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One way I tried to explain "severe" and "serious" adverse events to the general reader was this way:

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"Severe adverse event” [is] anything that interferes with normal function. That includes things like, you got a headache and so you didn’t cook dinner as you normally would, or you called off work for a day or two because you had a fever (as many people were told to expect).

Which sounds scarier?

“I got the Pfizer vaccine, and I had a severe adverse event.”

Or

“I got the Pfizer vaccine, and I had a fever and stayed home for a day.”

These are equivalent. In other words, a severe adverse event is not the scary thing that it sounds like.

Same for the “serious” adverse events, which ...resulted in a hospital trip. There were 127 people in the Pfizer group and 116 people in the placebo group who ended up taking a trip to the hospital. We know that in clinical trials, there’s very much a bias toward “When in doubt, go to the hospital” because the patients’ safety is paramount.

But we know, don’t we, that the 116 people in the placebo group who went to the hospital had a tiny amount of salt water in their arms and there was absolutely nothing seriously wrong with them [related to the shot], right? Common sense. So 116 people went to the hospital because they had some kind of random symptom unrelated to the salt water, were scared, and everyone erred on the side of caution.

It's reasonable to suppose, human nature being what it is, and random symptoms being what they are, that a similar number of people who received the Pfizer vaccine also had some kind of random symptom unrelated to their injection, were scared, and everyone erred on the side of caution with them too. Probably in the neighborhood of …116, like the other group.

So then the question becomes: if 127 in the Pfizer group went to the hospital, versus 116 in the placebo group, is that 11-person difference between groups, in the context of 46,331 people total in the Pfizer trial, a statistically significant difference? Without doing the statistics, I’m going to guess “probably not.”

What is clear, at the very least, is that people were not experiencing effects from the vaccine bad enough to send them to the hospital, any more than they were experiencing bad effects from the salt-water placebo that sent them to the hospital.

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It's really a problem with language and communication isn't it? People who are fearful of the vaccine are going to hear the words "serious adverse event" and not even know what those words mean, and certainly they won't know what the numbers mean in context, or what they represent. Our big-name science communicators have done a terrible job conveying information to the public.

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We can take preventative measures to improve chances of less severe Covid. Improve our health and take vitamins.

But the injections, why Russian Roulette oneself with them, and live in sick fear of unknown tinkering long term. Being healthy won't save one from the clot shot.

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