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 The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.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

I’ve come to a conclusion that vaccines do cause myocarditis in the young. COVID also causes myocarditis. COVID’s not a big enough deal to me that I feel like digging thru 100’s of studies to figure out which risks is higher. As someone fairly young and in shape Whose had COVID, had 1 vaccine, been exposed to COVID since and got no COVID I’ve basically just decided to ignore COVID and the vaccine. I see no reason to jab myself every 6 months and take some incremental vaxx myocarditis risks as a sub 40 male.

If I were a 65 year old male I’d probably try to figure it out. But it’s just not worth my time to figure out which marginal risks is worse. I have a larger risks crossing the street and typing this out and dying which I’m doing right now than my guess from COVID or vaxx.

Long since came to a conclusion the left was full of shit that vaxx was no risks. But I knew that from my own personal symptoms and seeing many leftist on message boards saying they were knocked out for two days from vaccine yet claimed no big deal.

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

Check out this study - you can do an autopsy and link sudden death to mRNA myocarditis. This should help you understand a bit more why such a rare risk is worth your time.

N= 25? That’s sort of my point it’s not so dangerous that theirs thousands dying and obvious deaths everywhere. It seems to be a mild statistical risks. Also as far as I could tell from that brief they did nothing to figure out if myocarditis was caused by COVID or mRNA vaccine.

I think people have died from the vaccine. I don’t have a smoking gun telling me it’s an issue disproportionately worth my time. Like I ordered an AI book today - I think figuring out how I fit in with our new AI overlords is more worth my mental energy than trying to figure out small statistical risks.

And at this point I just have COVID vaccine Super safe as primarily another example of the powers that be suppressing any information against their edicts. Another example of them lying to me.

Among the 35 cases of the University of Heidelberg, autopsies revealed other causes of death (due to pre-existing illnesses) in 10 patients (Supplementary Table 1). Hence, these were excluded from further analysis. Cardiac autopsy findings consistent with (epi-)myocarditis were found in five cases of the remaining 25 bodies found unexpectedly dead at home within 20 days following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

5/25

Well, this is not the statistical smoking gun I want per say.

So of 35 sudden deaths, 10 were other causes. And then of 25 sudden deaths, 5 were found to have thee abnormality. They were looking for sudden deaths from myocarditis and they found it.

Who knows. We basically agree in a bunch of domains, I just think it's still not possible to say this is a disproportionally unimportant issue.