Do you know someone who died from side effects of vaccine?
24% of adult Americans, if the survey is representative, think “they knew someone personally who died from side effects of a Covid-19 shot”.
How is that even possible?
Maybe someone better than me at doing the network theory math can confirm. But I think this means at the very least about 1 in 5000 Americans had to have died from side effects of a Covid vaccine. The real number is what, 1 in a million?
What’s going on here?
I think the number is so low because all the evidence I’m aware of is that it’s quite low. I think it’s a bit hard to measure small effects like this and overage deaths, the main way, are subject to a lot of complexity and I’m not qualified to evaluate the studies. It’s certainly possible that my casual estimate is off by a huge amount, say, a factor of ten. But 1 in 100,000 is still way too low for a quarter of Americans to know someone who died of a side effect of a vaccine.
Furthermore, it’s not likely that such deaths can be attributed in individual cases (hence the reliance on the overage stats). So to be confident I knew someone who died of a vaccine side effect, I’d have to know a lot of people who died of various possible causes and had a reasonable chance of attributing it to the vax. Not only is this beyond the knowledge and skills of a typical person, but the incidents rate seems way too low for making that judgment even if you were an expert.