A Second Look at Santa Clara’s COVID-19 Vaccination Data: Reevaluating Vaccine Risk Claims

Or why using spreadsheets to do an epidemiological and statistical analysis can cause misunderstandings.

Spreadsheets are good for some things, but not for analyzing large data sets.

A friend and colleague pointed out an interesting Substack post from a person trying to analyze vaccination data in Santa Clara, California. I don’t know the author, and I don’t know his intentions for his analysis. But, in my opinion as an epidemiologist, his analysis seems flawed. Let me tell you why I think so…

COVID-19 Cases in Santa Clara in January 2022

In his Substack post, Mr. Kirsch linked to a dataset he claims to have received from the Santa Clara County (California) Health Department through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. He claims that “it appears that the public health epidemiologists in Santa Clara County knew in January 2022 that the vaccines made people more likely to get COVID, but they remained silent.”

The data do not support that claim, in my opinion.

Mr. Kirsch linked to the data in an Excel spreadsheet, and I downloaded it. The data contain 117,839 records of people diagnosed with COVID-19 in January 2022. The pivot table Mr. Kirsch shows on his post…