Speaker 1: We're going to start today with died suddenly. What does that mean? Someone died
suddenly has become the new code for the COVID vaccine is killing people. Now, this has all
come to an extremely stupid crescendo because of what happened with the collapse in cardiac arrest
of NFL football player DeMar Hamlin on the field during an NFL game a little over a week ago. And
as you know, if you've been watching this program because we've been we've been following it,
I even got some voicemails about it that I played for you. The gist of the story is that
DeMar Hamlin collapsed not because he got hit in a particular way, but because of the COVID vaccine,
the COVID vaccine, which by the way, nobody knew whether DeMar Hamlin had actually received at the
time that people started saying the vaccine is to blame. And this brings us to a bigger story that
has been building the died suddenly. Conspiracy theory is the idea that people who have received
the COVID 19 vaccine are either dying at an unusual rate. The story is always otherwise
healthy. People are suddenly dying for unexplained reasons. That's one piece of it. Or experiencing
health effects of different, different kinds. Now, there is a lot that we could say about this and so
many different things. There is even a film called Died Suddenly, which rehashes a lot of these same
debunked claims. But a lot of this has to do with some really basic logical fallacies that I hope
I've done an okay job of educating people about over the years on the show. And it also has to
do with something called the base rate bias. So there's really two things going on here. First
of all, it's a fundamental issue of correlation versus cost causation. We sometimes call this post
hoc, ergo prompter hoc, meaning it happened afterwards. Therefore it happened because of
or to put it another way, B happened after a therefor A must have caused B And when you zoom
out you very quickly see how faulty this sort of thinking is. So let's start tight and then we'll
zoom out. Let's start with them. Are hamlyn are there examples of cardiac arrest during sporting
events among athletes? Yeah, there are. You know, in in major sports, Detroit Lions Chuck Hughes
had a fatal heart attack on the field in 1971. That's the only NFL player to die while playing
a Danish soccer player. Christian Eriksen suffered cardiac arrest during a tournament
in 2021. Hockey Hall of Famer Chris Pronger. His heart stopped when he was hit in the chest
by a hockey puck. NHL player. JAY Boom. Mr. Verbal? BAUMEISTER I'm not exactly sure. On
the pronunciation collapsed on the bench after a cardiac episode. Mark Vivian Foyer died during
a 23 semifinal match from an undiagnosed heart condition that was a soccer death. All of these
have not have not been claimed to have anything to do with vaccines. Most of them predate the
COVID vaccines. So the DeMar Hamlin situation is not unique, but that's not really the big story.
The big story is you have to understand base rates. When you test a vaccine,
as was done by Pfizer and Moderna before the COVID vaccines were fully released to the public.
A lot of these studies, clinical trials had 40,000 adults, for example, 40,000 adults. And so someone
who wants to think critically about this issue rather than fearmonger or spread conspiracy
theories would say, if you have a group of adults, if you take 18 plus 40,000 people distributed
among ages, how many of them would you expect to die over a three month period? Aside from whether
you're testing anything, and what I mean by that is if you take a group of 40,000 people and you
just follow them for three months, you would expect some to die. If their ages are normally
distributed. And it's a tough question to answer exactly for a vaccine test group, because it could
depend on particular choices that are made for who's included or who's not, who's not included.
But there's something called the crude death rate. That's the number of deaths per thousand
people a year overall in the U.S., the crude death rate is 7.8, meaning over the course of a year,
you would expect 7.8 deaths per 100 people, per thousand people for all different causes. Now,
if we use that rate, we would estimate that over a three month period you would expect
between five and six deaths per 100 people. These are rough numbers. So if you've got a group of
40,000 people, you would expect to see about 235 of them die over a three month period. This
is a side from testing anything, but that's just an estimate. And the other thing that's important
to consider is that that number that I gave you, 7.8, that's not just adults, that's everybody.
That includes younger people. The death rate for 18 plus. Again, aside from testing, a vaccine
would be higher than the death rate for the entire population because the risk of death increases
with age. And when you do only 18 plus, you would have a higher expected death rate than for people
of all ages, all the way down to newborn. So it's an estimate The number of people you would expect
to die in a group of 40,000 would vary. But the point of it is the fact that people died in the
three months after getting a vaccine doesn't actually tell us anything. People die. And in a
group of 40,000 people will die. So then we get to this particular died suddenly. Conspiracy
theory here they want to talk about young people are dying, healthy young people are dying. Now,
first of all, when we say healthy, in many cases, we don't actually know the full history. And what
we mean by healthy can vary in a lot of different ways. So that is fallacious and lacks evidence at
the top of the of the discussion. But here's the really important thing. The crude death rate for
those aged 18 to 34 is about 3.3 deaths per thousand people per year. That's just the
average crude death rate in the United States. The CDC believes about 65% of those aged 18
to 24 got a full regimen of the COVID vaccine. That means the two initial doses. Forget about
boosters. That's not part of the data. But 65% of those 18 to 24 got the two doses. That means if
we have about 32 million people aged 18 to 24, 65% of them are vaccinated, meaning 21 million
people aged 18 to 24 received the full dose of vaccines. If you look at that crude death rate
and you look at the number of people who have gotten vaccinated, you would expect
70,000 deaths among that group over the course of a year. Now, you will have endless circumstances.
You will have motor vehicle accidents, you will have cardiac episodes, you will have cancer,
you will have all you will have COVID 19 and some of you will have all those different things. The
fact that some people aged 18 to 24 died in the period after which they got a vaccine tells you
nothing. Five stories, ten stories, 20 stories about a 21 year old who died seven months after
getting a vaccine. And we don't exactly know the circumstances or we vaguely know,
but it's a privacy issue. It doesn't tell us anything about the safety of vaccines. And what is
missing from this analysis in most cases is this issue of the base rates. What are the base rates
of death in all of these different categories? It's basic stats, it's basic research methods,
and it's basic common sense and logic. And that is not a surprise then. That it is completely missing
from the minds and the discussions of these conspiracy theories. So don't fall for it. Don't
fall for it. Understand these concepts. Causation. Correlation. Base rates. Critical stuff.