Panic porn for me, but not for thee
The disturbing antivax turn of Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson is a usual suspect on BadCOVID19Takes. In the course of building his platform and making hundreds of thousands of dollars from self-published book(let)s minimizing the pandemic, Berenson has gotten things wildy, repeatedly, shamefully, and sometimes bizarrely wrong about the virus.
In minimizing COVID-19, Berenson often calls out the press for circulating anecdotes he labels “panic porn,” even when they’re true. For example, he jumps on reports of COVID-19 among the young and contends that the media exaggerates these rare deaths. What about long-term the effects of COVID, such as those experienced by college athletes? Berenson simply denies they exist. You see, these reports are also merely anecdotal:
Whatever the merits of this worldview, in the last month, Berenson has transformed himself into the most cynical panic dealer on Twitter.
He spreads unmoored panic about the vaccines.
Alex Berenson: panic pornographer
Berenson breathlessly posts seemingly every example worldwide of alleged adverse reactions to the vaccines, nearly all of them non-lethal and even for common or benign side effects—the kinds of warped reporting he mocks when it comes to the virus itself.
Berenson doesn’t put vaccine events into context as he insists should be done with COVID deaths—he doesn’t say that because 7.05 million doses have been administered in the US, that the low number of serious adverse events combined with the admittedly high efficacy of the vaccines implies hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by them.
Instead, Berenson cynically peddles panic porn:
These data come from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which tracks adverse events following vaccinations. Events get reported whether or not they they are believed to have actually occurred because of the vaccination, and CDC has rolled out a novel text-message based monitoring system that will encourage more people to file VAERS reports for serious events than has been done with other vaccines in the past.
Berenson cites the raw VAERS numbers quite cynically here. When challenged, he pretends as if he’s just reporting facts and making some profound point about COVID reporting.
The facts are that over 7.05 million vaccines have been administered in the US, and the serious events appear vanishingly rare in this context. There is some lag to reporting, sure, but the VAERS data currently includes reports received through January 1, and as of December 31, over 3.13 million vaccines had been administered.
The data show the reverse of the impression Berenson cynically cultivates: that the deaths and hospitalizations are much lower than expected by chance, which tends to confirms the determination of the FDA and of similar agencies in other countries that the vaccines are safe and efficacious.
When 3.13 million people get the vaccine, eleven deaths is remarkably low
When millions of people get a vaccine, some of them will then get rare diseases or die shortly thereafter. The “curse of incidental illness” has been exploited by antivaxxers for ages, and Alex Berenson has joined their ranks.
Big sample sizes (like 3.13 million) make unlikely events certain. Dispense enough vaccines and some of the recipients will be struck with lightning. This isn’t even a hypothetical example. One of the 30,000 participants in the Moderna trial received the vaccine and then developed an arrhythmia after being struck by lightning.
Does the vaccine cause lightning strikes? Do deaths mean the vaccines are unsafe? No, of course not. A handful of people died in both the Pfizer and Moderna trials, but more people died in the saline placebo group of each.
If the vaccines cause any deaths at all, they’re at a very low level. Ironically, the figures in Berenson’s fear-mongering posts suggest vaccine safety.
Some back-of the-envelope calculations confirm this: if you were to randomly sample 3.13 million people from the US population, in pre-COVID times you would expect about 74 of them to die each day given our normal mortality rates. (Currently this is closer 85 each day due to the substantial excess deaths caused by COVID-19). Yet Berenson harps on 11 deaths—a much lower number than we should see by chance.
As for ER visits, among a random sample of 3.13 million Americans, in ordinary times you’d see an average of 3631 visit the ER the very next day. Of course, the number would be even higher if you randomly count ER visits that occur days and even weeks later, as reported by many VAERS events. Again, 876 ER visits is very low.
One might quibble that the population of vaccinated people are not random because they’re filled with active medical professionals who presumably have lower mortality than average. But the vaccinated population also over-represents people in nursing homes who have much higher mortality. And anyway, the numbers are not even in the right ballpark for concluding a significant risk of death.
If Berenson were honestly presenting the numbers, he’d note that they show the reverse of what he implies—that it’s actually stunning only 11 deaths and 876 ER visits have been reported. (More likely he’d argue they were suspiciously low, so untrustworthy, but at least then his argument would be consistent with the evidence.)
“Now do COVID”
I’ve seen lots of people on Twitter respond to these facts the same way Berenson does: “Now do COVID.”
Gladly.
To people not steeped in COVID minimization, this three-word response doesn’t make a lot of sense. As background, the argument is that COVID deaths are overcounted because some people who were going to die anyway also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
The best reply to this is that while such deaths might occasionally occur, they don’t occur very frequently. Most COVID-19 deaths really would not have occurred without the virus, which we can tell from the total number of deaths. Since March 2020, deaths have been above normal and closely correlated with COVID deaths:
(See also my previous post on how COVID minimizers have misrepresented CDC numbers which do indeed show hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.)
Some people remain skeptical and imagine that COVID deaths are actually generated by testing. The theory, promoted by Berenson himself, is that the increase in testing itself leads to “casedemics,” where more deaths are assigned to COVID. The theory cannot explain why the overall excess deaths (shown above) should rise and fall based on the incidence of testing (nor are overall deaths correlated with lockdowns).
But let’s pretend for the sake of argument it makes sense—that testing does not identify people who have a sometimes-fatal disease, but instead mostly picks up deaths that would happen anyway. What’s the upper limit of genuine COVID deaths under this assumption?
Let’s do some more back-of-the-envelope calculations. Let’s assume that every case tested within 60 days of death results in a COVID-19 death, even if it was actually a car accident. This is false, but let’s pretend it’s true for the sake of corona-skeptics. Let’s also pretend that every “case” represents a unique individual who tested positive, even though there are actually some duplicates. What’s a reasonable estimate for “fake” COVID-19 deaths that would have happened anyway?
