID (again if we average across the population), and that’s just actual hospitalizations, many more have been at home sick, took time off work, etc.

Further, the complications from the disease can be serious. COVID can set off a cytokine storm that affects multiple of your body’s major systems. It’s too early to know exactly what that means long-term, but based on what we know about COVID and other viral diseases, there is good reason to be concerned that many people who survive will have long-term lung and heart issues (Mitrani et al. 2020; Fraser 2020). To be clear, we need to wait for more data before knowing for sure if there will be long-term complications, but the reasonably high probability that there will be is certainly something to think about when considering the risks and benefits of the vaccine, and it’s something that is completely ignored by this unreasonably simplistic “99% survive” argument.

Vaccines: benefits outweigh the risks

Finally, let’s briefly turn our attention to the COVID vaccines. This would take many posts to cover in proper detail, so I’ll try to be brief and just hit the key points.

All vaccines have side effects, but serious side effects are rare, and your risk of a getting COVID and having a serious complication from it is much higher than your risk of a serious complication from vaccines. Countries with large vaccination programs (e.g., Israel; Rossman et al. 2020) are seeing massive drops in COVID infection, hospitalization, and death rates thanks to vaccines, and there has not been a comparable increase in injuries, hospitalizations, and deaths from vaccines. In other words, the vaccines are reducing risk.

In the USA, an analysis of data in May (by which time roughly 40% of the country had received both doses of the vaccine and 50% had at least one dose) found that out of over 107,000 COVID hospitalizations, fewer than 1,200 were for vaccinated individuals, and out of 18,000 COVID deaths, only ~150 of them were for vaccinated individuals. In other words, over 99% of COVID deaths were from unvaccinated individuals, as were nearly 99% of COVID hospitalizations. That trend has continued, and now with over half the country fully vaccinated, officials like Dr. Fauci are likewise reporting that over 99% of COVID deaths and over 97% of COVID hospitalizations are from the unvaccinated. The vaccines clearly work.

Further, we have not seen hospitalization or mortality rates from vaccine side effects rising to meet those numbers. In other words, with roughly half the population vaccinated, if the vaccine was truly more dangerous than the disease, we should see vaccine deaths and serious injuries at a rate that exceeds the rate for COVID. So where are the >18,000 individuals in May who died from the vaccine? Where are the >100,000 hospitalizations from the vaccine? They don’t exist, because serious side effects are extremely rare.

This clearly shows that your total risk is lower with the vaccine than without it. These numbers make that undeniable. Yes, the disease has a ~99% survival, and yes, the vaccine does have side effects, but the disease is exceptionally common, and series side effects of the vaccine are exceptionally rare, which, when taken together, results in your risk of serious injury or death being substantially lower when you have the vaccine.

Just to really drive this home, let’s look specifically at myocarditis following the mRNA vaccines. It is still not entirely clear if this is actually a side effect of the vaccines, but there is growing evidence that it is causal. Exact rates vary, but every calculation shows them to be low (Shay et al. 2021). A large data set from Israel reported a mere 148 cases within 30 days of vaccination out of over 5 million people who were vaccinated (Israel Ministry of Health). Even if all of those were caused by the vaccine, that would be a rate of 0.003%! Further, 95% of those cases were mild.

In the USA, with over 150 million people vaccinated, using data from VAERS (much of which has not been verified), the WHO calculated the following myocarditis rates per fully vaccinated individual: 0.041% for males aged 12–29, 0.004% for females aged 12–29, and 0.002% for males and females over 29. Further, again, most of those cases were mild and did not require serious medical intervention. I have not so far seen any confirmed deaths from this. In contrast, COVID has a case fatality rate of ~1%.

Now, I hear you saying, “but I am a male under 30, which means I’m at a low risk of death from COVID and higher risk of myocarditis, so for me the risk outweighs the benefit,” however, that math still doesn’t work. From the start of the outbreak in the US (based on the current CDC data), there have been 2,462 deaths from COVID in males under 30, and 1,594 deaths in females under 30. There is no evidence to suggest that the vaccines are causing comparable carnage.

Scientists actually ran the numbers on this and calculated that for males under 30, every 1 million second doses of an mRNA vaccine will result in 39–47 cases of myocarditis, but will prevent 11,000 COVID cases, 560 hospitalizations, 138 ICU admissions, and 6 deaths (Gargano et al. 2021). Also, remember again that most of these myocarditis cases are mild, whereas for COVID, even just the expected number of ICU admissions is 3 times the number of mostly mild myocarditis cases! Further, that is for a group with a relatively low COVID risk and relatively high myocarditis risk. The benefits of the vaccine are even more exaggerated for other groups. In men over 29, for example, 1 million second doses will only result in 3–4 cases of myocarditis, and will prevent 15,300 COVID cases, 4,598 hospitalizations, 1,242 ICU admissions, and 700 deaths (Gargano et al. 2021)!

Also, notice how those who like to cast aspersions on vaccines try to downplay death from COVID while hyping mostly mild injury from the vaccine. Indeed, this “99% survive” argument would have us believe that a 1% fatality is too low to be seriously concerned, but a 0.002–0.041% rate of generally mild myocarditis is unacceptably high. It is crazy to think that 3–4 mostly mild cases of myocarditis is worse than 700 deaths! That’s simply not how math works.

The numbers are undeniable: your personal risk* is lower with the vaccine than without the vaccine, even though “99% of people survive.”

I’ve been focusing on the concerns around Pfizer and Moderna because those are the prominent vaccines where most of my readers are, but we can do the same sorts of calculations with any of the vaccines currently available. They all have various risks, but in every case, the risks associate with not getting the vaccine outweigh the risks associated with getting it.

*Obviously some people have pre-existing conditions that make vaccines dangerous for them. That is not what I am talking about here. I am addressing people who have no known health conditions that would prevent them from getting the vaccine.

Conclusion

In summary, the “99% survive” argument completely ignores the high prevalence of COVID and completely ignores the importance of non-lethal effects (including hospitalization, possibly long-term effects, time off work, etc.). Further, using this argument against the necessity for vaccines massively and inappropriately downplays the risk from COVID while exaggerating the risks from vaccines. The empirical reality is that COVID is very dangerous, with over 600,000 dead in the US alone, whereas the vaccines are very safe. Given that over 50% of the US population is currently vaccinated, if the vaccines were truly more dangerous than the risk from getting COVID, we’d expect the rates of vaccine deaths and serious injuries to be surpassing the rates of deaths and serious injuries from COVID. In reality we are, of course, not seeing anything even remotely like that. Deaths and serious injury from COVID remain common in the unvaccinated, whereas serious injuries from the vaccines are extremely rare and deaths virtually unheard of.

I think part of the problem is that we often view taking an action as the inherently riskier choice. After all, you can’t get myocarditis from the vaccine if you never get the vaccine. That reasoning, while understandable, ignores the fact that not getting the vaccine is also an action, and that action puts you at a much greater risk of death or serious illness. Indeed, that risk from COVID is so great, and the risk from vaccines is so small, that even if you are young and healthy, the risk associated with not getting the vaccine is far higher than the risk associated with getting the vaccine. This is a mathematical fact.

Please read this post before making an argument about “unknown long-term effects” from vaccines.

Related Posts

Literature Cited

  • Ahmad and Anderson 2021. The Leading Causes of Death in the US for 2020. JAMA
  • CDC. Provisional COVID-19 deaths by sex and age. Accessed 26-July-2021
  • COVID.NET. Laboratory-confirmed COVID-10Associated Hospitalizations. Accessed 25-July-2021.
  • CDC Pinkbook. Poliomyelitis. Accessed 26-July-2021
  • Fraser 2020. Long term respiratory complications of covid-19. BMJ 370
  • Gargano et al. 2021. Use of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine After Reports of Myocarditis Among Vaccine Recipients: Update from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — United States, June 2021. CDC 70:977–982
  • Johnson and Stobbe. 30-June-2021. Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated. AP
  • Israel Ministry of Health. 2-June-2021. Surveillance of Myocarditis (Inflammation of the Heart Muscle) Cases Between December 2020 and May 2021 (Including). Accessed 26-July-21.
  • Mitrani et al. 2020. COVID19 cardiac injury: Implications for long-term surveillance and outcomes in survivors. Heart Rhythm 17:1984–1990
  • Reese et al. 2020. Estimated Incidence of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Illness and Hospitalization—United States, February–September 2020. Clinical Infectious Diseases 72:e1010-e1017
  • Rossman et al. 2020. COVID-19 dynamics after a national immunization program in Israel. Nature Medicine 27: 1055–1061.
  • Shay et al. 2021. Myocarditis Occurring After Immunization With mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccines. JAMA
  • Sullivan, 16-Jul-2021. U.S. COVID Deaths Are Rising Again. Experts Call It A ‘Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated’. NPR
  • WHO. 9 July 2021. COVID-19 subcommittee of the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS): updated guidance regarding myocarditis and pericarditis reported with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Accessed 26-July-2021.
  • Worldometer. Coronavirus. USA. Accessed 25-July-2021.
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Jon Stewart’s irresponsible, anti-science, COVID conspiracy theory rant

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Fallacy Man

stewartI’ve been a fan of Jon Stewart for a long time. I usually find him to be both funny and insightful. It was, therefore, with great dismay that I watched him spread a conspiracy theory and inaccuracies about science on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and I regret that it is now my duty to explain his errors.

In the clip, which you can see here, Stewart begins by saying that we owe a great debt to science for helping to ameliorate the COVID19 crisis. That much I absolutely agree with. Scientists deserve an enormous amount of gratitude for developing the vaccines that are currently saving lives and reducing suffering around the world. Unfortunately, the interview quickly took a turn for a worse as Stewart endorsed the conspiracy theory that the virus that causes COVID19 escaped from the lab in Wuhan and made numerous dangerous, false statements about how scientists operate.

Mischaracterizations of science and scientists

Before I get to the conspiracy theory, I want to respond to a more general comment he made which really bothered me, because it is a common and damaging misconception about science and scientists. He said,

“This is the problem with science. Science is incredible, but they don’t know where to stop, and nobody in the room with those cats ever goes, ‘ya know, I don’t know if we should do that.’”

This is an inherently untrue statement that is, unfortunately, a very common misconception about science, perhaps most famously stated by Dr. Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park as, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

In reality, most of us scientists spend a great deal of time thinking about the implications of our work and whether it is a good idea, and even if we didn’t want to do that, we are forced to do that by ethics committees. The days of “mad scientists” operating in isolation doing dangerous, unethical experiments are long gone. In modern science, you have to submit proposals before you do research, and those proposals get reviewed by ethics boards (which, btw, usually include scientists and non-scientists) who will approve, reject, or insist on modifications to your proposal. If you get approved, you then have to submit reports on what you actually did, and there are usually audits. Further, if you want to work with something dangerous, you often need additional government clearance and approval. Things are checked and regulated, particularly in a major lab like the one in Wuhan.

Indeed, Stewart went on to give an example that undercut his whole argument. In a deranged monologue in which he asserted (I hope jokingly) that scientists would be the death of humanity, he inaccurately described scientists’ re-animation of the virus that caused the 1918 flu,

“They had a little sample of [the virus], and it hadn’t been a scourge in the earth for 100 years, and they thought to themselves, ‘what if we just, I don’t know, woke it up?’ And nobody in the room was like, ‘No. Let’s not do that.'”

The reality of the situation was quite different. The research was conducted by the CDC and went through both an Institutional Biosafety Committee review and an Animal Care and Use Committee review before being conducted. The risks and benefits were carefully thought out, evaluated, and discussed by several groups of people, and very strict bio-safety guidelines were put in place and followed. This wasn’t a scientist working in their garage doing whatever popped into their head. It was, carefully planned, well-thought out, closely monitored, rigorously controlled research in a secure, state-of-the-art laboratory (you can read the details on the CDC’s website).

To be 100% clear, that obviously does not mean that no one ever goes rogue and operates outside of the system. There will always be people who break the rules, but those cases are rare, they are pretty close to impossible at a lab facility like Wuhan, and when those people get caught, the consequences are generally serious (such as loss of funding, loss of job, and sometimes prosecution). So, this notion that no one is telling scientists not to do things is simply false. There are constantly people checking our proposals and telling us not to do things.

This misconception matters, because it paints scientists as people who are totally disconnected from reality, blindly doing whatever interests us regardless of the dangers, but that’s a caricature, not reality. Scientists are normal people. We think about things like ethics and broad implications, and we have people checking us. Further, this sort of caricature downplays the importance of labs like the Wuhan lab. It’s not full of “mad scientists.” It’s full of incredibly intelligent, thoughtful people doing important work that needs to be done if we are going to prevent future disease outbreaks and mitigate the ones that we fail to prevent. Indeed, that Spanish Flu research that Stewart mocked gave us important insights into how highly virulent pathogens operate, and those insights help us to prepare for future outbreaks. This sort of mischaracterization of scientists undermines the critical work that scientists do.

The lab leak conspiracy theory

Moving on, I’m not going to go into great detail debunking the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theory, because it has been thoroughly covered elsewhere (e.g., Siegel 2021). Instead, I’ll just hit a few highlights and point out some errors in Stewart’s reasoning. Before I start, I do realize that much of what he said was deliberate hyperbole for comedic effect, so I have no intention of nitpicking his jokes and will instead focus on the broad strokes.

The crux of his argument was basically just proximity:

  1. There is a lab in Wuhan that studies novel coronaviruses
  2. The novel coronavirus originated in Wuhan
  3. Therefore, it escaped from the lab

To anyone familiar with logic, this reasoning is clearly fallacious. It’s a non sequitur fallacy. Just because the two things occurred in proximity doesn’t mean that there was any relationship between them (note: you might argue that this is a correlation fallacy, but that generally involves trends, not isolated incidents; it is arguably a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy [i.e., there was a lab in Wuhan, then there was an outbreak; therefore the lab caused the outbreak]).

It is entirely possible for the co-occurrence of two things to be a coincidence, or for there to be some other factor that caused those two things to line up. In this case, the latter is true. Infectious disease labs very often focus on the pathogens around them, and as Colbert tried to point out to Stewart, China has many coronaviruses, and Wuhan is a massive city with an active wildlife trade. In other words, if a novel coronavirus was going to jump to humans, we would expect it to be in a city like Wuhan, which is why there was a coronavirus lab in Wuhan. As one virologist (Vincent Munster) commented,

“Nine out of ten times, when there’s a new outbreak, you’ll find a lab that will be working on these kinds of viruses nearby” (Maxem and Mallapaty 2021).

So, no, the fact that the outbreak originated in a city that has a coronavirus lab does not suggest that the outbreak was a result of a lab leak. That is extremely circumstantial evidence and totally ignores the fact that labs are often positioned in the areas where we’d expect an outbreak.

Similarly, Stewart dismissed the abundance of bats around Wuhan by pointing out that there are also lots of bats in Texas, but the outbreak didn’t start there. This is more specious logic (indeed, it’s a reductio ad absurdum fallacy). It’s not simply that there are bats in China, but rather that China is  a hot spot of human-wildlife interactions. It is those interactions that are problematic and, it is something scientists have been warning about for years. Back in 2007, a paper in Clinical Microbiology Reviews said,

“The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb” (Cheng et al. 2007).

