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Seems like it’s been a while since we had a COVID report. I am seeing reports of excess deaths continue in western countries especially mRNA vaxxed countries. Theoretically after a pandemic that targeted people with a high risks of death we should see a period of below trend deaths. Usually I use Berenson when something feels off on the vaccine; always thought he misrepresented data but I knew he would have the vaccine skepticism data and seemed to do Scott’s line of the official media (he was NYTimes) will always present you true data just misrepresent it.
So he’s showing 1 million excess deaths in the last 12 months in MRNA countries which is a lot
https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1622623915775336448?s=46&t=5lPC0Ua_zfSaFWePIhVHfg
And a few counties I believe parts of UK and Germany are at peak excess deaths.
Then you had the Hamlin incident which doesn’t look like the initial story sold to me.
A few rationalist made mea culpas lately for being too pro lockdown etc. I’m now questioning whether my pro-vaccine position was correct. Scott Adams gave a mea culpa he was wrong on vaccines.
https://youtube.com/embed/C41GCgyG4mI
Of course on death counts. Overdoses seem to be at a new base rate adding some excess deaths. Maybe explains 150k. Murders up too but that’s like 30k tops. And some more suicides. And COVID still exists. But we also thinned the herd of near death people which should pressure excess deaths down. Did everyone get fat sheltering in place and/or didn’t stimulate their immune system enough with all sorts of pathogens plus other health care (cancer etc) went undetected?
I think the long term mRNA vaccine bear case rests on it training your body wrong for long term immunity by flooding your system with just the spike protein. Plus the Pfizer project Veritas guy said they don’t have a good explanation for menstrual changes that shouldn’t be occuring but could indicate it’s doing something with hormones unexpected.
Now I was never pro-mandate. Got COVID before vaccination confirmed and without symptoms. Eventually got 1 jab of mRNA as a booster and it knocked me out for 36 hrs so I swore off taking more shots. But I still recommended it to older family members.
Which leads to the discussion - what is causing the excess deaths? Will the mRNA vaccines end up being viewed as a huge failure and Berenson moves from quack to Seer who saw everything everyone else was blind to. And Kyrie Irving moves from fool to semi-normal. Currently I am in the confused stage where the data seems to be not fitting with my prior beliefs and trying to figure out what is going on. Is there a more rational explanation for excess deaths than mRNA vaccines are bad.
I think that the best example of the non-mainstream perspective on COVID and the vaccines is John Michael Greer's post "A Hypothesis" https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/140421.html
The bear case posited there, that the vaccines cause lingering immune system problems which make repeated infections in the future more dangerous, is actually a pretty good fit to the data that I've seen. A weakened immune system means that you don't have this really clear and immediate correlation that is easy to find, because of the galaxy of confounding factors that determine what actually kills you in that situation. There's no clear and direct timeline between when you get the vaccine and when a disease overcomes your immune system (or you experience some other kind of complication).
That said, I find it hard to talk about this issue because I just cannot find data that's trustworthy, and even if I do there's all sorts of in-depth research required (a lot of studies talking about death rates include people who get the vaccination and die in the first two weeks in the statistics of the unvaccinated, because you don't count as vaccinated until some time after your second dose) to make sure that the data hasn't been massaged or corrupted.
The full bear case seems to be unlikely of widespread ADE. We haven’t had waves of increasing death rates. I guess it’s still possible.
Losing effectiveness seems true.
From what I can gather most people here seem to have an awareness of excess deaths but are lacking explanatory power for why.
ADE also I do not believe would have a correlation to the prior issues of being sick from the vaccine for 1-2 days, heart problems in mostly young men, and some sort of hormonal issue effecting female menstrual cycles.
I do find it weird how so many PMC message boards would have been confirming the “safety” of the vaccines at the same time everyone’s just reporting a normal 36 hr fever and desire to stay in bed all day after vaccination. But that’s just one of a dozen things during COVID where people seemed to develop weird beliefs that seemed to not have a connection to the objective world.
We've just had increasing excess deaths? This is exactly what the hypothesis posted above would predict - an increasing number of people dying from a weakening of their immune and cardiovascular systems. There's so much variability (how strong was their immune system before the vaccine, what illnesses do they actually catch, what is the environment they're in, how fit they are, etc) that this would in fact just show up as unexplained excess deaths.
