Michael Hiltzik decided to ruin my day by pointing to yet another COVID vaccine conspiracy theory I hadn't heard of before. This time it comes from the British Medical Journal, which published an article stating that excess deaths remained high in Western countries in 2021 and 2022 even after the COVID vaccine was introduced. There's nothing new about this observation, but then they go a step further:
The next step concerns distinguishing between the various potential contributors to excess mortality, including COVID-19 infection, indirect effects of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccination programmes.
The authors suggest the possibility that COVID vaccines are killing people in large numbers, and naturally this has been picked up by the usual suspects. But as Hiltzik points out, the researchers' own chart shows that excess deaths closely followed the known waves of infection:
A more sophisticated critique of this chart is here. The main point, as Hiltzik says, is that excess deaths were high in 2021 because that was the peak year for COVID. What's more, vaccines were rolled out slowly:
Far more people were exposed to COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020.... Furthermore, the COVID variants that appeared in 2021 — the Delta and Omicron waves — were far more transmissible and virulent (causing more hospitalization and death) than the initial variants.
....As for the vaccines, the Dutch authors seemed to conjecture that vaccination happened as if with the turning of a switch in January 2021. Of course that’s untrue.... The vaccines were rolled out only gradually through 2021. By mid-year, only about 20% of the population of countries that submitted figures had received even a single dose; by the end of 2021, nearly 50% were still unvaccinated.
Naturally I'd like to add a chart of my own to this discussion:
This is only for the US, and it doesn't rely on any kind of sophisticated model. It just shows total deaths. As you can see, all-cause mortality did indeed peak in 2021, but has since declined. In 2023, deaths were precisely back on the trendline of the previous decade.
The BMJ article has come under withering criticism from all sides. The authors' suggestion of vaccine mortality is largely based on reports of "adverse events" in the original clinical trials, but those have obviously been known for years and aren't deaths. What's more, clinicians don't even know if they're related to the vaccine in the first place.
There's just nothing here. COVID vaccines continue to be remarkably safe while COVID itself becomes ever more worrisome as the effects of Long COVID become more evident. Get your jab.
"The BJM article has come under withering criticism from all sides."
Doesn't matter. The anti-vaxxers will be over it like flies on shit.
And I mean every word.
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Kevin, what's needed is a graph like the first one, superimposed on a graphic showing the number of vaccinated people. I'm confident that there weren't peaks and valleys of vaccination that superimpose on the peaks and valleys of deaths. So why would some periods of vaccination yield high numbers of deaths and other periods not?
Nevermind that COVID deaths are associated with viral load, and none of the vaccines are whole virus vaccines. COVID death scores are not randomly assigned, the decedent must show evidence of viral infection. The entire thesis is absurd on its face. Shame on the journal editors and reviewers for letting this dreck see the light of day.
At this point I feel like journal editors are so keen to have articles go viral, that they purposely publish garbage, as long as it's going to hit the news cycle.
Exactly. All in the effort to make money.
There's got to be a better way to make a living.
Yeah, but if you publish bullshit, it's eventually going to get found out and then you have to retract it and then your journal gets a reputation for shoddy peer review and publishing shit science and its citation ranking will tank and that's not good for business.
Almost a certainty that a plot of 'number vaccinated' would resemble a logistic ('S'-shaped) curve; the initial rate of increase limited by availability, accelerating as more vaccine is produced and distributed; then decelerating as fewer and fewer of those unvaccinated are willing to be jabbed. In any case, the number having had the vaccine must increase monotonically with time, though actual immune status declines over time.
And if deaths are *caused* by the vaccine, those deaths should track with a plot of the number of newly vaccinated. Unless the hypothesis is that once you get the jab, the vaccine could kill you at any time after, ever decades later. That hypothesis is impossible to falsify.
There's already pretty good evidence that infection with SARS-CoV-2 makes people stupider. We could consider this study as evidence that the mere existence of the virus makes some people stupider.
I guess people just don't want to admit that:
A) Lots of people refused to follow the health advice about distancing, masking, and getting vaccinated.
B) Nursing homes were death traps where many people were so ill already that vaccines couldn't save them, distancing was nearly impossible, and staff didn't (or couldn't) follow appropriate safety procedures.
People also seem to be forgetting that COVID does a lot of damage internally even when people don't die or get hospitalized, and much more so than in any of the ways the vaccine is posited to have side effects (mostly thought temporary).
When I got COVID the first time, the main thing I noticed is my head felt really weird, almost as if didn't really recognize myself, along with some hard-to-explain emptiness or void. This quickly passed in a day or two and I was back to normal.
A few weeks ago, I got it again, and this time it was less an "alien" feel in my head and more an ache, but that sense that my heads feels drastically different was there again, and not in a congestion kind of way. This time the sickness lasted over a week, I've still got some fluid in my lungs even now, and who knows what kind of damage has occurred I can't see.
