Dishonesty can never satisfy intellectual curiosity. It’s not an insinuation, it’s a scientific possibility that warrants further investigation, especially when boosters are being rushed to market with similarly abbreviated clinical trials. There are some reasons for suspicion. One is the rapid fading of the vaccine’s effectiveness. Why is it so much faster than expected? What’s the mechanism? Another is that every other coronavirus vaccine tested has resulted in decreased immune function due to Antibody dependent engancement. Do we know the current vaccines cause ADE? Not so far as I’m aware. Is it something that should be researched? I’d say so.
Not being aware of any research about ADE doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened… There has been a ton of it and it tends to be something that shows up pretty evidently in clinical trials.
If you do a Google Scholar search for COVID vaccines and all-cause mortality, you'll see that in most studies, people who got vaccinated die less in general (i.e. counting deaths from all causes).
Population level or absolute increases in deaths do not tell you the marginal impact of getting vaccinated. For example, there's no contradiction between both vaccinated and unvaccinated dying more and vaccines being protective.
If you select for careful, risk-averse populations, you'll see correlary effects of your selection and theirs, irrellevant to the measure you're taking.
People are dying at rates well outside historical norms. Things have causes. What is the cause of people dying more?
One would think after a pandemic with an outsized effect on those already in a moribund state that overall deaths would be down, but they aren’t, they are up. Why is that?
Why are excess deaths higher after rollout of the mRNA injections than before?
Nothing about it adds up, other than one sacred cow elephant in the room.
If people are dying more, there is a cause for that, people have tried everything they can that doesn’t involve going down sacred cow avenue, and they’ve come up empty.
Can be seen in the European data. Excess mortality should be back to normal levels, but it's barely changed between 2020, 2021 and 2022. Worse, older people do seem to be doing better but younger age groups worse.
> People are dying at rates well outside historical norms. Things have causes. What is the cause of people dying more?
I suspect it's your preexisting bias that makes you assume it's vaccines vs any vast number of other possible explanations. The point is, that we don't know what is driving these deaths. Research should be done, and if evidence turns up which suggests it's more likely vaccines than most other possibilities then sure it'd make sense to say vaccines may be the cause. Do you really think we have enough evidence pointing to vaccines being the cause right now? If so, where is it?
Until we have more answers it's impossible to say what the cause is, but what we do know and have evidence for is that Covid has become extremely (and unnecessarily) politicized, that data on the number of cases and deaths have been being interfered with by government officials, that there is a very strong economic incentive to get people to act in ways that could cause them to get infected, and that people who have been careful are growing tired of the restrictions being safe puts on them as well. We absolutely should expect uncertainty in the number of cases and deaths we see reported, and that could result in some amount of increase in excess deaths. So could complications not directly attributed to the virus, but caused by it still.
We've also got a whole lot of people these days drinking poisoned water and people who don't even have drinkable water. I can't even keep track of the all the cities that are under boil water orders. We've got people without power. We've got areas of the country flooding, other areas that on fire, people living in extreme poverty (including those who lost their job due to lockdowns or their ability to work because of long covid or their household income due to illness or deaths).
It seems like if there's one thing we're going to have to start getting used to it's increasing amounts of death. With so many causes throwing their contributions into the mix it's going to take time to sort it all out and we'll have to do it in an environment where at least some of the data is being manipulated and many people have their egos wrapped up in "taking sides".
Personally, I accepted the possibility that the vaccines could have terrible effects down the road (it was clear enough that there were no major issues in the short term) and I came to terms with that ages ago. If it does start to look like the vaccines have done some great harm then at least I can say that the choice to get vaccinated was easily the best that could be made with the information I had at the time. Sometimes you can make the right choice and still end up screwed when new information is discovered. I'm still hoping that doesn't turn out to be the case here, but if it is there's no point in denying it. Pretending it isn't true if it is would only make it harder to try to fix it (if that's even possible).
There are three things that have changed since the number of deaths went up in 2020.
Covid, lockdowns and the associated harms and the vaccine. Now apparently covid deaths are down, yet excess deaths remain elevated. So the two obvious changes are a rushed "vaccine" with what appears to be fraudulent trials and lockdowns causing delayed diagnosis, treatment or suicide.
It should be easy to compare vaccinated to unvaccinated groups to find out if the vaccine is causing problems. But rather then do that, the authorities have done their best to destroy the control group and coerce everyone to take the failed "vaccine".
Excess deaths are widely considered to be “from Covid” right now. It is possible there’s something else going on, but as the parent said, the numbers you should care about when making a vaccine decision are the mortality rate of the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated.
