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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.
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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