This isn’t a virus that came out of nowhere with no warnings. It’s something scientists have worried about for a long time, which, once again, is why labs that study these diseases are so important, and why it is so dangerous to undercut them by spreading this kind of conspiracy theory. It’s also, again, why this lab was in China.

As you can hopefully see, Stewart’s arguments are bogus, but what should we make of the lab leak hypothesis more generally? As I said, I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, because that is a whole series of posts in itself, but here are a few highlights.

First, the WHO investigation into the Wuhan laboratory concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had escaped from the lab. Second, scientific assessments of the sequences in SARS-CoV-2 have shown that it is most likely natural. Andersen et al. (2020) found no evidence to suggest that it was man-made and,

“strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”

If the virus was engineered, we’d see evidence of that in the genome, but we don’t see that evidence. This is critical, because it means that even if it escaped from a lab, it was probably a natural virus that was being stored there, not one that was engineered. As you will see, however, the arguments for the lab leak hypothesis generally center around the virus not being natural (you can read more about this research and how we know the virus wasn’t man-made in these articles: Bryner 2020; Hayes 2020; Saey 2020).

So, where does this leave the lab-leak hypothesis? It leaves it solidly in the territory of conspiracy theories that ignore official reports, cherry pick experts, and spin fanciful tales that attempt to “connect the dots” based on circumstantial evidence. This hypothesis inherently requires that scientists and governments have lied and falsified records, but there is no actual evidence of that happening. It is just something that has to be blindly assumed in order for this conspiracy theory to be possible, and as a scientist, I have an aversion to making more assumptions than necessary.

The more scientific arguments for the lab leak hypothesis have tended to focus either on the fact that we have yet to find the original virus in the wild yet or on an unusual CGG-CGG sequence. The fact that we have not confirmed the original host is, however, hardly surprising. It often takes many years to track novel virus back to the original host. It took 14 years to find the origin of the SARS epidemic (Maxem and Mallapaty 2021). So, 1.5 years of failed searching is hardly enough to conclude that it probably isn’t natural. The other argument is that the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 has a CGG-CGG sequence that is unusual. CGG codes for the amino acid arginine, but there are several other ways to produce arginine, and CGG is relatively uncommon in coronavirus. This led David Baltimore to famously refer to the double CGG as a “smoking gun” that the virus was man made. That statement was, however, misleading, because about 3% of the arginine sequences in SARS-CoV-2 are CGG, and CGG is found in plenty of other coronaviruses. It is, therefore, entirely possible for CGG-CGG to arise naturally, and even Baltimore has now acknowledged that it could be natural (Maxem and Mallapaty 2021). Dr. Anderson, who wrote the study I mentioned earlier, explained the situation in more detail, here.

Finally, what are we to make of various governments and even Dr. Fauci saying there should be thorough investigations? First, as I explained in a previous post this week, we should never conflate government decisions with scientific evidence. Second, if people like Fauci want more investigations, I don’t really object (I don’t think they are necessary, but I’m not going to rant in opposition of them either). However, critically, as it stands right now, the weight of evidence is strongly against the lab leak hypothesis, and arguments to the contrary inevitably stray into the realm of conspiracy theories, conjecture, and baseless assumptions. As such, it is extremely problematic for a man like Stewart to insist on national television that the virus originated in a lab. Look, if you want to say, “the current evidence suggests that it did not escape the lab, but out of an abundance of caution and in the interest of being as certain as possible, we should conduct another investigation” I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but that is a very, very different thing from the type of proclamation that Stewart made or the types of conspiracy theories that I’m seeing online. Further, it absolutely does not justify Stewart’s rant about what he perceives as the dangers of science.

Let me conclude this with a question. If you doubt the official reports and want another investigation, will you accept the results of that investigation if it shows the disease was natural? To put that another way, how many investigations are required to convince you? This is a question that is worth thinking about. It is always a good idea to ask yourself what it would take to convince you that you were wrong.

Update 1-Sept-2021: A new review paper (Holmes et al. 2021) which was released after this post has reviewed the evidence for the lab leak hypothesis in even more detail, and concluded that the evidence strongly points away from that hypothesis.

Sources

  • Andersen et al. 2020. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine 26:450-452
  • Bryner 2020. The coronavirus was not engineered in a lab. Here’s how we know. Live Science (21 March 2020)
  • Cheng et al. 2007. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus as an Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 20:660–694.
  • Hayes 2020. Here’s how scientists know the coronavirus came from bats and wasn’t made in a lab. The Conversation (13 July 2020).
  • Holmes et al. 2021. The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review. Cell
  • Maxem and Mallapaty 2021. The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know. Nature: News Explainer (8 June 21)
  • Saey 2020. No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows it’s from nature. Science News (26 March 2020).
  • Siegel 2021. The Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis Is A Conspiracy Theory, Not Science. Forbes (3 June 2021)
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The “it’s banned in Europe” fallacy

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Fallacy Man

banned in europe

The title of this post is written somewhat in jest because this is not a formally recognized fallacy; nevertheless, it is a very common line of reasoning that is logically flawed and very closely aligned with multiple fallacies. The argument, in a nutshell, asserts that something is dangerous or likely dangerous simply because it is banned in some (usually European) countries. It often takes forms such as, “if X is so safe, then why is it banned in so many countries in Europe? All of those countries can’t be wrong.” Most commonly, I see this flawed reasoning applied to GMOs, certain pesticides (e.g., glyphosate), and some pharmaceuticals, but the flaws are inherent to the argument structure, regardless of the topic.

Recently (and why I’m writing this now), I have been seeing it applied to the AstraZeneca COVID 19 vaccine, with the claim that the vaccine was banned in Europe due to concerns about blood clots, therefore, according to the argument, the vaccine must be dangerous. Before I go any further and talk about the general problems with this line of reasoning, let me be 100% clear that the vaccine was not “banned.” Rather, it was only temporarily halted while scientists investigated the reports of blood clots. Those investigations found that the rates of blood clots following vaccination were below or only slightly above background rates (Østergaard et al. 2021; Pottegård et al. 2021), and the European Medicines Agency (EMA 2021) concluded that while there are potential side effects that are being monitored (as is true of all medicines), any serious side effects are extremely rare, and the benefits outweigh the risks. As a result, the vaccine has been resumed in almost all countries that had temporarily halted it.

Moving on, let’s look at the more general problems with this line of reasoning. First, it is inherently an appeal to authority fallacy. It is asserting that something must be dangerous simply because of the people (governments) who say that it is dangerous. This is problematic for multiple reasons. First, government decisions are often influenced by political motivations and lobbyists, and in many cases, the people making decisions are politicians, not scientists. Indeed, this argument is very similar to the flawed tactic of citing court cases as scientific evidence, as if judges, lawyers, and jurors are somehow scientific experts who are qualified to evaluate scientific evidence and make scientific decisions. Non-scientists (and sometimes scientists) make bad calls about science all the time. Do I really need to explain that governments often get the science wrong? Isn’t that something that everyone intuitively knows? After all, Saudi Arabia bans the teaching of evolution in public schools, does that mean evolution is wrong? Obviously not. We have to look at facts and evidence, not just whether or not a government has banned something.

Nevertheless, you may be wondering about the subset of cases where the ban actually was the result of a scientific assessment by an agency such as the FDA, CDC, EMA, etc. Shouldn’t we listen to those organizations? That is a totally fair question, and in that subset of cases, the argument should be treated more seriously. However, it still ultimately has to be about the evidence. Even scientists on government agencies can make bad calls. So, ideally, we should base our views on the evidence, not the source of the evidence. Having said that, for most people who don’t have the time or training to wade through a mountain of scientific literature, it does often make sense to default to the relevant scientific agencies agencies. I would not, as a general rule, encourage you to challenge professional scientific organizations unless you have a considerable amount of scientific training and expertise yourself.