Unvaccinated people are dying at a much higher rate. If your biggest concern is not dying, you should be vaccinated.
I was going through serious medical issues when I lost access to my doctors from Covid.
I got lucky in that the 20th medication they tried just before lockdown ended up working. Would most likely probably be dead if things had shut down a month earlier.
Tons of people in support forums were in a panic over lost access. Needed testing / procedure.
Not fun when brain is swelling and doctors say they can’t see you.
I have loved ones that suffered similarly. I do not doubt there were excess morbidity/mortality from restrictions. I'm not doubting, but there is a ton of nuance in epidemiological data like this and I'm wondering about things like demographic cuts and magnitudes of numbers which are necessary to understand the statement.
And, likewise, you cannot NOT attribute them to the vaccine.
Inconclusive data is not to be either used as a calibrated measure nor to be simply ignored.
The excess deaths are quite possibly attributable to both the virus and the vaccines if, as one plausible but very unproven example, they're due to inflammation and/or micro-clotting caused by the spike protein. But in an environment where everyone will be exposed to the actual virus eventually, with uncontrolled initial exposures, it comes down to whether the benefit of getting vaccinated is worth the risk. The data I've seen says that it is.
There are large crowds that took 2 doses in pandemic period (getting vaccinated properly back at the time) but not receiving boosters.
It would be easy to track:
- 2 dose, no other booster
- all boosters
- no vaccine
and readjust results considering age and other bias etc.
If all booster people have excess deaths, than "not from Covid" ?
If 2 dose people excess deaths < all boosted people, than something about vaccine?
No vaccine could be control.
The unvaccinated have been receiving lower quality of care. The symptomatic have Been diagnosed without PCR accuracy. The data being collected is bad. Let's not treat it as good data, and see assumptions such as this for what they are, which falls in the "not good data" category.
> Excess deaths are widely considered to be “from Covid”
Considered by whom? The funny thing is that there was no non-covid excess mortality in 2020, that stated on 2021, which is the same time the v{censored} started.
> Unvaccinated people are dying at a much higher rate.
Insurance companies have already begun publishing reports indicating that excess mortality rates are inversely related to vaccine adoption (i.e. higher excess mortality in states with lower vaccination rates).
Thanks. Very noisy data, so I'd say far from conclusive, particularly given the confounding variables that differ between states. Still, the best attempt I've seen to actually look into this issue.
Countries like the UK have national vaccination databases. They could easily put this issue to rest with a study of excess deaths by vaccination status, controlling for age/health/etc., except they conspicuously have chosen not to.
Starts on page 33, for any one else curious at looking. Quite interesting to see what appears to be their hazard ratio relative to the state population: their members have a much higher excess death rate, and their members show minimal correlation to the vaccine rate of the state they are in—presumably reflecting that older, sicker, or more health-conscious people opt in more often to buying health care plans?
Do you mean “Weekly number of deaths (from all causes)?” If so that is such a junk chart I don’t see how it supports either claim. The X axis label is absolute garbage. It’s completely unclear where the new year begins. A naive reading (counting back from 2022) has the excess deaths starting in 2019!
1. That wasn't a controlled experiment. Observational data < RCTs.
2. You are mixing up mortality and mortality attributed to COVID. It's a common error. For overall mortality the picture is far less clear. For example in the Pfizer trials there were more deaths overall in the vaccinated arm than the unvaccinated arm i.e. RCT evidence = no mortality benefit.
Also, we now have excess deaths above the expected baseline for long periods in 2022, which is unprecedented. Governments are highly reluctant to split these deaths out by vaccine status, but the increase seems mostly attributed to heart and blood clotting related deaths. So the data from the "experiment" is not obviously positive.
>You are mixing up mortality and mortality attributed to COVID.
There's also the problem of governments playing funny games around deaths and "vaccinated". Someone who died from an adverse reaction immediately following their shot would not count as a vaccinated death, because the _definition_ of "vaccinated" meant you completed the vaccine schedule which was multiple shots over time.
In trials the vaccines were tested in tens of thousands of people where adverse reactions were meticulously recorded and there just isn’t any evidence that the vaccines caused immediate death in anybody.
Then beyond that there isn’t any evidence that there also is a government conspiracy following the first dubious claim.
> For example in the Pfizer trials there were more deaths overall in the vaccinated arm than the unvaccinated arm i.e. RCT evidence = no mortality benefit.
> Governments are highly reluctant to split these deaths out by vaccine status, but the increase seems mostly attributed to heart and blood clotting related deaths.
