They aren't lying, in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie.

They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.

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andreygrehov 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction.

Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven.

What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?

If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule.

Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.

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ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality…

Don't assume. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established."

> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?

He gets to restrict vaccines, which is a thing he's wanted to do for decades.

(And not just COVID ones; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-acip-vaccine-panel-hepatiti... happened this morning. Or the spurious claims about Tylenol and autism.)

What about this administration makes you think they care about having their false claims "shredded in 24 hours"?

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andreygrehov 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Duh. VAERS guide says raw reports dont 100% prove causality. Nobody claims they do. That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.

They could've just said "VAERS proves nothing" and left the recommendation unchanged. Instead they wrote it up, leaked it early, and invited the exact scrutiny you're giving it now.

If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown. They only take that risk if the OBPV analysis actually held up internally.

Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978

	▲	magicalist 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis. We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely". We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks. > If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.
	▲	ceejayoz 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis. And we're back at the "Hitler provided free things to Jews" technical truth again. This is likely an accurate statement! But it'd deeply missing important context. > If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown. This is likely meaningless to the guy who leaves dead bears in Central Park. The biggest political innovation in the last 50 years or so is the discovery that you can look like a clown without much consequence. > Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978 I don't recommend eating poop, but that doesn't mean it causes autism.