The odds that 5 people in a row have such serious side effect is 1/10^25. That is equivalent to tossing 83 coins in a row and getting all heads.
Which is more likelier. 1/10^25 or that you have false information regarding this. : )
Edit, here's some corrections:
This isn't 5 people in a row who had issues, it's 5 people within 4 nodes of distance in their social network. 4 nodes of distance is a lot of people, probably around 200,000 - 2,000,000.
The odds of having severe complications from the vaccine are about 1 in 100,000.
Therefore, everyone should expect to have 2-20 people within 4 nodes of their social network to have severe complications from the vaccine.
The mistake is not realizing the absolutely massive amount of people within 4 nodes of distance in your social network.
The other massive issue I see here is that there should also be somewhere around 500 covid deaths in the same pool of people that produced these 5 people with vaccine complications. The fact that they are focused on the 5 and not the 500 speaks heavily to their biases.
Keep in mind, all of this also assumes that what they're saying is 100% accurate, and these complications were definitely caused by the vaccine, and were not a coincidence. In truth, for every 1 person that has complications with the vaccine, 10-100x had the unlucky coincidence of something bad occurring that would have happened even if they hadn't gotten the vaccine.
There are around 200 strokes per 100 000 people per year [1].
And number of "heart issues" is even more, only deaths because of heart issues are around ~170 per 100k people per year.
Correlation is not causation.
[1] https://www.world-stroke.org/assets/downloads/WSO_Global_Str...
Same guy as before. I know of two people who temporarily lost taste and I heard of one person who died from COVID, a coworker's uncle.
You can rationalize this however you like, but these are the cases I'm aware of.
Definition of social circle is "A social circle is a group of socially interconnected people". I doubt anyone would complain about having a small social circle if it contained 2M people. :)
What you have calculated:
(using 4 deaths at 1e-6 odds, because it's simpler and still gives 10x better odds at 1e-24)
Taking 4 death row inmates, jabbing them with AstraZeneca and expecting all 4 of them to die.
What you have not calculated:
Jabbing 1e9 people, 10k of them developing serious issues (expected prior) and there being a multi-hop connection between 5 of them. Two of them actually being brothers (familial clustering), and some with issues likely more prevalent so not even from the 10k group (1/1e5 cutoff).
The implied qualification of - there exists a HN-er so divide by 1e9 to get odds - is nowhere close to accounting for the additional degrees of freedom from the social graph.
