American excess mortality does not reflect Covid vaccine harms (yet)
Partial endorsement of Ron Unz's "decisive refuting" of a link between Covid vaccines and excess mortality.
Yesterday, Ron Unz happened to post more counter-evidence against the case for Covid vaccines having generated a rise in excess mortality.1
His post is worth reading on its own and serves as a useful prompt for follow-up discussion from my post yesterday regarding ONS all-cause mortality (in which, Covid-vaccinated Brits are dying less, but this is probably because of extreme healthy user bias in England).
The fact is, I do think the Covid vaccines are, let’s say, “largely” behind all the sudden deaths in the young. But I have been making the same case as Unz for a year that death statistics don’t yet show an impact — where and when excess mortality is up, it is from the virus (and/or mistreatment of).
The situation now is that this can be observed going on all the time —
Gregory Yee, a breaking reporter for the Los Angeles Times, died unexpectedly on Wednesday [January 3] in the Hollywood bungalow where he lived. Her [sic] family said the cause appeared to be complications from a respiratory problem.
— But health statistics aren’t moving much.
But that is simply a reason to suspect that the current health statistics can’t show a reality that is still, prima facie, of horrifying, historic import. Young people are dying, yes, “in droves” (the word just means “large numbers,” after all). Statistics doesn’t make true things false.
The Unz Case
Ron Unz, if the reader is unfamiliar, is a political polymath who runs Unz Review, a frequent outlet for fringe-y, white-supremacist-adjacent content. (Unz’s own work doesn’t transgress the same taboos as the other contributors to his site.)
He was an early proponent, perhaps the first, of the theory that the US released SARS-CoV-2 intentionally, which has brought him newfound notoriety as that way of looking at events has now, finally penetrated the narrative-skeptic consciousness.
(My understanding is that Unz characterizes this as an attempted attack on China’s economy; which I find implausible, since dissemination or “blowback” of the virus would have been easily foreseen. However, the clear artificial preparation and promotion of the “lab leak,” “GOF” anti-narrative convinces me that Unz was right about the intentional release in of itself.)
Commenter Richard Sharpe did me the favor of highlighting Unz’s latest post, which finds a not-mathematically-strong, but organically compelling association between obesity levels and excess mortality on a per-country level.
To accompany his table, I have recycled some of Unz’s selections for example cases (though I highlight 2021 as opposed to 2020 or 2022). It’s obvious the association is weak in mid-range countries (which is everything down to Switzerland, since the obesity rates aren’t actually moving much in this range), with some performing well and some performing poorly, regardless of vaccination level. But on the extremes (South Korea vs. the top seven), results are a binary split.
To sum up, however imperfectly, Unz’s position:
Lockdown-like behaviors depressed “working age” (15-64) mortality due to tamping down on the everyday accidents that typically drive deaths in these groups.
However, the virus, which is otherwise primarily deadly in the elderly, strongly drove mortality in obese working age adults (whether during acute infections or as delayed sequelae, aka “Long Covid” deaths).
This is further supported by trends in increased working-age deaths (as well as cardiac deaths) being consistent (and consistently different from historical values) in 2020, 2021, 2022: The elevation, where it happens, starts with the virus, not with the injections [with some exceptions, for example Germany, which was only grazed by the virus in 2020].
Canada, 2020. Time-traveling vaccine deaths?
Thus, excess working age mortality in all three years is a factor of comorbidity confounders for SARS-CoV-2 infection, chiefly obesity.
The (anti-) Control Group countries
Unz thus considers the debate over whether the Covid vaccines are killing more people than the virus resolved.
Unless anti-vaxxers can produce a more plausible explanation for this very strong international pattern, their hypothesis that the vaccines rather than the lingering consequences of Covid infections are causing significant numbers of deaths seems to have been decisively refuted. Thus, I think that the bitter vaxxing debate of the last couple of years may now be nearly over.2
I fundamentally disagree with the last part (more below), but I do take his observation of multiple heavily-vaccinated countries (France, Sweden, South Korea, Denmark, Belgium, and Finland) with lower-than-trend working-age excess deaths as self-evident proof that Covid vaccines are not causing statistically observable increases in deaths (i.e., one literally cannot statistically observe them, whether this is because of weird biases, data fraud, or other).
