Post version: Beta. Spreadsheets and graphs will be updated if any errors found.
In October, one of twitter’s horde of (planted or self-appointed) Narrative Defenders™ produced a provocative graph using the CDC’s records of deaths attributed to “diseases of the circulatory system” via standard codes for younger adults. Presumably, epidemics of “dying suddenly” would create a signal here due to imputed causes of stroke and cardiac disease. The only strong, apparent signal was for the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 in its various forms.
Although the twitter-er’s graph had the wrong values for given age groups, I was able to reproduce the result.1 Five months (and some improvements in my spreadsheet competence) later, has anything changed?
Excess circulatory deaths still high, still seem mostly virus-related
For this update, I have jury-rigged a way of looking at raw “circulatory system disease” deaths for both younger and older adults in somewhat consistent resolution. Note that these are absolute counts of events, not rates. As in my previous outing, there is a clear distinction between the pre-“pandemic” and inter-“pandemic” average of monthly deaths attributed to “blood stuff.” This version also highlights a smaller increase in average if considering the eras before and after the Covid vaccines:
As in my other posts on the theme of “excess deaths do not yet reflect Covid vaccine harms,” I feel a naturalistic interpretation favors the virus and/or our reaction to and mistreatment of it driving the bulk of “deathiness.” It would seem that our various age groups are experiencing 1,600 to a handful of extra deaths attributed to circulatory diseases every month since the arrival of the “pandemic.” Whether these deaths reflect coagulatory and cardiac harms from infection, or harms from mistreatment of infection, or from delayed care due to fear of infection, or from reduction of accuracy for other diagnosis due to the same, they precede the Covid vaccines.
The question then shifts to what to make of the era after the Covid vaccines. I have only ventured to pin a month for gains in first injection uptake (estimated as when one state reports over 60% of an age group having one shot) for four of our age bands. I do not think there is any value to using the month of the Emergency Authorizations, as distribution was sluggish in most states until spring. Age 75-84 was further excluded because choice of a transition month would drastically change the result, so that band is a choose-your-own-adventure book. The youngest were excluded as the entire band seems even.
Circulatory deaths increased because of vaccine harms?
Perhaps. However, it is unclear why the youngest would not show a signal here; this group should have the most notable effect as baseline deaths were so low. Unless this data is being overtly fabricated, it remains the case that there is no apparent signal in the data for the youngest. As always, the caveat applies that just because something is not showing up in statistics, does not mean I am arguing it isn’t real. Statistics are not real life.
Vaccine failure? Or “efficacy by delay” again?
This is perhaps the stronger take; and has even been suggested by others such as myself who primarily credit excess deaths to the virus (and mistreatment of). How can the vaccines be preventing severe outcomes, if just as many people are dying?
As before, I would argue that this is consistent with tolerance exacerbating organ damage from the virus.
However, it is likely that normalizing excess circulatory deaths to how many people are getting infected would still show a “discount” in the wake of the vaccines, as with excess deaths in the UK (see last week’s post).
Problem sustained in 2022? (Yes)
Deaths attributed to circulatory disease are clearly still over-high in 2022:
This is despite a creep toward moderate levels of seroconversion during the BA.1 wave,2 which should mean that some daily deaths should no longer be occurring due to the killing-off of would-be-die-ers back in 2020 and 2021 (i.e., we should be seeing “pull forward effect”).
Also notable here is that a small bump corresponding to the summer “BA.5 wave," which seems to represent the beginning of the boosted “catching up” with first-time infections.3 Does this argue for or against my IgG4 tolerance theory of post-viral deaths (since the ultra-boosted can reasonably be expected to have the most IgG4 at this point)? The bump is certainly higher relative to attributed “Covid-19” deaths (grey line) than those that followed the five preceding waves. However, this may be more related to reduced incentives for coding deaths as “Covid-19.” Overall, I would call it a weak signal.
What next?
We have confirmed that the problem of excess circulatory deaths, whatever the cause, persisted toward the end of 2022. Now that winter has marked the virus’s apparent last hurrah, will deaths still be elevated in 2023, or recede? And what would the former mean — a slow-killing virus, a slow-killing virus and vaccine, or a transition to purely vaccine-caused deaths that the virus may have rendered impossible to prove?
If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.
Originally described as high, until a revisit of
Clarke, K. et al. “Seroprevalence of Infection-Induced SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies — United States, September 2021–February 2022.”
In which N antibodies among the over-65s are low 30%’s in February, 2022.
What about when you look at TOTAL non-COVID deaths, before versus after the vaccine rollout? There does seem to be a concerning post-vaccine increase (links below). Restricting to only cardiac / circulatory deaths could be misleading because of the phenomenon of actual cardiovascular deaths being classified under the victim's underlying conditions instead (I have seen this happen with my own eyes, and I'm not the only one), which would very conveniently "muddy the waters" around a rise in cardiovascular deaths itself. Therefore, looking at total non-COVID deaths is much more reliable.
Perhaps more importantly, it would be a mistake to regard "CDC data" as completely trustworthy. You'll probably be interested in these documents: the initial CDC death data report for 2021 stated a death rate of 841.6 https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm, but then they quietly corrected it 8 months later to 879.7 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db456.pdf, which is a ~5% discrepancy and corresponds to >100,000 omitted deaths among the U.S. population. Regardless, the 2021 numbers don't look good at all for the vaccine because the 2020 age-adjusted rate was 835.4, and even subtracting COVID deaths, the remaining excess in 2021 corresponds to ~80,000 excess non-COVID deaths compared to 2020. But I would wager that even the "corrected" 2021 numbers aren't revealing the entire bad news. Remember that the Pfizer and Moderna gold-standard RCTs did show a 16% increase in non-COVID deaths with vaccine vs. placebo, and if I had to bet my life on it, this absolutely was NOT "just a fluke" when taking all the other evidence into account.
Very true on a generalized high death rate, but they have been trending to fewer deaths per 1000 for years (as countries generally do when they begin climbing out from third world status). That paper makes sense. Leave a virus alone and you predominantly get three primary curves followed by true
endemicity--unlike the vaccinated western world now. Check out this death rate by year curve and you can see that Covid doesn't seem to have had an impact. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NGA/nigeria/death-rate. And ya gotta love those U.N. projections too...so climate-esc.