Tina “Vaxxed” McCanadian🇨🇦

Brett, this is what happens when you get your information secondhand from an anti-vaccine activist rather than examining the evidence yourself. Barry Young leaked a subset of New Zealand vaccination records. Steve Kirsch, a technology entrepreneur turned anti-vaccine activist, interpreted those records as evidence of mass vaccine deaths. But Kirsch isn’t an epidemiologist or biostatistician, and his analysis has serious methodological problems. The dataset contained incomplete vaccination histories, lacked an appropriate unvaccinated comparison group, and didn’t adequately account for age, underlying disease, or expected background mortality. You cannot simply count deaths occurring after vaccination and conclude the vaccine caused them. And New Zealand has published population-level research examining vaccination, hospitalization, and mortality using more appropriate epidemiological methods. As for Japan, which study? Which population? What controls? Saying “Japan’s data” isn’t evidence of anything until you establish what the data actually show. Here’s the problem, Brett. You started by telling me about people developing heart disease after vaccination. When I explained that temporal association isn’t causation, you offered Kirsch’s interpretation of leaked records as proof. But you’ve simply exchanged individual anecdotes for a larger collection of observations without establishing causation. This is the danger of relying on secondary information from an activist who already knows what conclusion he wants. The records may be genuine. The interpretation can still be spectacularly wrong. Semmelweis had data that survived scrutiny. Invoking his name doesn’t exempt Kirsch—or you—from that same standard.