It would seem the most reliable data to base an educated guess concerning the real makeup of covid-related mortality on, is to be found in john beaudoin's analysis of Massachusetts death certificates and from what i gleaned from it, it seems to point to massive underreporting of vaccine deaths, misclassification of the same as covid deaths and equally misclassified casualties to iatricidal covid treatment protocols (remdesivir etc)
Inferring excess 2021 and 2022 cardiac etc. deaths as vaccine-induced leaves unexplained the fact that the elevation began in 2020, didn't increase much vs. 2020 in the next two years, and the biggest spikes are around waves of recorded "Covid cases / deaths," a very clear signal that the virus is driving these deaths. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/checking-back-on-us-cardiac-deaths
So it doesn't seem like officially recorded Covid deaths are an overestimate. I think there's a mix of counting deaths that weren't caused by the virus and not counting deaths that were, and it's almost a wash, which is why North America comes out pretty even on Schellekens's graph.
Previous looks at MA excess deaths by Joel Smalley have produced estimates I find pretty reasonable, e.g. that maybe a handful of deaths in younger groups, a bit more in older groups, nothing extreme as far as the stats show https://metatron.substack.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-covid-and This may be because discounts from lower accidents due to lockdowns are obscuring the signals here, but that's the problem with small signals.
The gold-standard randomized clinical trial mortality results for mRNA vaccines (the ONLY mortality data not compromised by healthy vaccine user bias and other fatal flaws) showed that mRNA vaccines are WORSE THAN USELESS for saving lives, even at the height of the pandemic and at peak effectiveness. BTW, the trials also showed ZERO reduction in the CASE-FATALITY rate by vaccination (though COVID deaths were rare in both groups)- the trials did show >90% reduction in the CASE rate, which is long outdated now in the Omicron era. Doesn't the data you are presenting show that the vast majority of mRNA vaccinated places had HIGHER all-cause mortality (and often COVID mortality) in the year after vaccine rollout than in the year before- so how can this data be used to claim that the vaccines saved lives? Especially considering that even in unvaccinated, case-fatality rates were: Wild type>Alpha>Delta>Omicron. Overall, we must not ignore the unfavorable gold-standard clinical trial data, especially when a VERY SIMILAR PATTERN is observed on a large scale in the real world as well. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/covid_19_virus_deaths_vs_vaccine_deaths
Finally, doesn't your Australia example do the OPPOSITE of showing the vaccines saved lives? It shows that the "reaction" as you call it (although not "palatable", and some will argue "not worth it" EVEN IF it saved lives) seemed to be a better bet than the vaccines, given that deaths clearly went up AFTER the vaccines. Especially since the same trend of "reaction">>vaccines (to save lives) was observed in many other places: to name a few- Japan, Canada, probably the "reaction-oriented" Northeast US too if you look at Year 1 vs. Year 2, taking variant case-fatality rate (even in unvaccinated) into account?
The trials met end-points before the "height of the pandemic." Even the last evaluations before unblinding, including the Pfizer report with more deaths in the vaxxed, do not capture the full toll of infection in the placebo group because Delta and Omicron were still pending. So the trials do not reveal true net mortality benefit (since placebo were nuked before most could be naturally infected). Anything else is just hot air.
"Denying that the experimental vaccines maybe reduce severe disease is failing to argue that we should still have freedom, and avoid experimenting on humanity, anyway."
Bingo! I know no one in my life who was vaccinated that died from, or almost died from Covid. I know of about 10 unvaccinated people who died from Covid (mostly in Delta wave) and about 5 unvaccinated who almost died. One of my very healthy son's got a bad case of a year long brain fog after Delta and the other very healthy son got a very mild case of myocarditis. Both unvaccinated.
That said, nearly all the strange heart attacks/sudden deaths, cancers, and autoimmune issues I've seen have been from a vaccinated person. I do know of a couple unvaccinated who have developed odd autoimmune issues post Covid however.
"Schellekens has operated “pandem-ic.com” since at least 2021 to highlight, er, viral equity, in order to advocate, er, unclear notions of anti-viral equity, or something." Fantastically funny!
As I said before, I think you are looking at it the wrong way.
OK, I admit there are those who claim the virus is not real or just like the flu. And we also have those like Steven Kirsch that claim that 1 million people in the US died from the shot, or whatever his latest number is. But 'debunking that' is not that far from suggesting that all 'Team Reality' players believe the shot made me a 5G cell-tower or magnetic. No reasonable person believes that.
We know the following:
1) COVID killed lots of extra people.
2) Most of them are old. The average age in the West was around 80.
3) The Pre-Omicron twin variants were far more dangerous. Hence Australia saved a lot of elderly.
4) Soaking your blood with antibodies surely has some temporal positive effect, even when compensated for healthy user bias, corrupt statistical manipulation and all the intense stupidity of the vax advocates.
Sure, I'll also admit some people may not be able to admit (4), but that is indeed just common science. Not 'The Science', but actual science. :-) The efficacy is likely not 0%.
But what is far more important:
1) How many people die from the vaccination. The best estimate I still have comes from the Dutch that suggests for every 5 excess COVID death we have 1 unknown excess death. By lack of alternatives that explain our excess deaths, that could serve as a first estimate of what we may be looking at.
2) What is the age distribution? We have indications it may be more slanted to younger groups, especially male. But perhaps that is just because young people's deaths are more likely to be noticed. This is important, as in most comparisons we don't compare death numbers, but years lost. More importantly, at what age group is the break even point, where a X month of COVID-death reduction would not outweigh the Y chance of dying from the shot.
3) What are all ways that the vaccine can kill. We know a lot already about the heart damage/clots and its kill/ER-visit rates, but cancer/immune suppression effects is still unknown. Are these truly rare incidents?
In order to look at these questions, excess death among sub 50 year is far more useful than overall excess deaths, especially if looked at per death category. And the holy grail would be, if they are vaxed or not, but that latter is a well-guarded secret. (In The Netherlands for instance, the secretary of health is currently fighting very hard tooth and nail to deny parliament from getting that data, even though some parties explicitly asked the government to make that comparison.)
Only when we did that we can make a good comparison on the shot vs deaths. I wonder how high the break even point is, when taking the shot would be worth while during the Delta wave, which is the main wave the shots would ever have a chance to shine.
I also wonder for how many more years we'll see excess deaths due to the shot, provided the current excess deaths are indeed caused in part by these shots.
'If we are all, in our individual connections, members of a village of 1,000, SARS-CoV-2 was never capable of being more than a minor tragedy, akin to a single house fire. Should villages stop making houses to avoid house fires?...How much thoughtless, panicked disruption is enough, just to avoid the reality that in life, sometimes people die?'
See, this is why I like to read Unglossed, for the distinct paucity of pearl-clutching.
I’ve said for decades now that there’s some weirdness going on where not one person can die from anything. The money we throw at things that are not stoppable is ridiculous. Regarding Covid the problem I have is complete lack of trust. I don’t know how you can state with surety the number of deaths when they fudged the numbers all along. They lied to boost the numbers of people with Covid and then they stopped reporting deaths when the vaccine was the killer. Who’s to know for sure? I believe the number killed is higher than we’ll ever know. I know for sure that people died unnecessarily for lack of treatment, the wrong treatment, being unhealthy while having Covid and from the vaccine. ALL of us were made to suffer though. It was a travesty and I will never stop calling for justice to hold those responsible, accountable!
I agree that almost none of the numbers are trustworthy. We have no way of knowing. All cause mortality is about the only number we have any hope of knowing for sure.
In an ideal world your sensible prescription would be sound. But we don't live in such a world. Aside from spending a significant amount of time reading scientific studies, you certainly must, to some extent, engage with the world around you, right? (Rhetorical q, of course). And having been informed by the sheer pervasiveness of human fallibility and absurdity all around you, you must somewhat recognize that such a libertarianesque appeal is a superfluous one. Do you really believe after all you have seen/read/heard over the last few years (even longer, perhaps) that your sensible position would garner much purchase? C'mon, Brian! I'm sure you know better.
Despite all of our supposed 'progress', we humans remain slaves to our passions. And in the era of Covid, fear reigned supreme. Reasonable pleas NEVER stood a chance.
I think - and this is repeating points from a previous comment discussion here - if people had been left to process the situation in 2020 face to face in bars, this kind of pragmatic view of the risk/reward would have risen to the top. The American revolution was the product of taverns. You take away taverns, freedom falls.
Well, people have been meeting in taverns and bars since, yet the majority of people believe that ALL of the measures taken to combat the virus were NECESSARY and SUCCESSFUL. You would think that these sober-minded individuals (see what I did there?!😁) would believe differently by now. Anyway.
That's sunk cost and cognitive dissonance for you. I find it pretty easy to gain agreement with working class of all ages, and non-medical non-student young, and the very old, here in San Diego, that lockdowns were stupid. PMC, especially middle-aged, still feel vindicated and some might have never cared about anything except defying Orange Man.
I’m not sure I totally followed this post, but there are plenty of countries with universal health care that know exactly who got COVID jabs, how many, what age they were, and whether they’re alive or dead. I’m tired of speculative articles guessing at what causes excess mortality. Look at the ACTUAL dead, report how many shots they got if any, and compare that death rate per group to the historic rates for those age groups. I did my best to do a study like that using UK data and to me it was pretty clear that young healthy people were dying from COVID jabs.
Depends which UK data you use. I like the ONS deaths data, everyone criticizes it but it looks stable to me, though very biased. The funny thing is that ONS all-cause mortality in some of the youngest groups *has* been worse for the ever-vaxxed, at least early last year when not many kids were vaxxed yet. This fact never made a big splash. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/into-the-weeds-uk-deaths-data
Swedish data is good, though not public afaik. I published a review of the preprint looking at hospitalizations for various things in teens, a bit of a signal for immune dysregulation driving infections and -itis'es. All cause deaths aren't reported. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-swedish-teen-vaccine-study-briefly
It's doubtful any healthy or very young *groups* can come out ahead from injection even in terms of infection outcomes alone. I prefer to focus on individual infection risk, however, in which case it's unlikely for any individual to benefit because even in "high risk" groups, severe infections are the exception, not the norm.
The bias is built into who is getting counted in the census, who is getting vaccinated vs. not. Care homes avoided vaccinating individuals on end-of-life so that created all sorts of crazy signals, i.e. suddenly the vaccinated "aren't dying at the normal rate" simply because at any given moment, most deaths are foreseen. This repeats for second and third doses. This wasn't a flaw in the ONS data. All the claims of flaws, lags, they lead to easy ways to validate a problem when you think them through, and those validations fail. So the data looks fine.
That's an argument over accuracy vs. consistency. A lot of the data coming out is inaccurate, whether through biases or through poor methodology. However, if the issues are consistent across studies or data collection then you can at least factor that in. Thus, data can be biased (have some inaccuracies) but will consistently report following the same inaccuracies which means that the data is at least comparable in some degree.
You’d think they’d like to know. Australia could have easily done this but they didn’t. I suspect they did but didn’t admit to doing it publicly. Now it looks like a study trying to get some of the answers is being defunded.
Great post. Yes. One thousand times yes. I have said this from the beginning. Our civil rights are not granted by governments,but bestowed by the creator, and are to be protected by the govt., following the biblical model as much as possible. Which is why the claim of asymptomatic transmission and widespread PCR testing is such pernicious evil...the bible does allow for quarantine of the visibly sick, and thus provides the proper balance of rights/responsibilities for societal function.
I asked a Covidian, one of my medical students here in Japan this very question. This student is unique in that she is not just out of high school as are her classmates; she is a licensed pharmacist and has worked for a major pharmaceutical company. To her, yes it was and is worth it and should be repeated. Same to, BTW, for ESG and China’s social credit scoring system. I share the following to give a more complete picture of the mind set of this pharmacist turned medical student. She said that whatever loss to whatever freedoms we enjoy in Japan is worth it to uphold her ideas of what will make the world a better place. She very angrily instructed us that businesses in business to earn a profit was “in the past!”, that their duty today is to do whatever is necessary to save the planet.
We can not think of these issues independently, these people aren’t.
Except they are everywhere. Over Golden Week I say signage stating that my dry cleaner and the Ueno Zoo peruse SDGs. In fact, SDGs and other such 3 letter policies for dehumanization of the planet (yes, that was meant to read and interpreted multiple ways.) are found every were. A publishing company specializing in English as a Second Language touts its support for DEI programs. ESG is written into textbooks and news stories. It is almost omnipresent.
What you seem to be calling Covid deaths I consider medical malfeasance deaths. Never did we tell sick people there’s nothing we can do to help you and close our clinics and offices to patients who were sick. That alone should have shown people that either this was a highly deadly disease or something was very wrong with our medical system. After a couple months it should have been obvious it was the latter as hardly anyone was dying. Putting non icu doctors in ICU’s and kids still in med school in the NYC hospitals certainly lead to needless deaths. Putting sick elderly in with the most vulnerable elderly who were locked away from their families and advocates killed them! That wasn’t Covid, it was malpractice! Covid likely would have killed as many as a bad flu had it been properly handled. This was about making money off our bodies with new tech they wanted to advance. This was about stealing the livelihoods of the middle class to bring them to their knees while enriching the Uber wealthy giving them more power over their weaken prey. This was about taking a big step toward one world rule and destroying freedom and the USA as a superpower. This was a trial run. Never is there a good enough excuse to coerce people into taking medical or bio weapons into their bodies and force healthy persons to lockdown. These shots certainly did not save lives but their agenda to bring them to market on a mass scale certainly killed them.
I would argue that this was not a trial run. It was/is a necessary series of steps to bring about whatever changes they hope to make. It is my opinion that the threat we face is much larger than the covid panic. The panic was just to set up the next phase. Otherwise, I am in agreement with you.
I think we are saying the same thing. It was part of a greater plan. I think they had an idea of how far they could get and certainly had a target of what they wanted to accomplish but I also think they were testing the waters with what would work on us and to define the areas they would need to overcome before they strike again. I was disappointed that so many people went along with this I think far too easily without thinking critically. They didn’t give the dangers of bio weapons enough thought.
It worked too well and did so in places as diverse in their ways of handling anything as the US and Japan and everywhere in between for it to be a test, IMHO. The tests were run earlier allowing for this to be as successful as it has been. Most people do not give enough thought to anything other than how they can out comply thy neighbor.
