Given the buzz of the last week set in motion by the naturopath quacks from Maine USA, I thought it might be nice to do some simple comparisons of probability. Call it a peer review process if you will. Now, I’m not doctor, but naturopaths aren’t real doctors either so i guess that puts us on equal footing.
For this example I’m going to focus again on Christopher Maloney, and the quote of his I cited in my last post.
“Last year there were 387 serious complications from the flu vaccine and eighteen deaths directly attributed to the vaccinations (VAERS data compiled by me.)”
Now, not withstanding that as I pointed out in my last post, these numbers are basically bullshit that Maloney has made up, but if we accept his numbers as accurate data, the conclusions that we can draw from the probabilities involved may be interesting.
So lets first assume that based on Maloney’s numbers, last year (2009) 18 people died as a direct result of the H1N1 flu vaccination in the USA. Now according to the American CDC, 46million doses of the H1N1 vaccine were administered in the USA in 2009. So if we were to divide 18, by 46million, that will give us the probability rate of death caused by the H1N1 vaccine.
1846,000,000
=0.00000039
=3.9×10−7
We can also go the other way and divide 46million by 18 and say there is a 1 in 2,555,556 chance of death from vaccination, but despite being somewhat less confusing to layman, its makes things more difficult later on and is standard practice to use fractions or percentages when dealing with probability in maths.
As John Alan Paulos points out in his fantastic book ‘innumeracy’, people have great difficulty comprehending the scale of very large or very small numbers. Exactly how small is 3.9×10−7? To get around this we can draw a comparison between the H1N1 vaccine death rate and other unlikely events that we have a better grasp of.
As far as layman understanding of probability is concerned, it is common to hear people make comparisons between unlikely events and being struck by lightning, so this would make a perfect example. Every year in the United States, something like 80 people are killed by lightning strikes. So once again, if we take the 80 deaths, and divide it by the 250million population of the USA we get the probability of death by lightning during that year.
80250,000,000
=0.00000032
=3.2×10−7
So based on Maloney’s own numbers (as made up as they may be) the probability of dying as a result of the H1N1 vaccine is on the same order of magnitude as your chances of being killed by lightning strike.
So now that gives us some idea of the immanent dangers of the H1N1 vaccination that Maloney is so valiantly trying to protect us from, we should also work out the probability of mortality from actually contracting the H1N1 virus, and how well its supports Maloney’s rather brazen assertions that:
“A response to a very heated conversation with an M.D. in which the words ‘children are dying of the swine flu!’ was used as the reason for getting vaccinated. The hindsight response (always 20/20) is that children are dying of vaccinations and the vaccine is no better than placebo for preventing the flu.“
First of all, lets take the the number of deaths in the US (it should be noted that in much the same way that Maloney’s ‘direct cause’ VAERS citations are effectively invented,* these ECDC statistics are reported deaths of H1N1, not confirmed deaths. I tell you this because a. I wish to be honest, and b. as this is already based off Maloney’s manufactured numbers it should be clear these aren’t accurate real world inferences but merely demonstrations of his bullshit.) which was a total of 2328, and divide it by the total cases of US infections which was somewhere between 39 and 80 million. We’ll use their mid range of 55million, and do the same as with the statistics above.
232855,000,000
=0.00004233
=4.233×10−5
So per capita, the rate of death if infected with H1N1, is quite low, but still two whole orders of magnitude higher than Maloney’s supposed rate of death from the vaccination. Now we can start to look at how effective the vaccine actually is based on Maloney’s own stats:
“For children over two, the flu vaccine shows 59% efficacy and a 33% effectiveness rate. Combining these would give me roughly a one in five chance of improving my older son’s chances of not getting the flu, with no evidence that it would prevent complications.”
I’m not entirely sure why he’s combining effectiveness and efficacy to get an even lower probability of success. My best guess is that this is similar to the creationist fine-tuning trick of saying “There’s a 0.1 chance that the oxygen in the atmosphere would be at the right level. There’s a 0.1 chance that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be at the right level. Therefore there is a 0.01 chance that both would be at the right level” when in fact oxygen and carbon dioxide are two sides of the same coin, balanced in equilibrium by an ecosystem based on photosynthesis. In other words Maloney is blatantly lying again to try and fudge the numbers in his favour by unnecessarily multiplying probabilities. Well, either that or he hasn’t bothered to learn what the terms actually mean. After all, he isn’t a real physician, so I guess he doesn’t really need to know these theings.
So with the overall chance of infection being the total number of infections, 55million, divided by the total population of 250 million. We get:
55,000,000250,000,000
=0.22
We can now start putting these probabilities together. How effective is the Vaccine? First we’ll multiply the overall likelihood of infection, with the infection rate of mortality. So if you didn’t vaccinate your child, the chances of a resulting infection and subsequent fatality would be:
0.22 x 0.00004233 = 0.00000931 or 9.31 x 10−6
So what is the total rate of death when vaccinated? There are actually two numbers to consider here. The rate of death Maloney directly attributes to the vaccination of 3.9×10−7, plus the overall infection/death rate of 9.31 x 10−6 multiplied by the vaccines rate of failure, 1 minus Maloney’s statistic (another dubious number given his other statistics and the fact that the CDC website rates the nasel spray version as high as 92% efficacious in the children 15-85 moths) of 33% effectiveness for the vaccine, as we wish to find it’s ineffective rate, which would be 1 – 0.33 or 0.66 ineffective.
3.9×10−7 + 9.31 x 10−6 x 0.66 =0.00000653 =0.653 x 10−6
So now to compare them, if we take the original rate of death by not getting your child vaccinated 9.31 x 10−6, and divide the number by 0.653 x 10−6, the probability of death caused by ineffective vaccination plus by death directly attributed to vaccination based on Maloney’s made up statistics:
0.000009310.00000653
= 1.4257274….
So based on Maloney’s own statistics which he flaunts on the swine flu ‘research’ page of his website, you are one and a half times more likely to end up with a dead child if you listen to Maloney’s advice. Actually seeing the maths turn out a number based on the man’s own statistics, you can’t help but wonder how many people he and others naturopaths, conspiracy nuts, anti-vaxers and other voodoo woos have helped killed in the lasts years pandemic. If Maloney is a real medical doctor as he claims, he should be held accountable for this.
One thing is evident though, Christopher Maloney must have failed maths as well as medicine to end up were he is. I mean, you think if a fraudulent quack was going to fabricate ‘research data’ (or fluff for his quack website if you want to label it properly), he’d at least have the initiative to come up with some numbers that would support his claims.
*the VAERS clearly states that it simply collects all data related to post vaccination incidents and does not discriminate against any reports based on the who, what, why, where, and when. Someone gets the vaccination, then at some point after gets sick, the event is logged with VAERS. The VAERS clearly state on their data/index page this does not infer any causal link between vaccination and logged events, and clearly warns against using the VAERS data to draw such links. It is entirely probable that some small minority of people have serious complications from H1N1, if for nothing else but the fact that its grown using chicken eggs with some portion of the population being allergic. However when Maloney states specifics numbers and direct causal links like this, he is making shit up.
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