Is your statement that more excess deaths happened in countries with less people transfected-vaccinated based on your graph with 47 countries on it? If so, in a nutshellout of how many of the 47 countries followed this trend, and by how much-average? (I don't expect you to do those calculations, but presume you have already since you referenced them). Also, I noticed your graph contains 47 countries, which is only a quarter of the countries in the world. You have no countries of Africa, which I think is the lowest vaccinated continent in the world and as I understand the least affected by covid, by far.
I think he's the one who made a video of every country in the world and most countries showed spikes in covid deaths followed increased percentage of the population vaccinated. It was striking, but unfortunately I can't find this video. His findings would seem to contradict what you are saying.
It's my understanding that each wave after alpha was less deadly, meaning a lower infection fatality rate. But if excess deaths remained elevated through each wave, doesn't that implicate causes besides covid viruses?
I saw this article more as a limited hangout from and for the health establishment. It doesn't actually say much new or even non-generic at all. Also it doesn't provide new data that hasn't been presented before. What is different is that it is in an establishment-approved publication. So it is more a signal that we now are allowed to suggest that the shots killed people.
That is good, as in order to truly prove the shots killed people, we unfortunately need data we don't have as it is protected by health privacy rules. There is ample evidence shots killed people, but really determining how much is harder than some people claim.
This as any investigation looking at excess death needs to look at four angles at the minimum, but virtually nobody did this. Both people who claim they see no signal as some others who claim millions have died with too hasty math. One needs to look at time periods in which we suspect vaccines killed people, what groups are targeted and in what rough numbers one expects to gather data that would rise above the noise of such a set. Last one needs to look at pull forward effects.
To elaborate, if one takes myocarditis as example as that is an official accepted side effect. We know it may kill within a few weeks, but we also know that historically there is a second wave of deaths. In general, this heart damage will sometimes only expose itself decades later. Someone may have an incident later at 68 and ten die, when they may have lived until 73 else. We really cannot tell. What we do know however is that traditionally about 5% of people die within wo years after experiencing myocarditis. One cause is that heart scar tissue takes a several weeks to fully develop and only then causes cardiac arrest as it blocks the signal causing one to 'die suddenly' during a specific daily sleep-phase or sports as that is when adrenaline rises.
These numbers are almost certainly not applicable to vaccine myocarditis, but it gives a reasonable time period to look at. Hence, I'd look at 2022 and 2023 excess deaths.
Second, we know heathy male seem to be affected most, but young people may take the hit better. So I'd expect the signal to be very small there. Their heart damage will only affect them years from now. For sick and elderly people the direct effects are likely greater, but these are also the groups people tend to overlook.
Third rough numbers are important. A shot that for instance kills 1 in 1000 would likely be the most lethal shots in human history, but with an easy-math lifespan of 80 year sold, be only an 8% increase in excess death. Spread it out in two years and it is perhaps down to 4%. Three years and it is even less. Realize it is targeting elderly and sick people and one may not even notice it, if you don't look careful. So even extremely lethal shots can easily drown in noise.
And careful one must be, as there is a pull-forward effect in most countries. A lot of sick and elderly died earlier, so 2022 and 2023 should have had lower excess deaths among elderly. So even the absence of a rise is a strong indication, we may have vaccine effects.
Etc. For other effects, like cancers you'd be looking probably more at a 5 year period as chemo can drag for a few years, and also would be best to dive into specific age groups to see signals. Etc.
But as many of this data is not available due to health privacy laws, or not yet available as not enough years have passed, or by sheer coincidence some countries have made changes in their ICD definitions in the last two years. So perhaps this article is a change in attitude and can we start to see mainstream investigators looking at this more?
I am trying to keep a Tony Fauci like "open mind" and so I do appreciate your take on this. However, it is not clear to me that "the persistent excess deaths are predominantly driven by the virus"
A year after the two cars crashed, six of the cars get useless protection and two don't. One of the six crashes into the tree but it gets categorized as sideswiping, so none of the six are listed as crashed. One of the unprotected cars gets pulled over by the cops for driving without useless protection. Cops jail the driver and impound the car. The driver of the other unprotected car sees what has happened, and so takes to driving at night without his lights on to avoid detection. Sadly, one dark and stormy night, he takes a wrong turn and ends up hitting a tree. None of the cars with useless protection crash and all of the cars without it crash. Infinite efficacy for the useless protection.
Note on methodology: The car impounded by the cops had not had a chance to reach the tree yet and so was removed from the data prior to summation.
This will always be part of the severe efficacy problem - US data and especially categorization is generally unreliable. "Should I infer from the trials, other geographies (Israel especially), and certain network-specific US studies with reliable vax status?" is a subjective question but doing so does not create any problems for understanding excess deaths. And it also layers with the biology of infections, adults don't mount an immune response fast enough all the time and that leads to severe disease. (Demonstrated excellently in the Paxlovid trial placebo group https://unglossed.substack.com/i/52792651/assay-what .) Ultimately I am just after having a consistent picture of reality from the virus up to the stats.
How to factor in the disappearance of the flu and the removal of the J&J jab from the mix?
Suppose the jabs saved A but killed B, or worse, saved elderly A but killed middle aged B. Or saved A from x but later killed A from y.
And this leaves out maiming. Suppose the jab saves A and maims B. Or worse, suppose the jab saves elderly A but leaves say, a 12 year old girl in a wheel chair needing a tube to get nutrition.
The absence of flu is probably causing a deflation of real excess deaths caused by the virus in 2020 - 2022. A preprint offers a strong argument that flu disappeared due to the shutdown of global air travel http://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2023.12.20.23300299 - It's important to note that flu was never regularly annual before the late 1980s or so, after China 'opened' - otherwise it had always been normal for flu to disappear, and "influenza and pneumonia" was a very heterogeneous cause of death with a lot of fluctuation. So annual flu as the new normal in 2019 was absolutely driving some number of regular deaths, and those didn't happen in 2020-2022, and whatever that number was was also caused by SARS-CoV-2 (otherwise the excess in 2020 would be lower).