They are striking again, at this very moment. Most of what they do is behind the scenes but there are clues. They are pushing hard and making great progress in replacing cash with digital currencies that they will control with social credit scoring systems. I do not pretend to know the extent of what they have accomplished in this regards but what I have stumbled across, while new to me has proved to have been in operation for a number of years at the time I discovered them. These are more than enough to scare the hell out of anyone who is blinded by the glowing reports of how convenient they will make life.
Here are a few.
QR CODE Only restrooms. ESG. Internet of Things. FinTech. FATCA/FBAR/CBT. OECD’s CRS. CBDCs. SDGs. DEI. Preapproval required to mail packages internationally. Digital IDs. Cashless society.
I think the shots saved lives, probably. I don't think that preventing some amount of 4 deaths per 1,000 remotely justifies mass human experimentation.
The totality of RCT evidence on ivermectin shows that it saves lives: https://c19ivm.org/meta.html#fig_fprd, but the totality of RCT evidence shows that mRNA vaccines DO NOT save lives. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10125209/. You are actually saying that mRNA vaccines saved lives even though Pfizer and Moderna's own clinical trials showed 4 excess non-COVID deaths for every 3 less COVID deaths with vaccination, even during the deadliest Alpha wave and at peak vaccine effectiveness? Why? Based on observational data ridden with healthy vaccine user bias and all sorts of other flaws? I have a dirty feeling that you won't accept observational data for ivermectin (never mind that the RCT data shows ivermectin saves lives but mRNA vaccines do not).
The Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data shows a higher rate of serious adverse reactions from vaccine (12.5 per 10,000) than any reduction in serious events from covid (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 for Pfizer and Moderna respectively).
A perfunctory rush emergency trial cannot show long-term harms or benefits. A true control arm (one that was not unblinded) would not have stopped being at risk of infection simply because somebody at Pfizer sent an efficacy analysis to the FDA. The virus doesn't care, it will keep infecting the 80 to 90% of placebo participants who haven't met the virus yet (we don't know how many seroconverted asymptomatically). So presumably our imaginary true control arm go on to experience 4 - 10 times as many severe infections by the time almost everyone unvaccinated has natural immunity, IRL this would have been early 2022.
Does a non-boostered vaccine arm continue to avoid severe infections in that time? We literally do not know. Just like we don't know if long-term all-cause deaths would have kept up with the placebo regardless of 4 - 10 times more severe infections accruing. We don't know the long term numbers from the trial. Looking at the short term numbers doesn't tell us what the long term numbers would have been. But imagining anything less than 4 - 10 times more severe infections + death in imaginary long term placebo is unsupportable.
You still believe the lies and that there was any legitimacy in what was done to us as if there was an altruistic motive. I am past that. Did you see how using a two week period post vaccination yet calling those people unvaccinated how that skews the efficacious data? A placebo loses it’s efficacy within 3 months down to 17 percent from 95 percent by this type analysis. This was the ultimate trick with statistics. If you haven’t seen the paper and presentation I can hunt it down for you.
Maybe they kept some people from dying of covid, in the near term. The jury is still out on the damage they will cause down the road. We don't how long the transfection will continue in any individual and I think we'll be seeing life expectancy hurt by the shots especially for people who've been jabbed as children.
But I agree, efficacy aside, there was no justice in mandating the jabs and putting everyone under house arrest. This adventure in transfection seems like a simple minded science fair project with a lot of pharma greed behind it.
The Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data shows a higher rate of serious adverse reactions from vaccine (12.5 per 10,000) than any reduction in serious events from covid (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 for Pfizer and Moderna respectively).
Any “vaccine” that causes the heart problems, clots and neurological problems this one does is a murder weapon and not a solution….no matter how many lives one thinks it might have saved. Studies show ivermectin given early enough and at the right dose saved lives! The US suffered more because we are a very unhealthy society!
I respectfully disagree with your opinion on ivermectin and HCQ as well as the toxic spike making injections saving anyone. There were other treatments and protocols that worked as well. Having adequate vitamin D levels would have saved millions. This was never about saving people. That is a foundational belief I stand on after investing more than 1,000 hours analyzing this nightmare from many perspectives. I certainly didn’t start there having worked in medicine myself but there is far too much evidence to believe any differently by now.
I'm pretty sure taking ivm made my two bouts with a serious case of covid a lot shorter. Felt better within 8 -12 hours of taking 0.6 mg/kg. I keep the stuff on hand and use it for any viral cold I feel coming on.
It really is illuminating, after 2 years of watching Berenson ignore evidence for severe efficacy, to see that January 2021 tweet and the borderline irrelevant "just as they aren't for the flu" argument. Why make a claim on the question so *early*, based on Israel data (which if anything was exaggerating severe efficacy at the time)?
It seems to all come down to a literally biological inability to change his mind on anything, and ideas he had in his head beforehand based on flu vaccines. But why should flu vaccine inefficacy govern expectations about the experimental Covid vaccines? When did this extrapolation ever make any sense?
Flu vaccines are futile because they are given to (elderly) adults who *already have natural immunity to the flu*. This isn't the hand the experimental Covid vaccines were playing. But instead he's so fixated on this handful of studies about flu vaccines that he doesn't even care about the actual evidence regarding this other, different thing.
'But why should flu vaccine inefficacy govern expectations about the experimental Covid vaccines? When did this extrapolation ever make any sense?'
Ignoring any arguments Berenson may have made for this, the fact that both flu and coronavirus tend to rapidly mutate is a good argument in itself. Hard to deploy a vaccine against such a moving target.
Not sure on this. The flu shots are common in Japan and may be required of children. I know my wife made certain our kids got them when they were in preschool; I am not sure if they were school requirements or not. I know that my oldest child, now 9, caught flu 2 of the first 4 years he got the flu shot. Not a ringing endorsement for their efficacy. My med schools offer it to us free or at reduced cost, depending on the school, each year. I do not get it but have had the flu only once as an adult. My students get flu despite getting the flu shot though. We have had epidemics of flu, especially through college aged people despite the flu shots. Perhaps later in life I might take it, but I see no evidence that it really does anything.
On Japan, the longer we have worn masks, social distanced, used hand sanitizer, worked from home and the more shot up and boosted, the more cases and deaths we have had. Does this mean these are the cause? No. But it also does not mean it would be worse if we did not do these things, as many claim. I realize that you are not making this claim, but so many are. I know not a single person who has had the polio vaccine who has caught polio; but I can not count the number of people who have caught the flu or covid despite getting the shots for these diseases.
Regardless, I agree with you that no amount of deaths or “saves” justify any of what we have just been through and the aftermath of it.
For children, it would be fine to infer from flu vaccines and really all vaccines to the Covid vaccines, because they are immune tabula rasa. But there *is* no severe efficacy in children - https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-no-severe-efficacy-in-kids-study - so I'm not objecting to anything Berenson has said about kids (I don't think he's covered it, since like I said he isn't really looking at the evidence with an eye toward "what is this fact that I don't know in advance").
I think it's crazy to give kids flu vaccines. When I was growing up, literally no one was worried about flu in kids. Now kids are flu-vaxxed like crazy; I had no idea until two years ago. It's just doctors inflicting their warped sampling of reality on society.
Agreed! Don’t even get me started on all the other vaccines that are pushed on us. Look, the rate of autism doubles every five years. The CDC never talks about it and isn’t serious about finding the cause. Why? Vaccines! I have a child with autism who was vaccine injured as so many other families in this country. It’s all about the Benjamin’s baby!
