Aluminum has been found to be neurotoxic.
We have evidence that glyphosate contributes to infertility.
Many insist that a plant-based diet is positively associated with healthy aging.
There’s a traditional Chinese belief that sweeping on New Year’s brings bad luck.
But how do we know if things like aluminum and brain damage and plant-based eating and aging are actually linked and not just randomly associated?
How do regulatory agencies, public health officials, medical doctors, and patients themselves determine if there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between two things?
This isn’t just a philosophical question.
In today’s world, figuring out the answers to cause-and-effect questions has become a matter of life or death.
Correlation or Causation?
Sir Austin Bradford Hill was a medical statistician in Great Britain.
In 1965, Bradford Hill established a set of nine “viewpoints” to determine when data demonstrated causation.
Hill’s work is foundational in showing cause and effect in epidemiology, as well as of showing statistically valid causation across the sciences.
You’ve heard the quip “correlation doesn’t equal causation” a million times. This is a phrase repeated by Big Pharma’s big apologists to defend the purported safety of medications like Vioxx, diethylstilbestrol, and statins; vaccines like the one developed against Dengue fever and the human papilloma virus; and medical devices.
The idea behind insisting that correlation isn’t causation is that just because two things happen together it doesn’t mean that one caused the other.
A quick example: Let’s say a lot of people named Ashley drive Priuses. That doesn’t mean that Prius drivers must be named Ashley or that people named Ashley prefer Priuses. The observation can be true without there being any real connection between and the name Ashley and Priuses beyond simple random chance.
However, when data show a correlation of any kind (whether it be sudden deaths among healthy young peoplewho have recently had COVID-19 vaccines or Prius drivers named Ashley), Bradford Hill points to nine ways of proving causation.
The Bradford Hill Criteria
Long before cigarette manufacturers admitted there was any connection, Bradford Hill applied his criteria to smoking and cancer.
While everyone now recognizes the connection, it’s important to remember that smoking and lung cancer do not have a 1:1 correlation.
Like millions of others, my grandfather smoked like a chimney his entire life without ever getting lung cancer.
However, the Bradford Hill criteria point to smoking as the cause of lung and other cancers, including rare cancers that are found more frequently in smokers.
His nine viewpoints, called the Bradford Hill criteria, are:
1. Strength: the more two things occur together, the more likely the causality, even for rare events.
2. Consistency: studies find the same correlation in different places and populations.
3. Specificity: a single cause produces a specific effect. (True of diseases like tuberculosis, for example, which is caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis; not so simple for cancer, which appears to have multiple causes.)
4. Temporality: the cause must come before (precede) the effect.
5. Biological gradient: more exposure leads to more frequent consequences.
6. Plausibility: is there a plausible mechanism for how one thing causes the other
7. Coherence: is the same effect found in both epidemiological studies of the population and in laboratory work?
8. Experiment: can the correlation observed in the population be reproduced in a laboratory experiment?
9. Analogy: is this cause-effect relationship similar to others we already understand?
Satisfying Just One Criterion Enough to Show Causation
According to Bradford Hill, you don’t need to satisfy all his criteria in order to show a clear cause-and-effect relationship between two things.
In fact, satisfying any one of the Bradford Hill criteria is enough to suggest causation.
But if several of the criteria are satisfied, the causation is more likely.
Consider this: many well-understood cause-and-effects do not meet all of Bradford Hill’s criteria. However, you must have temporality (#4) in order to prove causation. In other words, the cause must come before the effect.
If any pharmaceutical product—including a prescription or over-the-counter medication or a vaccination—meets even just two of the criteria, the possibility of causation should be vigorously investigated.
Debilitating Heart Problems After COVID-19 Vaccines
No one doubts that COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis. Even the CDC is being open about this. In fact, when my colleague recently contacted the CDC to ask about heart issues post COVID-19 vaccines, he received the following written response from a CDC spokesperson:
“To date, the CDC systems in place to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines have found four serious types of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, with evidence that suggests, although rare, a link to certain types of COVID-19 vaccinations that were administered. They are anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), myocarditis, and Guillain-Barré Syndrome.” [my emphasis]
Moreover, cases of myocarditis in young men who had received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made British health officials concerned that the risk of myocarditis might be as great or greater to young men than the risks of COVID-19 itself.
Because of a risk-benefit analysis that showed that cases are higher in men who get the Pfizer vaccine, the NHS began recommending young men get the Moderna injection.
Florida Stopped Recommending mRNA Vaccines For Men Under 40
When Florida public health officials did an extensive review of the existing data, they came to a very different conclusion. Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, now recommends that adult men under 40 do not get vaccinated against COVID-19.
In a statement released on October 7, 2022, Ladapo explained:
“This analysis found that there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. With a high level of global immunity to COVID-19, the benefit of vaccination is likely outweighed by this abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death among men in this age group. Non-mRNA vaccines were not found to have these increased risks.