There were approximately 40k people in the vaccinated and the placebo groups. One group had 17 deaths, and the other one had 21. If you are not aware of this information, how can you consider yourself informed on the topic?
There is a pretty good reason that the Pfizer RCT doesn't show excess mortality benefit. It wasn't designed to study that. The recruited population is mostly healthy as individuals with multiple risk factors were excluded. For example the proportion of the study group over 65 and the proportion with at least 1 comorbidity is much smaller than the population as a whole. The studied group was very unlikely to experience mortality in the first place so a much larger study would be needed to show any evidence of an effect on mortality. The difference between 17 and 21 is not statistically significant.
In the absence of a large enough RCT we're left with observational studies and there are a ton of these now. The observational data shows a large mortality benefit in the vaccinated population and I'm not aware of a single observational study that shows the opposite, but I suppose there could be one out there that I have missed.
The preponderance of the evidence is pretty strongly in favor of the vaccinated population experiencing lower mortality than the unvaccinated population.
And yet, this is the "science" that was used to push the vaccines on the entire population. It just so happens that the group with the larger number of deaths was the vaccinated group, but we aren't allowed to talk about that. A question: why was this not discussed?
> And yet, this is the "science" that was used to push the vaccines on the entire population.
Yes. It's sound science. What problem do you have?
> It just so happens that the group with the larger number of deaths was the vaccinated group, but we aren't allowed to talk about that. A question: why was this not discussed?
It wasn't discussed because 17 vs 21 in a sample size of 40K is not a statistically significant difference. I don't know how to make that more clear without going into a lesson in high school-level statistics.
So, really, it was discussed, as indicated since you and they heard of the discussion. It is indeed quite simple to discuss even, since the conversation should end with learning that this is covered in high-school stats class.
What is more ironic to me is that this is the total deaths number, without any regards to cause. And in a large population of 40k healthy individuals, is is expected for a few to unexpectedly die over 6 months. This is ironic, since skeptics also often seem to claim that 10-50% excess all-causes death in the population was just random noise.
Lack of statistical significance does not mean you get to assume the outcome you want, it means you can't say for sure if the effect exists or not. Therefore if you see more people who take the vaccine die than those who didn't, you need more data. End of story.
This should be obvious, indeed, obvious from high school statistics classes. If the effect does in fact exist and you roll out the vaccine on a global scale, you will end up creating a truly enormous number of deaths that should have never happened. Therefore you must be sure that the number of deaths will reduce. Their data couldn't prove this so it should never have been approved. But of course the whole thing was on rails from the start. The idea that governments would have rejected the vaccine trials when they were telling people vaccines were the only way out of lockdowns and buying up millions of doses before the trials even completed, is naive in the extreme.
The core problem for COVID vaccines is of course that COVID just isn't very deadly and many of the so-called COVID deaths were in people dying anyway of other reasons where the cause of death was spuriously mis-assigned, i.e. not people who will join trials. That's why they struggled to show any impact on death.
"To examine the possible non-specific effects (NSEs) of the novel COVID-19 vaccines, we reviewed the randomised control trials (RCTs) of mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines ... For overall mortality, with 74,193 participants and 61 deaths (mRNA:31; placebo:30), the relative risk (RR) for the two mRNA vaccines compared with placebo was 1.03 (95% CI=0.63-1.71)"
Excess deaths in the UK. Useful because (a) it's all in English and (b) the UK authorities do split out deaths by vaccine status unlike most places:
"For 14 of the past 15 weeks, England and Wales have averaged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the current trajectory continues, the number of non-Covid excess deaths will soon outstrip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more deadly than the omicron wave. The Government has admitted that the majority of the excess deaths appear to be from circulatory issues and diabetes – long-term, chronic conditions that can be fatal without adequate care."
UK data at first appears to show that the unvaccinated die at a higher rate. However, this is only because they're using incorrect population figures. Although it may seem absurd the government population figures in the UK are officially labelled "experimental" because they are universally acknowledged to be far too low. In some age groups the official population is lower than the number of people who came forward for immunization, so these figures cannot be used and indeed the UK HSA didn't use the official population stats when computing their own effectiveness rates, but rather estimates from NIMS (National Immunization Service). If the same methodology is used then you can calculate chart 4 on this page from officially released data:
"The ONS data is interesting because it also includes data on non-Covid deaths by vaccination status ... Using this alternative estimate of the population of England [from NIMS] now suggests that the vaccines substantially increase the risk of death for reasons other than Covid."