My kids are also vaxxed against Chickenpox. Was not happy when learned of that.
Japan he gone full hypochondriac even before the panic with flu shots administered far and wide. I have no idea the numbers, but have reason to doubt they are anything like the Covid shots. But they are extremely common among those in medicine, such as my employers and students. While there may be a couple that I do not recall properly, everyone I have known who has caught the flu in Japan over the past 10+ years had received the flu shot. Med students, nursing students, colleagues and bosses. Then there is me, who works with the all these I know who have caught the flu but do not get the flu shot and have caught the flu rarely as an adult, the last close to 20 years ago and most likely from my wife, according to the doctor. I did not catch it from my children even when caring for them while they were sick with the flu.
However, long suspicious of comparisons of data from different countries, the past three years have made me suspicious of all claims made by medical professionals. I just do not trust a word coming out of their mouths…out of their masked mouths. Seriously, one should anyone heed anything coming from anyone wearing masks to stop a virus? Such people are no more worthy of trust than a naked person on the street trying to tell me how to invest my money.
“But why should flu vaccine inefficacy govern expectations about the experimental Covid vaccines? When did this extrapolation ever make any sense? “ You’re joking, right? Do you really not understand this? Coronavirus mutate quickly. You can’t get a head of it. Flu strains are different each year so they guess and hope. That’s how scientific that is. Flu shots are highly ineffective even when they guess right and do not have the data to prove they stop death. You should read some books on vaccines.
I don't read books on vaccines, I read studies. Nor am I joking. Everyone assuming flu rules = SARS-CoV-2 rules does not mean flu rules = SARS-CoV-2; it's literally an assumption, right? Who said it was true? How could anyone have known it was true in order to say it was true? So Berenson is just assuming something, the fact that everyone else assumes it doesn't justify the assumption. And there are a lot of "flu rules" that aren't even true.
1 There was no preexisting confirmation that coronaviruses mutate to evade antibodies.
"[L]ittle is known about how HCoV-OC43 genotypes persist in human populations. It is assumed that the continuous adaption of viral antigenic gene is required for the persistence of OC43 genotypes. However, this hypothesis has not been carefully examined by precise evolutionary pattern analysis." Ren, et al. - *2015* https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11451
Granted, there's good evidence coming in the last 10 months that SARS-CoV-2 is finally doing just that, but in 2020 up to January 2021 there was zero evidence of antigenic drift to escape immunity. The virus wasn't mutating that way at all. So the assumption was unfounded by human knowledge.
2 Flu vaccines do not fail because of yearly small-scale variant mismatch. This is a modern myth, like OAS, invented to pin down a "flaw" for their failure so research money still flows (to fix the "flaw," science is never going to just admit that flu vaccines are futile because natural immunity is better). When you dig up classic studies, flu vaccines work and there isn't a high dependence on getting the variant right. When they don't work, it isn't because the variant is wrong, it is because the control group builds natural immunity. So if you only measure one year they work, if you track outcomes the next year they don't. It's just futility. Berenson doesn't know this because he doesn't actually do research.
3 However, in 1957, rushed vaccines for "Asian flu" were developed and deployed in US, UK, and Russia, and everywhere they reduced infections at least a bit. (Still futile in the long run, because now everyone else has natural immunity which works better.)
4 I am an anti-vaxxer. I do not change this opinion based on an experimental gene technology maybe reducing 4 deaths in 1,000. However, there's no difference between front-loading Vitamin D and front-loading antibodies in terms of giving people an immune boost before infection, except that one requires getting sunlight and the other requires human experimentation.
'There was no preexisting confirmation that coronaviruses mutate to evade antibodies.'
Aren't a lot of colds caused by coronaviruses? And we do get colds repeatedly.
I confess I'm influenced by having just this week read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel chapter about crowd infections and how they tend to behave. Zoonotic infections tend to start out severe and then evolve to a form that's more infectious and less fatal. Admittedly that's not specifically addressing antibody evasion, which is possibly getting too far into the weeds. He's addressing herd immunity, not vaccination, but as a general principle it made sense to me — for what that's worth!
It takes a lot of work to figure out if viruses have multiple serotypes, essentially to distinguish between human blood not neutralizing the virus sometimes because of having antibodies for a different serotype vs. a million other reasons. And you need the virus to be friendly to cell culture, coronaviruses are not team players in this regard. Alternately, you can infer things by feeding genomes into algorithms that tell you if there's positive selection, or using reason. Alternately you can passage escape mutants in a lab like with flu, but this doesn't prove it happens in natural infection.
None of that work had been previously done with human coronaviruses. I don't actually know if reinfection with human covs has been documented, but probably it happens. However, we don't know if that's because of antigenic drift or not. Flu is a really special animal in terms of how responsive it is to antibody escape. Maybe there is a reservoir of flu-like covs out there in bats in terms of being sensitive to immunity, so they enter human circulation for a while, mutate to evade antibodies until they are out of moves, and then die out because there's no more hosts, like flu does. And maybe that's SARS-CoV-2, and we are only noticing it's re-arrival because the population is older than normally in history.
This proves my point about vaccines and autism. Where are the studies? Oh there aren’t many cause those studies aren’t funded. Why? Cause the CDC and Big Pharma are one and the same!!
All data is suspect. Individual nations, individual agendas (died from vs. died with; connected to vax, etc.) All dirty data. Truth from the source? E Europe (lower uptake of vax) highest xs deaths vs. W Europe (higher uptake) - does not make sense. Maybe E Europe is more honest with reports. Everyone knows higher vax uptake = higher sudden deaths. So sad to see data reported dishonestly three years in.
Overall, higher uptake doesn't seem to increase excess deaths as far as the statistics, especially not in working-age where you would expect dying suddenly to show up. Even in US, e.g. states with more vax have fewer working age excess deaths. So the statistics do not add evidence. This doesn't mean there is no evidence, or that it isn't happening. There's lots of evidence, young people are dying, the reports are there. It just isn't in the stats.
East Europe I think is a combination of low mitigation and potentially including Ukraine deaths. They aren't going to go to a separate deaths category. I'm not sure.
If you look at rate of change post-vax versus pre-vax, comparing high-vax states to low-vax states, that COULD be helpful, but it assumes that data across states is equally accurate and trustworthy, and I certainly would not ASSUME that, given the huge agenda at play here. Still, that comparison would be interesting to see.
It would seem the most reliable data to base an educated guess concerning the real makeup of covid-related mortality on, is to be found in john beaudoin's analysis of Massachusetts death certificates and from what i gleaned from it, it seems to point to massive underreporting of vaccine deaths, misclassification of the same as covid deaths and equally misclassified casualties to iatricidal covid treatment protocols (remdesivir etc)
https://coquindechien.substack.com/p/vaccine-death-count-and-a-ramble
Inferring excess 2021 and 2022 cardiac etc. deaths as vaccine-induced leaves unexplained the fact that the elevation began in 2020, didn't increase much vs. 2020 in the next two years, and the biggest spikes are around waves of recorded "Covid cases / deaths," a very clear signal that the virus is driving these deaths. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/checking-back-on-us-cardiac-deaths
So it doesn't seem like officially recorded Covid deaths are an overestimate. I think there's a mix of counting deaths that weren't caused by the virus and not counting deaths that were, and it's almost a wash, which is why North America comes out pretty even on Schellekens's graph.
