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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

Since COVID-19 vaccinations have become available in December 2020, an estimated 182 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by September 21, 2021. However, since April 2021, the number of people starting to get COVID-19 vaccines has decreased. People have cited vaccine safety concerns as deterrents to getting a COVID-19 vaccine, concerns that include deaths following COVID-19 vaccination. Although deaths after COVID-19 vaccination have been reported to VAERS, there have been few studies done to evaluate the mortality not associated with COVID-19 among vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. To analyze this, researchers conducted a study using the Vaccine Safety Datalink, comparing those who received COVID-19 vaccines and those who did not between December 2020 through July 2021. This study included data from 11 million people; 6.4 million received either Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Janssen COVID-19 vaccine and 4.6 were unvaccinated. The analysis showed that those who received COVID-19 vaccinations had lower rates of mortality for non-COVID-19 causes than those unvaccinated. These findings provide evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and support current vaccination recommendations.

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.

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?