I am not sure why the J&J removal would matter as far as excess deaths. In terms of cardiac deaths there is definitely a rise in August 2021 when boosters were authorized, but this rise is exactly like every other rise in that it coincides with waves of Covid deaths https://unglossed.substack.com/p/checking-back-on-us-cardiac-deaths
The other two parts of this comment are ethics questions which I have risen myself in previous posts. They don't change anything about whether severe efficacy is real or not, just what to do about it. Like I have said before my whole thing is not to combine 'works' with 'should take.'
Glad you're still writing Brian. It seems like we're reaching a COVID lull so output from writers is really slowing down.
I think your perspective is interesting on the matter. We're sort of in this area of uncertainty with a lot of COVID-related topics and so this leaves people to speculate, but one's speculation may be taken as factual affirmation. I do believe the vaccines have harmed a lot of people- the number of people who will randomly bring up some weird new illness or disease raises a lot of questions, but as of now there really is no way to pin down actual numbers. But rather than show restraint it appears that people will just go down whatever rabbit hole they want.
I've honestly been disappointed with some of the information I have seen coming out that just seems to focus egregiously on speculation on the part of the writers, and if readers can't discern speculation over facts then they may just take whatever information they see as being true and just running with it. It doesn't help that Notes has become the same cesspool that has infected Twitter and other social media sites.
If the people with 'no pandemic' theories were building any models or bringing new facts it would keep the controversy solid - instead they retreat further into 'what even really 'is' X" and distractions, deconstruction, performative confusion. Rather than make the strongest argument they can, they make the one that requires the widest knowledge and familiarity with linguistic inversion to see through.
The big flaw with the study is they could easily have counted the number of Non-Covid Deaths but didn't.
Here is US
Year- Excess- Covid- Non Covid
2020-445,670-385,676-59,994
2021-523,064-463,203-59,861
2022-291,606-245,444-46,162
Of course, we know many Covid Deaths were not COVID deaths, but those who died with a positive PCR test w/oCOVID symptoms. Perhaps 30% or more
Another flaw with the numbers is they did not attempt to adjust for the Pull Forward Effect. Those who died early would of died in subsequent years, so those should be subtracted from expected deaths
It took 1 year from submission to publication, plenty of time to sanitize it
I mention that Covid deaths could be subtracted from excess, but the accuracy of the official tally isn't knowable.
But this idea that "many" of the tally was "with, not from" has never been convincing, for the simple reason that you don't have any extra deaths happening when there are no waves. It is still a justification for being cautious with studies following post-positive-test outcomes because, so often, the raw data isn't there. But with Covid deaths there isn't this same problem, you can compile that overall deaths surge with the waves *and* that these surges account for almost all "Covid deaths." Wave happens, you have X extra dead people, you have X tallied Covid deaths, the numbers are similar. End of the year, the number of tallied Covid deaths is mostly the same as "Covid deaths during the wave of extra deaths." So unless "dying of natural causes during a randomly caused surge" somehow causes higher rates of testing positive, the causation is clear.
There's no pull-forward when 80+% of elderly still haven't had a first time infection as of May 2021. Again because the Covid deaths are Covid deaths. The fuel is still 4/5 unburned.
Deaths with or due, is also sort of irrelevant as most of them were in poor health or very old. I mean, if you have X pre-existing conditions and then get covid, does it really matter whether you classify it as with or due. It is the combination that killed you.
(BTW I believe Colorado stated the difference was 15% early on and WA state said 13% shortly after. So that may be a good ballpark.)
But in the end, it mostly matters for people wanting the number to be as high as possible, but indeed shouldn't matter for excess deaths.
"Deaths with or due, is also sort of irrelevant as most of them were in poor health or very old." But "poor health" and "very old" people already abound - the whole dynamic of "normal" and SARS-CoV-2 outcomes is defined by the fact that medicine keeps so many poor-health and very-old people alive that would usually die off from diabetes and pneumonia in prior decades. Then comes this thing that kills them anyway. So in the context of the new normal of highly-prolonged death, it's a highly advanced death, years, decades, doesn't matter that the average is old.
And in a less frequent per-capita you have middle aged who also die. This is abnormal but it's part of the deal when adults are challenged with a coronavirus with no immunity from childhood, they aren't all going to make it.
In both cases you are driving true excess deaths. You can't grade the result as if we don't artificially prolong life - we do. So a lot of people in the basket of 'medically carried to another decade' were dumped into the grave.
"So a lot of people in the basket of 'medically carried to another decade' were dumped into the grave."
Exactly. But of course the question is what were the causes that did that, and more importantly - as I think we all agree it was a combination of covid, shots and our non-medical interventions - what ratio.
You seem to suggest it was (almost) all covid (and non-medical interventions)? Or am I missing your point?
I personally doubt that, especially since the excess deaths didn't drop after the omicron twins took over. Especially I haven't seen a convincing mechanism in which omicron kills people after the acute illness phase, and most of these excess deaths are people dying outside that acute phase.
But time will tell I guess. If it was all covid and non-medical interventions, it is likely to die down to pre-pandemic levels very soon. The pool of elderly and sick who didn't get covid is also near empty now.
If some of it are the shots, it will lag longer but also should continue since surprisingly many people are still taking the yearly fall-booster.
The waves of COVID were largely due to deadly hospital protocols and negligence/lack of care in nursing homes but no doubt some percentage were legitimate COVID deaths. The hospitals were in incentivized to report deaths as COVID deaths.