Previous looks at MA excess deaths by Joel Smalley have produced estimates I find pretty reasonable, e.g. that maybe a handful of deaths in younger groups, a bit more in older groups, nothing extreme as far as the stats show https://metatron.substack.com/p/the-definitive-guide-to-covid-and This may be because discounts from lower accidents due to lockdowns are obscuring the signals here, but that's the problem with small signals.
The gold-standard randomized clinical trial mortality results for mRNA vaccines (the ONLY mortality data not compromised by healthy vaccine user bias and other fatal flaws) showed that mRNA vaccines are WORSE THAN USELESS for saving lives, even at the height of the pandemic and at peak effectiveness. BTW, the trials also showed ZERO reduction in the CASE-FATALITY rate by vaccination (though COVID deaths were rare in both groups)- the trials did show >90% reduction in the CASE rate, which is long outdated now in the Omicron era. Doesn't the data you are presenting show that the vast majority of mRNA vaccinated places had HIGHER all-cause mortality (and often COVID mortality) in the year after vaccine rollout than in the year before- so how can this data be used to claim that the vaccines saved lives? Especially considering that even in unvaccinated, case-fatality rates were: Wild type>Alpha>Delta>Omicron. Overall, we must not ignore the unfavorable gold-standard clinical trial data, especially when a VERY SIMILAR PATTERN is observed on a large scale in the real world as well. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/covid_19_virus_deaths_vs_vaccine_deaths
Finally, doesn't your Australia example do the OPPOSITE of showing the vaccines saved lives? It shows that the "reaction" as you call it (although not "palatable", and some will argue "not worth it" EVEN IF it saved lives) seemed to be a better bet than the vaccines, given that deaths clearly went up AFTER the vaccines. Especially since the same trend of "reaction">>vaccines (to save lives) was observed in many other places: to name a few- Japan, Canada, probably the "reaction-oriented" Northeast US too if you look at Year 1 vs. Year 2, taking variant case-fatality rate (even in unvaccinated) into account?
The trials met end-points before the "height of the pandemic." Even the last evaluations before unblinding, including the Pfizer report with more deaths in the vaxxed, do not capture the full toll of infection in the placebo group because Delta and Omicron were still pending. So the trials do not reveal true net mortality benefit (since placebo were nuked before most could be naturally infected). Anything else is just hot air.
"Denying that the experimental vaccines maybe reduce severe disease is failing to argue that we should still have freedom, and avoid experimenting on humanity, anyway."
Bingo! I know no one in my life who was vaccinated that died from, or almost died from Covid. I know of about 10 unvaccinated people who died from Covid (mostly in Delta wave) and about 5 unvaccinated who almost died. One of my very healthy son's got a bad case of a year long brain fog after Delta and the other very healthy son got a very mild case of myocarditis. Both unvaccinated.
That said, nearly all the strange heart attacks/sudden deaths, cancers, and autoimmune issues I've seen have been from a vaccinated person. I do know of a couple unvaccinated who have developed odd autoimmune issues post Covid however.
"Schellekens has operated “pandem-ic.com” since at least 2021 to highlight, er, viral equity, in order to advocate, er, unclear notions of anti-viral equity, or something." Fantastically funny!
As I said before, I think you are looking at it the wrong way.
OK, I admit there are those who claim the virus is not real or just like the flu. And we also have those like Steven Kirsch that claim that 1 million people in the US died from the shot, or whatever his latest number is. But 'debunking that' is not that far from suggesting that all 'Team Reality' players believe the shot made me a 5G cell-tower or magnetic. No reasonable person believes that.
We know the following:
1) COVID killed lots of extra people.
2) Most of them are old. The average age in the West was around 80.
3) The Pre-Omicron twin variants were far more dangerous. Hence Australia saved a lot of elderly.
4) Soaking your blood with antibodies surely has some temporal positive effect, even when compensated for healthy user bias, corrupt statistical manipulation and all the intense stupidity of the vax advocates.
Sure, I'll also admit some people may not be able to admit (4), but that is indeed just common science. Not 'The Science', but actual science. :-) The efficacy is likely not 0%.
But what is far more important:
1) How many people die from the vaccination. The best estimate I still have comes from the Dutch that suggests for every 5 excess COVID death we have 1 unknown excess death. By lack of alternatives that explain our excess deaths, that could serve as a first estimate of what we may be looking at.
2) What is the age distribution? We have indications it may be more slanted to younger groups, especially male. But perhaps that is just because young people's deaths are more likely to be noticed. This is important, as in most comparisons we don't compare death numbers, but years lost. More importantly, at what age group is the break even point, where a X month of COVID-death reduction would not outweigh the Y chance of dying from the shot.
3) What are all ways that the vaccine can kill. We know a lot already about the heart damage/clots and its kill/ER-visit rates, but cancer/immune suppression effects is still unknown. Are these truly rare incidents?
In order to look at these questions, excess death among sub 50 year is far more useful than overall excess deaths, especially if looked at per death category. And the holy grail would be, if they are vaxed or not, but that latter is a well-guarded secret. (In The Netherlands for instance, the secretary of health is currently fighting very hard tooth and nail to deny parliament from getting that data, even though some parties explicitly asked the government to make that comparison.)
Only when we did that we can make a good comparison on the shot vs deaths. I wonder how high the break even point is, when taking the shot would be worth while during the Delta wave, which is the main wave the shots would ever have a chance to shine.
I also wonder for how many more years we'll see excess deaths due to the shot, provided the current excess deaths are indeed caused in part by these shots.
There's also the possible long term effects of the vaccine, which you allude to indirectly. But we won't know about that for a while.
'If we are all, in our individual connections, members of a village of 1,000, SARS-CoV-2 was never capable of being more than a minor tragedy, akin to a single house fire. Should villages stop making houses to avoid house fires?...How much thoughtless, panicked disruption is enough, just to avoid the reality that in life, sometimes people die?'
See, this is why I like to read Unglossed, for the distinct paucity of pearl-clutching.
I’ve said for decades now that there’s some weirdness going on where not one person can die from anything. The money we throw at things that are not stoppable is ridiculous. Regarding Covid the problem I have is complete lack of trust. I don’t know how you can state with surety the number of deaths when they fudged the numbers all along. They lied to boost the numbers of people with Covid and then they stopped reporting deaths when the vaccine was the killer. Who’s to know for sure? I believe the number killed is higher than we’ll ever know. I know for sure that people died unnecessarily for lack of treatment, the wrong treatment, being unhealthy while having Covid and from the vaccine. ALL of us were made to suffer though. It was a travesty and I will never stop calling for justice to hold those responsible, accountable!
I agree that almost none of the numbers are trustworthy. We have no way of knowing. All cause mortality is about the only number we have any hope of knowing for sure.
very good analysis. few people understand this. Berenson in particular got it very wrong and cannot admit it. he made millions by deceiving millions.
I simply wish he would put some of those millions back into hiring an intern who can generate proper screenshots. His phone screenshots are an insult.
In an ideal world your sensible prescription would be sound. But we don't live in such a world. Aside from spending a significant amount of time reading scientific studies, you certainly must, to some extent, engage with the world around you, right? (Rhetorical q, of course). And having been informed by the sheer pervasiveness of human fallibility and absurdity all around you, you must somewhat recognize that such a libertarianesque appeal is a superfluous one. Do you really believe after all you have seen/read/heard over the last few years (even longer, perhaps) that your sensible position would garner much purchase? C'mon, Brian! I'm sure you know better.
