David Spiegelhalter Quotes

These s that epidemiologists report, as Michael has so ably shown, tend to get... badly reported in the newspapers. So this... in the ... "Less Meat, More Veg is the Secret for Longer Life" which... probably could well be the case, but the way they report it... They said that if we cut down the amount of red meat... 10% of all deaths would be avoided. ...So 10% of us will live forever eating nuts. This is not true. ...[T]hey're talking about relative risk, but they don't understand.

Life-expectancy reduced by 1 year = about 30 minutes off your life expectancy for each day with the habit = 1

That change in life expectancy is not that gripping in itself. So what we've done in the book, it does seem a rather a strange thing to say... "Over an adult lifetime, about... 50-60 years... take a year off your life." It's like losing roughly 1/50 of your life. It's actually because of... these daily habits... like losing a week every year of your life, the same as losing 1/2 hour off a day. So we could say... that... 2 hours watching television... it's as if it's taking 1/2 hour... off your life. ...You're aging an extra 1/2 hour sitting on your backside watching television ...

So we've been trying to think of another metaphor... and the one we caught hold of is... speed of aging. So it's turning these numbers, rather bold numbers quite difficult to understand, into stories, and the story we've got is, "Getting older quicker" or "Aging Slower"...

[W]e can compare hang gliding... taking heroin... health treatments, with standing next to Hiroshima. We're deliberately... using these numbers to tell uncomfortable stories.

This was discovered by Gompertz in 1825. There's something about our bodies, the way that we age, that means that every year our chance of dying increases by the same amount, 9%.

[S]omeone is diagnosed with autism after receiving the , so people assume a causal connection – even when there isn’t one.

In the UK, adverse reactions are reported using the “yellow card”... Up to 28 February, around 54,000 yellow cards have been reported... from... 10 million vaccinations... three to six reports per 1,000 jabs [0.3-0.6%]. That means a far greater number of side-effects are reported in the trials...

Gompertz's observation said that between the ages of 25 and 80, your risk of dying increases by about 9% per year. ...[T]hat means that every eight years your risk of dying doubles, essentially. ...[I]t's going to get you in the end. Mathematics proves it. You can't go on forever, because it's this exponential increase in the risk. Amazing, really powerful. That's why you peg out in the end. It's going to get you.

Randomised trials have proved the effectiveness of some Covid treatments and saved vast numbers of lives... also showing... overblown claims about treatments... as hydroxychloroquine and , were incorrect.

In the trials that led to the vaccines... adverse events were reported by 38% of those receiving the real vaccine... 28% of those who received the control [dummy, or fake vaccine, of which some were meningitis vaccine] also reported a side-effect. ...[F]ewer than 1% reported a serious adverse event, and of these... slightly more had received the dummy than the active vaccine. ...So there was no evidence of increased risk ...

[S]easonal flu—average year—kills 6,000 people in this country. Mainly old... vulnerable... frail...[etc.] So we are hit by this, year after year... epidemics... we've got to put this into perspective... [T]o an extent it is a trade-off between massive disruption... [I]f you say everyone has to stay in their home for 4 weeks... that's not just economic loss. It has a massive... health... [detriment] in terms of... mentality and fitness. Norsemen of harm will be done... so it's not just a matter of... "Minimize the number of deaths."

There'a a nice thing about 1/2 hour because an adult life expectancy is 55 to 60 years... is actually a million 1/2 hours. A million 1/2 hours is 57 years. So you have got, not all of you... some of you have got a million 1/2 hours to fritter away.

So... in the book we make all these comparisons... That's acute timing risk, things that are going to kill you on the spot. ...What about the other sort of risks? ...You can have your spam ...[T]hat is not going to kill you on the spot. Well, it might. ...You might choke on...[it]... but it's... unlikely...

[W]e tend to think... of something that's going to happen... soon, or is well understood as risk, but if we're talking about what will happen in the world in ten years time. Who's going to start putting chances on this. You'd be... deluded... There's much... deeper uncertainty or... radical uncertainty...