The Unvaccinated Had More Car Crashes... Because they Were the Ones Driving!
Discover more from Igor’s Newsletter
The Unvaccinated Had More Car Crashes... Because they Were the Ones Driving!
The Dumbest "Scientific Study" of the Month
An amazing scientific study, a product of leading minds of Canadian Covid Science (TM), is making rounds on the Internet.
The authors are not mincing words: they found that UNvaccinated people are MORE likely to have car crashes. Based on this statistical finding, they urge people to vaccinate to avoid car crashes!
Conclusions
These data suggest that COVID vaccine hesitancy is associated with significant increased risks of a traffic crash. An awareness of these risks might help to encourage more COVID vaccination.
As a fan of science, I was ashamed of my unvaccinated self for a minute: even though I have never had the kind of crash discussed in the study, I was exposing people to a heightened risk of a collision due to my refusal to take the vaccine. How selfish!
The authors highlight the extreme irresponsibility of the unvaccinated:
we theorized that individual adults who tend to resist public health recommendations might also neglect basic road safety guidelines
Then I started thinking…. How is this possible? Can a shot of mRNA make me less likely to be hurt in a crash? Are we THAT careless if we are willing to be penalized for trying to stay healthy? Is thoughtfully “doing our own research” akin to reckless and inattentive driving?
Let’s think together!
The Study Setup
The study looked at Ontario residents for whom records of vaccination, as well as records of ER visits, were available. It looked at people with known vaccination status who ended up in ER due to car crashes. It turned out that the share of people seriously hurt in crashes was higher in the unvaccinated group!
A total of 11,270,763 individuals were included, of whom 16% had not received a COVID vaccine and 84% had received a COVID vaccine. The cohort accounted for 6682 traffic crashes during follow-up. Unvaccinated individuals accounted for 1682 traffic crashes (25%), equal to a 72% increased relative risk compared with those vaccinated (95% confidence interval, 63-82; P < 0.001).
Driven Miles
After reading the study, I realized that it does NOT account for “driven miles”! What if the UNvaccinated people drive more due to NOT having a “remote job”?
Take a look at this picture:
Which of these two persons was more likely to…
Be called an “essential worker” in 2021?
Be unvaccinated?
Drive MORE miles per day?
End up in a serious crash?
It turns out that this was indeed the case in Canada:
That article explains that neighborhoods with “essential workers” had LOWER vaccination coverage. This confirms my experience with people I know: those who work in person (and drive to work) were least likely to want to get vaccinated.
Guess who is more likely to get into a car crash? That’s right, the person who drives to work daily, as opposed to a remote worker.
How many remote workers were hurt in this particular 8 am morning commute pileup in Ottawa? (it is a 2009 story, but you get the idea)
The Unvaccinated Could not Take Trains or Fly in Canada
So they had to drive more.
Retired People are the “Internal Control Group” - and Blow Up all Conclusions!
Is there an “internal control group”? Is there a group of people in which being an “essential worker” and having to commute more due to work cannot possibly influence the likelihood of being involved in a car crash?
The Canadian crash study, fortunately, provides us with a group of people who cannot work: those over 65 years of age. Those people are retired, are NOT essential workers, and tend to avoid morning commutes. (my dream)
How did these retired people compare in terms of vaccinated vs. UNvaccinated car crashes?
The study provides us with a table! Turns out that people over 65, who do NOT drive to work, are the ONLY group where vaccination leads to a slightly higher chance of car crashes for the vaccinated (without reaching statistical significance).
This outcome is the OPPOSITE of what happened to employed people:
So we can see that the conclusion that “unvaccinated people are more likely to be hurt in crashes” is explained by the fact that “essential workers” who drive to work were the ones choosing not to get vaccinated!
So… It is not the COVID vaccine that reduces the chances of having a crash. It is a fact that staying home with warm coffee and a laptop is safer than commuting to work or driving a truck. The effect does NOT exist in old people who do not work.
Thomas V’s Take
Our astute reader, “Thomas V,” offered another take on the study in the pinned comment. He did a fantastic job finding MORE issues.
Such is the state of “Covid science” nowadays, and not just in Canada.
Why did the Canada study authors choose not to address “miles driven?”
The Unvaccinated Had More Car Crashes... Because they Were the Ones Driving!
I've just finished reading the entire study, and have the following comments:
1. Vaccination status used in the study came from the COVaxON database, which followed Ontario definitions. This means a person was considered unvaxxed for the first 14 days after a shot (any shot). As the study period was only for 1 month, even a month that was preceded by a record number of injections, it is safe to conclude that a significant portion of the "unvaxxed" were actually "vaxxed." That is, they were people that followed public health advice. If only 602 of the 6682 casualties involved such misallocations, the difference in incidences of vaxxed vs unvaxxed crashes vanishes.
See:
https://covid19tracker.ca/provincevac.html?p=ON
https://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/health-and-wellness/vaccine-information-for-primary-care.aspx#COVaxON-information
https://www.ontario.ca/page/proof-covid-19-vaccination
2. Based on Table 3 in the study, less than half of the injured were drivers. By the logic of the authors, an unvaxxed passenger is more likely to cause an accident than a vaxxed passenger. This is ludicrous and positively demonstrates the data is unreliable (see point 1 above).
3. By section S7 of the Appendix, all deaths that occurred at the scene of the accident were excluded. The authors estimate at least 42 deaths were excluded. Since only 8 deaths were included, that means they excluded 84% of the most serious crash outcome. Also, since the study involved only 550 people that were actually admitted to a hospital, excluding 42 deaths was a major oversight.
4. By excluding all deaths that occurred at the scene of the accident, they conveniently excluded all accidents resulting from a vaccine induced sudden death.
5. The source data is not available, so none of their work can be verified.
6. They admit that a weakness of their study is that they did not account for miles driven. They go on to claim that "a 100% increase in driving distance, however, is unlikely to explain the magnitude of traffic risks observed in this study." But here they are incorrect, for a doubling of the distance driven should double the risk of a crash, all things being equal. And even their study did not find the unvaxxed twice as likely to be involved in an accident.
7. While they blatantly say that those that resisted the covid shot were misinformed, they do have the honesty to admit that "the study does not test the reliability of COVID vaccination as a proxy for COVID vaccine hesitancy." In other words, the authors didn't bother to verify that many people refused the covid-death-shot, not because they were misinformed but because they saw that the so called vaccine was unreliable. By admitting that they didn't test for this critical factor they overthrow the whole basis of their paper: vaccine hesitancy is associated with reckless driving habits.
8. They testify: "We verify that traffic crashes disproportionately involve those in poverty."
But since poverty does not make people more reckless behind the wheel, this statement proves there are other factors involved (such as: older cars of inferior quality, driving further to work, driving to work even when the weather is bad, driving during rush hour, etc.). Thus, the whole premise of their study is unhinged.
9. The study expressly says what I suspected in an earlier post, for they say: "COVID vaccine status might be considered for regions that prioritize road safety, such as those that mandate physicians to warn risky drivers and report to vehicle licensing agencies." And, "The observed risks might also justify changes to driver insurance policies in the future." Such a conclusion is utterly reprehensible, since they themselves admit they have not prove causality between so called vaccine hesitancy and car crashes, and more so because they know the extra insurance costs will fall on the poorest people.
Unvaccinated have more sex because our hearts and junk still work. It's science.