Despite all of our supposed 'progress', we humans remain slaves to our passions. And in the era of Covid, fear reigned supreme. Reasonable pleas NEVER stood a chance.
That doesn't mean reasonable pleas are a lost cause and should therefore not be offered. They do reach some.
I think you just unintentionally bolstered my point. Because I never said it should not have been offered.
You make a good point. It sounded implied.
I think - and this is repeating points from a previous comment discussion here - if people had been left to process the situation in 2020 face to face in bars, this kind of pragmatic view of the risk/reward would have risen to the top. The American revolution was the product of taverns. You take away taverns, freedom falls.
Well, people have been meeting in taverns and bars since, yet the majority of people believe that ALL of the measures taken to combat the virus were NECESSARY and SUCCESSFUL. You would think that these sober-minded individuals (see what I did there?!😁) would believe differently by now. Anyway.
That's sunk cost and cognitive dissonance for you. I find it pretty easy to gain agreement with working class of all ages, and non-medical non-student young, and the very old, here in San Diego, that lockdowns were stupid. PMC, especially middle-aged, still feel vindicated and some might have never cared about anything except defying Orange Man.
I’m not sure I totally followed this post, but there are plenty of countries with universal health care that know exactly who got COVID jabs, how many, what age they were, and whether they’re alive or dead. I’m tired of speculative articles guessing at what causes excess mortality. Look at the ACTUAL dead, report how many shots they got if any, and compare that death rate per group to the historic rates for those age groups. I did my best to do a study like that using UK data and to me it was pretty clear that young healthy people were dying from COVID jabs.
Depends which UK data you use. I like the ONS deaths data, everyone criticizes it but it looks stable to me, though very biased. The funny thing is that ONS all-cause mortality in some of the youngest groups *has* been worse for the ever-vaxxed, at least early last year when not many kids were vaxxed yet. This fact never made a big splash. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/into-the-weeds-uk-deaths-data
Swedish data is good, though not public afaik. I published a review of the preprint looking at hospitalizations for various things in teens, a bit of a signal for immune dysregulation driving infections and -itis'es. All cause deaths aren't reported. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-swedish-teen-vaccine-study-briefly
It's doubtful any healthy or very young *groups* can come out ahead from injection even in terms of infection outcomes alone. I prefer to focus on individual infection risk, however, in which case it's unlikely for any individual to benefit because even in "high risk" groups, severe infections are the exception, not the norm.
How can it be stable if it’s biased?
The bias is built into who is getting counted in the census, who is getting vaccinated vs. not. Care homes avoided vaccinating individuals on end-of-life so that created all sorts of crazy signals, i.e. suddenly the vaccinated "aren't dying at the normal rate" simply because at any given moment, most deaths are foreseen. This repeats for second and third doses. This wasn't a flaw in the ONS data. All the claims of flaws, lags, they lead to easy ways to validate a problem when you think them through, and those validations fail. So the data looks fine.
That's an argument over accuracy vs. consistency. A lot of the data coming out is inaccurate, whether through biases or through poor methodology. However, if the issues are consistent across studies or data collection then you can at least factor that in. Thus, data can be biased (have some inaccuracies) but will consistently report following the same inaccuracies which means that the data is at least comparable in some degree.
You’d think they’d like to know. Australia could have easily done this but they didn’t. I suspect they did but didn’t admit to doing it publicly. Now it looks like a study trying to get some of the answers is being defunded.
https://youtu.be/EVSTHbd0Bo8
Why the lack of scientific curiosity by governments around the globe?
'Why the lack of scientific curiosity by governments around the globe?'
Presumably that question is rhetorical ;)
To plagiarize a recurring phase in John Wick 4: Such is life.
Great post. Yes. One thousand times yes. I have said this from the beginning. Our civil rights are not granted by governments,but bestowed by the creator, and are to be protected by the govt., following the biblical model as much as possible. Which is why the claim of asymptomatic transmission and widespread PCR testing is such pernicious evil...the bible does allow for quarantine of the visibly sick, and thus provides the proper balance of rights/responsibilities for societal function.
I asked a Covidian, one of my medical students here in Japan this very question. This student is unique in that she is not just out of high school as are her classmates; she is a licensed pharmacist and has worked for a major pharmaceutical company. To her, yes it was and is worth it and should be repeated. Same to, BTW, for ESG and China’s social credit scoring system. I share the following to give a more complete picture of the mind set of this pharmacist turned medical student. She said that whatever loss to whatever freedoms we enjoy in Japan is worth it to uphold her ideas of what will make the world a better place. She very angrily instructed us that businesses in business to earn a profit was “in the past!”, that their duty today is to do whatever is necessary to save the planet.
We can not think of these issues independently, these people aren’t.
Zealotry never turns out well.
No it does not. Sadly, zealots art not the only ones who pay the price for their folly.
'businesses in business to earn a profit was “in the past!”, that their duty today is to do whatever is necessary to save the planet.'
One can't help wondering what planet she's living on, exactly.
Except they are everywhere. Over Golden Week I say signage stating that my dry cleaner and the Ueno Zoo peruse SDGs. In fact, SDGs and other such 3 letter policies for dehumanization of the planet (yes, that was meant to read and interpreted multiple ways.) are found every were. A publishing company specializing in English as a Second Language touts its support for DEI programs. ESG is written into textbooks and news stories. It is almost omnipresent.
I had a conversation with a young Chinese Canadian in 2019 who echoed this way of thinking. So different to historical western values.
Thankfully, her classmates were appalled.
True
What you seem to be calling Covid deaths I consider medical malfeasance deaths. Never did we tell sick people there’s nothing we can do to help you and close our clinics and offices to patients who were sick. That alone should have shown people that either this was a highly deadly disease or something was very wrong with our medical system. After a couple months it should have been obvious it was the latter as hardly anyone was dying. Putting non icu doctors in ICU’s and kids still in med school in the NYC hospitals certainly lead to needless deaths. Putting sick elderly in with the most vulnerable elderly who were locked away from their families and advocates killed them! That wasn’t Covid, it was malpractice! Covid likely would have killed as many as a bad flu had it been properly handled. This was about making money off our bodies with new tech they wanted to advance. This was about stealing the livelihoods of the middle class to bring them to their knees while enriching the Uber wealthy giving them more power over their weaken prey. This was about taking a big step toward one world rule and destroying freedom and the USA as a superpower. This was a trial run. Never is there a good enough excuse to coerce people into taking medical or bio weapons into their bodies and force healthy persons to lockdown. These shots certainly did not save lives but their agenda to bring them to market on a mass scale certainly killed them.
I would argue that this was not a trial run. It was/is a necessary series of steps to bring about whatever changes they hope to make. It is my opinion that the threat we face is much larger than the covid panic. The panic was just to set up the next phase. Otherwise, I am in agreement with you.
I think we are saying the same thing. It was part of a greater plan. I think they had an idea of how far they could get and certainly had a target of what they wanted to accomplish but I also think they were testing the waters with what would work on us and to define the areas they would need to overcome before they strike again. I was disappointed that so many people went along with this I think far too easily without thinking critically. They didn’t give the dangers of bio weapons enough thought.
