There are truths to be discovered regardless of our convictions.

Back after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, there were, within a month, multiple stories from mainstream media of a dramatic increase in racism crimes.  Mainstream media journalist, to a person, were convinced that Trump was a racist, that his supporters were racists, and that his election was essentially a green light to naturally racist Americans to display their savagery racism.  Of course, racist attacks would increase.

From an ideological convictions perspective, that all made perfect and logical sense.  From an empirical perspective, not so much.

The most complete crime reporting data comes from the Department of Justice, primarily via the FBI.  And their data is incomplete, noisy, tardy, and unreliable.  You can sort of pick up long term trends over time but you have to be exceptionally careful about how much reliance you put on that data.

The FBI receives its data from police departments and sheriffs offices from around the nation.  They are not compelled to participate.  In 2022, only 69% of law enforcement officers participated and that was up a large amount from prior years.  The saving grace is that it tends to be the largest law enforcement offices which participate so that more than 69% of crime is covered but it does highlight one of the major statistical chinks in the data set.

Another is that the data is gathered by those local law enforcement offices.  Yes, the FBI has extensive forms and definitions and instructions, but the degree to which the data is accurately collected and reported is debated.  

And even when the data is accurately collected and reported, it is often still incomplete because citizens often do not report crimes for a whole variety of reasons.  

And hate crimes are the most notoriously malleable crimes reported because they are not objectively determined.  An interracial mugging occurs.  It is a criminal act (of theft).  Is it a hate crime?  Well that depends on a lot of factors that have to be interpreted.  What words were used?  What symbolism was invoked?  How explicit was the communication?  Even in the best of times and under the best of circumstances, hate crime data is extremely noisy from a statistical perspective.  It is hard to get reliable signals.  

And those are just the biggest issues.

These issues are reasonably well known to virtually anyone who has been reading newspapers and news magazines for more than a few years.  It is a known issue.  

The consequence is that anyone reporting a near term increase or change in a crime trend is virtually certainly being deceptive or simply misreporting.  

So all the reports of a steep increase in hate crimes in the weeks immediately following the 2016 election?  It was easily known by anyone paying attention in past years that there had been no reported increase in such crime because there was simply no such data to report.  The FBI Uniform Crime Report comes out annually, many months after the beginning of the calendar year.  

So what were the mainstream media journalists reporting if the data was not even available to support their bald assertions?  And how were they reporting it.  Typical mainstream media dereliction of professional standards.  

Unnamed sources.  Weasel words.  Anecdotes.  Cherry picking.  Strategic sourcing.  

Find a city where there had been some sort of statistical anomaly (there are always anomalies in an average), report on that as representative of what is happening.  Find a police chief trying to drum up pressure to increase the police budget who would be happy to talk about a perceived (though undocumented) increase in hate crimes.  Quote a sympathetic academic who is happy to blur the distinction between what is empirically observed versus what might be logically expected.  Bolster the academic's assertions by interviewing a couple of unnamed crime reporters in other big cities, Et Voila!  You have your increase in hate crime statistics owing to the election of Trump without there ever being a change in underlying crime patterns and without the bother of actual data or analysis.  

That was what happened after the election of Trump.  It was right out there in the open for anyone to reading critically and objectively.  Mainstream media reporters said there was a real increase in hate crimes owing to the election of Donald Trump and it was never a real thing.  It was what they logically expected based on their ideological beliefs and partisan biases but it was never based in reality.

That was easy to see.

We have had a harder one going on post-Covid.  We have known since the beginning that virtually every public health decision in the US from March of 2020 onwards was both wrong in terms of past policy and experience, wrong in actual outcomes, and either absent any empirical foundation or via an ignoring of the empirical data which did exist.

All that was denied by the establishment and the clerisy and the mainstream media at the time, hence the strident claims of disinformation campaigns and the desperate attempts to suspend civil rights (especially freedom of speech).  

In the past 12 months, it has become increasingly well documented that the charges by the empirical skeptics were true all along.  The trials were poorly designed, faulty, too small, and terminated too early to support the deployment of the experimental vaccines.  All the established public health protocols were ignored.  Civil rights were suspended.  Masks were enforced.  Schools were closed.  Public spaces were closed.  All of it known to be wrong and inconsistent with history, existing norms, and established evidence.

But it happened anyway and now the cost and consequences are slowly being acknowledged.

But what were the consequences.  

Once you have such demonstrably bad actors, it is reasonable to accuse them of anything.  But they should be indicted for no more than is real.  

For me, the two major open issues are 1) whether the Experimental Use Authorization of mRNA vaccines cause an excess of myocardial infarctions among young men and 2) whether Long Covid is real.

