A perpetual staple of statistical shenanigans are “studies” comparing one heterogeneous population with other, or with many other heterogeneous populations, where the researcher picks out one item among the myriad differences and then flashes his wee P at us, insisting this one difference is the cause of some terrible thing.
They might not use the word cause, but they use every word they can get away with that’s close enough. Like “associated”, “linked”, “inclined”.
The latest embarrassment resulted in this headline: “People in Republican-voting states more likely to report Covid-19 vaccine side effects, study says“.
Do they.
The peer-reviewed paper is “Reports of COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events in Predominantly Republican vs Democratic States” in JAMA Network Open by David A. Asch, Chongliang Luo, and Yong Chen.
Their “key” points:
Findings This cross-sectional study of 620?456 AE reports found that a 10% increase in state Republican voting was associated with a 5% increase in the odds that a COVID-19 vaccine AE would be reported, a 25% increase in the odds that a severe AE would be reported, and a 21% increase in the odds that any reported AE would be severe.
Meaning The findings suggest that the more states are inclined to vote Republican, the more likely their vaccine recipients or their clinicians are to report COVID-19 vaccine AEs.
There it is: “inclined” for “cause.”
States don’t vote Republican, people inside states do—or don’t. The researchers didn’t report on people, but states. Which is asinine. Because we don’t know who did what.
It’s true those who call themselves Republicans tend to more be Reality-oriented than those who call themselves Democrats. Such that proportionally more on the R side were skeptical of the vax, and disbelieved the Official Lies told by the Regime. Such as when Rochelle Walensky, a physician then in charge of the CDC, said that if you got the vax you couldn’t get sick and couldn’t pass it on. She said it on camera, multiple times.
The effect was that proportionally more Rs than Ds refused the vax.
Which is well known. And the subject of other “research”, which lamented the vax skepticism “denial” of the Rs.
These current researchers use VAERS, which is odd. You will recall that during the panic Experts said not to trust VAERS, which couldn’t possibly be filled with useful data, because that data went against the party line.
I reported on VAERS several times, notably to show that reported deaths were skewing a lot younger with the J&J vax. The signal here was not ambiguous. It was plain. And we recall the J&J vax fell out of favor. Not because anything I did, of course. I was shouting into the void.
Now VAERS is back in favor. Here’s more detail from this very thin paper (it’s only a few paragraphs long):
A total of 620?456 AE reports (mean [SD] age of vaccine recipients, 51.8 [17.6] years; 435?797 reports from women [70.2%]; a vaccine recipient could potentially file more than 1 report, so reports are not necessarily from unique individuals) for COVID-19 vaccination were identified from the VAERS database. Significant associations between state political inclination and state AE reporting were observed for all 3 outcomes: a 10% increase in Republican voting was associated with increased odds of AE reports…These associations were seen across all age strata in stratified analyses and were more pronounced among older subpopulations.
In their favor, that the sex ratio was skewed so heavily toward women does give weight to some VAERS suspicion. There seems to be no good reason vax-caused injuries would be that much higher in women. But it is very plausible women complain more. We don’t know from this barely-there paper the state or political party breakdown of the sexes, so this says nothing about their hypothesis.
They don’t show the time breakdown, either, appearing to lump all reports across time. Which was not how the panic played out, injury reports being more common later than earlier.
Anyway, supposing Rs, and not just “R states”, do proportionately report greater injury, it could be that Rs were more on the look out for harms, whereas Ds would go on lying to themselves that all was right because Experts assured them that to complain was to be a bad person.
There just isn’t anything here. Which you can prove to yourself. Here’s one picture from the Supplement (authors keep moving key material away from more watchful eyes).
Those solid black lines are their “discoveries”. They’re supposed to well represent the state data and paint Rs in a bad light. Do they? They do not. The real data is all over the place.
There is also the possibility that reporting adverse events in D-majority states was harder. Who knows.
There were three very important numbers I did not quote, which were in the ellipsis above. I quote them now: “P < .001…P <.001…P < .001”.
Well. The wee Ps have it.
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I think I mistitled this post. Maybe "Researchers claim Republicans cried about the vax more"?
Something like that.
I am utterly shocked by the lack of rigor and common sense in this so-called "research." It's mind-boggling to think that these "authors" are willing to forever associate their names with what can only be described as some of the worst garbage ever produced in the academic realm. And JAMA? William's assessment hits the nail on the head—voters are individuals, not states, and let’s cross these two heterogeneous groups rendering these data utterly meaningless. Can you imagine the absurdity of these "researchers" discussing their nonsensical approach? "Let's cross (marginal distribution) VAERS adverse events by state political affiliation" – it's like a parody of statistical analysis that we see in a freshman statistics course, not in serious academic discourse. This kind of methodology is reminiscent of the well known freshman crossing broken necks with banana sales. Perhaps next, they'll claim we must ban bananas. Will this rubbish ever stop?