Further support in US by-state data
Unz’s approach reflects my own “organic” examinations of this topic, the first of which found that excess working age deaths in US adults seem totally explained by the Delta wave:
The US listed more “Covid deaths” in summer 2021 than in 2020. Using the cumulative death timestamps in Worldometers,3 they observe the following comparison between “summer Covid-19 deaths” in 2020 and 2021:
Oct 15 - July 15
2020
226,534 - 142,544 = 83,990
2021
748,469 - 627,080 = 121,389
These deaths did not manifest in highly-vaccinated, and likely healthier Northeastern states: They were (almost) entirely a phenomenon of the South and Midwest. Meanwhile, official statistics — though they are far from perfectly trustworthy — credit Delta deaths to the unvaccinated in absolute numbers, even when excluding the just-first-dosed (aka “partially vaccinated”).
The total death rate for this sampling of states is consistent with my worldometers-based total for the US in the Delta era. And once again, it is only some states that experienced the Delta wave. (Here I have lined up excess deaths in the 25 most populous states.)
My take on this trend, unlike Unz, was not merely that “comorbidities going to comorbidity,” but that unvaccinated Americans were both allowed to die and potentially assisted in dying by healthcare systems in the affected states.
These deaths were not necessary; they were a product of CARES-act-incentivized neglect, indifference, and mistreatment. There were a silent holocaust. (Here I have compiled a surge of anecdotes of unvaccinated Delta wave deaths from survey respondents who would be expected not to believe my thesis.)
Moving on, the second of my adventures that accords with Unz’s analysis is my breakdown of deaths recorded for diseases of circulation, which finds no rise in the Covid vaccine era to date. Rather, the elevation begins with the arrival of the virus. Whether this is for legitimate cardiac sequelae (certainly plausible) or simply an artifact of the socially derelict being coded as cardiac deaths after dying alone for unclear causes, it seems to be a feature of the so-called “pandemic.”
So in all respects, Unz seems to be correct that there is no statistical signal for deaths caused by Covid vaccines.
Covid vaccines can drive “significant” deaths without being statistically observed.
The fact of the Covid vaccines not causing statistically observable excess deaths, of course, doesn’t mean they aren’t killing people. In fact, Unz isn’t even making such a claim. He merely asserts that the likely number of individuals killed is orders less than those threatened by the virus itself.
Billions around the world have now been vaccinated for Covid, and I would hardly be surprised if many, many tens of thousands have died as a consequence. But such losses would represent merely a tiny sliver of the 15 or 20 million killed by the disease itself, and if the medical experts are correct and vaxxing greatly reduces the risk of severe illness, the cost-benefit ratio is tremendously positive, at least for individuals who are middle-aged or older.4
In subsequent articles, including yesterday’s, he characterizes the likely numbers of Covid-vaccine-induced deaths as not “significant.” I do not know if he has a specific meaning for this. I would call tens of thousands significant, regardless of whether they disappear into the background of lower-than-trend overall or among-vaccinated deaths.
By definition, a lower-than-trend background can hide lots and lots of “true” excess deaths.
To acknowledge the working age mortality reduction is there (in certain highly-vaccinated countries and states) is to acknowledge that the prior trend is no longer a valid measuring-stick for the rates we should expect to be seeing now; so by definition deaths from the Covid vaccines would be missed due to being less frequent than deaths avoided by whatever is causing deaths to be avoided. All one sees is the difference between A and B, not the values for A and B.
Moreover, there are myriad reasons why Unz’s premise — Covid vaccines prevent more deaths than they cause — does not demand accepting, in the first place, that the Covid vaccines are a net benefit to date; in the second that they will turn out to be a net benefit long-term; and finally that such a utilitarian determination is the only aspect to consider.