So, what do we do when a group like the EMA recommends halting a vaccine? There are two important considerations here. First, we need to look at precisely what they said, and why they said it, because usually, the situation is far more nuanced than simply, “they banned it.” The AstraZeneca situation illustrates this wonderfully. The vaccine was not initially “banned.” Rather, it was temporarily halted while the evidence was reviewed. This was done out of an abundance of caution, and once the possible harms had been evaluated, it was resumed in nearly all countries (as a side note, this actually shows just how seriously vaccine safety is taken; if anti-vaccers were right that governments/Big Pharma push vaccines with little regard for safety, then such halts wouldn’t take place).

The second consideration is the extent of the consensus on the topic. Was the ban recommended by a handful of organizations or was it recommended by the vast majority of scientific organizations? This is where we get to another one of the underlying flaws in the argument. Namely, it has a tendency to cherry pick experts. What I see happen over and over again is someone insisting that something must be dangerous because some countries banned it while totally ignoring the fact that just as many (often more) countries have approved it! In other words, if you can appeal to authority and claim that something is dangerous because some countries ban it, then it is equally logically valid* for me to claim that it is safe because some countries approve it (*both lines of reasoning are invalid, my point is simply that they are equivalent).

See how that works? If we are going to go down this road of blindly trusting authority, why should we blindly assume that the countries that ban something are right rather than blindly assuming that the countries that approve it are right, especially when (in a great many cases) the countries that approve it are more numerous than the countries that ban it?

Indeed, the AstraZeneca situation illustrates this well. While a handful of countries continue not to use it, most have resumed using it, and the EMA now recommends it. So why should we cherry pick the handful that don’t use it and hold them up as proof while totally ignoring the ones that do use it? What makes the countries that don’t use it right and the far more numerous countries that do use it wrong?

The answer is simple, there is no logical reason to blindly assume that something is dangerous just because a country banned it. We need to look at the actual evidence and the reasoning behind why it was banned. We shouldn’t determine whether something is safe by flipping a coin between lists of countries that do and do not use it, and we certainly shouldn’t decide by cherry picking the list that fits our biases and preconceptions. Rather, we need to look at the actual evidence and the logic of why it is banned or approved.

Related posts

Literature cited

  • EMA 2021. COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca: benefits still outweigh the risks despite possible link to rare blood clots with low blood platelets. 18-March-21.
  • Pottegård et al. 2021. Arterial events, venous thromboembolism, thrombocytopenia, and bleeding after vaccination with Oxford-AstraZeneca ChAdOx1-S in Denmark and Norway: population based cohort study. BMJ 373:n1114
  • Østergaard et al. 2021. Thromboembolism and the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine: side-effect or coincidence? The Lancet 397: 1441–1443.

First posted on 14-June-2021

Posted in Rules of Logic, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , , , | 16 Comments

The problems with anti-vaccers’ precautionary principle arguments

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Fallacy Man

Invoking the precautionary principle is a favorite tactic of anti-vaccers, anti-GMO activists, and various other groups that are prone to opposing scientific advances, but there are numerous issues with this strategy. The exact definition of the precautionary principle is a bit amorphous and variable, but the general concept is that before taking an action that has potential risks (particularly with the application of something new), the burden of proof should be on the proponent to demonstrate the safety of that action before taking it. There is certainly an element of validity to this. I absolutely agree, for example, that new medications should be tested and shown to be safe before being made publicly available (indeed, that is part of why we have organizations like the FDA that regulate the approval of new drugs). Similarly, months ago when COVID vaccines were in early stages of testing, I and many other ardent pro-vaccers stated that while the vaccines were promising, we wanted to see the results of the tests before drawing any conclusions. That is a completely rational, evidence-based way to approach the situation. New drugs, vaccines, and technologies certainly have the potential to cause harm. So, it is not unreasonable to want safety testing prior to their use.

Where this becomes problematic, however, is in determining what constitutes reasonable evidence. Groups like anti-vaccers have a tendency to stretch the precautionary principle to unreasonable limits and use it as an excuse for science-denial, rather than a legitimate decision-making tool. Usually, what I see is an incorrect insistence that the precautionary principle demands absolute assurance of safety and that it should be used in a strictly binary decision tree where any possible risk means that the thing in question should not be used, regardless of the known benefits. This is very bad risk assessment and ignores important aspects of how science actually works. As I’ll explain, science is about probabilities, not absolutes, and you must consider both the risk and benefit of an action.

Note for clarity: Just to be sure that I have been clear, I am not attacking the general concept of the precautionary principle. Rather, I am taking issue with the way that many people apply it (and you could make an argument that they are not actually applying it at all and are instead using something else entirely that they are incorrectly calling the precautionary principle. Indeed, many definitions of the precautionary principle explicitly state that it only applies in the absence of scientific evidence).

Science is about probabilities, not proof

This is a really important concept that I have written about frequently. Science is an inherently probabilistic endeavor. It shows us what is most likely true given the current evidence, not what absolutely is true. It always leaves open the possibility that the current results are wrong or some other piece of evidence has been missed. Indeed, the statistics we use to determine things like drug safety and efficacy are inherently probabilities. When we say that a result is statistically significant, what we really mean is that if there is actually no effect (i.e., all results are from chance), there is a low probability that a result as great or greater than the one we observed could arise (i.e., if there is no effect of the thing being tested and we did the experiment again, we’d be unlikely to get such a strong result). Probabilities are inherent to modern science.

Ultimately, this is a good thing. It forces skepticism and avoids dogmatism. Unfortunately, opponents of science seize that inherent and entirely justified skepticism and erroneously conflate it with practical doubt. The fact that we can’t be 100% about a result does not inherently mean that we should have any practical doubt about it. Am I 100% certain that smoking causes cancer? No, but the topic has been so well-studied and the results are so consistent that I’m 99.999% sure, and for all practical purposes, there is nothing wrong with making a statement like, “smoking causes cancer.” Similarly, it is technically possible that scientists are wrong about gravity, but, to borrow from Tim Minchin, you would be pretty foolish to act as if there is any practical doubt about gravity when deciding whether to exit your apartment through your door or a second floor window.

Even so, for many vaccines, we have an extremely high level of certainty that they are safe and effective. Take the notion that vaccines cause autism, for example. As I’ve written about at length, this hypothesis has been extremely well-studied. Multiple studies with tens of thousands of participants have been conducted (e.g., (Hviid et al. 2019 [657,461 children]; Madsen et al. 2002 [440,654 children]; Anders et al. 2004 [109,863 children]; and Jain et al. 2015 [95,727 children]), including a meta-analysis with over 1.2 million children (Taylor et al. 2014), and no large, properly controlled study has found any evidence of vaccines causing autism. Nevertheless, I frequently encounter anti-vaccers who try to ignore that evidence by inappropriately invoking the precautionary principle and asserting that, “since we can’t be 100% sure that vaccines don’t cause autism, we should err on the side of caution and act as if they do cause autism.” That is extremely faulty logic and is nothing more than science denial dressed up as a cogent decision-making principle.

