Perhaps Tucker Carlson's data cherry-picking isn't limited to vaccines

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Philip Bump
@pbump
Tucker Carlson now has an obvious pattern of using incomplete or inaccurate data to make a wild rhetorical claim and then standing by the claim after the data are undercut.

Analysis | Perhaps Tucker Carlson’s data cherry-picking isn’t limited to vaccines
Maybe it’s endemic.
washingtonpost.com
9:09 AM · May 7, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/07/perhaps-tucker-carlsons-data-cherry-picking-isnt-limited-vaccines-maybe-its-endemic/

Given how the health-care system is distributed in the United States, the federal government has a number of warning systems in place to flag widespread problems. One of the ways it tracked the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, for example, was using its national influenza surveillance system, an established process by which hospitals and health care providers update the government on instances in which people report flu-like illnesses. Eventually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created a separate tool for tracking covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but in the early weeks of the pandemic, the ILI (influenza-like illness) monitor helped capture its spread.

There's something similar in place to ensure that examples of negative vaccine reactions aren't missed. Called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, it's a tool that allows people to report adverse reactions to vaccines. Again, the idea is simple, allow the country to self-report issues and, then, for the government to evaluate possible patterns.

One effect of these tools is that there's a lot of publicly-available data which can be accidentally or willfully misinterpreted. At the beginning of the pandemic, for example, Fox News's Laura Ingraham tried to downplay the spread of the coronavirus by pointing at reported flu cases, suggesting incorrectly that covid infections were in reality just misdiagnosed cases of the flu. More recently, people hoping to elevate skepticism about the coronavirus vaccines, like former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, have been using reports submitted to VAERS to suggest that something worrisome is happening.

There’s no actual evidence of problematic patterns related to the vaccines used in the United States beyond the rare issue that emerged with the Johnson & Johnson shot. But if you want to claim that there is something dubious about the vaccines, pointing to VAERS is useful, just as those who want to claim that voter fraud occurred find it useful to point to the hundreds of affidavits collected by Donald Trump’s campaign in Michigan alleging weirdness in the 2020 election. Having a lot of information that doesn’t prove a point isn’t actually more useful than having only a little bit of information that doesn’t prove a point, but it seems like it is. So people elevate the numbers.

*snip*