Other means were and are available to prevent deaths from the virus. Healthy lifestyle; better treatment; monoclonal antibodies — all of which were under-promoted or suppressed — and now Paxlovid (sorry, but it works). Unz is likely hostage to the consensus of “medical professionals” on this issue, and thus refuses to consider that the vaccine is redundant in mitigating the virus.
Although I believe that severe efficacy is real (simply based on the biology), the observed “reduction” of deaths from Covid vaccination probably would not scale well. In other words, they are a product of healthy user bias to some extent. One could imagine time-travel-vaccinating the 100,000+ unvaccinated Americans who died in the Delta wave only to find that rather less than the expected number of them live through their infection: As a group, they were likely less healthy than those who chose Covid vaccines to begin with; and as individuals, there would have been many “lost cause cases.”
Deaths from SARS-CoV-2 would have tapered off no matter what. There is, in other words, a ceiling on the benefit of the Covid vaccines. There still is no intrinsic ceiling on long-term harms. Therefore, the long term years of life lost can still be starkly worse for the vaccines than they would have been for the virus. Essentially, Unz is being short-sighted.
Utilitarian net benefits do not address the ethical issue of Covid-vaccine deaths (and all vaccine injuries) as a statistically obscured form of human sacrifice. Most people do not benefit from Covid (or other) vaccines, because most people do not experience a severe infection. Thus, most people who are harmed by Covid vaccines — especially most healthy, young people — are harmed in absence of potential benefit. They are sacrifices for “the greater good.” I oppose this form of sacrifice on what may be called both natural-philosophic and religious terms. We should let God decide such things, not medical roulette.
Will Covid vaccine deaths ever appear in the statistics — will we ever have “proof”?
My intuition is that they will — that rates of “dying suddenly” have been escalating, and that they will continue to escalate.
We may be seeing these reversals (on the statistical level) already. Here, Igor Chudov’s work is the most convincing; though I would note that the association with boosters and mortality could be an artifact of the boosted still catching up with their first encounters with the virus.5
Meanwhile, I wonder if Unz’s dismissal of the controversy reflects any actual disagreement with the “crackpot” antivaxxers that so annoy him. I think there is plenty of interest in this subject driven by the possibility of the very figures he assumes as realistic — have 10s of thousands of (lets say young) individuals died from these experimental injections?
Other concerns lie between what he dismisses as impossible (eventual millions of deaths, potentially via tolerance-assisted-viral-destruction6) and that assumed baseline. What about the fertility impacts? What about elite sports? Etc. There are endless ways the Covid vaccines could change human life besides causing overt deaths.
Unz and his crackpot readers seem like bickering roommates who are both saying the same thing to each other, and finding it ridiculous in the other party’s mouth.
It seems like the Covid vaccines are killing people.
In droves.
Related:
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Unz, Ron. “Obesity and the End of the Vaxxing Debate?” (2023, January 9.) The Unz Review.
ibid.
Unz, Ron. “Vaxxing Conspiracies and 700,000 Rumble Views.” (2022, July 18.) The Unz Review.
See “Tolerance (Maims and) Kills - Potential Examples.”
The following are additional edits to test a tech issue with the substack editor.
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I suspect that we "ain't seen nothing yet" when it comes to vaccine-induced problems showing up. Autoimmune disorders, long covid that never goes away, that sort of thing...but that's more of a gut feeling than backed by data. I will say what frustrates me about this entire "vaccines saved lives" argument is that if public health officials had focused on prevention and early treatment instead, the point might have been moot. I'm not even talking about ivermectin. I'm talking basic stuff, like handing out free vitamin D supplements to everyone in the northern hemisphere during the winter months.
Yes, but... why is the virus STILL killing people?? Why is the global COVID mortality rate higher, much higher, since worldwide jab campaigns, when ceteris paribus, it should naturally be lower??? I totally agree, having studied plenty of excess mortality all around the world, including cause of death data, that the indirect consequences of the mRNA experiment are yet to be substantially found in the mortality data but the same cannot be said of probable cause of COVID deaths which are indeed the primary source of excess deaths in the last 2+ years.