The other related issue is the never-ending string of possible mechanisms of harm. Anti-vaccers frequently concoct an ever-shifting litany of things that scientists need to test before they will accept that vaccines are safe, and they often do this under the guise of simply adhering to the precautionary principle. Sticking with autism for a minute, for a long time, mercury was the main anti-vax boogeyman (and it still is in some circles), and anti-vaccers insisted that the burden of proof was on pro-vaccers to show that the mercury wasn’t causing autism (fundamentally a precautionary principle argument; see note on the burden of proof). So, scientists did lots of tests and even removed thimerosal (the form of mercury in vaccines) from nearly all childhood vaccines. The results of those studies consistently showed that thimerosal doesn’t cause autism (Hviid et al. 2003; Verstraeten et al. 2003;  Taylor et al. 2014), and removing it did not reduce autism rates.

So the burden of proof has been met and the precautionary principle satisfied, right? Not according to anti-vaccers. According to them, maybe its actually the age at vaccination, and the precautionary principle says that we need to demonstrate that it isn’t age at vaccination before we consider vaccines to be safe. Then, when studies show that it isn’t the age at vaccination (Uno et al. 2015; Destefano et al. 2004; Smeeth et al. 2004; Madsen et al. 2002), they switch to number of antigens, and when studies discredit that (DeStefano et al. 2013), they switch to it being the number of doses, and when studies discredit that (Fombonne et al. 2006; Hviid et al. 2003), they switch to aluminum or countless other fantasies.

It’s like fighting the hydra. No matter how many arguments you test and defeat, more crop up to take their place. This is the problem with the practical application of the precautionary principle. There will always be other possibilities. No matter how many things we test, there will always be things that haven’t been tested. This is why the burden of proof is usually on the person making the claim, and by switching the burden of proof, the precautionary principle opens a can of unending worms (see note on burden of proof).

Again, to be clear, I agree with a reasonable level of testing before something like a vaccine goes to market, and even after it goes to market, if reasonable evidence arises that it is causing a problem, I agree that the evidence should be investigated and proper trials should be done. If there is a legitimate, science-based reason to suspect that a risk might exist, it should be investigated. That is a totally reasonable application of the precautionary principle. The problem is that many people try to use it unreasonably and insist that all possibilities must be tested, even if they can’t present any good evidence to show that a danger is likely. Actually testing all possibilities is, however, impossible. Thus, anti-vaccers can be immune to studies, because no matter how many we conduct, there will inevitably still be things we haven’t tested.

A similar issue arises with an insistence for “long-term” studies. As I’ve argued before, “long-term” is meaningless unless it’s carefully defined beforehand. We have studies that followed patients for multiple years (Idbal et al. 2013; Ferris et al. 2014; Vincenzo et al. 2014), which would fit the definition of “long-term” for most scientists, but this never seems to satisfy anti-vaccers. No matter how long the study is, they will always retort that the negative effects might come at some later age. This flawed reasoning is fundamentally just an argument from ignorance fallacy. It is saying that we don’t know for sure that there aren’t problems 35 years later, therefore we should act as if there are. That is bad logic unless we have some compelling reason to think that there would be negative effects 35 years later, which we don’t. We do, however, have plenty of evidence that there are enormous benefits to vaccines and the risk from not vaccinating is much higher than the risk from vaccinating. This brings me to the next topic: risk assessment.

Bad risk assessment

Good risk assessment needs to consider both the risks and the benefits within a probabilistic framework. All actions carry some level of risk, and people often ignore the fact that inaction can be riskier than action.

So, when it comes to topics like vaccines, we need to consider both the risks and the benefits. Vaccines do have side effects, but serious ones are very rare, and we know that the benefits far outweigh those risks because numerous studies have shown that vaccines are extremely beneficial at saving lives (Clemens et al. 1988; Adgebola et al. 2005; Richardson et al. 2010). Indeed, the WHO estimates that from 2000 to 2018, the measles vaccine alone prevented 23.2 million deaths! That benefit absolutely has to be considered when evaluating the risk of vaccines.

This is another place where anti-vaccers misuse of the precautionary principle becomes problematic. They focus on hypothetical potential risks that have somehow eluded all previous studies and argue that we should “err on the side of caution” before potentially injuring children with vaccines. That is horrible risk assessment because it totally ignores the massive, well-established risk from not vaccinating. In other words, the cautious approach is actually to use vaccines that have passed reasonable safety testing, because the known risk from not vaccinating is so high.

Is it possible that there is some unknown danger from vaccines that we have missed? Yes. As explained above, it is technically possible, but it is extremely unlikely. Meanwhile, we know that there are massive dangers from not vaccinating. Studies have repeatedly shown that vaccines save countless lives. Therefore, it is absurd to knowingly sacrifice those millions of lives out of a fear of some unknown danger which probably doesn’t even exist! That’s not erring on the side of caution, and it is not a proper application of the precautionary principle.

Similarly, when it comes to the issue of long-term studies, is it technically possible that there is some long-term effect that we haven’t found yet? Yes, but it is very unlikely. Meanwhile, we know that vaccines prevent diseases which are often fatal for children and can have long-term consequences for survivors. Here again, anti-vaccers are asking us to put more weight on an unknown and unlikely risk than on a very real and well-known risk. Further, even beyond the known risks, it is very possible that measles and other childhood diseases have additional long-term complications that we are unaware of. Indeed, based on our understanding of physiology and diseases, it is more likely that vaccine-preventable diseases have additional unknown long-term consequences than it is that vaccines do. Measles, for example, negatively affects children’s immune systems for years (Petrva et al. 2019; Mina et al. 2019; more details and sources here and here), thus opening the door for all manner of secondary infections and long-term complications. So if we are going to play this game of fearing the unknown, why should vaccines be the unknown that we fear rather than the dieses?

The answer given to that question often involves some variant of the appeal to nature fallacy, and asserts that we shouldn’t play God, or can’t improve on nature, or humanity survived for millennia with these disease, etc. These responses are all obviously flawed for numerous reasons that I have elaborated on elsewhere, so I won’t waste any more time here (see posts here, here, here, and elsewhere).

What about COVID vaccines?

Finally, let’s apply all of this to the new COVID vaccines, because I have recently seen countless people using some variant of the precautionary principle to argue against receiving the COVID vaccine.

First, it is true that, by the very nature of being new vaccines, the COVID vaccines have not yet received as much testing as most vaccines currently on the market*, but they have received just as much or more testing as those vaccines had when they first entered the marked, and the amount of testing they have received is very good. The Pfizer trials used over 43,000 participants (Polack et al. 2020), Moderna used over 30,000 (Mahase 2020), etc. Those are very large trials with good power to detect adverse effects, and they found that the vaccines were very effective (generally with effectiveness in the high 80s or 90s), with few serious complications (comparable to existing vaccines). This is very good evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective, and it meets any reasonable application of the precautionary principle. The problem is precisely that anti-vaccers’ application is unreasonable, so instead of accepting the results, they are spreading baseless fear about possible unknown dangers and future long-term consequences.

*Update 1-Sept-2021: This is no longer correct. The COVID vaccines are now extremely well-studied. See this post for details.

Again, I agree that those trials were necessary before the vaccines went to market. I don’t blindly support vaccines. Rather, I base my views on the evidence, and the evidence shows that these vaccines are safe and will save countless lives. Is it possible that scientists are wrong about these vaccines? Yes, but based on all the available evidence, it’s not likely. Nevertheless, many insist that because it is possible that we have missed something, we shouldn’t vaccinate and should instead apply “caution.” As I’ve been trying to explain throughout this post, that sets up a false dichotomy, because not vaccinating has substantially more risks than vaccinating.

