After death of Joshua Dean & John Barnett, their lawyers are concerned about the possibility that around 10 more Boeing whistleblowers may suffer the same fate.
From what is currently known about the two whistleblowers neither were particularly at higher risk of suicide or MRSA. The person who died of MRSA was healthy and active with no history of hospitalization whatsoever. Close friends of the first whistleblower claim that suicide was very unlike him, and his previous statement of “if anything happens, it wasn’t suicide” strengthens that.
There are other commenters here speculating that being a whistleblower makes you at higher risk of suicide, but there are no official statistics on that, so it is at most speculation, therefore I need to use general statistics.
All probabilistic models and datasets eventually get replaced with more accurate ones, but that doesn’t discredit them until then.
Even looking at it from a statistical perspective, these are low chances.
Let’s do the numbers.
Suicide rate is 14 / 100,000 (0.00014).
Deaths from MRSA in the US in 2017 was 20,000 / 325,100,000 (0.000062).
The chance of either happening to one person is 0.000202 (0.02%). The chance of it happening to 2/12 whistleblowers in the same year is:
1-((1−(14÷100,000))×(1−(20,000÷325,100,000)))^6 =
0.00120845658 (0.12%),
1 out of 826 cases with 12 whistleblowers would have this outcome.
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You do for disease and suicide as it can happen to literally anyone.
If working for a specific company or being a whistleblower affects those statistics, the company should be held responsible anyway.
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From what is currently known about the two whistleblowers neither were particularly at higher risk of suicide or MRSA. The person who died of MRSA was healthy and active with no history of hospitalization whatsoever. Close friends of the first whistleblower claim that suicide was very unlike him, and his previous statement of “if anything happens, it wasn’t suicide” strengthens that.
There are other commenters here speculating that being a whistleblower makes you at higher risk of suicide, but there are no official statistics on that, so it is at most speculation, therefore I need to use general statistics.
All probabilistic models and datasets eventually get replaced with more accurate ones, but that doesn’t discredit them until then.