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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32064 thread views

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?

There are 24,000 "morticians, undertakers, and funeral directors" in the US, and probably as many in europe. Assuming half of those are morticians, that's more than enough room for one or a few of them to notice an uptick in blood clots that should be surprising, while just being noise overall. If one in every two or even five morticians is noticing this, that'd be worth looking into in some sense, but things like this constantly happen everywhere. A billion people x ten thousand possible strange combinations of things that can happen = a lot of one in a billion events. Covid itself was reported to cause blood clots or something a bunch early in the pandemic.

According to Politifact;

"The association between COVID-19 and blood clots was recognized early in the pandemic among hospitalized COVID-19 patients," said Yazan Abou-Ismail, a hematologist at University of Utah Health. "These patients experienced blood clots both in deep veins and arteries, which sometimes led to strokes and heart attacks. Although these conditions have mostly been seen in patients with severe COVID-19 illness, people with moderate illness have also developed blood clots."

Abou-Ismail said the incidence of blood clots ranged from 20% to 40% among patients with severe COVID-19 illness, and 3% to 9% among those with mild to moderate COVID-19 illness.

and;

The National Funeral Directors Association, a U.S. professional organization, told PolitiFact that embalmers in its network have noticed similar abnormalities in COVID-related deaths, but among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

"It’s only anecdotal evidence, and there’s no scientific evidence to draw any conclusions," said Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the association.

So it's more than just "one or a few" noticing. Politifact chalks it up to COVID. I seem to remember someone saying something like "COVID-19 is the first airborne vascular disease" when the pandemic first popped off.

It's hard to tell if 'embalmers in the network' in that quote means 'one in five members' or 'five members total', so it's hard to tell what that means. But even correct conclusions can be supported by poor evidence, and it's entirely possible the clots in OP are noise (especially if he started noticing them now, as opposed to 2 years ago - will skim the video to check). Also, steven crowder is a good get for 'exclusive content' on rumble, and 871,071 Views is quite a few!

[at this point, i just watch the video, then decide to comment on the article instead]

The video links this article. (the guest in the video is named "John O'Looney!") It's probably more informative and takes less time to go through than the video (I'm listening to the video, and they put spooky music over their 'calls with local morticians'...). It's a ... very strange article! Between the hint hinting that it's the vaccine, a few clearly false claims provided by experts interspersed with a bunch of other believable but weird claims by experts, and the generally big if true nature of the claims. Point by point, I guess ...

He found that the clots are lacking key elements present in healthy human blood, such as iron, potassium, and magnesium, suggesting that they are formed from something other than blood.

... what? a blood clot that isn't formed from blood? I'm not sure how to evaluate the claim (they give 'evidence' based on mineral content later), but that doesn't seem that plausible? Maybe someone said something sensible and then the article writer interpreted it one way and decided to make a darkly foreboding paragraph? idk. (They imply many times later the clots are spike protein. If that was true, it'd be very easy to prove in a lab)

“Prior to 2020, 2021, we probably would see somewhere between 5 to 10 percent of the bodies that we would embalm [having] blood clots,” Hirschman told The Epoch Times. “We are familiar with what blood clots are, and we’ve had to deal with them over time,” he said. He says that now, 50 percent to 70 percent of the bodies he sees have clots.

Obviously, big if true (i.e., if the frequency claim is true of the significance claim - if 75% of bodies have one 1mmx1mmx1mm clot and .2% of bodies have "as long as a human leg or as a pinky finger" ones, and that was the status quo, that is different).

“They are not normal post-mortem clots but rather the long tiny strings may have been etiologic in the deaths, preventing circulation to those regions. Others have shown that the spike protein can and does unfold and form a different configuration, contributing to tight string-like bonded structures with longitudinal twisting as well as cross binding, visible by microscopy, each one measuring angstroms in diameter—it takes 254,000,000 angstroms to make an inch—a typical capillary is around 5 microns, so many strings are needed to occlude a vessel.”

