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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31233 thread views

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 The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.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.

Well, the elephant in the room is the inexplicable and ongoing high level of excess deaths being reported among all age groups and across continents. These deaths do not appear to be driven primarily by Covid itself or at least not directly.

if there is a 50-50 chance of excess deaths, then there is a 1/4 odds by chance alone of two consecutive years of excess deaths.

Naively, one might have predicted excess deaths to be unusually low, perhaps negative, following a pandemic which disproportionately and prematurely killed off so many elderly and unhealthy people. Instead, we have significant, consistent, and prolonged increases across all groups. There is a clear signal in the data, and it is not wrong to suspect the mRNA vaccines as a potential culprit. Unfortunately, the institutions which we depend upon to research these questions have strong incentives to avoid particular results, and they have proven themselves quite untrustworthy where such conflicts of interest are in play. We're left with a lot of anecdotes, hear say, conspiracy theories, and gut instincts to guide our action.

I mean, the pandemic is still ongoing. If COVID were suddenly gone, sure. And even then we might still expect excess deaths from long-term damage of the pandemic.

Covid will never be gone, nevermind suddenly gone. By that logic, the pandemic will go on forever. But almost everyone has had the virus; it's endemic now. We lost. The question is now just discovering how badly we lost, and how much of the damage was self-inflicted (if the virus was made in a lab, then I guess it was all self-inflicted, but you know what I mean).

the pandemic

Please define.

Covid infections "strongly" (arguable) above longterm YOY. "Abnormal" amounts of Covid.

LOL. The longterm is epsilon, since COVID didn't exist prior to 2019. If you're going to use that as a criterion, you're never going to declare the pandemic over. And your criteria are broken.

There's going to be a "new normal". I think we're still well above it.

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