When Is A Coincidence Not A Coincidence?
The idea that a particularly unusual sequence of deaths cannot happen by coincidence has been used by both sides of the covid narrative as explanations for their respective positions.
For example, this story of a husband and wife dying on the same day from covid was used by those promoting the ‘official narrative’ to imply that this could not have happened if covid was not an extremely deadly virus, and would not have happened if the couple had been vaccinated.
On the other hand those critical of the official narrative have used examples of unusual sequences of deaths among the vaccinated to claim that the covid vaccines are especially deadly.
I have produced some previous videos such as this one and this that have looked at the issue of coincidences, but as I am continually asked what is the probability that some unusual sequence could have happened by chance I decided to do a video that laid out in detail the probability calculations.
To keep it as non-controversial as possible I have based it around real, but non-covid examples, but it should be clear how it extends to the kind of covid examples above.
Specifically, a colleague recently posed the following problem: He knew of a husband and wife, both in their sixties, who died within the space of a year from the same rare brain disease – a type for which just four people per 100 thousand die annually.
There was no blood relationship between husband and wife, so obviously there was no common genetic factor that caused their deaths. This meant that, if there was no other causal explanation for both deaths, we could treat the deaths as independent events and hence compute the probability of both deaths within a year from this disease as
That’s a one in 625 million probability. Far too low, he reasoned, to have happened purely by chance. He felt, therefore, that there had to be some other – presumably environmental – factor contributing to their common deaths.
But, as with the classic example of the Canadian woman who won the multi-million dollar jackpot lottery twice within a fews year, such ‘incredible coincidences’ have a much higher probability of occuring than people assume.
In the case of the lottery, when we take account of the number of times a typical individual plays the lottery and the number of different people who play, it would be more unusual not to find at least one person in a large country winning the jackpot twice within a a short period over, say, a 20-year time span.
In the video I provide the full details of the probability calculations required for these types of problems.
It shows, for example, that in a country of one million couples the probability that purely by chance, over a period of 15 years, we would observe at least one couple dying of the same rare disease within the same year is over two percent.
That’s a better than one in 50 chance, which is very different to the one in 625 million assumed. Moreover, in a country with 50 million couples the probability increases to 70 percent.
So, in the absence of evidence of any other environmental factor causing the deaths, it is difficult to argue that the extremely low probability of it happening to a specific couple is sufficient basis to assume it could not have happened purely by chance.
See more here substack.com
Header image: WPLN News
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