Originally Posted by wphamilton

Yes, I've been harping on in along those lines. Restrict the scope exclusively to fatalities doesn't give you the full picture of risk. Fatalities occur in a very small portion of crashes, very small even in comparison to hospitalizations even further paired down to brain injuries. Who really knows how many more there were that weren't serious enough for the hospital, even hit from behind incidents? But just from the sheer size of the ratio of just the recorded accidents and all fatalities, chances are overwhelming that you would say, "a lot of them". And in those cases, there is no convincing rationale to say that helmets did not provide some protection.