Regardless of how one died, if you have a large number of excess deaths and these are found disproportionately among the elderly and those in nursing homes, there will be a PFE regardless of immune status and pretty much all elderly had either vax or infection immunity by June 2021
There is a lot of math happening that makes pull-forward not "work" (in the sense that many seem to assume we can just incant the word at the numbers and it will apply to them). Like egm will just assert "pull forward," skeptic will impute it without justification, no one's actually doing the math that shows it should matter.
First let's establish that pull-forward first of all implies that a death that should have happened in 2021 was accelerated to 2020 either due to virus or reaction to virus/test. It's nothing to do with how many officially recorded "Covid deaths" were just regular deaths, *only* to do with bona fide *excess* deaths in 2020. I leave the longer future out of it because the question first is should we see pull forward in 2021, and if we can establish no then obviously 2022 isn't a given for PFE either. There has in other words to actually be an *effect* on the following years, and if not or if the effect is trivial then there's no or rather trivial PFE.
From here, each age band needs to be considered separately. The math isn't going to be the same for a group with 13% annual mortality (85+), 4% (75-84) and 1.7% (65-74). As it happens because these groups have a pyramid pop structure you get comparable numbers of annual deaths from each (800k-600k), an equilibrium of sorts, and also there were about 100k each *extra* deaths in 2020 (120k-100k). The numbers I am using are at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14EcwU4g8XYTQWe0_ii1NKSX0xLEeweRemTNmj2AsOLE/edit?usp=sharing
In order for pull forward to be relevant in 2021 it needs to exert a 2021 deficit of over 160k in these three groups, in other words it basically would to be strong in all three groups or need all of the 85+ and most of one of the others. And the question of "strength" takes place in the context of more *pending excess deaths* in these groups due to future first infections - this is where you will see why I have split the question into groups like this.
1: Are 2020 extra deaths all future 2021 deaths?
How is PFE getting any of these 2021 deaths to begin with? Since again these are *extra* deaths, someone was made to die in 2020 that wouldn't have. If it is because of either virus or reaction to virus/test, that means that virus or reaction happened to 120k to 100k future 2021 deaths.
Ok, but how did it do that without also happening to future 2022-2040 deaths?
Only 13% of 80 year-olds die annually. The other 87% die in the years afterward. If the virus is pulling forward the next 13% then it is also pulling a lot of the later 87%. So what portion of the 120,000 extra deaths is pulled from 2021? You can't experience the *effect* of PFE until the year of the pulled-forward death. It is not plausible that say an 87 year old fated to live to 100 has a zero chance of dying from either the virus or treatment homicide. Likewise for 65-74+ where 98% of future deaths will be "unavailable" in 2021 in terms of PFE, and a 70 year old fated to live to 76 cannot be expected to be immune to whatever is causing extra deaths in 2020.
In all three groups the majority of "pulled forward" deaths are probably from after 2021. In the 85+ (13% annual mortality), 119k extra deaths, at most 60k would have been due in 2021 as opposed to later, that's 60k deficit. In 75-84 (4% annual mortality), at most really 20k of 111k, in 65-74 (1.7% annual mortality), at most really 10k of 100k, of *extra* deaths were probably due in 2021 as opposed to later.
2 But we are measuring against still-pending extra deaths.
So right away the overall deficit (~90k) is less than a third of 2020's extra. So you need to halve next year's extra to really lock this. You need ≥50% infected in all three groups in 2020.
You don't have that. Again, only 10-20% of 65+ were infected in USA by May 2021 based on blood donors (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784013), similar in UKHSA, much lower in other parts of Europe which still had low elderly seroprevalence into 2022.
In reality there were probably more elderly pre-Omicron infections/+tests in 2021 than 2020, because of reopening, or at least it was comparable, this is just more in line with anecdotes you find all over Covid skeptic forums besides the recorded case counts. And even in the 85+ group only 42% of people are in long term care at a given moment, so you still have a lot of pending infections in this group (like you could assume the remaining 58% roughly matches the blood donor seroprevalence and so that's at most a 50% discount on 2021 infections in this group). Discounts for the other two age bands will be less; in short most elderly people are still available for infection so the number of infections in 2021 didn't go down vs 2020.
So the most optimistic 2021 deaths deficit of 90k is competing against a pending discounted repeat of 2020 in terms of *extra* deaths of what? Say (.5)119k + (.6)111k + (.7)100k = 196k. This is me doing the most generous model for the *effect* and it comes up 106k short. IRL I don't agree with any of the generous assumptions that went into this math to begin with, and would tend to have much lower expected deficit basically matching the percentage of future 2021 survivors in each age, and to just use .8 across the 2021 expected extra deaths by age board, plus a modifier for Delta being more severe and treatment being more mendacious, resulting in a wash. But the point is to show that even the most generous model is short.
I'm not quite following, but that may very well be me. I mean, by definition you cannot claim to have excess death in elderly/weak due to COVID, but at the same time have no pull forward effect in these groups due to COVID.
So since most people accept we had excess deaths in 2020/2021 in elderly explicitly due to COVID (even if one insists in lowering the official numbers for 'with' vs 'due'), why would we not expect a lower toll in 2022/2023, when the much wimpier omicron twins arrived?
The only way our I can imagine if we were to claim this pull forward is compensated by all the elderly and sick only then getting it having escaped it the first two years. But then the pull forward effect would still apply, but only be seen in 2024/2025 or so.
Last at least The Netherlands in her official reporting even acknowledged a strong pull forward effect. I believe 30%'ish.
(That doesn't mean in some nations it may have gone the other way. I think extreme lockdowns may have saved elderly, only to see them die more afterwards. E.g. those few islands down under perhaps.)
My math is just for 2021. You have posed it as, 'if we avoid asking *why* pull forward didn't apply in 2021, shouldn't we get to casually assume it's there in 2022?.' No, because it didn't apply in 2021, *for specific reasons*, burden of proof applies to 2022. And no one is even trying to prove PFE, as I said at the top of my comment, it's all just lazy assumption.
