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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I posted about excess deaths continuing a few weeks ago. Eric Topol writes on that today and blames it on COVID causing heart attacks/strokes far later. The evidence seems solid though I don’t think it’s the sole explanation of excess deaths. I do think this is an underreported story and quite alarming. We should seem to want to know if vaccines or covid are causing the continued rise (along with increased deaths of despair amongst other things).

Anywhere on Reddit I couldn’t even get people to deal with the data. Even throw a blue tribe approved cause of long covid effects. Here’s his article and data he’s citing. Because of replication issues, confounding biases, and my guess excess deaths are coming from multiple causes I don’t ever truly understand what’s going on. Especially when these things can get blended into culture wars. My guess is and I don’t understand why covid does have some kind of long term damage effect that’s not common in other colds. And the vaccine also causes this effect probably at a lower rate.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/heart-attacks-and-strokes-late-after

Somewhat related The Swedish govermnetal statistics bureau released new data on excess mortality in Europe

Turns out Sweden has had the lowest excess mortality in Europe during the pandemic. Previously there some of our neighbours had lower numbers but now that the data is in for the full 2020-2022 it turns out sweden is even below them and compared to Finland Sweden had half as high excess mortality.

This strikes me as a somewhat funny result because Sweden both didn't really lock down or use masks, but at the same time we were very good at vaccinating people, so it's not because "people aren't dying from the vaccines" either like some people like to imply. It seems to me that hysterical people and conspiracy theorists everywhere can go and pound sand.

How does Sweden compare to Denmark/Norway/Finland in vaccination percentage? I thought all Scandinavia/western Europe were good in that.

They are, and rates are broadly comparable. Sweden has marginally lower (like 1% lower than Finland) full vaccination rates but higher total doses administered.

One can generally say that the Nordics have been good at vaccination and that Swedens more open strategy seemingly didn't come with any cost at all could even have helped.

Sweden's state department of public health thinks that the lower excess mortality might have something to do with a comparatively more successful initial targeting of risk groups for vaccination, but I've not seen any data on that.

Well, hold on there. For the entire lockdown I had to listen to how the difference in excess mortality between Sweden and other Nordics proves "Sweden's irresponsible approach" was wrong, now it turns out their excess mortality was actually lower, and not only are we supposed to forget all about the lockdown argument, the same comparison is now used to argue for the vaccine, even though there are no significant differences in vaccination rates between the Nordics?

I'm not even entertaining that argument, until the pro-lockdowners are publicly made an example of.