Day 739: Hot Lots

Mathew Crawford goes into detail about how baseless (yet still possible) the theory of bad lots of COVID vaccines is.

Certain lots can, mathematically, have more adverse events reported against them without being in any way different than others, because they were distributed in settings where reporting to VAERS is more likely. He mentions long term care facilities and red states; the political likeliness of adverse event reporting can be misinterpreted as a conspiracy where Big Pharma is trying to kill conservatives.

Hot lots are just the lots put into hot patients. He accumulates some evidence that earlier lots are associated with more side-effects, but they also went into the elderly, who suffer more side-effects, at higher rates.

Aspiration (the practice of injecting the vaccine properly) can also be associated with lot, when the same lot got into hands with similar training. While PlagueBlog is fond of aspiration theories, this is the first place we've seen it suggested that anyone aspirated anywhere in the US during the pandemic of the vaccination. If he or the hot lot sites have some European data, then this is a valid consideration.

Taking just these considerations (and perhaps those I haven't thought of) into account, I can easily imagine data that appears to suggest "hot lots", but ultimately represents other issues of varying concern. While this certainly does not fully dismiss the HLH, our simplest and primary reasons to be skeptical of the HLH could potentially explain all of the observed effects. However, we should thank all of the investigators looking into this problem, both because the HLH may yet turn out to be true, but perhaps more importantly because that investigation may help shed light on other serious issues.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his numeracy, Mathew Crawford is a conspiracy theorist, so he can't just leave it at that. He adds a fourth point that lot sizes vary, and says (boldface omitted):

At this point I'd like to offer a middleground hypothesis. It could very well be that a large part of the noisy AE batch distribution is due to points 1-4 that I made earlier. It could also be that there are a small number of toxic batches within all of that which resulted in additional harms.