Yes, this is what the steelmanned antivaxx position (at least in my mind) would be claiming - that the vaccine, after a two-week period of heightened risk, provides a period of bolstered resistance to the virus. The effectiveness of that bolstered resistance goes down over time, hence the need for boosters, but each booster provides a shorter-lived burst of protection and without intervention the decline actually continues down to below baseline.
Weakened immune system and unintended vaccine side-effects.
It isn't a case of them "seeming to develop" weird beliefs, but the distorting influence of the massive wealth and social power held by the corporations responsible for manufacturing the MRNA vaccines. Look at the recent twitter files - when those companies were given the ability to remove misinformation, they also removed things like activists talking about how the vaccines should not be another excuse for these corporations to profit off of government largesse. The bodies and mechanisms society uses to develop and work out these beliefs has been damaged and hijacked by vested interests of the kind pointed out in the article I linked, so it is no wonder that a lot of people are going to be confused (not to mention that many people will simply lie about their beliefs or reasoning because expressing any kind of hesitancy or skepticism about the MRNA vaccines gets you thrown into the basket of deplorables).
“Below baseline”. That seems bigger than we are seeing. ADE I don’t think has happened yet.
That’s why I posted the conclusion you want to come to - vaccine deaths seems possible now. But I want to investigate and see if that’s true.
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It was weird how often people repeated “it’s safe” without seeing data to verify (ie took the word of the FDA).
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As it's said, correlation does not equal to causation. Even without Covid, by randomness, you would expect to have some years in which there are excess deaths and other years the opposite.
Yes, you'd want to know the normal variance from year to year.
It's graphed right here, since 2017:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
For Europe as a whole it's currently worse than it's been at any point in that period other than March 2020; for ages less than 45, it's quite a bit worse than any time in that dataset.
So, in terms of z-scores, slightly above the March 2018 peak?
The sub-45 figure looks more interesting, though.
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In the United States, all of the excess death peaks line up with winter respiratory season or the emergence of a new Covid variant. The simplest explanation is that the vaccines didn't do an amazing job at stopping deaths and the United States remained old, fat, and unhealthy even after the initial 2020 and 2021 harvests. We still have plenty of sedentary septuagenarians that are susceptible to Covid.
If there's a country with a different story, I'm all ears, but it would be pretty weird if it turned out that vaccine-induced deaths happened to have the same pattern of death as spikes in Covid infections and that the death rates were higher among the unvaxxed.
Lockdowns/restrictions likely contributed to the population being fatter and unhealthier.
Fatness seems to be mainly a product of diet and occupational activity. Lockdowns and restrictions would have some affect on the latter, but not enough to have a major effect on the level of US fatness and ill-health, which was already bad before covid. There's no "lockdown spike" in the data:
https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/adult-obesity-rate/112885/
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The excess deaths are probably caused by the after effects of Corona. Myocarditis and other heart issues are moderately common in people who didn't even have severe cases. Most of the people who have these issues probably don't know they have them. Then there are the severe cases, of which there were a lot, where people were stuck on ventilators and likely had all sorts of complications. Those people often aren't long for this world. There's also a case to be made that isolation caused by the pandemic has increased all cause mortality, bit that's pretty foggy and may not be true. It's also possible that the data is just off.
If the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there. Also, hiding a health issue caused by a drug is so outside of the FDAs historical behavioral pattern that it's really ridiculous to lean into some conspiratorial coverup. Remember, when 2 J&J vaccine patients had heart issues out if millions (a rate which is far less than the rate in the random population) the FDA pulled the vaccine immediately. Yet they're covering up mass sickness from other vaccines?
This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported.
What would you say if a positive correlation seemed to exist between number of vaccine doses and likelihood of contracting Omicron?
See page 21
That double blind trial data is a lot better and very clear that this isn't the case. We don't have to do guessing games with outside factors (such as risk taking when you know you're vaccinated), so why would we?
What double-blind trial is studying booster performance against Omicron?
Anyways, you said "correlation" -- one seems to exist, what now?
They have trials for all the boosters.
Double blind ones looking at probability of infection as compared with zero, one, two (or more) previous doses?
I don't think they do, please link.
Being boosters, they are inherently looking at the effect vs the previous dose.
Its a bit ridiculous to ask for something so easily accessible on google as moderna vaccine trials.
