Baseball, Weather, and Public Health
Post #1217
In this prior report, it was brought out that the WHO claimed, in May 2022, that experimental COVID injections had a very good (“overwhelmingly positive”) benefit-risk ratio. But by that time there had been 37 deaths reported to VAERS regarding the early Moderna lot: 032 H 20 A, a lot with a grand total of 111,600 doses in it.
Once you do the math, you discover that the reporting rate of fatal adverse event reports (AERs) per million doses reached 331.5 fatal AERs per million doses:
But a reporting rate of 331.5 fatal AERs per million is a value which cannot simultaneously be accepted while also accepting the WHO statement about an overwhelmingly-positive benefit-risk ratio. Trying to hold both propositions in your mind involves a contradiction. They cannot both be true (one must be false).
This is because the baseline reporting rate for fatal AERs per million doses is 1.1 — and 331.5 fatal AERs per million doses is 300x worse than that (and you cannot simultaneously be 300x worse and also “overwhelmingly positive”).
How wrong is too wrong?
However, if the statement by the WHO, in light of evidence from Moderna, is proven wrong, then it pays to ask:
How wrong should we allow public health officials to be allowed to be before they lose their jobs for substandard performance?
We can contrast different professions to reveal a scope of standards, measured as a percentage or proportion of “failures” given a certain number of attempts to complete something successfully.
Baseball Batting Averages
In Major League Baseball, the top contender for getting a hit while at bat is Ty Cobb, with a career batting average (BA) of 0.366:
For every 1,000 instances of being at bat, Ty Cobb got a hit 366 times (4,189 hits from 11,434 at bats). Another way to say this is that he had a 63% failure rate (while getting on base 37% of the time, he also failed to get on base 63% of the time). Ty Cobb got to keep his job while being 63% wrong (failing to get on base 63% of the time).
Not only that, he was the best at what he did — while “failing” 63% of the time.
Weather Forecasts
Meteorologists get paid in order to predict the weather, but the 10-day weather forecast is notoriously poor, being at 20% back in 1981:
Back in 1981, professional meterologists’ 10-day predictions were 80% wrong — and they were allowed to keep their jobs. But if a meteorologist came along today with that track record, then they’d be “shown the door” (they would lose their job, because of not being able to be correct “enough”).
Being 80% wrong is no longer tolerable (it is completely unacceptable performance) in this particular field of expertise.
Public Health
Perhaps a good benchmark for public health officials is to score them based on the standard of a 3-day weather forecast — something which is correct more than 95% of the time (less than 5% wrong). If public health officials are more than 5% wrong, then they should lose their jobs — just as if they were meteorologists with 3-day forecasts.
Because of how wrong they were during COVID, nearly all public health officials should be out of a job right now (if the standard of success was the 3-day weather forecast performance of meteorologists). Having been “mostly wrong” (over 50% wrong) for several years in a row, they should not be allowed to continue in their jobs.
Reference
[May 2022 statement by WHO of a very positive benefit-risk ratio; recommendations for boosters, even within the same year as the original shots] — https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2022-statement-for-healthcare-professionals-how-covid-19-vaccines-are-regulated-for-safety-and-effectiveness
[ICAN page with a link to the 17Mb PDF file showing Moderna lot sizes] — https://icandecide.org/article/exclusive-moderna-lot-and-dose-data-release/
[typical reporting rate for fatality is 1.1 fatal AERs per million doses] — https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5201a1.htm
[MedAlerts VAERS searching tool] — MedAlerts. https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php
[baseball stats] — https://www.espn.com/mlb/history/leaders
[weather prediction] — https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts