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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31626 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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What we need to compare this to is the pre-existing risk of stroke in people over 65 before getting any vaccines or treatment of any sort for any condition, and that appears to be high already:

About 75 percent of strokes occur in people 65 or older. In other words it is an increasing problem the older we get. It has been estimated that the chance of having a stroke double every decade after 55.

Stroke afflicts about 800,000 people a year and is estimated to occur at the rate of one American every 40 seconds. About three-fourths of the annual strokes are first-time strokes and the other quarter are recurrent. In other words most strokes are first-time episodes.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death among Americans. It kills about 140,000 people a year.

So this is the same question as the one about miscarriages etc. - are they directly attributable to the vaccine, or are they being noted and recorded as vaccine-related/Covid-related, just because a lot of people are being vaccinated/contracting Covid? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now, if you pull up a link about 30 year olds getting strokes at the higher than normal rate, great, that's something to be addressed. But "population already at high risk of having strokes are getting strokes" is not, not unless "the rate is usually 75% but now has increased to 90%".

CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.

That is not what it says, upon reading. It says that there was a signal which "met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent".

They investigated, and found nothing of concern. This is because:

Often these safety systems detect signals that could be due to factors other than the vaccine itself. Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal. CDC and FDA will continue to evaluate additional data from these and other vaccine safety systems. These data and additional analyses will be discussed at the upcoming January 26 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

So you leading off with "Guys, guys, CDC found the vaccine booster causes strokes!" is incorrect.

Now, if you pull up a link about 30 year olds getting strokes at the higher than normal rate, great, that's something to be addressed. But "population already at high risk of having strokes are getting strokes" is not

I think this is totally wrong. If two people get strokes instead of one, that's not a worry. If two thousand people get strokes instead of a thousand, that is way more of a worry, the absolute amount of people being affected is much higher. I get the logic. Strokes happening to old people is Normal and to young people is Scary. But often Scary problems are Scary precisely because they're uncommon, while we shut our eyes to bigger problems precisely because we decide they're Normal.

met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65

You think that the CDC's statistical criteria don't involve exceeding the base rate in a statistically significant manner?

What's the base rate, what are the criteria for reporting?

So what we have is this: CDC did additional investigation, found nothing. Two conclusions:

(1) There is nothing there, the initial system that triggered the investigation was just picking up usual numbers

(2) There is something there, and the CDC, Pfizer, and other countries are all lying and covering up

Original post is trying to incline us to number (2). I want to know what is the base rate and how was it exceeded, if it was exceeded, before I throw ni with "it's all a cover-up".

Even if it is a real risk, how many of us are over 65? OP is using "risk of strokes in over 65" as an argument not to get any boosters, on the grounds that "if this is happening to them, what is happening to younger people?" and that's where the link needs to be demonstrated.

For instance, stroke is increasing among younger adults. Down to the vaccine? No, this is the conclusion of a 29 year study looking at data from 1990-2019:

Overall, in 2019 in the U.S., there were an estimated 460,000 strokes (of those, two-thirds were ischemic), 190,000 stroke-related deaths and 3.83 million stroke disability-adjusted life years.

From 1990 to 2019, the change in the prevalence of stroke in the general population increased by about 60%. Incidence, death and disability-adjusted life years also increased by about 20%.

However, the age-standardized rates of stroke incidence, death and disability-adjusted life years declined by 20% to-30% in that same period, and the prevalence of stroke did not change. These decreases have plateaued in the last 10 years of the study period.

Since 1990, stroke incidence among older adults (age 50 and older) decreased nationwide, yet increased in younger adults (ages 15 to 49) in some geographic areas, including certain states in the South (Alabama, Arkansas) and the Midwest (Minnesota, North Dakota).

So the reporting system may well be picking up something to do with strokes, but that it's down to the Covid vaccine alone has not been proven. Apparently, globally the incidence of stroke is going up, due to increased risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, etc. And the rate of brain hemorrhage amongst younger adults, due to uncontrolled high blood pressure, is also increasing:

In the new study, lead researcher Abdulaziz Bako, a postdoctoral fellow at Houston Methodist Hospital, and colleagues used aggregated nationwide data from 803,230 ICH hospitalizations. They calculated the rate of ICH over five consecutive three-year periods from 2004 to 2018. People were divided into four age groups: 18-44 years; 45-64 years; 65-74 years; and 75 years and older.

Overall, researchers found an 11% increase in the rate of ICH among U.S. adults over the 15-year study period. ICH increased at a faster rate for adults under age 65 compared to those 75 and older. The rate of increase also varied by region, climbing faster in the South, West and Midwest than it did in the Northeast. ICH stroke rates were 43% higher for men than women.

Among those who had ICH strokes, the percentage of people who had high blood pressure also rose, from 74.5% to 86.4% over the study period.

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