It's a bit ridiculous to try changing the subject when
called on your own bullshitasked for data to back up your unsourced assertions.You said that if vaccines caused increased chance of health problems, there would be an obvious correlation -- and asserted that it wasn't there.
When I provided a large survey (in a young and pretty homogeneous population, btw) by a bunch of infectious disease PhDs showing... an obvious correlation between # of vaccine doses and likelihood of contracting coronavirus, instead of re-evaluating your position, you bring up different studies studying different things. (most notably conducted ~2 years ago, against a significantly different variant than the one currently circulating)
Have you considered that your position in this matter may not depend on what's true at all?
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It's definitely hard to separate negative effects of COVID from negative effects of vaccination, but here's an Israeli study on 200,000 unvaccinated people who had COVID that didn't find any increase in myocarditis in unvaccinated subjects post-COVID: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219
So it seems likely that myocarditis is primarily vaccine-related.
As for health risks from vaccination, there's plenty of data on a clear corellation. Here's some highlights:
A Danish study on the original clinical trials that were performed to authorize the vaccines found higher overall mortality among those vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines than in the the unvaccinated control group (study linked in article): https://brownstone.org/articles/have-people-been-given-the-wrong-vaccine/
Mind you, this is very early on when the circulating strain of COVID actually matched the one in the vaccines, and they offered the best protection against COVID, but vaccination STILL had a negative effect on overall mortality. Vaccination=higher mortality, indeed.
Here's a study finding a 16% increase in serious adverse events after COVID vaccination, also based on the original trials: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283
If you look at the VAERS database (the official US database for tracking vaccine adverse events), 75% of total reported vaccine-related deaths in the last 30 years have been in 2021 and 2022 - in other words, more vaccine deaths have been reported since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all other vaccines over the last 30 years. Go to https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html, and request data on death from all vaccines by year.
Now VAERS reports are far from fully reliable, but they are submitted by physicians, and the comparison with previous vaccine data is extremely negative for COVID vaccines. More vaccine deaths in the last two years than in the last 30 years combined, in the best vaccine adverse effect tracking database in the world. Wow.
As for the FDA, here's an article in BMJ (top medical journal) basically begging the FDA to relase vaccine safety data on COVID vaccine safety, which they haven't done: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527?fbclid=IwAR3e8Rv7UdOUjx60Vf7CnrtZAcM7rCVxl5IRpT76ngyTokkALHVCbiO3Naw
Again, these are just the highlights - seems pretty clear to me that there is a "noticable health risk" from the vaccines.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/research/publications/index.html
There is another study in there as well with the same conclusion. This is just non-covid mortality risk, obviously the risk for COVID itself is much lower for people who took the vaccine, and that data is in there as well IIRC.
Thank you for the response, but it doesn't really address what I was saying. You claimed that "if the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there." and that "This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported."
I showed you that clinical trials (the best kind of data!) found a significant increase in serious adverse events after vaccination (health risk!) and increased deaths in the vaccinated group compared with controls (vaccination=higher mortality).
Your response that cites a study with different results may indicate that the situation is complex, with contradictory studies supporting different positions, but it does not show that the "correlation isn't there" - it's there in the randomized clinical trials (RCTs), which represent the best type of evidence. Your initial claim was very very strong, and it is what I'm contesting. You did not just say that there are contradictory studies on COVID vaccine health risk, you said that the claim of health risk is so thinly supported it's hard not to be condescending about that claim, when in fact the clinical trials that were used to approve the vaccines show both a serious health risk and that vaccination=higher mortality.
The study you quoted here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm) is not a RCT and thus immediately weaker evidence than the clinical trials, but let's look at it more closely. The study has a very surprising result, namely that vaccine recipients had lower non-COVID mortality than the unvaccinated. Unless you want to claim that the COVID vaccine magically protects against all forms of death, the study has missed something or introduced some kind of bias in their study design that skewed the results.
One explanation that immediately springs to mind when reading the study stems from this decision in the study design:
"To ensure comparable health care–seeking behavior among persons who received a COVID-19 vaccine and those who did not (unvaccinated persons), eligible unvaccinated persons were selected from among those who received ≥1 dose of influenza vaccine in the last 2 years."