I have might strong doubts about the second, but I am seeing better and better studies but so far they also seem relative inconclusive.  Clearly there are advocating populations (among patients, doctors, and public health experts) who want it to be true, but whether Long Covid is real remains unclear to me and I am skeptical.

The myocardial infarctions among young men has been even harder to tell.

It was reported relatively early and relatively frequently.  Too frequently for it too have been true (see Trump hate crime reporting).  Yes, the instances of young athletes dropping dead from heart attacks were real.  But was it a trend line dramatically above the norm?  The claims were in advance of any possible reliable reported data.

The challenge is also similar to hate crimes in being such a rare event.  The number of hate crimes as a percentage of all crimes is de minimis.  Though there are occasional real hate crimes.  The number of mortal heart attacks among healthy young men as a percentage of all deaths in a year are also de minimis.  Though there are occasional real deaths by heart attack among healthy young men.  

Was there an increase and was the increase due to the EUA mRNA vaccines, as opposed, for example, to the sudden imposition of a substantially more sedentary life style for a prolonged period?

We couldn't know early on.  And because such deaths are uncommon, tragic, and attention-grabbing, they are especially prone to the frequency illusion.  

For me, the jury has been out.  The EUA mRNA was criminally and coercively enforced on populations below 60 without adequate evidence about its effectiveness or safety.  And while excess young male heart attacks have been extensively claimed, the underlying data has appeared to be substantially anecdotal.

Sudden Cardiac Death in College Athletes by John Mandrola goes some ways to tilting the field towards this having been an illusory claim.  The subheading is A recent paper on the incidence and causes of death in NCAA athletes over the past two decades made me Stop and Think about making causal connections from anecdotes.

I had thoughts. Maybe you did too.

There were just so many media reports of cardiac arrest in athletes.

This is a column about two things—a medical problem (cardiac arrest) and the way our brains work.

During the pandemic we learned that the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could cause myocarditis—or inflammation of the heart. Young males had the highest risk of this adverse effect.

This was neither a welcome finding nor was it a common adverse effect. But it was real. Everyone now agrees. Also well known—from old data—was that myocarditis is a cause of cardiac arrest during sport.

So. When media reports during the pandemic told the dramatic stories of athletes having cardiac arrest, my brain started making causal connections…between a) the fact that most athletes had to take a mRNA vaccine, b) the vaccine could cause myocarditis, a cause of cardiac arrest, c) young athletes, mostly male, had the highest risk of vaccine-related-myocarditis, and d) there sure seemed to be a lot of these media reports.

The cardiac arrest of the famous Danish football star Christian Eriksen added a mental glue to these connections. His cardiac arrest occurred months after the vaccine was released in 2021. There was initial speculation that he had received a vaccine. The director of the team then said that Eriksen was not vaccinated. He is now back playing professional football—with an ICD.

Maybe it was my curated news feeds, but I saw media report after media report of athletes having cardiac arrest. I started to think. Well. That seems like some-thing is going on.

The problem with media reports is that anecdotes do not sum up to data. And now we have some systematic data.

Indeed.  Mandrola is a doctor but you don't have to be a doctor to see the issue with Covid-19 heart attack reporting.  Just as you don't have to be a criminologist to see the issue with reporting increased hate crimes.  Just as you don't have to be a climatologist to see the issue with reporting weather events as evidence of climate change.

These are empirical rationalist mental hygiene issues, not expertise with embedded deep knowledge issues.  If you see hard claims early in a fast breaking story involving rare or poorly defined events for which there is infrequent data collection or transparency, then you can be reasonably certain that the reports are unreliable.  Especially if there are parties with material financial or status rewards involved in the issue.  The claims may end up being true, false or some point in between but they are opinions, not factually grounded reporting.  Regardless of the issue and its consequentiality.  

All you have to do is recognize the pattern, you don't have to know much about the underlying technical  issue itself.  

Read Mandrola's piece for the emerging evidence why the young men dying of heart attacks reporting might have been substantially the consequence of motivated reasoning and the frequency illusion.  And also why the issue is not yet resolved.  The new evidence is strongly suggestive that there has been no post-vaccine change in the base rate of young male deaths from heart attack.  But we still don't have the complete picture.  The strong claims will probably need to wait for another few good studies over the next few years before we can have strong confidence.

For the time being though, we have more basis for being skeptical about the claims of a dramatic increase in young male heart attacks.

Regardless, the public health authorities still made virtually all the wrong decisions, at virtually step of the crisis, for virtually all the wrong reasons.