Pull forward itself of course doesn't need to be proven, as it is literally defined as excess death. Excess death *is* pull forward by definition.
Hence pull forward applied to 2021 as in 2020 we had excess deaths, but as these effects were very regional may just be overcome by having even more excess deaths in 2021.
But that said, for 2021 you may have a partial point. Most people were unvaccinated for at least some part of the 2021 year and various alleged side effects of the shots can take months to develop. And with the more deadly Delta being the main player, I think excess deaths could certainly be more strongly or perhaps even mostly been determined by covid.
I'm however personally more interested in the post-2021 period. Exactly because covid inherently plays a diminishing role, but excess deaths stayed a thing.
It is also sort of like those mask wearing studies that showed region X with masks was so much better than region Y not wearing masks in time period A. But then in time period B suddenly the correlation was gone. Hence, for true excess death correlations I think we need to look at wider periods and wider regions than just the US in 2021.
The big flaw with the study is they could easily have counted the number of Non-Covid Deaths but didn't.
Here is US
Year- Excess- Covid- Non Covid
2020-445,670-385,676-59,994
2021-523,064-463,203-59,861
2022-291,606-245,444-46,162
Of course, we know many Covid Deaths were not COVID deaths, but those who died with a positive PCR test w/oCOVID symptoms. Perhaps 30% or more
Another flaw with the numbers is they did not attempt to adjust for the Pull Forward Effect. Those who died early would of died in subsequent years, so those should be subtracted from expected deaths
It took 1 year from submission to publication, plenty of time to sanitize it
This isn't relevant to the question. If the theory is that testing positive for the virus causes a set of treatment decisions that result in a unique and uniquely deadly disease progression, then that doesn't result in treating any of the statistics differently in the end. Not to say that this is even convincing - just that it "Covid deaths are caused by reaction to the virus" doesn't actually suggest that Covid deaths aren't *caused* by the virus.
As I argued in refutation of the very weak bacterial pneumonia theory:
"Defining a group of patients or deceased in terms of being positive with the virus predicts differences from regular pneumonia. If one merely wants to argue that iatrogenic harm causes these differences, there is no need to shove them under a rug at the same time. This confesses a need not to really let the reader see the differences." https://unglossed.substack.com/p/repeating-the-case-against-bacterial
Have you looked at insurance actuary excess non-Covid deaths. Apparently these deaths are catastrophic according to the actuaries. Also, I have read possibly thousands of anecdotes of people who’ve lost family and friends after they received the shot. In my own circle of friends and family I know of one Covid death but many more deaths from cancer and heart problems from after they received tbe shot, most of them young. I read that Dr Jessica Rose analyzed the Vaers data and discovered 50% of the deaths occurred within 24 hours of the shot and 85% within 2 weeks. As for the PCR test my husband, two friends and myself got Covid. They all tested positive, I tested negative. This happened another two times. So much for an accurate test! I did a T-cell test for antibodies and it came up positive. The regular test came up negative every time
This is what I refer to in the state-by-state US data. "Working age excess deaths" in 2021 are just Covid deaths. They were never "non-Covid" - the story from early 2022 was that most deaths were non-Covid, not most *excess* deaths. Totally different meaning. What I am saying is if you go back to any of the articles that created this insurance actuary meme back in early 2022 it says "we've got some excess deaths in working age adults - but most deaths are not Covid" you see how "most deaths" isn't talking about the *excess deaths*.
The excess deaths are Covid deaths, they are all in southern and midwestern states that had Covid deaths in summer/august 2021, the delta wave - https://unglossed.substack.com/p/covid-cases-vs-middle-aged-excess. In other words this has never been some crazy mystery, really obvious explanation - the virus killing some middle aged adults in late 2021.
Check out Steve Kirsch’s “Nobody can Explain Egat Happened in Apple Valley”. After shots rolled out in January 2021 more nursing home patients died in a week than a year quoted one nurse. She said people were afraid to speak out.
So the main hook on Kirsch's post is that before the vaccines, there was a 0/30 CFR (and this is in 2020 when "cases" in nursing home outbreaks were typically counted only when they got bad). Is 0 deaths for 30+ infections normal for the elderly in long term care? Not really. Did the vaccines cause this? How (time travel?)? So nothing about the statistical weirdness of Apple Valley can really be because of the vaccines, the weirdness is already baked in in 2020. Maybe they just made a typo.
Also in the original post, Apple Valley and the other examined company have early 2021 outbreaks right in the middle of the vaccine EUA. In general we don't know a lot about the winter 20/21 wave, it generated a lot of deaths shortly after the vaccines were authorized but weeks before anyone could get their hands on a shot. There are some studies of outbreaks in nursing homes during this period and they don't show anything particularly remarkable.
Without knowing if the cases at Apple Valley in the winter wave were even vaccinated beforehand, there's nothing clear being implied about the vaccine here.
Is your statement that more excess deaths happened in countries with less people transfected-vaccinated based on your graph with 47 countries on it? If so, in a nutshellout of how many of the 47 countries followed this trend, and by how much-average? (I don't expect you to do those calculations, but presume you have already since you referenced them). Also, I noticed your graph contains 47 countries, which is only a quarter of the countries in the world. You have no countries of Africa, which I think is the lowest vaccinated continent in the world and as I understand the least affected by covid, by far.
Joel Smalley has graphed covid deaths with percentage of the population vaccinated. This is one example, and there is a high correlation between increasingvaccination rate and covid deaths in many countries. This stack is one example: https://live2fightanotherday.substack.com/p/safe-and-effective-bad-joke?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
I think he's the one who made a video of every country in the world and most countries showed spikes in covid deaths followed increased percentage of the population vaccinated. It was striking, but unfortunately I can't find this video. His findings would seem to contradict what you are saying.
