So your Uncle Jim is planning to get his COVID vaccination on Monday. You are thrilled for him but cousin Fred is warning him that those damn vaccines can cause heart attacks. You shake your head and tell Uncle Jim that’s nonsense — go get the jab.
So Uncle Jim gets the jab on Monday. Then on Tuesday, just 1 day later, right on schedule, a heart attack takes Uncle Jim. The family is devastated. Cousin Fred tells everyone that he warned Uncle Jim that would happen, but would he listen? NO-O-O-O. Stubborn old fool would be alive today if he’d only listened.
Cousin Fred immediately reports Uncle Jim’s adverse event on the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Another vaccine-related heart attack. Another unverified VAERS report.
This is a classic example of the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy. If event A precedes event B, then event A must have caused event B to happen. The rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise.
Let’s do some simple math. According to the CDC, approximately 800,000 Americans have a heart attack every year. Also according to the CDC, in 2021, approximately 240 million Americans received at least one jab.
So, of the 800,000 Americans who had a heart attack in 2021, approximately 582,000 of them also received a vaccine. (Assuming the heart attacks and the vaccinations are uncorrelated, then 240 million / 330 million is the fraction of vaccinated Americans. 800,000 x 240/330 = 582,000). Each of those Americans had a vaccination and a heart attack within a 365-day span. If those events are randomly distributed, the probability that their heart attack occurs within 1 day after a vaccination is 1/365. So of those 582,000 Americans who also received a vaccine dose, 1594 of them will have their heart attack within 1 day of their vaccination. That’s just the result of a random distribution of a known number of heart attacks and vaccinations within the same year.
A search of the VAERS database reveals that in calendar year 2021, exactly 1474 reported a myocardial infarction as the symptom that was “caused” by the vaccination. Which is exactly what would be expected from a random distribution of heart attacks and vaccinations in 2021.
So it seems that cousin Fred, even though he may believe that he correctly predicted Uncle Jim’s heart attack, has fallen victim to the post-hoc fallacy. Just like the damn rooster.
Has this happened to you?