Tribune. According to reports from the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM), health professionals noted between January and July 2021 a thousand deaths in France among people who suffered disorders following the injection of one of the four vaccines against Covid-19. This figure has been interpreted in two opposite ways.
On the one hand, Laurent Mucchielli, a sociologist known in particular in the field of criminal statistics, published on the site Mediapart a text [depuis retiré] in which he believes that all of these deaths were caused by the vaccines.
Binary debate
On the contrary, eight of his colleagues criticized him fiercely in a column in the World by asserting that the link between this thousand deaths and the administration of the vaccine had a “Infinitesimal probability”. Here we are in an all-or-nothing binary debate: either a thousand vaccine deaths, or zero.
Who is right ?
Neither side, it seems. The ANSM reports conclude after a fairly thorough examination of post-vaccine deaths that, “Under these conditions, it is not possible to rule on a physiopathological link with the vaccine”.
In other words, the question remains open. It is indeed very difficult to establish a causal link in such circumstances, but there is a great deal of evidence to favor, if not a direct link, at least a causal relation. Thus, on 171 deaths observed by medical personnel after vaccination with AstraZeneca Vaxzevria (out of 7.2 million injections), 153 concerned people with a history of cardiovascular disease.
Did they die because of this weakness unrelated to the vaccination or, on the contrary, did the latter trigger the fatal accident? Here again the formulation is binary. It is more likely that the vaccination accelerated the arrival of the fatal moment, just as during the great heatwave the most fragile people had died when they had perhaps a few months or years still to live. We did not know until after the fact by noting a drop in mortality in old age during the quarters that followed the heatwave.
The same test is unfortunately not possible in the current case. In other words, vaccination would be partly, and not completely, nor “infinitesimally”, responsible for these 153 deaths.
Continuity between severe case and death
In support of this interpretation, it can be noted that for the 5,191 serious cases identified following the injection of this same AstraZeneca vaccine, the ANSM reports do not cast any doubt on their direct link. with the injection. There is continuity between a severe case and a death. It would be surprising if it suddenly disappeared at the crucial moment when we went from one to the other.
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