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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Last night I watched a spooky video interview with a UK mortician who claims he has been pulling out larger than normal blood clots that don't look like normal blood clots during embalming. There are a couple of other morticians and a pathologist around the world who are saying the same thing.

The way the morticians are describing this phenomenon seems alarming. Is this some sort of congealing happening after death or is this something that might have contributed to the cause of death? Is this something caused by Covid, by any of the vaccines, or all of the above? Is it affecting a large part of the population, is anyone looking into treatment? Is it even happening at all or is it a hoax? So many good questions to ask.

When I checked the Internet the only question I saw people asking was if it was caused by the vaccine or not. And most of the time they weren't even asking. One side is absolutely certain it is the vaccine, the other side is absolutely certain it is caused by Covid and vaccines can't have contributed at all. No discussion on detection or if it's treatable or anything that I would consider a higher priority than finger pointing. Do people care more about culture warring than survival?

I don't have any relevant training or education, but if I had to guess this is most likely nothing. There have probably been lots of unusual blood clots of this variety that occur normally from time to time and are typically not noted as anything worth investigating further by morticians. People have been very concerned about COVID and about vaccines for years now: in such an environment a weird blood clot that would have been ignored otherwise might now become an object of interest. There's a lot of seemingly random noise and variation in existence: if you're not worried that vaccines could secretly be causing problems, then you don't notice odd things that might point in that direction. When you are worried about it, an atypical blood clot becomes a red flag lending evidence to your concern.

I mean it could be something, but you'd need a proper study. More compelling Anecdata than this has proven to be nothing before.