Let’s just compare the two for a minute. The vaccines have passed large, well-conducted trials. Further, they are based on technologies that have been being researched for many years, and many of their components are the same as other vaccines that have passed numerous, repeated tests. All of this gives us very good reason to think that they are safe, and the probability that they are actually dangerous and we just haven’t found out yet is extremely low. In contrast, we know that COVID is highly contagious and highly deadly. Total global deaths are over 2.5 million, and in the USA, COVID is currently one of the leading causes of death (it spiked all the way to the number 1 spot during the large outbreak at the beginning of 2021). So, the known risk from not taking the vaccine is extremely high (see notes at the end before responding with the inane “it *only* kills 1 in 100” or “it only kills the elderly” arguments).

Further, if we want to go down this road of fearing unknown long-term complications, unlike the vaccine, there is very good reason to think that COVID will cause long-term problems. There is growing evidence that many patients have complications long after being infected (though the disease is recent enough that the data are still being collected and a clear picture hasn’t emerged yet), and given the damage that COVID is known to cause to the heart, lungs, and other organs, and our knowledge of other diseases, it is very reasonable to think that there might be long-term problems (Mitrani et al. 2020; Fraser 2020).

So, on the one hand, we have few known risks from the vaccine and no good reason to suspect unknown long-term complications, and on the other, we have an extremely high known risk from COVID, as well as good reason to suspect that there might be long-term damage.

Thus, proper application of risk assessment absolutely does not support avoiding the vaccine. Reasonable concerns have already been tested (thus appropriate precautions were taken), the known risks of COVID are substantially higher than the known risks of the vaccine, and there is far more reason to suspect unknown future complications from COVID than from the vaccine.

If your concern is really that there might be currently unknown long-term damage, then really think about which of the following is more likely to cause such damage: a vaccine that has been well-tested and simply stimulates your immune system and prepares it to fight a single pathogen, or a deadly virus that sets off a cytokine storm and is known to cause serious damage to your heart, lungs, and other organs. Which one actually seems riskier to you?

Part of the problem here is that we often perceive a decision not to take action as the safe option or “erring on the side of caution,” but that’s not always true. Not taking action still has risks, and taking action is not automatically “erring on the side of caution.” The precautionary principle no longer applies to approved vaccines because they have already passed testing. At this point, it is a simple matter of risk assessment, and the risks from not vaccinating are far higher than the risks from vaccinating.

See this post for details on why vaccines are highly unlikely to cause long-term side effects.

Note on the burden of proof: The burden of proof always lies with the person making the claim. In other words, the person saying something exist has to provide evidence that it exists, and the other person does not have to discredit its existence (e.g., the burden of proof is on someone claiming that bigfoot is real, not someone claiming it isn’t). The precautionary principle inherently flips this by saying that we need to provide evidence that a danger doesn’t exist, rather than the burden being on the person claiming that it does exist. As explained earlier, given the very real possibility of injury form something like a new medicine, some basic safety testing is rational prior to approving the drug. However, once reasonable testing has been done, the burden of proof then falls to anyone who claims that there is a risk that those tests missed. In other words, if you want to say that those tests were wrong, then the burden of proof is on you. This is fundamentally why anti-vaccine arguments fail. They try to shift the burden of proof rather than presenting actual evidence.

Note on the “it only kills 1 in 100” argument: I frequently hear people make the argument that we don’t need the vaccine because most people survive COVID. This is a very bad argument for numerous reasons, which I will only briefly outline (see detailed explanation here). First, 1 out of every 100 infected individuals is actually a very high death rate. Second, you also have to consider how infectious the disease is. Even if a disease only kills a minority of infected individuals, that can still result in millions of deaths if lots of people become infected. This absolutely is the case with COVID. Again, it is currently the leading cause of death in the USA. Third, this totally ignores all the non-lethal effects. Fourth, this totally ignores the massive economic harm being caused by the virus. Fifth, this totally ignores the fact that the odds of a currently unknown future side effect from COVID are still much higher than the odds of a currently unknown future side effect from the vaccine.

Note on the “it only kills the elderly” argument: First, no it doesn’t. Yes, mortality rates are much higher for the elderly, but they still exist for all other age groups. In contrast, the mortality rate from the vaccine is 0 for all age groups. So the vaccine reduces risk for all age groups. Additionally, if we want to protect the elderly, the rest of us need to vaccinate to reduce the spread of the disease (vaccines are often less effective for the elderly, not to mention that many vulnerable people simply cannot receive the vaccine). Finally, this argument suffers most of the same flaws as the “it *only kills 1 in 100” argument, so see that note as well. 

Related posts

Literature cited

(note: if these hyperlinks break and/or you have trouble accessing articles for free, see this post for suggestions about how to access them)

  • Adegbola et al. 2005. Elimination of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) disease from The Gambia after the introduction of routine immunisation with a Hib conjugate vaccine: a prospective study. The Lancet 366:144–150
  • Anders et al. 2004. Thimerosal exposure in infants and developmental disorders: a retrospective cohort study in the United Kingdom does not support a causal association. Pediatrics 114:584–591
  • Clemens et al. 1988. Mesles vaccination and childhood mortality in rural Bangladesh. American Journal of Epidemiology 128:1330–1339
  • DeStefano et al. 2013. Increasing exposure to antibody-stimulating proteins and polysaccharides in vaccines is not associated with risk of autism. J Ped 163:561–567
  • Ferris et al. 2014. Long-term study of quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine. Pediatrics 134: e657-665.
  • Fombonne et al. 2006. Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Prevalence and Links With Immunizations. Pediatrics 118
  • Fraser 2020. Long term respiratory complications of covid-19. BMJ 370
  • Hviid et al. 2003. Association between thimerosal-containing vaccine and autism. JAMA 290:1763–1766.
  • Hviid et al. 2019. Measles, mumps, rubella vaccination and autism: A nationwide cohort study. Annals of Internal Medicine.
  • Idbal et al. 2013. Number of antigens in early childhood vaccines and neurophsychological outcomes at age 7–10 years. Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety 22:1263–1270.
  • Jain et al. 2015. Autism occurrence by MMR vaccine status among US children with older siblings with and without autism. JAMA 313:1534–1540
  • Madsen et al. 2002. A population-based study of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and autism. New England Journal of Medicine 347:1477–1482
  • Mahase 2020. Covid-19: Moderna vaccine is nearly 95% effective, trial involving high risk and elderly people shows. BMJ 371
  • Mina et al. 2019. Measles virus infection diminishes preexisting antibodies that offer protection from other pathogens. Science 366:599–606
  • Mitrani et al. 2020. COVID-19 cardiac injury: Implications for long-term surveillance and outcomes in survivors. Heart Rhythm 17:1984–1990
  • Petrva et al. 2019. Incomplete genetic reconstitution of B cell pools contributes to prolonged immunosuppression after measles. Science Immunology 4: eaay6125
  • Polack et al. 2020. Safety and efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine. New England Journal of Medicine 383:2603–2615.
  • Richardson et al. 2010. Effect of rotovirus vaccination on death from childhood diarrhea in Mexico. New England Journal of Medicine 362:299–305
  • Smeeth et al. 2004. MMR vaccination and pervasive developmental disorders: a case-control study. Lancet 364:963–969
  • Taylor et al. 2014. Vaccines are not associated with autism: and evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies. Elsevier 32:3623-3629
  • Uno et al. 2015. Early exposure to the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and thimerosal-containing vaccines and risk of autism spectrum disorder. Vaccine 33:2511–2516
  • Verstraeten et al. 2003. Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A two-phased study of computerized health maintenance organization databases. Pediatrics 112:1039–1048
  • Vincenzo et al. 2014. Long-term efficacy and safety of human papillomavirus vaccination. International Journal of Women’s Health 6:999–1010.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Facts: Why they matter and how to check them

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Fallacy Man

We seem to be living in the golden age of misinformation, and while cognitive biases and motivated reasoning have always existed, they seem to have reached epidemic levels in recent years, with attacks on the very nature of facts coming from the highest offices in the land (the phrases “alternative facts” and “fake news” come to mind). Many people seem to be living in an alternative reality where everything that agrees with them is true, and anything that disagrees with them is biased, fake news or “just an opinion.” Indeed, I have frequently encountered an open disdain for facts and those who check them. For many people, fact checking seems to boil down to, “if it came from a source I like, then it is true, and if it came from a source I don’t like, then it is false,” but that is an extremely faulty and dangerous dichotomy. So, it feels like high time that we have a basic discussion about facts and how to evaluate them.

fact checking fake news

Now, at this point, it may seem like I am picking on the America’s conservative right, and there is an extent to which that is true as they currently embody this problem in a truly extraordinary fashion, but let me be 100% clear that this is not a conservative problem. Liberals do it to. Everyone does it. We are all prone to cognitive traps and biases, myself included. The key is to be aware of those traps and take active steps to correct them. Scepticism is a skill that has to be practiced and often requires training. It takes work to fact check claims before accepting or rejecting them, but with practice, it becomes habitual, and it’s a habit everyone should get into.

