Statistics and questionnaires

I just received an email full of fun facts, such as "A comet's tail always faces away from the sun". I was reading them in hopes of finding inspiration for cartoons. One item really caught my eye: "The Swine Flu vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was intended to prevent." As I tried to grasp the meaning of this so I could turn it into a cartoon, I realized that it was a prime example of how statistics can be used to mislead us and twist our perceptions. My first reaction was, that must have been a misguided vaccination campaign...until I realized that it was still to the good. Fewer people died from the flu itself because fewer people came down with it, having been protected by the vaccine. Let's say 100,000 people avoid coming down with the flu because they were vaccinated; another 100 die from the vaccine and another 100 get sick from it. Ten die from contracting the flu. So the vaccine killed or sickened 200 people, while the flu only killed 10. But what if those 100,000 hadn't been vaccinated, and 20,000 of them got the flu, and 5,000 of them died from it? Then there would have been 5,000 flu-caused deaths and only 200 deaths due to the vaccine. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure this was a case of statistics implying a result that is the opposite of the truth.

I had a guy working for me years ago, and he bragged that he and his wife had never had their child vaccinated, and she'd never come down with any of the diseases the vaccines were intended to prevent. Well duh, I thought to myself---there's no polio to catch because everyone else got it taken care of. If everyone stopped getting their children vaccinated, these diseases would come back.

Now, I'm not campaigning for universal vaccination; everyone must weigh the risks and proceed accordingly. But to say that vaccines haven't helped or should never be administered is a bit unrealistic, don'tcha think?

It brings to mind the questionnaires I get in the mail occasionally, or phone polls I sometimes get sucked into because I forgot to check Caller ID first. The questions are generally phrased to make the "logical" answer the one which favors the inquiring party's position. Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Right-to-Lifers...they all do it. Instead of asking "Do you think people should use crosswalks?", for example, the wording might be, "Would you rather be forced by the government to use crosswalks or have the freedom to make your own choices about safety as a thinking adult?" What gets me is when the organization doing the asking then touts the inevitable results as supporting their own position.

Maybe misleading statistics and leading questionnaires aren't really the same, but that's how my mind goes about its business sometimes. Hey, I was just looking for a joke, and I managed to come up with a topic for a new blog, which I know I should do more often. It's Friday. It's cloudy. So is my head. Did you know that most people who write a blog on an overcast day tend to be less coherent in their writing? No? Well, I'm putting together a questionnaire that will prove it...