It worked too well and did so in places as diverse in their ways of handling anything as the US and Japan and everywhere in between for it to be a test, IMHO. The tests were run earlier allowing for this to be as successful as it has been. Most people do not give enough thought to anything other than how they can out comply thy neighbor.
They are striking again, at this very moment. Most of what they do is behind the scenes but there are clues. They are pushing hard and making great progress in replacing cash with digital currencies that they will control with social credit scoring systems. I do not pretend to know the extent of what they have accomplished in this regards but what I have stumbled across, while new to me has proved to have been in operation for a number of years at the time I discovered them. These are more than enough to scare the hell out of anyone who is blinded by the glowing reports of how convenient they will make life.
Here are a few.
QR CODE Only restrooms. ESG. Internet of Things. FinTech. FATCA/FBAR/CBT. OECD’s CRS. CBDCs. SDGs. DEI. Preapproval required to mail packages internationally. Digital IDs. Cashless society.
Agree that treatment would have saved lives, though I'm not very convinced by ivermectin evidence and more-so by HCQ. Overall results from Raoult show few deaths over two whole years https://substack.com/profile/13852140-brian-mowrey/note/c-14482809
I think the shots saved lives, probably. I don't think that preventing some amount of 4 deaths per 1,000 remotely justifies mass human experimentation.
The totality of RCT evidence on ivermectin shows that it saves lives: https://c19ivm.org/meta.html#fig_fprd, but the totality of RCT evidence shows that mRNA vaccines DO NOT save lives. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10125209/. You are actually saying that mRNA vaccines saved lives even though Pfizer and Moderna's own clinical trials showed 4 excess non-COVID deaths for every 3 less COVID deaths with vaccination, even during the deadliest Alpha wave and at peak vaccine effectiveness? Why? Based on observational data ridden with healthy vaccine user bias and all sorts of other flaws? I have a dirty feeling that you won't accept observational data for ivermectin (never mind that the RCT data shows ivermectin saves lives but mRNA vaccines do not).
The Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data shows a higher rate of serious adverse reactions from vaccine (12.5 per 10,000) than any reduction in serious events from covid (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 for Pfizer and Moderna respectively).
A perfunctory rush emergency trial cannot show long-term harms or benefits. A true control arm (one that was not unblinded) would not have stopped being at risk of infection simply because somebody at Pfizer sent an efficacy analysis to the FDA. The virus doesn't care, it will keep infecting the 80 to 90% of placebo participants who haven't met the virus yet (we don't know how many seroconverted asymptomatically). So presumably our imaginary true control arm go on to experience 4 - 10 times as many severe infections by the time almost everyone unvaccinated has natural immunity, IRL this would have been early 2022.
Does a non-boostered vaccine arm continue to avoid severe infections in that time? We literally do not know. Just like we don't know if long-term all-cause deaths would have kept up with the placebo regardless of 4 - 10 times more severe infections accruing. We don't know the long term numbers from the trial. Looking at the short term numbers doesn't tell us what the long term numbers would have been. But imagining anything less than 4 - 10 times more severe infections + death in imaginary long term placebo is unsupportable.
You still believe the lies and that there was any legitimacy in what was done to us as if there was an altruistic motive. I am past that. Did you see how using a two week period post vaccination yet calling those people unvaccinated how that skews the efficacious data? A placebo loses it’s efficacy within 3 months down to 17 percent from 95 percent by this type analysis. This was the ultimate trick with statistics. If you haven’t seen the paper and presentation I can hunt it down for you.
Maybe they kept some people from dying of covid, in the near term. The jury is still out on the damage they will cause down the road. We don't how long the transfection will continue in any individual and I think we'll be seeing life expectancy hurt by the shots especially for people who've been jabbed as children.
But I agree, efficacy aside, there was no justice in mandating the jabs and putting everyone under house arrest. This adventure in transfection seems like a simple minded science fair project with a lot of pharma greed behind it.
The Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data shows a higher rate of serious adverse reactions from vaccine (12.5 per 10,000) than any reduction in serious events from covid (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 for Pfizer and Moderna respectively).
Any “vaccine” that causes the heart problems, clots and neurological problems this one does is a murder weapon and not a solution….no matter how many lives one thinks it might have saved. Studies show ivermectin given early enough and at the right dose saved lives! The US suffered more because we are a very unhealthy society!
I respectfully disagree with your opinion on ivermectin and HCQ as well as the toxic spike making injections saving anyone. There were other treatments and protocols that worked as well. Having adequate vitamin D levels would have saved millions. This was never about saving people. That is a foundational belief I stand on after investing more than 1,000 hours analyzing this nightmare from many perspectives. I certainly didn’t start there having worked in medicine myself but there is far too much evidence to believe any differently by now.
I'm pretty sure taking ivm made my two bouts with a serious case of covid a lot shorter. Felt better within 8 -12 hours of taking 0.6 mg/kg. I keep the stuff on hand and use it for any viral cold I feel coming on.
Jotting some rooftop thoughts as a note.
It really is illuminating, after 2 years of watching Berenson ignore evidence for severe efficacy, to see that January 2021 tweet and the borderline irrelevant "just as they aren't for the flu" argument. Why make a claim on the question so *early*, based on Israel data (which if anything was exaggerating severe efficacy at the time)?
It seems to all come down to a literally biological inability to change his mind on anything, and ideas he had in his head beforehand based on flu vaccines. But why should flu vaccine inefficacy govern expectations about the experimental Covid vaccines? When did this extrapolation ever make any sense?
Flu vaccines are futile because they are given to (elderly) adults who *already have natural immunity to the flu*. This isn't the hand the experimental Covid vaccines were playing. But instead he's so fixated on this handful of studies about flu vaccines that he doesn't even care about the actual evidence regarding this other, different thing.
'But why should flu vaccine inefficacy govern expectations about the experimental Covid vaccines? When did this extrapolation ever make any sense?'
Ignoring any arguments Berenson may have made for this, the fact that both flu and coronavirus tend to rapidly mutate is a good argument in itself. Hard to deploy a vaccine against such a moving target.
Not sure on this. The flu shots are common in Japan and may be required of children. I know my wife made certain our kids got them when they were in preschool; I am not sure if they were school requirements or not. I know that my oldest child, now 9, caught flu 2 of the first 4 years he got the flu shot. Not a ringing endorsement for their efficacy. My med schools offer it to us free or at reduced cost, depending on the school, each year. I do not get it but have had the flu only once as an adult. My students get flu despite getting the flu shot though. We have had epidemics of flu, especially through college aged people despite the flu shots. Perhaps later in life I might take it, but I see no evidence that it really does anything.
On Japan, the longer we have worn masks, social distanced, used hand sanitizer, worked from home and the more shot up and boosted, the more cases and deaths we have had. Does this mean these are the cause? No. But it also does not mean it would be worse if we did not do these things, as many claim. I realize that you are not making this claim, but so many are. I know not a single person who has had the polio vaccine who has caught polio; but I can not count the number of people who have caught the flu or covid despite getting the shots for these diseases.
Regardless, I agree with you that no amount of deaths or “saves” justify any of what we have just been through and the aftermath of it.