My point is that if while reading this you find yourself thinking, “yes, this other group/person really needs to read this” pause for a second and consider whether you are yourself falling into cognitive traps and biases, because this post applies to everyone, regardless of political affiliation. In other words, it applies to you too.

Note: Although I am going to talk broadly about facts (not just scientific facts) including some political facts and news sources, this is not a political post. Facts are not political. They can certainly be used to make political arguments, but the facts themselves are inherently apolitical, and if it seems like facts have a particular political bias, that is reflective of faults in the political position, not the facts themselves.

Facts vs opinions

This may seem extremely elementary and pedestrian, but recently, I have had numerous conversations with grown adults who seem truly baffled by the distinction between a fact and an opinion. So, let’s go through this. A fact is an objective statement of reality. It can be independently verified and does not change based on individual views, beliefs, and preferences. An opinion is a subjective perception of reality that does change based on individual views, beliefs, and preferences.

As an example, if I say, “a water molecule is made of one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen,” then I have stated a fact. It is an objective statement of reality that does not change based on individual beliefs or views. In contrast, if I say, “swimming is fun” I have stated an opinion. It is a subjective perception that others may not share.

For these basic examples, everyone seems to understand the concepts just fine, yet when it comes to political topics and “controversial” science topics, suddenly people seem to completely forget this distinction and act as though their personal disagreement means that something isn’t a fact. This is clearly faulty. As the old saying goes, “you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.”

The number of times that I have seen this play out in recent months is truly astounding. Over and over again I have been having a conversation with someone, shown them verifiable facts that are confirmed by numerous sources, only to have them say, “that’s just your opinion.”

Let me give you an example. In a recent discussion with a family-member, they made the claim that “Biden has never condemned violent rioting and looting.” I responded by showing him statements like this one, which Biden made way back in July, “I’ve said from the outset of the recent protests that there is no place for violence or the destruction of property.” My relative’s response was, “well you’re entitled to your opinion.”

Do you see the problem here? Whether or not Biden has issued statements against violent protests is a matter of fact, not opinion. It is a fact that he has done so, and that fact is not political. It is an objective, independently verifiable statement of reality. You can watch the videos and read the transcripts for yourself. Whether or not you like Biden and agree with Biden has no bearing on the fact that he has made these statements. Now, whether you think Biden’s statements are appropriate and how you feel about his position on violence is certainly a matter of opinion. What you do with the fact that that Biden has condemned violence is political and is up to your subjective perceptions and beliefs, but whether or not he has made statements condemning violence is a simple matter of fact.

This sort of flawed thinking also pervades science denialism. I frequently encounter people who describe evolution, the safety of vaccines, anthropogenic climate change, etc. as “opinions,” but that is just as flawed as claiming that Biden has never condemned violence. When thousands of studies have all confirmed that something is a fact (as is the case on all of the topics I just mentioned) you don’t get to have an opinion about whether or not that thing is a fact. You can blindly deny the fact (as many do), but it’s still a fact; you are just willfully ignorant of it. If I claim, for example, that water has four hydrogens per oxygen, that doesn’t suddenly make the composition of water an opinion that is subject to debate. Rather, I would simply be living in blind denial of the fact. My personal views do not change the nature of the fact.

Follow these links for my articles (which contain citations to the relevant literature) on evolution, vaccines, and climate change.

Facts matter

Interestingly, this is actually an opinion. I personally believe that facts matter, and that belief is based on my views that human life and well being are worth protecting, the environment is worth protecting, and knowledge is worth pursuing. If you don’t share those views, then you may not value facts (at least not the categories of facts that I’m talking about in this post), but for most people, I think you would agree, at least in concept, that facts matter.

For example, I think that facts on COVID matter, because I value human life and think it is worth protecting. So, when a politician lies and makes claims that are not supported by evidence, I think that matters, because those claims affect people’s behavior, and false or misleading claims cost lives. When a politician lies and says that COVID is going away and we’re rounding the corner when in reality cases are spiking, that matters, because people will behave differently based on whether it is going away or spiking, and that behavior affects who lives and dies. Similarly, if a politician downplays the seriousness of the disease, that matters, because it risks people’s lives. Now, if you don’t share my opinion that human life is valuable, then you likely don’t share my view that facts about COVID matter, but if you agree that human life is worth protecting, then these facts should matter for you as well, and that means that you should want to make sure that your information is correct. You should be willing to fact check and evaluate your views to make sure that you are not supporting a position that endangers lives.

The same is true for things like climate change. The evidence very clearly shows that we are the primary cause of climate change and heat waves, storm intensity, and droughts are all increasing and costing lives. I think those facts matter, because they affect lives. People will live or die based on whether we accept those facts and take appropriate action. Now, again, if you don’t value human life, then you probably don’t value those facts, but if you value human life, then surely it is worth laying aside your biases and looking closely at the evidence. Surely it is worth fact checking and verifying information before you believe or reject it.

Similarly, in politics, I think facts matter. I think the veracity of a politician’s statements and reported actions matter, because that affects people’s lives. It is critical that we actually test the veracity of claims, because things like whether or not Biden has condemned violence (he did), whether or not Trump instituted a zero-tolerance policy that caused thousands of families that would not otherwise have been separated to be separated (he did), whether or not Trump told a predominantly white crowd that they have good genes and he believes in racehorse theory (he did), etc. affect people’s lives. People are impacted by the things politicians do and say. Therefore, I think that we have a duty to carefully test information before accepting or denying it. We owe it to ourselves and the other members of our society to make sure that our political views are based on facts.

How to fact check

Details of this topic vary by discipline, but I’m going to provide some general concepts that are universal, as well as some details for a few specific subject areas.

Let me start by asking this as a question. What do you do when you encounter a claim? Let’s say you are on Facebook and you see a post making a political claim, how do you test whether it is factual? Be honest here, because being honest about your methods is the first step towards improving them. Do you use a simple dichotomy like, “it came from CNN, therefore it is false” or, on the other end of the spectrum, “Trump said it; therefore, it is false?” If you go further than that, how do you go about doing it? Do you search for sources that confirm your views, or do you look for a broad range of sources? When you find those sources, what do you do with the information inside them? Do you blindly accept it based on the source, or do you dig deeper and look at where the original information come from?

Hopefully this line of inquiry has started to reveal my point. Many people don’t fact check at all, or if they do, they don’t do it correctly. Many view fact checking as an exercise to find sources that agree with them, but this is actually the opposite of how it should work.