It's my understanding that each wave after alpha was less deadly, meaning a lower infection fatality rate. But if excess deaths remained elevated through each wave, doesn't that implicate causes besides covid viruses?
It seems that an early IFN1 response is required. A delayed one is bad:
Dysregulated Type I Interferon and Inflammatory Monocyte-Macrophage Responses Cause Lethal Pneumonia in SARS-CoV-Infected Mice
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26867177/
Merogenomics is at it again and seemingly hitting it out of the park.
IgG4 role in cancer - Dr. Raszek new publication (IgG4 part 17, update #147)
https://www.explorationpub.com/Journals/ei/Article/1003140
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33qcZFNs2X8
"What we cover:
*Summary of when mRNA vaccinated do not produce IgG4 antibodies
*Summary of how IgG4 antibodies are produced in mRNA-vaccinated
*Background on how IgG4 are seen in cancers
*Review of turbo cancers (called hyperprogressive disease)
*How IgG4/IgG ratio or IgG4 B cells could be biomarkers of cancer outcomes
*What are tumor suppressor proteins and oncogenic proteins
*Background on how galectin-3 plays a role in cancer
*How spike protein mimicry of galectin-3 could be a factor in cancer development"
The paper is at:
I saw this article more as a limited hangout from and for the health establishment. It doesn't actually say much new or even non-generic at all. Also it doesn't provide new data that hasn't been presented before. What is different is that it is in an establishment-approved publication. So it is more a signal that we now are allowed to suggest that the shots killed people.
That is good, as in order to truly prove the shots killed people, we unfortunately need data we don't have as it is protected by health privacy rules. There is ample evidence shots killed people, but really determining how much is harder than some people claim.
This as any investigation looking at excess death needs to look at four angles at the minimum, but virtually nobody did this. Both people who claim they see no signal as some others who claim millions have died with too hasty math. One needs to look at time periods in which we suspect vaccines killed people, what groups are targeted and in what rough numbers one expects to gather data that would rise above the noise of such a set. Last one needs to look at pull forward effects.
To elaborate, if one takes myocarditis as example as that is an official accepted side effect. We know it may kill within a few weeks, but we also know that historically there is a second wave of deaths. In general, this heart damage will sometimes only expose itself decades later. Someone may have an incident later at 68 and ten die, when they may have lived until 73 else. We really cannot tell. What we do know however is that traditionally about 5% of people die within wo years after experiencing myocarditis. One cause is that heart scar tissue takes a several weeks to fully develop and only then causes cardiac arrest as it blocks the signal causing one to 'die suddenly' during a specific daily sleep-phase or sports as that is when adrenaline rises.
These numbers are almost certainly not applicable to vaccine myocarditis, but it gives a reasonable time period to look at. Hence, I'd look at 2022 and 2023 excess deaths.
Second, we know heathy male seem to be affected most, but young people may take the hit better. So I'd expect the signal to be very small there. Their heart damage will only affect them years from now. For sick and elderly people the direct effects are likely greater, but these are also the groups people tend to overlook.
Third rough numbers are important. A shot that for instance kills 1 in 1000 would likely be the most lethal shots in human history, but with an easy-math lifespan of 80 year sold, be only an 8% increase in excess death. Spread it out in two years and it is perhaps down to 4%. Three years and it is even less. Realize it is targeting elderly and sick people and one may not even notice it, if you don't look careful. So even extremely lethal shots can easily drown in noise.
And careful one must be, as there is a pull-forward effect in most countries. A lot of sick and elderly died earlier, so 2022 and 2023 should have had lower excess deaths among elderly. So even the absence of a rise is a strong indication, we may have vaccine effects.
Etc. For other effects, like cancers you'd be looking probably more at a 5 year period as chemo can drag for a few years, and also would be best to dive into specific age groups to see signals. Etc.
But as many of this data is not available due to health privacy laws, or not yet available as not enough years have passed, or by sheer coincidence some countries have made changes in their ICD definitions in the last two years. So perhaps this article is a change in attitude and can we start to see mainstream investigators looking at this more?
I am trying to keep a Tony Fauci like "open mind" and so I do appreciate your take on this. However, it is not clear to me that "the persistent excess deaths are predominantly driven by the virus"
A year after the two cars crashed, six of the cars get useless protection and two don't. One of the six crashes into the tree but it gets categorized as sideswiping, so none of the six are listed as crashed. One of the unprotected cars gets pulled over by the cops for driving without useless protection. Cops jail the driver and impound the car. The driver of the other unprotected car sees what has happened, and so takes to driving at night without his lights on to avoid detection. Sadly, one dark and stormy night, he takes a wrong turn and ends up hitting a tree. None of the cars with useless protection crash and all of the cars without it crash. Infinite efficacy for the useless protection.
Note on methodology: The car impounded by the cops had not had a chance to reach the tree yet and so was removed from the data prior to summation.
Conflicted yet still interested.
This will always be part of the severe efficacy problem - US data and especially categorization is generally unreliable. "Should I infer from the trials, other geographies (Israel especially), and certain network-specific US studies with reliable vax status?" is a subjective question but doing so does not create any problems for understanding excess deaths. And it also layers with the biology of infections, adults don't mount an immune response fast enough all the time and that leads to severe disease. (Demonstrated excellently in the Paxlovid trial placebo group https://unglossed.substack.com/i/52792651/assay-what .) Ultimately I am just after having a consistent picture of reality from the virus up to the stats.
How to factor in the disappearance of the flu and the removal of the J&J jab from the mix?
Suppose the jabs saved A but killed B, or worse, saved elderly A but killed middle aged B. Or saved A from x but later killed A from y.
And this leaves out maiming. Suppose the jab saves A and maims B. Or worse, suppose the jab saves elderly A but leaves say, a 12 year old girl in a wheel chair needing a tube to get nutrition.
