> Take them with wikipedia, not me. I will note, that Wikipedia talks about both Cutter and Wyeth having problems, so it is possible the numbers are a sum of wyeth+cutter which would be compatible with your numbers being cutter only, but in the context of safety vs. polio wouldn't matter.

Wikipedia is not wrong, but you are using their numbers wrong. Your source is talking about the total number paralysis cases that occurred as a result of the vaccine ("250 cases of paralytic illness had occurred"). This includes secondary infections. If you follow the sources listed on Wikipedia page you reference, you will find two sources: my source [1], and [2] (via [3]), both which declare around 60 cases of paralysis in vaccinated persons, and then a larger number (in the order of 200) of total cases. The numbers you reference are referring to only the Cutter polio vaccine, by the way.

And you cannot use the total number of cases in the comparison that you did.

> All wild polio numbers include those numbers by default - there actually is no way to get them otherwise, I guess you are saying "you should probably debase by more than 200,000 because of secondary infections". I don't know how to do that, exactly, but it will likely still be similar.

If by debase you mean divide, then yes: you would need to divide by more than 200,000.

Your number is {how likely am I to get paralysed by the vaccine polio + how likely am I to cause further paralysis via secondary infection chain}, and you are comparing it to simply {how likely am I to get paralysed by the wild polio}. The first number is inflated a lot by the addition of secondary infections.

The numbers are not at all likely to be similar. As you can see in my (and your) sources, secondary infections accounted for more than double the number of paralysis cases, and therefore there it is likely a lot more people got sick via the secondary infections than the number people who was vaccinated. This causes the big discrepancy between our numbers.

Wild polio causes secondary infections as well, but this is not included in the number you are using for comparison, since it only includes the individual risk.

> With this calculation, the vaccine was 25% worse than the wild type. No error bars, but, that's easily worse, even much worse.

But the lack of error bars means that the calculation is meaningless.

You are assuming that "one in 1000 cases" means exactly one case per 1000 cases, and translate this to 0.100% with three decimals of accuracy.

It is clear from context that "one in 1000" is a rounded number for convenience, and they could very well have runded up from 0.8 or down from 1.4. You simply cannot conclude that the vaccine was 25% worse from your data. But we can conclude that they were in some way similar under your false assumptions, as they both would round to 1.

If you want to conclude anything else except "they are both around 0.1%", you would have to find a source that specifies at least 1 decimal of accuracy in the number incidents per 1000 cases.

Of course, this does not really matter, since you would still be comparing the wrong numbers.

Your argument here is "It's ambiguous and inconclusive when using clearly wrong assumptions that inflate the difference". Taking that argument into consideration, I'm still willing to confidently call it patently false.

Although I agree that I should not have said "Even with your own inflated assumptions it's false that the vaccine was worse than polio." What I meant was "Even your own inflated assumptions does not support that the vaccine was worse than polio", but I clearly worded it badly.

> How kind of you to drop "patently". If you didn't mean "patently" false earlier, why did you use that word? twice?

I meant it when I used it, and my question had a purpose. If you cannot give any reasonable assumptions where it wouldn't be false (which you haven't been able to do), then it would be patently false to me. The reason it does not seem patently false to you is because you have several misunderstandings in your reasoning and your reading of the sources. But I'm not really interested in discussing this terminology further.

> given that they disagree with the sources I gave

They don't. As I said, you are simply misreading your sources.

But seriously, even if you would manage to find some source which would refute my sources and back up your original claims, I have a bigger point to make now:

During this discussion, you have made numerous mistakes in many posts, beyond my criticism of your faulty reasoning:

(1) Mathematical mistakes

(2) Misreadings of the sources

(3) Inability to clear up ambiguities by looking at the referenced source or secondary sources

Even if by some happenstance you would happen to be right (even a broken clock, etc), you clearly are not confident enough doing this kind of analysis to be lecturing people about the specifics of vaccination risks. You are just as likely to mislead yourself and others as you are to educate.

Of course, this probably won't stop you, since you are not likely to respect my opinion. But hopefully it will still be in the back of your mind next time you approach this topic.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048180
[2] https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19642705083
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2928990