To fact check properly, there are several things you should look for:

  1. The quality of the source
  2. Verifiable information
  3. Agreement among sources

Let’s start with the quality of the source. For science, this usually means peer-reviewed studies. That is where scientific information is published, and it should be your primary source. Failing that, well-respected secondary sources (e.g., NASA, CDC, etc.) are a good option. A youtube video or random blog on the internet is simply not a good source and should not be trusted without verification (see #2; and yes, that includes this blog).

When it comes to something like politics, things become somewhat more fuzzy, especially because Trump has spent the past four years insisting (without evidence) that essentially any source that says anything negative about him is “fake news.” This has resulted in large swaths of the country blindly believing that nearly all major news outlets are “biased left-wing media” and a handful of highly conservative outlets (e.g., Fox and OANN) are the only sources of truth. This view is childish and immature. There are objective ways to evaluate whether or not a source is biased (more on that in a minute) and none of them include “it said something negative about Trump” as a diagnostic criteria. You can (and should) actually verify the information in sources, look at whether they gave the whole context, look at the wording they used and whether they presented information fairly, etc. The problem is that so many people have this mindset that saying something bad about Trump automatically makes it biased or, conversely people on the left frequently write off any source that ever says anything good about him. Again, that’s not how facts work, and it’s certainly not how fact-checking should work.

Fortunately, several non-partisan organizations have already done the heavy lifting for you. Several groups have put together media-bias trackers to document which sources are factual or inflammatory and which sources are neutral or biased. Ad Fonte’s media Bias Chart, Media Bias/Fact Check, and All Sides are three prominent examples. Similarly, there are many excellent fact-checking websites to assist you. Here are some useful examples: PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Washington Post’s fact checker, and, of course, Snopes.

I can already hear the outrage, derision, and mockery, but hear me out before you lambast me for thinking that those “biased, liberal” sources are useful. First, if your response was ridicule, my question is, why? Can you give me actual evidence that these sources are biased, funded by Soros, etc. or, are you simply assuming they are biased because they frequently say things you don’t like? I’m betting it is the latter. You see, many people live in what I have previously termed a “circle of ignorance,” where they have decided which sources are good and bad based on their biases, and the ones they’ve decided are good constantly re-affirm their biases (that’s why they were selected), which leads to further confirmation that those are the only good sources. Any source that contradicts those sources is then assumed to be biased. This is a very dangerous situation because it inherently gives you a biased view of the world, not a factual one. So, again, what objective reason do you have for thinking these fact checkers are biased?

The second point I want to make shifts gears into my next principle for fact checking: verification. You shouldn’t blindly believe something because it was in one of the fact checkers I listed or in one of the news outlets that is rated as trustworthy and non-partisan. Rather, you should look at the evidence they presented. Good sources will give their evidence and explain their reasoning. For the sites I’ve listed, they, at the very least provide information on their methodologies, funding, and steps they take to minimize biases, and, in most cases, you can actually see a detailed breakdown of why a source was rated the way it was or why a claim was rated as true or false. You don’t have to blindly take their word for it. Rather, you can and must verify.

Don’t just scoff at a Snopes article, actually read it. Actually look at the evidence it presents. Don’t just dismiss the claim that a source is biased (or conversely that it is non-partisan). Actually look at the reasons it was scored that way. Look at the evidence being presented.

This applies far more generally than just using the fact checkers. For any news article or video, look at where they got their information from. Is their source a speech that you can watch for yourself? a recorded interview? an official government document? or a single totally anonymous report? How solid is the information that they are giving? Don’t just assume that the source is “fake news,” actually look at the evidence.

In the conversation with my relative that I mentioned previously, I shared several sources with him (both media sources and fact checkers) and he immediately decried them all as fake news and refused to look at them (he also mocked me for being gullible enough to use them). Had he actually opened them, he would have found videos and transcripts of Biden’s speeches. He didn’t have to blindly trust the sources. He could (and should) have looked at their evidence, then done a bit of searching to see if it was verifiable.

The same sort of thing is true in science. If a site makes a claim about science, it needs to provide citations to peer-reviewed studies to back it up. Thus, although you should not blindly trust a blog like mine, I try very hard to provide good sources to back up my claims, and my posts on scientific topics generally include lengthy literature cited sections at the end so that you can verify what I am claiming. Sites like mine (and fact checkers) are conduits to information. You should use them to help you find good information, not as endpoints. That is the correct way to use them.

Finally, (point 3) see whether multiple reputable sources are saying the same thing. If multiple fact checkers, news outlets, etc. have all reported the same thing, you have good reason to think that it is likely true. In contrast, if many reputable sources are presenting contrary evidence or the information is only in a handful of fringe sources, you should be wary.

Here again, people often misunderstand fact checking as simply looking for something that agrees with you. I once had someone derisively respond to a link to a fact checking site with the retort, “well whose fact checking the fact checkers?” and someone else sarcastically told me, “I can’t wait until we have fact checkers for fact checkers, then we’ll REALLY know what is going on.” These statements misunderstand the process. If one fact checker errs, odds are that the others will catch it and call them out, which is why you should both use multiple sources and verify their information. For the most part though, you will find that these organizations are very thorough and, as a result, generally agree with each other because, again, facts are objective, whereas opinions are subjective. Similarly, if you compare the various media bias organizations, you will find general agreement in most cases despite their different approaches, staff, funders etc. Again, it is possible to objectively assess biases by looking at the language being used, how factual the information is, etc.

To be clear, agreement among sources is not an absolute guarantee of veracity, and it certainly can be abused by doing things like looking for agreement only among sources on one extreme of the political spectrum. So, I don’t recommend using this strategy in isolation (and to use it properly you need neutral sources). Rather, all three of my points need to be used in conjunction. You should make sure you are using good, neutral sources (not just a few biased sources), you should see whether there is agreement among sources, and very importantly, you should verify the information. Don’t just look at what a source said, look at why it said it. What facts did they base that claim on. Can you verify them?

A similar situation is true in science. It is always possible to cherry-pick a handful of outlier studies on any topic. That is why you should always look at the entire body of literature, rather than latching onto the first studies that agree with you (more details here).

At this point, it may seem that I have generated an endless chain of verification, where to verify a claim in a source, you have to track it to another source, then verify the claims in that source using another source, etc. Sometimes this happens. Often, however, fewer steps are required because you quickly get to the original source (e.g., a speech, legal document, etc.). To be clear, however, fact checking is work. It takes effort to force yourself to check all claims before believing or rejecting them. It takes time to verify information and check a diverse range of sources, but it is worth it. To use my relative as an example one last time, they proudly proclaimed to me that they got almost all of their news from OANN and didn’t care what fact checkers said. This is not a position to be proud of and it is, in fact, very dangerous. I really like the Socratic method, so let me ask this as a question. If you have a similar mindset and get all your information from a handful of sources on either side of the political spectrum, blindly believing them without doing any verification, then how would you ever know if they deceived you? How would you ever know that they have lied to you if you don’t verify their information? This sort of behavior, on either side of the political spectrum, inherently gives you a very narrow and biased view of the world, and that is dangerous for all the reasons I’ve discussed. Facts matter and they are worth checking.

In closing, I want to briefly bring up the topic of acknowledging your own ignorance. None of us know everything, and all of us can be misled. Therefore, if we are going to have a rational, evidence-based view of the world, it is critical that we are open to new information. To be clear, being open-minded does not mean believing something without evidence. Quite the opposite. Evidence must be a requirement, but we should always accept the possibility that we might be wrong and use good evidence to find out if we are wrong. We should humbly acknowledge our own limits and try to overcome them by seeking out good information and testing ideas before believing or dismissing them. We should be receptive to facts we were previously ignorant of, rather than blindly dismissing them as “fake news.”

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