The absence of flu is probably causing a deflation of real excess deaths caused by the virus in 2020 - 2022. A preprint offers a strong argument that flu disappeared due to the shutdown of global air travel http://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2023.12.20.23300299 - It's important to note that flu was never regularly annual before the late 1980s or so, after China 'opened' - otherwise it had always been normal for flu to disappear, and "influenza and pneumonia" was a very heterogeneous cause of death with a lot of fluctuation. So annual flu as the new normal in 2019 was absolutely driving some number of regular deaths, and those didn't happen in 2020-2022, and whatever that number was was also caused by SARS-CoV-2 (otherwise the excess in 2020 would be lower).
I am not sure why the J&J removal would matter as far as excess deaths. In terms of cardiac deaths there is definitely a rise in August 2021 when boosters were authorized, but this rise is exactly like every other rise in that it coincides with waves of Covid deaths https://unglossed.substack.com/p/checking-back-on-us-cardiac-deaths
The other two parts of this comment are ethics questions which I have risen myself in previous posts. They don't change anything about whether severe efficacy is real or not, just what to do about it. Like I have said before my whole thing is not to combine 'works' with 'should take.'
Glad you're still writing Brian. It seems like we're reaching a COVID lull so output from writers is really slowing down.
I think your perspective is interesting on the matter. We're sort of in this area of uncertainty with a lot of COVID-related topics and so this leaves people to speculate, but one's speculation may be taken as factual affirmation. I do believe the vaccines have harmed a lot of people- the number of people who will randomly bring up some weird new illness or disease raises a lot of questions, but as of now there really is no way to pin down actual numbers. But rather than show restraint it appears that people will just go down whatever rabbit hole they want.
I've honestly been disappointed with some of the information I have seen coming out that just seems to focus egregiously on speculation on the part of the writers, and if readers can't discern speculation over facts then they may just take whatever information they see as being true and just running with it. It doesn't help that Notes has become the same cesspool that has infected Twitter and other social media sites.
If the people with 'no pandemic' theories were building any models or bringing new facts it would keep the controversy solid - instead they retreat further into 'what even really 'is' X" and distractions, deconstruction, performative confusion. Rather than make the strongest argument they can, they make the one that requires the widest knowledge and familiarity with linguistic inversion to see through.
The big flaw with the study is they could easily have counted the number of Non-Covid Deaths but didn't.
Here is US
Year- Excess- Covid- Non Covid
2020-445,670-385,676-59,994
2021-523,064-463,203-59,861
2022-291,606-245,444-46,162
Of course, we know many Covid Deaths were not COVID deaths, but those who died with a positive PCR test w/oCOVID symptoms. Perhaps 30% or more
Another flaw with the numbers is they did not attempt to adjust for the Pull Forward Effect. Those who died early would of died in subsequent years, so those should be subtracted from expected deaths
It took 1 year from submission to publication, plenty of time to sanitize it
I mention that Covid deaths could be subtracted from excess, but the accuracy of the official tally isn't knowable.
But this idea that "many" of the tally was "with, not from" has never been convincing, for the simple reason that you don't have any extra deaths happening when there are no waves. It is still a justification for being cautious with studies following post-positive-test outcomes because, so often, the raw data isn't there. But with Covid deaths there isn't this same problem, you can compile that overall deaths surge with the waves *and* that these surges account for almost all "Covid deaths." Wave happens, you have X extra dead people, you have X tallied Covid deaths, the numbers are similar. End of the year, the number of tallied Covid deaths is mostly the same as "Covid deaths during the wave of extra deaths." So unless "dying of natural causes during a randomly caused surge" somehow causes higher rates of testing positive, the causation is clear.
There's no pull-forward when 80+% of elderly still haven't had a first time infection as of May 2021. Again because the Covid deaths are Covid deaths. The fuel is still 4/5 unburned.
Deaths with or due, is also sort of irrelevant as most of them were in poor health or very old. I mean, if you have X pre-existing conditions and then get covid, does it really matter whether you classify it as with or due. It is the combination that killed you.
(BTW I believe Colorado stated the difference was 15% early on and WA state said 13% shortly after. So that may be a good ballpark.)
But in the end, it mostly matters for people wanting the number to be as high as possible, but indeed shouldn't matter for excess deaths.
"Deaths with or due, is also sort of irrelevant as most of them were in poor health or very old." But "poor health" and "very old" people already abound - the whole dynamic of "normal" and SARS-CoV-2 outcomes is defined by the fact that medicine keeps so many poor-health and very-old people alive that would usually die off from diabetes and pneumonia in prior decades. Then comes this thing that kills them anyway. So in the context of the new normal of highly-prolonged death, it's a highly advanced death, years, decades, doesn't matter that the average is old.
And in a less frequent per-capita you have middle aged who also die. This is abnormal but it's part of the deal when adults are challenged with a coronavirus with no immunity from childhood, they aren't all going to make it.
In both cases you are driving true excess deaths. You can't grade the result as if we don't artificially prolong life - we do. So a lot of people in the basket of 'medically carried to another decade' were dumped into the grave.
"So a lot of people in the basket of 'medically carried to another decade' were dumped into the grave."
Exactly. But of course the question is what were the causes that did that, and more importantly - as I think we all agree it was a combination of covid, shots and our non-medical interventions - what ratio.
You seem to suggest it was (almost) all covid (and non-medical interventions)? Or am I missing your point?
I personally doubt that, especially since the excess deaths didn't drop after the omicron twins took over. Especially I haven't seen a convincing mechanism in which omicron kills people after the acute illness phase, and most of these excess deaths are people dying outside that acute phase.
But time will tell I guess. If it was all covid and non-medical interventions, it is likely to die down to pre-pandemic levels very soon. The pool of elderly and sick who didn't get covid is also near empty now.
If some of it are the shots, it will lag longer but also should continue since surprisingly many people are still taking the yearly fall-booster.