Just because the vaccines dented COVID, and kept it from becoming immediately serious or deadly, doesn't mean it's not damaging internal organs and what not as people keep catching it (and eventually shrugging it off), and internal damage is known to be far greater from infection than vaccination.
Plus long COVID which fortunately I've avoided so far (knock on wood).
So the vaccines killed a bunch of people when they were rolled out, but somehow this level of lethality wasn't detected -- or was (*dum-dum!!*) covered up -- by the WHO, numerous world governments and health agencies, doctors, etc. during the testing/trials phase or something? Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense.
*All* vaccines have some side effects and, very, very rarely they can be serious. But to ascribe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of deaths to the Covid vaccine is just lunacy. How the hell did this cow pat of a study get through peer review?
" But to ascribe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of deaths to the Covid vaccine is just lunacy. How the hell did this cow pat of a study get through peer review?"
They don't actually say that. They make suggestive statements to raise suspicion about vaccines, but don't actually claim that vaccines cause death.
Doesn't really explain why it was published, it doesn't actually show anything interesting.
html : https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000282
That actually makes it worse.
They highlight that vaccines might have all these problems that weren't picked up in their trials, mRNA might hang around a lot longer than thought, and we really don't know why there are all these excess deaths....
I was in the Moderna phase III trial. 12 hrs after the second jab, I had the classic reactions: mild headache, mild fever, achy joints. Went away within a day. Classic healthy reaction to vaccination, not exclusive to the COVID vaccines. No respiratory symptoms.
Three years later, COVID finally caught up with me. I did have the coughing and runny nose from a respiratory infection.
From what I've read, these are the experiences of tens of millions of people. There's been no significant mortality clearly ascribable to any of the COVID vaccine commensurate with the mortality clearly ascribable to viral infection.
I think I can explain what's going on here. It starts by explaining this:
The following have something in common. Joseph Lister (1827-1912), Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), John Snow (1813-1858), Robert Goddard (1882-1945), Alice Catherine Evans (1881-1975), Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), William Harvey (1578-1657), and Claire Cameron Patterson (1922-1995) are all renown scientists that were first mocked and then ignored in their time by the scientific community that they themselves were part of.
The null hypothesis assumes it can't be explained. My testable explanatory hypothesis assumes some scientists adhere to the scientific principle, but they take it for granted, the rest violate the principle with impunity, and there's fewer of the former than the latter.
Question: What is the scientific principle?
Answer: Science involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation.
Question: Why do "scientists" violate the scientific principle.
Answer: Because "science" becomes so much easier if I assume my cognitive assumption are beyond reproach.
"Because "science" becomes so much easier if I assume my cognitive assumption[s] are beyond reproach."
At which point, it ceases to be science and its practitioners cease to be scientists.
Science is based on arguments from evidence, not arguments from authority.
You are correct. A person that behaves that way is not practicing science. They are practicing pseudoscience. But that doesn't stop them from referring to and thinking of themselves as scientists, or holding tenured professorships at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc.
Question: If entire scientific communities are committing scientific malpractice in different contexts in different historic time periods, does anybody notice?
Answer: Yes, even if it's only just me.
Usually, if the malpractice findings are significant, others will follow up and the findings will be shown to be unreproducible. This is the usual fate of malpractice. Also, there's PubPeer.
"They said Galileo was crazy; they said Pasteur was crazy; they said Luigi was crazy."
"Who's Luigi?"
"He's my uncle. He IS crazy."
Well all I know is that my dodgy knee is aching like hell today, and yesterday I got a Covid booster! Coincidence shmoincidence! Lock Fauci up!
Golly! I wonder why they didn't just have the NYTimes publish the article in their Opinion section? They've been out to rewrite the history of COVID for quite some time now, first 'proving' it came from a lab in China and more recently showing how it 'wrecked' our public health system by causing them to mislead us all. (I think they're pining for Herr Trump and all the juicy headlines they'll write.)
The research done using the VA records showed huge jumps in all cause mortality for a lingering period after COVID infection. It's possible that the vaccines have a small effect that might be teased out eventually but we have enough data to observe that infection is far worse,COVID is actively circulating and we can't choose to exist in a pre-COVID world.
Surprised Kevin hasn't heard about this before. I heard about this dumb conspiracy over a year ago from YouTube vids. These idiots never stop.
A google search on this paper found:
https://christinapagel.substack.com/p/guest-post-a-terrible-academic-paper
Highlights include:
Anyone trying to suggest that vaccines are the cause, or even part of the cause, for excess deaths needs to explain why the most excess deaths are in the least vaccinated countries and vice versa.
Excess deaths were 79% lower in 2023 than 2022 (for 45 countries with 2023 data).
Why the sudden interest in excess mortality and public health from these oncologists with no history of related research?