Unfortunately and worryingly, even the NIMS estimates are likely to be seriously off. According to NIMS about 9% of the British population refused vaccination but a few months ago the BBC commissioned a professional survey from a polling firm, to ask people questions about their vaccine status and if they didn't take it, why not. They were surprised to discover that 25% of people said they were unvaccinated.
> To examine the possible non-specific effects (NSEs) of the novel COVID-19 vaccines, we reviewed the randomised control trials (RCTs) of mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines
Did you bother to click on that first link? It's broken because the authors retracted the paper. This kind of stuff is the reason it's hard to take vaccine skeptics seriously.
Yes, that's how I quoted from it. The link had a number deleted from the end, a mistake whilst editing the post. I fixed it. The authors haven't retracted the paper.
> For overall mortality, with 74,193 participants and 61 deaths (mRNA:31; placebo:30)
31 deaths with mRNA and 30 deaths with placebo with over 74K people in the trial to me means that mRNA carries zero risk. In a sample size that large, 1 additional death means essentially zero correlation.
"This article is very painfully committing the Base Rate Fallacy."
You didn't read past the first sentence, did you? Embarrassing, because the article starts by explaining the base rate fallacy and pointing out that the social media meme it starts by highlighting is wrong. Then it goes on to do correct analysis, which shows the conclusions I gave. You'd have known this if you read my post properly too, because I have a whole paragraph about the stats involved in correctly calculating base rates. If you think there are mistakes in the rest of the article please explain them, but you do need to actually read it first.
"I'm not going to accept "Daily Sceptic" as a source."
Again you didn't even click the link and look, did you? The image is a table of data from official government statistics, they simply happen to host the screenshot. But I knew I'd get a response like that from someone. Lack of intellectual curiosity around this topic is extreme - for obvious and understandable reasons of course. But still.
Re: PowerBI
Where do you see that? There are virtually no COVID deaths (a.k.a. "had a positive test a month before death") since the end of the winter in the UK. Look at the data for the various kinds of heart failure, for example. You see clear excess where COVID isn't implicated starting around the end of April.
"1 additional death means essentially zero correlation."
After incorrectly snarking about not understanding statistics, you're now demonstrating a mis-understanding yourself (albeit a very common one).
You can't simply look at a small difference and say "not statistically significant therefore there is no risk". That's not how statistics works. Firstly, the overall sample size was very large, it was an RCT. So we can say with great certainty that the vaccines have no effect on mortality, yet, that was the entire purpose of developing them. I see up thread some people are now trying to deny this, claiming that the vaccine trials were never meant to even study death rates! Truly Orwellian stuff. Death is the endpoint that motivated everything.
What we can't say with great certainty is if the vaccines are truly more deadly than the placebo. But statistical significance is not the same thing as significance. This is a really common logic error you see even amongst scientists themselves (when badly motivated). This result means the vaccines might be more deadly than the placebo or might not, and therefore the correct response is to gather more data. The incorrect answer is to say "eh, yolo, let's assume the optimistic result", especially if you're about to force people to take it on a massive scale.
But of course they didn't gather this data. The people who created and run the COVID vaccine programmes think that any expression of doubt about vaccine safety is immoral anti-science anti-vaxx insanity, which in turn means they can't neutrally measure or act on data. Their conclusions are chosen before they even do a single experiment, so they just went ahead and did it.
At any rate, the placebo in these trials was incorrect. They gave the placebo arm vaccines too, just different ones, so this is actually not comparing against reality (=no vaccine) and therefore overly generous to the vaccine under test.
As you see in the article, this is a mathematical model which indicates vaccines saved 20,000,000 lives. It is completely unprovable and only serves as a nice sounding talking point.
I also could claim 20,000,000 lives were saved by natural immunity. Or vitamin D from sunshine. Or the placebo effect.
Prove it then... not even the 20 million but just a single death saved because of the vaccine. You cannot. It's not a rip on you, nobody can. Hence it's not provable.
If anyone could, they would have already and wouldn't have to resort to nonsense theoretical computer models.
VERY interested in your attempt though gets out popcorn
Really, you think that?
There are excess deaths and dropping fertility. What is the cause? People have tried every explanation they can think of and nothing adds up except for one thing few people want to talk or think about, why is that?
We’re not talking about speculation, we’re talking about clear thinking and rigorous deduction of potential causal pathways. The drop in fertility is, horribly so, blindingly obvious. In country after country, 9 months after mRNA injections rollout for young people we are seeing a striking drop in births. We know there is an effect on women’s reproductive system and men’s. Men’s sperm counts drop a study from Israel has shown. Many, many reports from women of their periods having been effected.