So they only included unvaccinated persons who were vaccinated against the flu but were not vaccinated against COVID. The majority of the healthy population does not vaccinate against the flu - some healthy people do, of course, but it's primarily given to older or sick and thus vulnerable people. Among the people who were vaccinated against the flu due to being sick, but did not vaccinate against COVID, some proportion did not receive COVID vaccination because they had gotten sicker in the meantime, and thus COVID vaccination was deemed too risky. It is possible that this group was large enough (you don't need that many such people to skew the results) to lead to the result that unvaccinated people died from non-COVID causes more often more than the vaccinated - because a proportion of the sample was unvaccinated due to being too sick to receive the vaccine, thus resulting in more deaths among the unvaccinated group.
Of course, this explanation is not a certainty, but the decision to only include flu vaccine recipients in the unvaccinated group, without controlling for initial health status and with no mention of ensuring that the vaccinated were also flu vaccine recipients, was very questionable. It may have skewed the results of this study, leading to the result that COVID vaccines seem to magically protect from non-COVID death. Even if this is not the explanation of this weird result, the results of this study just make no sense - something is happening that the study doesn't account for, even if the result were to be correct. I therefore rate the reliability of this study a fairly low - definitely lower than the reliability of RCTs that show vaccination=higher mortality.
To summarize, the study you quoted here has a weird result that indicates some unknown factor at play that is skewing the results, and they made a questionable decision in study design that they did not match in both samples.
In any case, randomized controlled trials are stronger evidence, and they do indeed show vaccination=higher mortality and that there's a health risk from vaccination (16% increase in serious adverse events).
This contradicts your original very strong claim that there is no correlation indicating a health risk from COVID vaccines and that believing that is something it's hard not to be condescending about because it's so thinly supported. That claim is what I'd be interested in hearing you defend.
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Don't the vaccines have quickly waning immunity/resistance, wasn't natural immunity/resistance shown to be superior, and aren't we at the point where everyone probably everyone has had COVID?
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Do you know if there is a dataset where this would be visible? Or would you need to do a controlled study? If it’s the later, do you think anyone has looked? I imagine there would be a lot of hurdles to even ask this question. Sadly the experts have lost all credibility. I personally don’t think anyone would ask that question for fear of the answer. And even if they did, I’m not sure they wouldn’t mislead us to get the proper results.
Yes, the data set was the vaccine trials.
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If that was the explanation, shouldn't we see a pretty big difference between current excess deaths in mostly vaxxed vs. mostly unvaxxed countries? Do we see it?
I would bet there is no reliable data in unvaccinated countries. Every country developed enough for a vaccine campaign (except for China) has used the Western mrna vaccines. Also, if there was good data it wouldn't be comparable. Africa's mortality is not comparable to countries where half the country is over 50 (or whatever it is). Especially when you factor in all the excess mortality in Africa from other things (AIDS, untreated diseases that wouldn't matter in the developed world, etc)
Did Russia / Belarus / Ukraine use western mrna vaccines ?
They used copies of them, so basically. Not sure about Ukraine but Russia and Belarus did.
This is false, Sputnik is an adenovirus vaccine like J&J. It would still be subject to potential issues around using a small subunit of the virus (the spike) to generate immunity, but not anything to do with the mRNA approach to replication.
I think some of those countries may have used Sinovax to some extent also? (which is more like a regular flu shot)
My bad. I'm just working off memory of Russia making a big deal over it years ago.
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Also very low vaccine uptake rates in those countries.
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Ukraine mostly didn’t get vaccinated, and Sputnik is sort of a hybrid between MRNA tech and more conventional vax.
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We're talking about excess death statistics, not some nuanced "died after getting vaxxed" vs. "died because of the vax". There are some countries dysfunctional enough that they might routinely miss a bunch of dead bodies in their statistics, but why should that effect be more pronounced post-covid relative to during-covid?
Regarding comparing Europe to Africa, surely there are some countries with a similar age profile, with some variance in how many people got vaxxed?
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You should have a look at Hungary -- their rate is lowish for Europe, and a significant number of those who did get it had Sinovac or Sputnik, due to Hungary opting out of the EUs Pfizer/Moderna supply in order to get quicker access.
Also I think Peru used a lot of Sinovac -- not sure they are devoloped enough for you, but clearly moreso than most places in Africa.
Those sound like the sorts of things that would increase mortality from the baseline? Anyways I'm not particularly fixated on Hungary; the fact that there are such large differences at the moment (and that many places are quite elevated) is profoundly weird.
