If there’s one pollster who been a surprising addition in telling the COVID panic peddlers to simmer down, it’s Nate Silver. Yes, FiveThirtyEight’s Silver has been shredding the COVID czars, especially when it comes to the vaccine. He straight-up accused Fauci of gaslighting on the vaccines.
For perspective, here are some numbers:
— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) April 13, 2021
1 in 1,000,000: J&J vaccine
1 in 3,000: oral contraceptives
1 in 5: hospitalized COVID-19 patients
As someone who got the J&J vaccine 8 days ago, and who took oral contraceptives for 20 years, I’ll take these odds.
“It's pure gaslighting at this point to say we don't know whether vaccinated people spread the virus,” Silver wrote. “Tons of studies—including from the CDC!!!—show that vaccines massively reduce (though probably not entirely eliminate) transmission.”
Now, with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine being paused, we’re once again seeing the panic peddler latch onto a new narrative. The move comes after just six women aged 18-48 developed a clotting issue 6-13 days after receiving the shot. This is extremely rare. There are probably more adverse effects seen from the seasonal flu shot, though there are no political points to be earned on that front. Silver ripped this move as a medical bureaucratic nightmare that’s going to get people killed. Twitchy captured it all:
6 cases out of 7 million people. What a disaster. This is going to get people killed. And it's going to create more vaccine hesitancy. These people don't understand cost-benefit analysis. They keep making mistakes by orders of magnitude. https://t.co/DQdvqoujHR
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
Public health bureaucrats have some weird habits in how they reason under uncertainty and how they communicate to the public. It might help if they sought out experts from economics, sociology, psychology, etc., instead of telling everyone to stay in the their lane.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
If out of the blue one morning Gov. Newsom was like "Shark attacks are extremely rare, but out of an abundance of caution, we're closing every beach in California until we investigate more", that's not likely to get more people to go out to the beach, even once beaches reopen.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
It's also a high-stakes test for the FDA, and they failed it, because of course lots of people are going to take away the latter message. https://t.co/dVlBxi2tYA
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
“If out of the blue one morning Gov. Newsom was like ‘Shark attacks are extremely rare, but out of an abundance of caution, we're closing every beach in California until we investigate more’, that's not likely to get more people to go out to the beach, even once beaches reopen,” he wrote.
He added, “Why did the FDA recommend the pause anyway? Because of a combination of institutional culture, cognitive biases, and bureaucratic imperatives incentives, they greatly overweight the importance of rare adverse effects relative to people dying from COVID.”
It all circles back to how these experts don’t know what to do it would seem. They want everyone to get vaccinated but seem totally fine with scaring the bejesus out of people while also telling them they need to remain in the bunker until his highness Dr. Fauci feels that it’s okay to eat in a restaurant.
He also offered what the FDA/CDC could’ve done without delivering what could be a massive blow to the vaccination effort:
There are some other options:
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
* Say you're continually monitoring complications and this rare event doesn't warrant a pause at the current time but of course you'll investigate further.
* Pause only for 16-49 year old women.
* Quietly investigate and *then* announce the results. https://t.co/1GfJefpjEO
Today's J&J news creates a scramble for governors already dealing with vaccine hesitancy. "I can't overstate how bad this is going to be," one GOP state official told me. "What we are going to deal with, it's not just a J&J issue now, it's a vaccine issue."
— Caitlin Huey-Burns (@CHueyBurns) April 13, 2021
These people want us to get vaccinated but then backpedal or shovel out pure panic for very, VERY rare adverse side effects. Is this out of an abundance of caution or are they trying to slow down our rapid pace towards herd immunity? I don’t know. Given how these clowns like to manufacture ‘impending doom;’ for no reason, nothing would shock me here.
"How dare the FDA shut down a vaccine just because it killed a teeny tiny percentage of people who took it!" screamed the panic pornographer who spent the last year demanding that all schools be shut down indefinitely over a virus that doesn't affect school-aged children.
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 13, 2021