Unfortunately, there is nothing speculative about this. Nobody wants this to be the case. That this was pushed the way it was on young people is criminal and insane.
In terms of death or injury there are definitely cases where it is entirely clear cut just hours or days after an injection somebody is dead or severely debilitated in a way clearly linked to the shot.
Those are deaths or injuries that had no business occurring and yet they did, why?
In the aggregate/macro overview we’re seeing it in data where it can’t be hidden and in the day to day. Just do a search for something like “unexpectedly died”
Again, who wants this thing so many went fanatical about a year ago to have caused this?
Something did cause it though, and at this point the most likely and parsimonious explanation is the shots. And not for lack of trying alternative explanations. Why stick your head in the sand if that leads to more death and destruction. We’ve found ourselves in a hole in terms of societal health, let’s stop digging.
This is the first I’ve heard of the invisible space alien theory. What is the evidence for it?
> The drop in fertility is, horribly so, blindingly obvious. In country after country, 9 months after mRNA injections rollout for young people we are seeing a striking drop in births.
The US birth rate continues to climb after the introduction of vaccines, for the first time in decades.
I have yet to see a chart that shows a decline that wasn’t painfully manipulate to hide the fact it declined much less after vaccinations than it had in the decade leading up to it. Though I have only seen articles for a handful of countries.
Common internet debate confirmation bias to grab the first thing you think supports your point after a quick scan, link to it like it is a slam dunk, and read no further.
You sounded like you were genuinely interested in learning more, saying you hadn’t seen most of the data so I posted some links to get you started. There is a lot more there than the link you posted.
I don’t think Chudov would say “unfounded,” even if it is temporary that is still a scandal almost beyond words.
“Take this shot you don’t need, that we’ve either
terrorized or coerced you into taking and it may permanently or temporarily impinge on your ability to reproduce or cause a host of other maladies “
No part of that is acceptable.
And even if it is temporary after one shot, how temporary is it going to be if the shots continue to be pushed and mandated, and each additional shot increases the effect?
The University of California system has just announced they are mandating yet another shot!
It is madness and criminal.
Ok, I should have read further and posted a full reply. I had seen his data before, and it looked a bit scary, so I am interested, but I also quickly noticed that it lacked statistical error bars and was excluding any data that contradicted his hypothesis.
Would it change your perspective if you learned that the still birth rate in 2022 was still lower than every previous year, except for the years 2019 and 2020 that he uses as comparison?
Does it change your perspective if you learned that the birth rate has been dropping about 2-3% per year, except for the year in comparison (2021) when it was 2% higher than the previous year?
Does it change your perspective if you learned that vaccinated mothers appear to have been slightly more likely to have a healthy, normal birth over this same time period (fig 3-9), though the difference was not statistically large?
All of these links are directly from his blog post, so I know he also had access to this data, which shows it was safe and even beneficial to you to get vaccinated, and he apparently chose to ignore it.
> even if it is temporary after one shot
If it doesn't reoccur though, it is temporary, regardless of what else happens. But the data would already have included the effect of boosters by now. In some ways, the blog post also suffers from a lesser known problem of being too-big of an effect. It was >8% decrease when <20% of the population had a vaccine, so now that >60% has had a vaccine, we should see a >25% drop in births. That is too big an estimated effect he's observing in one specific area for it to be invisible to other statistical measures and countries. So that hints something else is wrong with his analysis, failing to account for something, or taking small numbers as divisors to make them look bigger.
I had heard a fun podcast on excess effect size being a possible yellow-flag for statistics, but cannot locate the exact one for you. If I recall right though, it was related to Andreas Glöckner's discussion of the size of the mental depletion effect linked from
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-a-job-interview-how-much.... In that article he shows how the correlation was too strong between "mental depletion" and outcome, that it likely points to there not being a causal-link.
I didn't know I was going to look more, but I decided to look at his Hungary data. He mentions in conclusion that his R^2 of 0.22 is "relatively low", but does not seem to understand that is means his theory fails to explain more than 75% of the variation between counties. And thus his result is that he is highly confident (97%) that less than 25% of the difference might be correlated to vaccinations.
Thus, to come back to belltaco's point, his post shows there is far more evidence for invisible space aliens (75% unexplained correlation) who only target Hungarians than for vaccines (25% possible correlation).
What we saw was no serious increase in mortality for the immunized, and a significant increase in mortality for the non-immunized.
Seems like the data from that experiment should be taken into consideration when deciding if the tradeoff is worthwhile, right?