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 co… - David Spiegelhalter

We spent ages... working... for child heart surgery... such a delicate area, trying to find the wording for... random error or binomial variability... [Y]ou can give a percentage... 95% . Well, am I going to be one of the 5% or one of the 95%? We don't know. It's just chance or luck, fortune. We can't... use those words in... delicate situations... operating on children... Then we came up with a good phrase... which we used and tested on parents... It's "unforeseeable factors," not "unforeseen factors," because that would suggest someone's to blame... [T]he unforeseeable factors could lead some people to... not survive the operation, and some to survive. So... we can put you in a group, but we can't go beyond that... [O]nly what develops over time, in terms of complications, or something like that, could... put... you in one group or another. "Unforeseeable factors," I really like that phrase. I try to use it all the time, I recommend it.

One of the other things we do in the book is talk about radiation... [Y]ou can say exposure to radiation, you can talk in terms of micro-lives or cigarette equivalents. So... a flight to New York, the radiation you get from that is equivalent to smoking a couple of cigarettes, about 1/2 hour of your life... The whole body CT scan... exposing yourself... to possibly an unhealthy dose of radiation... 150 microlives, smoking about 300 cigarettes, about the same as standing about 1 1/2 miles from the Hiroshima explosion. ...[W]hen they advertise these things for a thousand quid, they don't tell you that.

What we use in the book... are ways which we think might... provide gripping narratives, and yet provide a realistic way of communicating small risks...