Midwits in Action: But Correlation Doesn't Equal Causation
As I expected, midwits have come out in force to defend the Covid vaccines. If you need a refresher on what a midwit is, check out:
As we note in that piece, midwits love second order logic. It enables them to feel all mighty by dunking on the first order rubes, all while not having to think too hard about anything. So the Covid jabs are a great case of this, one you might summarize as the following:
When midwits do happen upon some inconvenient facts that break their worldview (e.g. any conflict to the “safe and effective” narrative), they reach into their admittedly limited bag of tricks to portray the guy on the right as the guy on the left so that they can feel better about their own views.
We’ll work with the anonymous reply that I got in response to Where did all this cancer come from?
“John Smith” writes:
It's unscientific and frankly reckless to suggest such outlandish causation without a shred of causal evidence. And then again to blame backlash to such swill on propaganda and government conspiracy.
Come on man, you're better than this.
This, dare I say, is the height of midwitism. Apologies if John Smith is someone I know (as is likely), but you deserve it.
I get accused of “suggest[ing] such [an] outlandish causation without a shred of causal evidence.” Like most people, midwits learned in school that “correlation doesn’t equal causation” and know enough to cling to that as an argument so that other midwits think they are smart. “The slippery slope is a logical fallacy” is another favorite in their spheres.
Now obviously, I am aware of all of the pitfalls of correlation, having studied statistics or worked heavily with it for over 15 years. And of course, as I note multiple times within the piece:
And again, while we can’t prove causality on this point alone, let’s remember where we were in April of 2021…
And later in the piece:
So look - I hope that I am wrong on this. Perhaps the rise in cancer is due to missed early screenings during 2020 and the rates will soon go back down. But we don’t know.
Obviously, this was couched with a clear degree of uncertainty, uncertainly frankly appropriate to the situation.
But remember what is unequivocal here: there has been an unprecedented rise in cancer deaths that start to deviate from the general trend in April of 2021. That is a fact, and it is a substantial enough rise that it would be insane for us to just brush it off as some weird data artifact and not worry about it.
That brings us to another trait of midwits: they love critiquing, but never really looking to build any alternative theories.
There are two more things to say. First, let’s address “but correlation doesn’t equal causation.” And while this line is broadly true, it is not an absolute. While I have been leveraging the concepts for a while, I haven’t directly mentioned Bradford Hill’s Criteria for Causation, which address how you can assess a correlation for causal ties. Let’s take a look:
Hill, it’s worth noting, was an epidemiologist, and came up with these criteria because there are clear challenges particularly in epidemiology of operating without a well-defined control group.
Several researchers have looked at these criteria in response to vaccine injuries as a whole, and found the case for the causal nature to be quite compelling. Here are a couple examples:
I won’t cover all nine criteria now with Cancer. And to be clear: not all nine would be met so far given a lack of certain data. But there are two criteria in particular that point in the direction of causality.
Temporality
The timing of the rise in cancer (as is true with the [disability data]) is after we saw the rise in the suspected cause, in this case by ~3-4 months. This is meaningful. Had the change been concurrent, you’d actually throw out a potential relationship as there is no way that A could have caused B that quickly. I’ll sound like a broken record here: while this doesn’t prove causality, it is a sign that it may be causal.
Plausibility
I covered this substantially in the original piece, which I’ll quote here:
Why could this be happening? There are plausible theories as to why and how the vaccine could cause aggressive cancers. We know that the vaccine particles make their way around the entire body rather than staying in the arm. We know that the spike protein is toxic to cells and that the vaccine triggers the body to generate these spike proteins in large amounts. And we know that the vaccine temporarily weakens the immune system and that the immune system plays a vital role in containing and attacking early cancerous cells that form.
Each of these links covers peer-reviewed science and each point here logically follows. If the vaccine particles make their way around the body, which they do, and if the spike protein is toxic to cells, which it is, then the fact that these vaccines tell the body to produce large amounts of these spike proteins can clearly cause cellular damage and mutation: cancer. Here is a paper that gets into it in a bit more detail.
Point is: there is a quite plausible mechanism for why the vaccines may be causing cancer that gets down to peer-reviewed research into the biochemical reactions going on.
We Need More Data
The answer to all this isn’t glib replies filled with the sickeningly smug “Come on man, you're better than this” attitude that midwits are so great at providing. Rather, the answer is to call for more and better data on this. What are the age-normalized cancer rates among unvaxxed vs. single vs. double vaxxed vs. boostered individuals? What about insurance claims data for cancer diagnoses/treatments? What are we seeing in other countries around the world?
All of these points could give us insight into what is going on and why we’re seeing a 1-in-3.5-billion blip in cancer deaths. Such analysis could disprove my hypothesis, and frankly I’d be ecstatic if that were the case. If we had competent health institutions, they’d be doing this analysis and sharing the data necessary to replicate it. In lieu of that though, it’s on us to find the data, figure out the truth, and not let smug little midwits like John get in the way.
As Mathew Crawford notes in his piece linked earlier, “The fact of the matter is, causality cannot ever rise above the level of opinion (until such time at which all the mysteries of the universe are unraveled, which seems exceedingly unlikely in the age of "Trust the Science")”. He’s right: whenever you are dealing without counterfactuals, causality will be an unobtainable ideal. That said - it doesn’t mean you don’t try! You still try to move the needle from unknown to known and get a sense of whether a causal relationship is 10% likely, 90% likely, or where it falls in between.
But what’s funny is that the side that admits that gets charged with being “anti-Science” by midwits like John. That “10%, 90%, or somewhere in-between” question is a degree of nuance he’s unable to handle. His warped view of science is one where there is a consensus view and that anything challenging that view is “unscientific” and to dismiss any evidence that the consensus is just wrong. In his petulant rebute, John is essentially saying that the rise in cancer *cannot* be due to the vaccines - the question is verboten in his mind. *That* is anti-science and midwitism at its finest.
it reminds me of the smoking wars between science and industry