“As such, the State Surgeon General recommends against males aged 18 to 39 from receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Those with preexisting cardiac conditions, such as myocarditis and pericarditis, should take particular caution when making this decision.”
How does looking at the data lead to rescinding the recommendation that males ages 18 to 39 get vaccinated?
The data showed the Bradford Hall criteria of strength—there are more incidence of myocarditis in more vaccinated populations; consistency—incidents of myocarditis post-vaccination have been found worldwide; temporality—young men (and many other people) are developing myocarditis following the COVID-19 vaccines; and perhaps specificity—until the roll-out of the vaccination program, myocarditis in young men was extremely rare.
In April of 2021 the CDC temporarily paused the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They did this after several women developed thrombosis and thrombocytopenia within two weeks of being vaccination.
Since this specific condition was virtually unheard of before the vaccines, six cases in women between the ages of 18 and 48 were enough to get the attention of the public health authorities. Several Bradford Hill criteria were fulfilled, including temporality and strength. The CDC recommends using other vaccines against COVID-19. As they explain on their website:
“There is a potential cause-and-effect relationship between J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine and a rare and serious adverse event. It is blood clots with low platelets (thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS). TTS occurs at a rate of about 4 cases per million Janssen’s Johnson and Johnson doses and has resulted in deaths. Because of this risk, vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines other than J&J/Janssen vaccine is preferred.”
As my co-author, Joe Wang, Ph.D., and I wrote about recently, autopsies done in Germany have now definitively established cause and effect between heart and brain damage and COVID-19 vaccines. Research is now being conducted to look at plausible biological mechanisms to explain why.
A Pharmaceutical Expert Weighs In
A former pharmaceutical executive, Sasha Latypova, spent her career founding several companies focusing on clinical trial reviews.
In a recent interview, Latypova pointed to data that show that, using the Bradford Hill criteria, it is clear that the harms of the COVID-19 injections outweigh the benefits.
Among other things, Latypova pointed to a Pfizer-funded rodent study that showed that pregnant rats had poor health outcomes. Pfizer dismissed the findings of skeletal abnormalities, feeding disturbances, and pregnancy loss in the vaccinated rodents as “incidental.”
But Latypova also mentioned that we know that there have been significantly more miscarriages and stillbirths in countries where large numbers of women have been vaccinated.
In these countries “the birth rates have declined in perfect correlation with the vaccination rates,” she said. At the same time, we have not seen a similar decline in poorer countries were pregnant women have not been getting COVID-19 injections. In those countries, birth rates have risen.
“What else do you need as proof?” Latypova asked rhetorically. “All the Bradford Hill criteria have all been met for all of this.”
Pfizer’s Hot Lot: EN6201
In May of 2022, my co-author, a molecular geneticist by training, and I reported on deaths associated with Pfizer Lot EN6201.
At the time we accessed the data, there were 167 deaths and 3,349 adverse events associated with this particular lot.
A search conducted this month found that there are now over 225 deaths and 4,000 adverse events associated with EN6201.
As of March 17, 2023, there have been 1,535,965 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines. In case you’re reading quickly, that’s one million five hundred and thirty-five thousand, nine hundred and sixty-five reports. Included in that number are 34,819 reports of people dying after the shots. Put differently, more people have died after COVID-19 vaccines than the entire population of Ithaca, New York.
Benjamin Gordon Goodman’s death was reported to the CDC (and the vaccine as the cause was also listed on his death certificate). He was 32 years old. My friend and neighbor, Tangren Alexander, died within days of getting the first shot. Her death was never reported.
We have also seen a definite correlation between the COVID-19 injections and other adverse events, including miscarriages, still births, and shingles.
In most cases, if a drug or a product is shown to cause harm by meeting just two Bradford Hill criteria, a warning label is added or it is removed from public use.
In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, all nine Bradford Hill criteria are being met. But the big pharmaceutical companies and our public health authorities are still pushing hard for people to get them.
It’s past time for public health officials, along with medical doctors, epidemiologists, and everyone else, to admit that this much injection-induced harm is unacceptable and that these vaccines are not safe.
About the author: Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science journalist. A different version of this article, co-written by Dr. Joe Wang, first appeared in The Epoch Times. Support independent journalism and medical freedom by becoming a paid subscriber to Vibrant Life. Or donate directly by buying Jennifer a cup of coffee via Venmo: @Jennifer-Margulis-2.
One mRNA caused death is too much since our government has declared medical war on its citizens.
“correlation doesn’t equal causation” - we've heard this over and over from those pushing the official COVID narrative, but the phrase isn't correct, and they know this: they know it restricts our thinking and arguments as a kind of cognitive trap. The correct statement is "correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation". Our cause and effect world would be a strange (insane) place if correlation didn't equal causation more often than not. When you apply the Bradford Hill criteria you listed above (very welcome to have this reminder, by the way), the whole picture is clarified. Excellent post by the way.