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Thomas V's avatar

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.

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CaliforniaLost's avatar

Unvaccinated have more sex because our hearts and junk still work. It's science.

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