The waves of COVID were largely due to deadly hospital protocols and negligence/lack of care in nursing homes but no doubt some percentage were legitimate COVID deaths. The hospitals were in incentivized to report deaths as COVID deaths.
Regardless of how one died, if you have a large number of excess deaths and these are found disproportionately among the elderly and those in nursing homes, there will be a PFE regardless of immune status and pretty much all elderly had either vax or infection immunity by June 2021
There is a lot of math happening that makes pull-forward not "work" (in the sense that many seem to assume we can just incant the word at the numbers and it will apply to them). Like egm will just assert "pull forward," skeptic will impute it without justification, no one's actually doing the math that shows it should matter.
First let's establish that pull-forward first of all implies that a death that should have happened in 2021 was accelerated to 2020 either due to virus or reaction to virus/test. It's nothing to do with how many officially recorded "Covid deaths" were just regular deaths, *only* to do with bona fide *excess* deaths in 2020. I leave the longer future out of it because the question first is should we see pull forward in 2021, and if we can establish no then obviously 2022 isn't a given for PFE either. There has in other words to actually be an *effect* on the following years, and if not or if the effect is trivial then there's no or rather trivial PFE.
From here, each age band needs to be considered separately. The math isn't going to be the same for a group with 13% annual mortality (85+), 4% (75-84) and 1.7% (65-74). As it happens because these groups have a pyramid pop structure you get comparable numbers of annual deaths from each (800k-600k), an equilibrium of sorts, and also there were about 100k each *extra* deaths in 2020 (120k-100k). The numbers I am using are at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14EcwU4g8XYTQWe0_ii1NKSX0xLEeweRemTNmj2AsOLE/edit?usp=sharing
In order for pull forward to be relevant in 2021 it needs to exert a 2021 deficit of over 160k in these three groups, in other words it basically would to be strong in all three groups or need all of the 85+ and most of one of the others. And the question of "strength" takes place in the context of more *pending excess deaths* in these groups due to future first infections - this is where you will see why I have split the question into groups like this.
1: Are 2020 extra deaths all future 2021 deaths?
How is PFE getting any of these 2021 deaths to begin with? Since again these are *extra* deaths, someone was made to die in 2020 that wouldn't have. If it is because of either virus or reaction to virus/test, that means that virus or reaction happened to 120k to 100k future 2021 deaths.
Ok, but how did it do that without also happening to future 2022-2040 deaths?
Only 13% of 80 year-olds die annually. The other 87% die in the years afterward. If the virus is pulling forward the next 13% then it is also pulling a lot of the later 87%. So what portion of the 120,000 extra deaths is pulled from 2021? You can't experience the *effect* of PFE until the year of the pulled-forward death. It is not plausible that say an 87 year old fated to live to 100 has a zero chance of dying from either the virus or treatment homicide. Likewise for 65-74+ where 98% of future deaths will be "unavailable" in 2021 in terms of PFE, and a 70 year old fated to live to 76 cannot be expected to be immune to whatever is causing extra deaths in 2020.
In all three groups the majority of "pulled forward" deaths are probably from after 2021. In the 85+ (13% annual mortality), 119k extra deaths, at most 60k would have been due in 2021 as opposed to later, that's 60k deficit. In 75-84 (4% annual mortality), at most really 20k of 111k, in 65-74 (1.7% annual mortality), at most really 10k of 100k, of *extra* deaths were probably due in 2021 as opposed to later.
2 But we are measuring against still-pending extra deaths.
So right away the overall deficit (~90k) is less than a third of 2020's extra. So you need to halve next year's extra to really lock this. You need ≥50% infected in all three groups in 2020.
You don't have that. Again, only 10-20% of 65+ were infected in USA by May 2021 based on blood donors (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784013), similar in UKHSA, much lower in other parts of Europe which still had low elderly seroprevalence into 2022.
In reality there were probably more elderly pre-Omicron infections/+tests in 2021 than 2020, because of reopening, or at least it was comparable, this is just more in line with anecdotes you find all over Covid skeptic forums besides the recorded case counts. And even in the 85+ group only 42% of people are in long term care at a given moment, so you still have a lot of pending infections in this group (like you could assume the remaining 58% roughly matches the blood donor seroprevalence and so that's at most a 50% discount on 2021 infections in this group). Discounts for the other two age bands will be less; in short most elderly people are still available for infection so the number of infections in 2021 didn't go down vs 2020.
So the most optimistic 2021 deaths deficit of 90k is competing against a pending discounted repeat of 2020 in terms of *extra* deaths of what? Say (.5)119k + (.6)111k + (.7)100k = 196k. This is me doing the most generous model for the *effect* and it comes up 106k short. IRL I don't agree with any of the generous assumptions that went into this math to begin with, and would tend to have much lower expected deficit basically matching the percentage of future 2021 survivors in each age, and to just use .8 across the 2021 expected extra deaths by age board, plus a modifier for Delta being more severe and treatment being more mendacious, resulting in a wash. But the point is to show that even the most generous model is short.
I'm not quite following, but that may very well be me. I mean, by definition you cannot claim to have excess death in elderly/weak due to COVID, but at the same time have no pull forward effect in these groups due to COVID.
So since most people accept we had excess deaths in 2020/2021 in elderly explicitly due to COVID (even if one insists in lowering the official numbers for 'with' vs 'due'), why would we not expect a lower toll in 2022/2023, when the much wimpier omicron twins arrived?
The only way our I can imagine if we were to claim this pull forward is compensated by all the elderly and sick only then getting it having escaped it the first two years. But then the pull forward effect would still apply, but only be seen in 2024/2025 or so.
Last at least The Netherlands in her official reporting even acknowledged a strong pull forward effect. I believe 30%'ish.
(That doesn't mean in some nations it may have gone the other way. I think extreme lockdowns may have saved elderly, only to see them die more afterwards. E.g. those few islands down under perhaps.)
