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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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So there have been a lot of people suddenly collapsing or dying recently. Or have there? My Twitter feed certainly seems to think so. Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well. This does seem... odd? I can't remember a lot of people just suddenly collapsing and dying in the past although I remember Hank Gathers from 1990 as a rare exception.

Now, I'm willing to accept that it's possible that sudden deaths of healthy people may be normal-ish thing. Possibly this is just signal-boosted noise. As a heuristic, no one I know personally has collapsed so it's presumably not incredibly widespread. We also have the possibility that Covid itself, not vaccines, is causing these deaths.

The problem is that, as a layperson, it is nearly impossible for me to obtain unbiased information about this phenomenon. I encourage you to search Google for "vaccine death". The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.

On the other hand, on Twitter, (where free speech is truly allowed now), #vaccinedeath is allowed to trend. However, the results for that hashtag tend to be a lot of anecdotes of sudden collapses mixed in with spurious assertions about vaccine safety.

What's a normal person to do in this information environment? For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself. However, I have little confidence in this assessment. And I have no faith that I will be able to reach a confident assessment. When counter-narrative information is suppressed by the media and by the scientific apparatus, how can we trust anything they say? But it doesn't mean the counter-narrative is correct either. It just means there is no way to be confident without a free exchange of ideas.

Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well.

I had to look up Adam Rich since I didn't recognise the name. His Wikipedia history has some perhaps relevant snippets:

"At age 14, he tried smoking marijuana, and at 17, in 1986, he dropped out of high school. He almost died of a valium overdose in 1989. In 1991, he was arrested and charged with attempted burglary of a pharmacy.

...In 2002, Rich was arrested for driving under the influence (DUI). He was in drug rehabilitation at least three times.

....Rich died in his Los Angeles home on January 7, 2023, at the age of 54. The cause of death was not disclosed."

Hm - Hollywood actor with history of drug addiction and (at times) risky behaviour dies of undisclosed causes. Plainly this must be due to the Covid vaccines! Do even we know if he was vaccinated or not?

MMA fighter, basketball player, NFL player - what do they have in common? Sportspeople dropping dead? Surely this does not happen to healthy young people who are athletes! But you know - it does.

Tons of normal people - yes, every day, tons of normal people drop dead for no (apparent) reason. People die in their sleep. Years back, I had a family member who was fine when one of their family left the house, when they came back a couple of hours later, the first person was dead.

We hear more about sudden deaths/mysterious deaths when there is something happening like a pandemic and with all the fights over vaccinations and risk. Maybe there is a greater risk. Or maybe we're just hearing about deaths now that we wouldn't have heard reported on five years ago, because there was no "rash of sudden deaths linked to eating bananas" story to hang them off. I suppose all I can say is "don't panic, judge for yourself if you think you are at high risk of adverse outcomes if you contract Covid, then decide to get boosters or not". Same with "will I bother getting the flu vaccine this year?" Probably a good idea, given that (over here at least) there has also been a rise in RSV and with everything going around at the one time, better not risk it.

Hm - Hollywood actor with history of drug addiction and (at times) risky behaviour dies of undisclosed causes. Plainly this must be due to the Covid vaccines! Do even we know if he was vaccinated or not?

Basically the right is doing the same thing the left did in 2020-2021.

Basically the right is doing the same thing the left did in 2020-2021.

Yeah. It's kinda hilarious how things have pivoted from 'random deaths/medical issues pinned on LONG COVID' to 'random deaths/medical issues pinned on VACCINE SIDE EFFECTS'.

Honestly personally I think the effects of 'Long Lockdown' in terms of weight gain, exercise disrupted, habits picked up, mental issues are probably going to present a greater specter than either COVID or the vaccine.

Um no.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

Here's a scientific paper showing there is a special link between mRNA and sudden death. Why would the right not be interested in the counternarrative developing? It's a smoking gun.