For children, it would be fine to infer from flu vaccines and really all vaccines to the Covid vaccines, because they are immune tabula rasa. But there *is* no severe efficacy in children - https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-no-severe-efficacy-in-kids-study - so I'm not objecting to anything Berenson has said about kids (I don't think he's covered it, since like I said he isn't really looking at the evidence with an eye toward "what is this fact that I don't know in advance").
I think it's crazy to give kids flu vaccines. When I was growing up, literally no one was worried about flu in kids. Now kids are flu-vaxxed like crazy; I had no idea until two years ago. It's just doctors inflicting their warped sampling of reality on society.
Agreed! Don’t even get me started on all the other vaccines that are pushed on us. Look, the rate of autism doubles every five years. The CDC never talks about it and isn’t serious about finding the cause. Why? Vaccines! I have a child with autism who was vaccine injured as so many other families in this country. It’s all about the Benjamin’s baby!
Berenson's Benjamin's?
My kids are also vaxxed against Chickenpox. Was not happy when learned of that.
Japan he gone full hypochondriac even before the panic with flu shots administered far and wide. I have no idea the numbers, but have reason to doubt they are anything like the Covid shots. But they are extremely common among those in medicine, such as my employers and students. While there may be a couple that I do not recall properly, everyone I have known who has caught the flu in Japan over the past 10+ years had received the flu shot. Med students, nursing students, colleagues and bosses. Then there is me, who works with the all these I know who have caught the flu but do not get the flu shot and have caught the flu rarely as an adult, the last close to 20 years ago and most likely from my wife, according to the doctor. I did not catch it from my children even when caring for them while they were sick with the flu.
However, long suspicious of comparisons of data from different countries, the past three years have made me suspicious of all claims made by medical professionals. I just do not trust a word coming out of their mouths…out of their masked mouths. Seriously, one should anyone heed anything coming from anyone wearing masks to stop a virus? Such people are no more worthy of trust than a naked person on the street trying to tell me how to invest my money.
“But why should flu vaccine inefficacy govern expectations about the experimental Covid vaccines? When did this extrapolation ever make any sense? “ You’re joking, right? Do you really not understand this? Coronavirus mutate quickly. You can’t get a head of it. Flu strains are different each year so they guess and hope. That’s how scientific that is. Flu shots are highly ineffective even when they guess right and do not have the data to prove they stop death. You should read some books on vaccines.
I don't read books on vaccines, I read studies. Nor am I joking. Everyone assuming flu rules = SARS-CoV-2 rules does not mean flu rules = SARS-CoV-2; it's literally an assumption, right? Who said it was true? How could anyone have known it was true in order to say it was true? So Berenson is just assuming something, the fact that everyone else assumes it doesn't justify the assumption. And there are a lot of "flu rules" that aren't even true.
1 There was no preexisting confirmation that coronaviruses mutate to evade antibodies.
"[L]ittle is known about how HCoV-OC43 genotypes persist in human populations. It is assumed that the continuous adaption of viral antigenic gene is required for the persistence of OC43 genotypes. However, this hypothesis has not been carefully examined by precise evolutionary pattern analysis." Ren, et al. - *2015* https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11451
Granted, there's good evidence coming in the last 10 months that SARS-CoV-2 is finally doing just that, but in 2020 up to January 2021 there was zero evidence of antigenic drift to escape immunity. The virus wasn't mutating that way at all. So the assumption was unfounded by human knowledge.
2 Flu vaccines do not fail because of yearly small-scale variant mismatch. This is a modern myth, like OAS, invented to pin down a "flaw" for their failure so research money still flows (to fix the "flaw," science is never going to just admit that flu vaccines are futile because natural immunity is better). When you dig up classic studies, flu vaccines work and there isn't a high dependence on getting the variant right. When they don't work, it isn't because the variant is wrong, it is because the control group builds natural immunity. So if you only measure one year they work, if you track outcomes the next year they don't. It's just futility. Berenson doesn't know this because he doesn't actually do research.
3 However, in 1957, rushed vaccines for "Asian flu" were developed and deployed in US, UK, and Russia, and everywhere they reduced infections at least a bit. (Still futile in the long run, because now everyone else has natural immunity which works better.)
4 I am an anti-vaxxer. I do not change this opinion based on an experimental gene technology maybe reducing 4 deaths in 1,000. However, there's no difference between front-loading Vitamin D and front-loading antibodies in terms of giving people an immune boost before infection, except that one requires getting sunlight and the other requires human experimentation.
'There was no preexisting confirmation that coronaviruses mutate to evade antibodies.'
Aren't a lot of colds caused by coronaviruses? And we do get colds repeatedly.
I confess I'm influenced by having just this week read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel chapter about crowd infections and how they tend to behave. Zoonotic infections tend to start out severe and then evolve to a form that's more infectious and less fatal. Admittedly that's not specifically addressing antibody evasion, which is possibly getting too far into the weeds. He's addressing herd immunity, not vaccination, but as a general principle it made sense to me — for what that's worth!
It takes a lot of work to figure out if viruses have multiple serotypes, essentially to distinguish between human blood not neutralizing the virus sometimes because of having antibodies for a different serotype vs. a million other reasons. And you need the virus to be friendly to cell culture, coronaviruses are not team players in this regard. Alternately, you can infer things by feeding genomes into algorithms that tell you if there's positive selection, or using reason. Alternately you can passage escape mutants in a lab like with flu, but this doesn't prove it happens in natural infection.
None of that work had been previously done with human coronaviruses. I don't actually know if reinfection with human covs has been documented, but probably it happens. However, we don't know if that's because of antigenic drift or not. Flu is a really special animal in terms of how responsive it is to antibody escape. Maybe there is a reservoir of flu-like covs out there in bats in terms of being sensitive to immunity, so they enter human circulation for a while, mutate to evade antibodies until they are out of moves, and then die out because there's no more hosts, like flu does. And maybe that's SARS-CoV-2, and we are only noticing it's re-arrival because the population is older than normally in history.
This proves my point about vaccines and autism. Where are the studies? Oh there aren’t many cause those studies aren’t funded. Why? Cause the CDC and Big Pharma are one and the same!!
All data is suspect. Individual nations, individual agendas (died from vs. died with; connected to vax, etc.) All dirty data. Truth from the source? E Europe (lower uptake of vax) highest xs deaths vs. W Europe (higher uptake) - does not make sense. Maybe E Europe is more honest with reports. Everyone knows higher vax uptake = higher sudden deaths. So sad to see data reported dishonestly three years in.
But not as sad as it is to see people ignore data simple because it doesn't confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
Overall, higher uptake doesn't seem to increase excess deaths as far as the statistics, especially not in working-age where you would expect dying suddenly to show up. Even in US, e.g. states with more vax have fewer working age excess deaths. So the statistics do not add evidence. This doesn't mean there is no evidence, or that it isn't happening. There's lots of evidence, young people are dying, the reports are there. It just isn't in the stats.
East Europe I think is a combination of low mitigation and potentially including Ukraine deaths. They aren't going to go to a separate deaths category. I'm not sure.
"states with more vax have fewer working age excess deaths"- that is healthy vaccine user bias right there- they also had the highest life expectancies BEFORE COVID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy
If you look at rate of change post-vax versus pre-vax, comparing high-vax states to low-vax states, that COULD be helpful, but it assumes that data across states is equally accurate and trustworthy, and I certainly would not ASSUME that, given the huge agenda at play here. Still, that comparison would be interesting to see.