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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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And there it is. The deaths of people who have been injected with the vaccine, but who are not yet immunized to Covid, have a huge death rate.

Calling people within that fourteen day window “unvaccinated” is blatantly disingenuous. Playing with words for political reasons is dangerous. Sticking with the moneyed narrative in a time of total narrative collapse can be deadly.

Those of us who were paying attention to the biology of the effects of SARS-CoV-2 were screaming to high heaven that vaccinating humans to replicate the spike protein was a Bad Fucking Idea. But since we were red-tribe coded, our words fell on stone-deaf ears.

How can we do better as a civilization next time (assuming for the sake of discussion Global Pandemic II won’t be deliberate)?

EDIT: Spike protein mechanism for causing myocarditis detailed in my reply here, for those who think I’m just being a reactionary.

What? Where's the connection? Who's the prominent scientist with a direct financial incentive to attack the COVID vaccines talking about their negative side effects while preparing his own vaccine? The "childhood vaccines cause autism" argument was actually highly specific and directly traceable to Andrew Wakefield and his fraudulent research, and I just don't see that happening in this case.

This is actually an incredibly different situation and the arguments in play are just as dramatically different - even if you use the thoroughly adulterated meaning of "literally" that's common today.

Could you details what you believe those flaws to be? I'm not convinced by either side of the argument yet, and I'd love to hear contradicting evidence.

As others have mentioned this is a dumb way of looking for vaccine deaths -- however it certainly did stack the deck in terms of efficacy stats.

The fact that the vaccine doesn't do anything for a couple of weeks doesn't mean you get to exclude those two weeks from the "vaccinated" category -- if one is trying to decide how well the vaccine will prevent them from getting covid, they have to go through those two weeks no matter what, so they need to be included in P(gets covid|gets vaccinated).

I think there was some evidence that the vaccine increases the risk for this period (particularly when the circulating variant differs from the vaccine strain) due to your immune system being 'distracted' by something a little different from what you're likely to be exposed to? Not sure how solid this is, but would make the warpage even worse.

I don’t see a huge death rate, I see voluntary reports of deaths that occured close to the time of vaccination clustering...close to the time of vaccination.

Direct factual issues aside, a single tweet with a single chart mentioning "The narrative" is almost never correct or informative. Not for individual consumption, but certainly not for a toplevel post. "Those of us who were paying attention ... were screaming to high heaven that vaccinating humans to replicate the spike protein was a Bad Fucking Idea." Bad Fucking Idea isn't a mechanism or an argument, make it if you have one!

it’s been known for quite a while that Covid itself leads to heart attacks, arrhythmias, and other heart problems.

Research presented at the American Heart Association’s Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Scientific Sessions 2022 suggests SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein can lead to heart muscle injury through an inflammatory process:

“It’s already known from the clinical side that COVID-19 infection can induce heart injury, however, what we don’t know is the mechanistic details of how this occurs. What we suspect is that the spike protein has unknown pathological roles,” said Dr. Zhiqiang Lin, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Masonic Medical Research Institute in Utica, New York. “Our data show that the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2 causes heart muscle damage. That’s why it’s important to get vaccinated and prevent this disease,” he added. [emphasis mine]

But that's old news to amateur followers of virology news; doctors were warning early on that the spike protein itself was not just a highly identifiable piece of the virus, it was also likely the mechanism behind COVID-19 heart attacks — and thus any rise in heart attack deaths among vaccinated people not normally considered at risk for heart disease:

[Researcher Byram Bridle] claimed the information shows that the spike protein produced by the vaccines, which is intended to prevent the coronavirus from infecting the body, does not remain in the shoulder muscle but gets into the blood — and can lead to clotting, bleeding, heart problems and neurological damage. "In short, the conclusion is, we made a big mistake," Bridle said. "We didn’t realize it until now. We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen. We never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin, and was a pathogenic protein. So, by vaccinating people, we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin. Some people, this gets into circulation, and when that happens in some people, they can cause damage, especially in the cardiovascular system. And I have many other legitimate questions about the long-term safety, therefore, of this vaccine."

Politifact rated these claims False because “Experts say there is no evidence that the spike protein produced by the vaccines is a toxin that could cause heart problems and neurological damage. The Canadian viral immunologist who made the claim has not produced evidence to back it up.”

Reading between the lines, the cited experts are saying the spike protein is not toxic because the vaccine and vaccinated cells stay at the injection site and never reach the heart to cause myocarditis. If further research shows that claim to be false, it’s the last link in the chain giving strong evidence that the spike-producing vaccines were indeed a Bad Fucking Idea.

Reading between the lines, the cited experts are saying the spike protein is not toxic because the vaccine and vaccinated cells stay at the injection site and never reach the heart to cause myocarditis. If further research shows that claim to be false, it’s the last link in the chain giving strong evidence that the spike-producing vaccines were indeed a Bad Fucking Idea.

That's been know to be false (by Pfizer at least) since before the thing was even released -- their submission to the Japanese government included a pharmokinetics assessment that showed spike-carrying nanoparticles pretty much everywhere. (in mice, I think -- but this a case where the response should be pretty similar for mammals in general)

I'm sure it's floating around the internet still -- the original was in Japanese only, but with English tables so still pretty intelligible.

So 4,000 people got vaccinated and then, what, immediately exploded?

What's the proposed mechanism of action? I find it more likely that this is showing normal deaths times a reporting factor. The tweet conveniently adds up all deaths over an unspecified window, so it'll be a little tricky to compare to any base rate.

Remember that over 2.8 million Americans died in 2019. I wonder how many of those got logged in VAERS.

How can we do better as a civilization next time?

We could try teaching Twitter warriors the difference between correlation and causation. I know that's a big ask. Maybe we could settle for discounting any news that contains an emoji.

That's VAERS-reported deaths, not total deaths. It makes sense that people are going to report deaths to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) more commonly if they happen right after a shot rather than several weeks later.

What are the demographics of the reported vaccine deaths? It looks like there were 7000 total over all of 2021. There were single days in 2021 where COVID killed more people than that in the US.

I don’t like the public health establishment lying to people either, but the vaccines still look positive-EV even if everything your link is true. “Whirlwind” this is not. What are right wingers gonna do? Storm the capitol again? Boycott big pharma? Sounds like a massive self-own.

I was going to point out that people who got the vaccine were older and had a higher base death rate than those who didn't, so there is selection bias in any comparison. But then I actually clicked your link, and it's way dumber than that! It isn't comparing to people who didn't get the vaccine, it's comparing VAERS reports by length of time since vaccination. Whether to make a VAERS report is an arbitrary decision, and obviously doctors will be more likely to do it the closer to vaccination it happened. If someone has a heart-attack a few hours after being vaccinated there will almost certainly be a VAERS report, if someone has a heart-attack months after being vaccinated there probably won't be, and that is true even if the risk of heart attack on day 0 and day 90 is exactly the same.