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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?

I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.

What if (purely hypothetically!) it turned out that racism and homophobia are mental disorders, science proved that immigrants are just as smart and nice - maybe even moreso - than white americans, and vaccine denialism killed millions of republicans, causing biden to win the election?

These aren't useful hypotheticals because they're meaningless. Neither is yours. A 25% mortality rate over ten years, even in the subset that gets "4+ shots", would've already been noticed. It would multiply by ten the death rate for 20-30 year olds (lazily estimated from here). That would have been noticed! Even if the death rate ramped up over those 10 years, via some wacky mechanism, a 50% increase among 20-30yos would still be obvious, both to people monitoring medical statistics, random doctors, etc.

I mean, people are noticing lots and lots of excess deaths not directly related to an active bout of covid. Some people are just assuming it's related to "long covid", others the massive despair anti-covid political measures caused, others vaccine side effects. Nobody knows, and it's bias the whole way down. It feels like unless a chest burster emerges from the corpse and announces "HAHAHA, SILLY HUMANS! YOUR RNA VACCINE SET ME FREE!", the default position is that it's all, somehow, a "covid death". And you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.

the our world in data excess mortality for death from from all causes chart here shows significant excess mortality around early 2022, when that article was published - but it's dropped by a factor of 5 since then, which isn't what you'd expect from long-term vaccine deaths. A similar pattern holds in many other countries.

And you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects

Looking for adverse effects for pharmaceuticals and vaccines is explicitly funded and ordered by various parts of the government. and ... it is done, a lot. VAERS exists. And policymakers act on them, see the temporary J&J pause for the claimed side effects.

But VAERS has been roundly criticized because it sucks. Wouldn’t we want to map excess deaths to vaccine rollout. If the two coincide, then isn’t that a plausible argument the vaccines could be causing issues?

The article you linked is from early January 2022. In 2021 (the Omicron wave!), excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).

Frankly, your link makes me more skeptical of you.

you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.

There are 25+ countries in the world with functional public health establishments. Surely one of them is actually doing follow-up studies on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the vaccines were a population-level experiment with unknown 4+ year side effects, but ... it's been two years now. We should start seeing signals.

excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).

Dude, I said they could too! My problem, and you did it too, is people stop there. Yeah, they could. They also could not. And nobody cares. That they "could" is all they need to hear and they move on.

I actually agree with you that the cause of "excess deaths" is always worth looking into. In the context of the discussion about potentially long-term vaccine-associated mortality rates, however, it sounded like you were establishing a bailey: "There are a lot of excess deaths which have not been investigated, therefore vaccine effects are likely." My apologies if that was not your intent.