"The monthly excess mortality indicator is expressed as the percentage rate of additional deaths in a month, compared to a baseline period. The baseline is given by average monthly deaths in the period 2016-2019."
This is a very crude methodology compared to the Euromomo approach.
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Would you trust data from Peru or Hungary? I sure wouldn't. I suspect even US data is quite fuzzy.
Sure, why not? You don't need to be a technostate to count dead people.
The cause of death and data surrounding it would be more what I'm worried about.
That information is not required to calculate excess mortality.
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Yes, and yes. I might be more skeptical of Ukraine, and not because I'm throwing shade at them, but because they're currently at war.
Have you ever been in either of the countries you criticize? You're acting like they're both worse than a 3rd world basket case.
I'm not criticizing anything. You don't have to be a 3rd world hell basket to have poor data. It's a pretty common problem. Detroit has poor data tracking and is not anything approaching a 3rd world hell basket, even if it's crime is pretty close. There are pretty big swathes of most countries which don't track data well. For example, its pretty well established that China probably isn't quite sure what it's exact population or GDP are. The specific problems in China are likely different (incentives for people collecting data to lie) but the problem as a whole is pretty universal.
EDIT:I'm not sure why you wouldn't just compare US vaccinated vs unvaccinated. That's basically what the trials did, and the data is public.
https://eua.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/providers/clinical-trial-data
We're talking about counting corpses. Things would have to get very bad for a given government to have significant problems with that data.
I'm skeptical of findings from controlled trials that don't show up in population level data in any way. There could be good reasons for that, but my first guesses are that the conclusions of the trial were wrong, or that the effect size is way smaller than it's made out to be.
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As I recall total mortality did not differ significantly between the groups during the trials -- expanding this analysis to a larger population group would be great, but sadly no country that I'm aware of tags all death certificates with vax status -- and you do get into data quality/sampling bias issues whenever you start looking at a convenience sample for which you happen to be able to get the two bits is_vaxxed and is_dead.
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New Zealand and Sweden, shown here, would be countries that have been quite extensively mRNA-vacced but haven't seen major excess mortality spikes lately, at least compared to Sweden's two Covid-wave-congruent spikes (which NZ avoided through its famous zero-covid policies, until it ended them, which then correlates with a modest excess deaths increase in mid-2022, ie. winter months in NZ). Lately, NZ excess mortality has been pretty close to baseline.
Now, that's just two countries, but if it it's mRNA vaccines, how could that be? According to NZ govt website, almost 90% of 12+ residents have got the primary course, ie. two shots. How are they avoiding excess mortality, if it's vaccine-related? Do they have different vaccines than the rest? Again, according to NZ govt, the Pfizer vaccine is the preferred vaccine in NZ.
I don't think it's impossible that there vaccine is somewhat more dangerous than generally understood and might contribute a bit, but I still consider it likely that the current excess mortality rates are better explained by Covid itself, non-Covid respiratory diseases that were smothered for two years and are now back in force, and the cumulative effects of past years leading to increase in obesity, decrease in doctoral check-ups etc, whether one blames those more on fear of Covid itself or the gov't policies like lockdowns. Maybe one even sees the effect of things like increased food prices and electricity prices etc. (ie. old/poor people cutting back on heating or food, worsening their health outcomes and contributing to potential earlier deaths, and so on).
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Excess deaths aren’t as scary as they sound. For starters, they aren’t unexplained, just excess over previous years. Or, in this case, over the Economist’s machine learning model. They include COVID deaths, meaning that the chart cannot distinguish between “failed to stop COVID” and “actively killed more people.”
I’ve got some issues with that plot which don’t really inspire confidence in Mr. Berenson. Why is “High Income Countries” treated as synonymous with highly vaxxed? Why are all the other groups so similar? And doing a cumulative plot so the numbers only go up is just dishonest.
Here is one that solves most of those issues. From the same source, even. Notice where the 12-month period lined up. Yes, Berenson’s chosen plot starts right after the biggest drops in excess mortality rate. Drops which would make the rest of his chart look a lot flatter.
Now this doesn’t at all demonstrate that vaccines were highly effective. But it’s also a really weak argument for spooky excess mortality. The whole last year was great compared to the winter spikes or even the year-round levels of 2021 or 2022. So his chart 1) includes COVID, not just mystery deaths, 2) shows cumulative instead of rate lines, and 3) starts at the most dramatic possible time.