My math is just for 2021. You have posed it as, 'if we avoid asking *why* pull forward didn't apply in 2021, shouldn't we get to casually assume it's there in 2022?.' No, because it didn't apply in 2021, *for specific reasons*, burden of proof applies to 2022. And no one is even trying to prove PFE, as I said at the top of my comment, it's all just lazy assumption.
Pull forward itself of course doesn't need to be proven, as it is literally defined as excess death. Excess death *is* pull forward by definition.
Hence pull forward applied to 2021 as in 2020 we had excess deaths, but as these effects were very regional may just be overcome by having even more excess deaths in 2021.
But that said, for 2021 you may have a partial point. Most people were unvaccinated for at least some part of the 2021 year and various alleged side effects of the shots can take months to develop. And with the more deadly Delta being the main player, I think excess deaths could certainly be more strongly or perhaps even mostly been determined by covid.
I'm however personally more interested in the post-2021 period. Exactly because covid inherently plays a diminishing role, but excess deaths stayed a thing.
It is also sort of like those mask wearing studies that showed region X with masks was so much better than region Y not wearing masks in time period A. But then in time period B suddenly the correlation was gone. Hence, for true excess death correlations I think we need to look at wider periods and wider regions than just the US in 2021.
The big flaw with the study is they could easily have counted the number of Non-Covid Deaths but didn't.
Here is US
Year- Excess- Covid- Non Covid
2020-445,670-385,676-59,994
2021-523,064-463,203-59,861
2022-291,606-245,444-46,162
Of course, we know many Covid Deaths were not COVID deaths, but those who died with a positive PCR test w/oCOVID symptoms. Perhaps 30% or more
Another flaw with the numbers is they did not attempt to adjust for the Pull Forward Effect. Those who died early would of died in subsequent years, so those should be subtracted from expected deaths
It took 1 year from submission to publication, plenty of time to sanitize it
And the iatrogenic deaths?
This isn't relevant to the question. If the theory is that testing positive for the virus causes a set of treatment decisions that result in a unique and uniquely deadly disease progression, then that doesn't result in treating any of the statistics differently in the end. Not to say that this is even convincing - just that it "Covid deaths are caused by reaction to the virus" doesn't actually suggest that Covid deaths aren't *caused* by the virus.
As I argued in refutation of the very weak bacterial pneumonia theory:
"Defining a group of patients or deceased in terms of being positive with the virus predicts differences from regular pneumonia. If one merely wants to argue that iatrogenic harm causes these differences, there is no need to shove them under a rug at the same time. This confesses a need not to really let the reader see the differences." https://unglossed.substack.com/p/repeating-the-case-against-bacterial
I write this blog.
Have you looked at insurance actuary excess non-Covid deaths. Apparently these deaths are catastrophic according to the actuaries. Also, I have read possibly thousands of anecdotes of people who’ve lost family and friends after they received the shot. In my own circle of friends and family I know of one Covid death but many more deaths from cancer and heart problems from after they received tbe shot, most of them young. I read that Dr Jessica Rose analyzed the Vaers data and discovered 50% of the deaths occurred within 24 hours of the shot and 85% within 2 weeks. As for the PCR test my husband, two friends and myself got Covid. They all tested positive, I tested negative. This happened another two times. So much for an accurate test! I did a T-cell test for antibodies and it came up positive. The regular test came up negative every time
This is what I refer to in the state-by-state US data. "Working age excess deaths" in 2021 are just Covid deaths. They were never "non-Covid" - the story from early 2022 was that most deaths were non-Covid, not most *excess* deaths. Totally different meaning. What I am saying is if you go back to any of the articles that created this insurance actuary meme back in early 2022 it says "we've got some excess deaths in working age adults - but most deaths are not Covid" you see how "most deaths" isn't talking about the *excess deaths*.
The excess deaths are Covid deaths, they are all in southern and midwestern states that had Covid deaths in summer/august 2021, the delta wave - https://unglossed.substack.com/p/covid-cases-vs-middle-aged-excess. In other words this has never been some crazy mystery, really obvious explanation - the virus killing some middle aged adults in late 2021.
I don't want to dismiss anecdotal evidence: even to this week, the vaccinated are still dying suddenly (https://x.com/EconomyBen/status/1798048880946557395) But when Steve Kirsch actually surveyed his own readers for anecdotes of most recent personal contact deaths, it was Delta wave all over https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-american-unvaccinated-holocaust
So personal experience and statistics are all blaring out the same signal quite loudly, there is no mystery to the "insurance actuary deaths".
Check out Steve Kirsch’s “Nobody can Explain Egat Happened in Apple Valley”. After shots rolled out in January 2021 more nursing home patients died in a week than a year quoted one nurse. She said people were afraid to speak out.
So the main hook on Kirsch's post is that before the vaccines, there was a 0/30 CFR (and this is in 2020 when "cases" in nursing home outbreaks were typically counted only when they got bad). Is 0 deaths for 30+ infections normal for the elderly in long term care? Not really. Did the vaccines cause this? How (time travel?)? So nothing about the statistical weirdness of Apple Valley can really be because of the vaccines, the weirdness is already baked in in 2020. Maybe they just made a typo.
He even mentions this in the original post https://kirschsubstack.com/p/apple-valley-village-health-care , usually the CFR in 2020 is much higher.
Also in the original post, Apple Valley and the other examined company have early 2021 outbreaks right in the middle of the vaccine EUA. In general we don't know a lot about the winter 20/21 wave, it generated a lot of deaths shortly after the vaccines were authorized but weeks before anyone could get their hands on a shot. There are some studies of outbreaks in nursing homes during this period and they don't show anything particularly remarkable.
Without knowing if the cases at Apple Valley in the winter wave were even vaccinated beforehand, there's nothing clear being implied about the vaccine here.