Is this trying to imply that the spike protein is causing the clots? It's not actually saying that, and nothing about 'the spike protein makes structures' indicates that the clots are made of spike protein (lots of proteins have "cross binding" and "structures"), so the two sentences don't really connect

As the summer [of 2021] went on, COVID deaths were on the decline, but these clots were increasing in number. My suspicion is that the vaccine may be the cause of these strange clots. I realize that I am not a doctor nor am I a scientist, but I do know what blood looks like and I am very familiar with the embalming process that I have been doing for two decades

Hirschman sent the clots to a few pathologists and claims that some of them have “overlooked” them, probably due to fear of retaliation.

Even if the clots are real, trends in the rate over time are harder to detect than just a change from 'absent' to 'present', because the thresholds you're discriminating are lower, both in quantity and time, so each 'bin' has less 'data', and noise is magnified.

[different person] Hooker sees about 300 bodies a year, and has seen numerous clots of the same kind Hirschman has. He told The Epoch Times that “people are seeing these [clots], it’s just not Richard and me and Anna [Foster],” another embalmer. “I have people sending me photos almost every week of what they’re seeing,” Hooker said.

... alright

Hooker lives in a conservative, rural area, and from his observation, fewer of the people there have been vaccinated compared to those in big cities.

“At least 25 percent of what I was embalming would display a significant amount of clotting,” Hooker said.

Of course, everything is correlated with everything else when you change geographic reasons, so 'if the overall effect is real' that could have a number of causes. Another way to interpret this (correct or not) is that Hirschmann was the biggest noise blip, and as we get farther away from him the magnitude of the effect will decrease (25% vs 75%).

He also noted that some embalmers with lesser skill might not find the clots after draining and that pathologists who do autopsies on the bodies might not do a full check on the vascular system.

“The very large blood clots that are being removed before and after death are unlike anything we have ever seen in medicine,” Dr. James Thorp, a maternal-fetal medicine expert who has been observing anomalies in pregnant women and fetuses, told The Epoch Times. “The COVID-19 vaccine diverts energy away from the physiologic processes in the body towards the production of the toxic spike protein,” Thorp said. “This directs energy away from the normal process of internal digestion also known as autophagy. This results in protein misfolding and propagation of large intravascular blood clots and also a variety of related diseases including prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, amyloidosis, and dementias including Alzheimer’s and others. While it is possible that COVID-19 illness in itself could potentially contribute to these diseases, it is unlikely and if so the effect of the vaccine would be 100- to 1,000-fold greater than that of COVID-19 disease.”

Even if Thorp did have a coherent argument, the 1-paragraph blurb for the Epoch Times would still sound like this - but this doesn't make sense as is, COVID itself also "diverts energy away from the physiologic processes in the body towards the production of the toxic spike protein", probably moreso than the vaccine, the connection to the randomly named diseases is just not present, and the "the effect of the vaccine would be 100- to 1,000-fold greater than that of COVID-19 disease" is also just not justified at all

Thorp also (this is linked in the article) spoke about vaccine hurting pregnant woman earlier. IIRC data didn't bear that out, but i've already pressed a lot of keys writing this, so someone else can search that. (And - is there's somewhere I can just put in a few variations of 'miscarriage rate by week' and get an updated time series? Statistia has a few things but they're all old)

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who has been analyzing vaccine adverse reactions for about three decades, also thinks the clots have to do with amyloid proteins.

“It appears the answer is coming directly through that needle. Spike protein disease, leading to the deposition of amyloid in organs and filling up arteries and veins,” Tenpenny told The Epoch Times.

"who has been analyzing vaccine adverse reactions for about three decades" was strangely phrased, and - "Sherri J. Tenpenny is an American anti-vaccination activist who supports the disproven hypothesis that vaccines cause autism.[1] An osteopathic physician, she is the author of four books opposing vaccination" yeah.

It was a very interesting article in the sense that 'this is the kind of thing hundreds of thousands of conservatives are reading', but not a very interesting article in the sense of actually understanding if these clots are happening and how that matters.

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