No way he moves up as a seer—even if he’s 100% right. This is the kind of prediction that’s hard to parlay into real benefits. Then again, I’m not sure how journos and influencers actually get that level of credibility, or if they even still can.
Speaking of which: is Scott Adams taking a contrarian stance really unusual? It’s been his MO since the Trump campaign: loudly and confidently proclaim that the outsiders are right, and that anyone who doesn’t buy it is irrational. I’d think antivaxxing is red meat to his viewers. Anyway, he probably represents an upper bound for parlaying truthiness into (in)famy, and it’s not that high.
It's been his MO forever. It's part of the trend on twitter of some on the right trying to occupy a niche of opposing mandates or laws, but at the same time arguing that the vaccines are safe, while expressing skepticism of the vaccine rollout and skepticism of the benevolence of pharma companies.
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Seems fair enough that he drew the chart favorably, though a dip from peak COVID should be expected.
So judging from your comment and that site is the argument that the Economists model is wrong and normalized deaths should be higher?
Would like to see that chart before 2020 to see if it eyeballs their baseline is correct.
I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with the economist’s numbers. There are clearly excess deaths happening.
It doesn’t tell you if they’re from vaccines or COVID or suicides or tsunamis or unknown, though. So the chart can only give an upper bound on unexplained excess deaths. They prove that the vaccines aren’t foolproof, which might change the cost benefit. I think Berenson is wrong to imply they show additional harm from the vaccines..
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Euromomo is my goto for this, considering that they've been tracking this for a long time using an apparently consistent methodology, and seem unlikely to fiddle the data/mislead with statistics one way or the other.
Those graphs look quite concerning to me? Especially the under-45 demographics -- lingering covid or whatnot doesn't seem to be a likely explanation here.
In terms of pinning things on vaccines directly that's pretty hard given that you can't slice mortality datasets that way -- but if you scroll down to the country-level excess mortality graphs it would be interesting to know why France, Germany, and the UK (to pick a few) are all substantially elevated while Hungary (for instance) is right around their baseline.
Thanks. This looks like a good site. I concur that there are obvious excess deaths ongoing, and the fact that they include the relatively young is…not good. Not good at all.
I am having a hard time seeing which countries are currently elevated on mobile. Is it possible that they are ones which evaded deaths early on, leaving larger vulnerable populations? E.g. I see Hungary had multiple high peaks in the first two winters, and now it’s actually down in the negatives. I have no idea how their current demographic pyramid looks.
The map is useful, but you need to roll it back a couple months as the data lags depending on the reporting systems of the individual countries. Based on the view for wk 50 2022, all of the EU is experiencing at least "moderate excess" (> 4 s.d., I think?) other than Ireland, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, Greece, and Hungary. (The last two being "no excess")
Germany, England, and the Netherlands were at "very high"
Eyeballing the charts, Estonia looks to be flirting with "substantial increase", Finland is trending up, Malta, Hungary and Greece seem OK.
It doesn't really seem to be related to strong peaks from the coronavirus waves -- France, Netherlands and the UK all did quite badly on those, and are now looking about as bad they've been as any time since 2017, other than the initial spring-2020 coronavirus wave.
The lower charts use z-scores based on a seasonal model, so normal flu deaths should be accounted for; a really strong flu season would do this, but if this is going on at the moment I haven't heard about it?
The current Covid stats aren't really comparable to 2021/early 2022 stats, though, since testing rates are much lower and most people with Covid will probably just treat it as a normal influenza and won't be recorded anywhere.
These aren't covid stats though, this is raw excess mortality.
I was reacting to "doesn't seem to be related to strong peaks from the coronavirus waves".
I was looking at the mortality peaks on the Euromomo charts -- you can pretty clearly see the covid waves on there in the whole-population group and older demographics.
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I believe the antivaxxers are summing excess deaths in countries that heavily used mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer/Moderna.
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Not sure it's sufficient to explain the data, but it does not seem obvious that we would expect COVID to kill more people than it causes long-term harm to to the extent of putting them in the "near death" category. Obviously both happen at quite low rates, but Long COVID does exist (and deaths due to it may not be recognized as COVID deaths). Also I recall people talking about a similar noticeable dip in healthiness of the population post-1917-flu, although it seems like it would be difficult to disentangle any population-wide trends from the effects of WW1.
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