Vaccine debate on Kiwiblog

The official position of Kiwiblog (ie me) on vaccines is that they’re fucking great and modern science is awesome in that something can be developed so quickly that can save so many people from death or suffering.

But Kiwiblog always has allowed people to disagree with me, and the same goes for vaccines. It is quite legitimate for people to point out that there are some adverse reactions and that over time they are less effective with elderly people (hence why Israel is doing boosters) etc. I do caution that no one should treat anything said here as being health advice. One should get health advice from health professionals.

Analysing vaccine data can be very complex. Look at this post about Israel and see the huge number of steps the author had to take to get to what is the relevant data about effectiveness of the vaccine.

I’ve seen claims that more people have died after taking the vaccine in NZ, than have died from Covid. At first glance this is true, but it misleading. The official data is here and 40 people have died within a couple of weeks of taking the vaccine. But only one death is linked. And they report that actually the 40 deaths recorded is lower than the normally expected number of people who would die in that period. So correlation is not causation.

And the other factor is the denominator. Only 4,000 people in NZ have had Covid-19 while almost three million people have been vaccinated. So even if all the 40 deaths were related to the vaccine (and half have been explicitly ruled out) then 40 out of 3,000,000 is still a lot less than 30 out of 4,000.

Kiwiblog does and will allow people to debate vaccines. But where moderators will step in is if people start pushing conspiracy theories above the data being faked etc etc.