Well, in the last 60 days about 11.5 million Americans have tested positive. That’s a lot of people! If you were to sample 11.5 million Americans at random, you would expect about 272 to die per day. But instead, we are averaging about 2,700 COVID deaths per day.
In other words, people who test positive for COVID are dying about ten times the rate we’d expect from the general population. Even if you want to insist we’re miscategorizing tons of deaths, to a first approximation about 90% of them are caused by the virus. In contrast, abnormally high deaths have not been shown to exist with the vaccine—the VAERS numbers Berenson quotes include far fewer deaths than would occur by chance.
“Now do COVID” is all hat, no cattle. It’s projection.
Young adults should vastly prefer the vaccine over the virus
What if the vaccine were as dangerous as COVID-19? How many people would die? Well, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison because the no one in the general population has had the vaccine 60 days yet, but we would expect something on the order of 500 deaths per day from the 3.15 million people who had gotten the vaccine by December 31.
If all you’re worried about is death, this is no contest—you’d much, much rather have the vaccine than the virus.
Berenson plays a motte-and-bailey game where he claims that COVID-19 is safer than the vaccine for people under 50, but when challenged retreats to arguing the vaccine has more side effects than the annual flu shot. It does, but that doesn’t imply it’s unsafe compared to the virus. Remember the virus itself does not have long-term testing, but it definitely causes nerve damages and blood clotting in the short term. Berenson puts his thumb on the scale of panic porn by assuming that the only worrisome effect of COVID-19 is death, and comparing this number to vaccine side effects, which consist overwhelmingly of temporary pain and tiredness.
But even if we falsely assume that only deaths matter, then even among people under 50, the virus is vastly more deadly than the vaccine. If we over-estimate the number of Americans that had the virus at 30% (so about 39 million Americans between age 18 and 54), then the odds of dying after acquiring the virus are about 1-in-1700 (considering the 23,145 deaths reported between 15 and 54). In actuality, the risk is greater, and particularly for those over 40, because likely closer to only 20% of the country has been infected. For comparison, how many vaccine-related deaths occurred among the 34,000 or so people vaccinated in the Moderna and Pfizer clinical trials due to the vaccine? Zero. And how many VAERS reports for deaths under age 55 exist? Again, zero. If the vaccine were even close to being as deadly as the virus, we’d expect well over 1000 deaths under age 55 caused by the vaccine already. This simply isn’t happening.
Berenson is just wrong on the risks, and misusing rare anecdotes to scare people.
Berenson misrepresents VAERS events
Berenson’s panic porn also conceals how unremarkable the vaccine events have been to date. As a reminder, recorded events do not prove that the vaccine caused the events—with millions of vaccines administered, freak occurrences will occur.
But are these events even freaky? Not really.
Among the eleven deaths, ten of them clearly befell nursing facility residents, which is easily seen below. Nine deaths followed a vaccine that was administered by “senior living” facilities. Another is coded “other,” but the narrative description says “RESIDENT CODED AND EXPIRED,” suggesting it was also a facility death.
Berenson does not describe these deaths, leaving it for his followers to assume the worst, as they do. While a follow-up tweet says that they “mainly appear to be nursing home residents,” he does not say that fully ten of eleven are.
I don’t mention the demographics of these reports to imply that such deaths don’t matter—they matter! Every death is a loss. Nor am I merely poking Berenson for his hypocrisy in pooh-poohing COVID nursing home deaths by radically misinterpreting statistics about them, although it is hypocritical.
Rather, I mention these deaths for context. These are the kinds of deaths we would expect to be reported if the vaccine was not dangerous—the sorts of deaths that happen just as a matter of course. Of the ten nursing home deaths, some have notes suggesting they probably died of other causes (“end stage renal failure” and “did not expect pt to make it many more days”). And other descriptions express doubt the death could be related to the vaccine.
These deaths, and the eleventh death—a “massive heart attack” that a 63 year-old man suffered four days after getting vaccinated—are exactly the kind of unrelated deaths we would expect if the vaccine was as safe.
To be sure, the vaccine has side-effects (see below), but they’re better than the virus.
The “permanent disabilities” that aren’t
Berenson also cynically reports five cases coded “permanent disabilities.” In fact, the permanent disabilities are much less than they seem, and I find it implausible Berenson does not know that.
From the reports, one 83 year-old woman suffered fractured bones after falling 30 minutes after her vaccination.
All of the others appear to be simple coding errors. None of them describe permanent disabilities from the vaccines:
To be sure, all of these are adverse events. The wall of text in particular describes severe headaches and fever that lasted several days, but remember that 3.13 million people received vaccines by the date of these reports.
Berenson knows how to view individual VAERS reports, and I would find it incredible he didn’t check these five in search of juicy panic porn. But he doesn’t see fit to tell his followers that the “permanent disability” category includes one fall and otherwise fevers and pain—and not what most people would assume by “permanent disability.”
Where we go from here
I think it’s important to note the mRNA vaccines do have side effects stronger than familiar flu vaccines, particularly in the second dose. People commonly experience muscle pain and tiredness, and people should not be surprised by these symptoms. Also, some serious allergic reactions have occurred, although they appear to be a small fraction of one percent. They occur quickly after the shot and can be treated.
But Berenson isn’t providing measured warnings based on realistic risks. He’s trying to scare the bejesus out of people, and it’s only going to get worse.
The number of VAERS events will get higher, and the anecdotes Berenson cherry picks will become more plentiful and lurid. We need to be clear here and now that people should not assume a causal relationship without proof. We need to look at the overall risks and shut out panic pornographers.
Why can't you put your name to the article? Berenson is is an impartial, honest , journalist. More than I can say for you.