Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacquesm 1630 days ago
Apologies for not taking you 100% serious at first, but I did make an attempt at answering your question. There are a lot of people that ask questions like that just to make fog, rather than to serve as an actual discussion point, forgive me for lumping you in with them, it has happened too often as of late to not wonder about these things.

Your expectations are very unreasonable. With a vaccine drive hitting 100's of millions of people in a very short time and with on average thousands of people normally dying of other causes, the assumption should be that some people that are vaccinated will die of natural causes within a reasonably short time.

After all, those causes don't suddenly go away within two weeks of being vaccinated. Some percentage of those people would have died anyway within those two weeks. The vaccine drive was spread out quite a bit but even so you can rest assured that any deaths that are even remotely suspicious (say, not a car accident, or someone falling to their death) are going to be looked at for patterns that lie outside the statistical expectations. Nobody would benefit from an unsafe vaccine, witness the care around AZ and Janssen when there was suspicion that these vaccines may cause disproportionate side effects.

So only excess deaths from COVID and excess deaths from vaccinations (which is a vanishingly small number utterly dwarfed by the COVID related deaths) should be counted, not the normal ones.

Base rates for a number of causes of death to give you an idea:

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/rHNYs/10/