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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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