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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Well, the elephant in the room is the inexplicable and ongoing high level of excess deaths being reported among all age groups and across continents. These deaths do not appear to be driven primarily by Covid itself or at least not directly.

I would be interested in seeing reputable data on this. Is there a good source? Would be interesting to see if its possible to tease apart the effect of vaccination vs. long-term Covid symptoms.

I've heard that Sweden has had less total excess death than other countries. Presumably their vaccination levels are quite high. Maybe the excess deaths are somehow lockdown-related. Is there a "Sweden" for anti-vaccine policy, i.e. a first world country that had a much lower of vaccination than others?

Nobody reputable is going to make any (non-deboonky) comment on this, by definition.

A disreputable (but seemingly smart and reasonably good-faith/not crazy) cat has been drawing conclusions from the UK NIH data for some time; the latest is here:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/uk-age-stratified-all-cause-death

I don't hang my hat on this analysis particularly, and I'm sure there's nits to be picked -- but it's not obviously terrible, and the effect sizes require that the nits be pretty big.

I'd actually be happy to see some reasonable complaints about this one -- on its face it's very concerning, and reasonable explanations are not jumping out at me on first read.

Thank you. This was the direction I was hoping to go in with my top-level post, but people got distracted (understandably so) about which D-list celebrity collapsed for this or that reason.

I'll give this a read, and maybe try to make a different top-level post next week.

OTOH regarding UK death data for 2022 this was just posted. It argues that:

  • once you age-adjust (which takes into account that the expected trend for the mortality rates in aging Western societies would be to rise, there's mostly no excess mortality that wouldn't be explained by Covid)

  • like in most countries, excess mortality spikes follow Covid spikes (though the Fisch argues in other posts for other countries that for this winter the other respiratory diseases almost certainly also show an effect)

  • while there are no not-explainable-by-Covid excess deaths in > 65 age bands, there are some not-explainable-by-Covid excess deaths in < 65 age bands, but these are better explained by NHS being burdened than by vaccination, if you look at schedules

I don't have time to read this analysis any more closely than El Gato's, but it also doesn't seem obviously terrible -- and it kind of doesn't really conflict that much?

In the bar-graphs, the Spring 2022-present deaths still look very concerning if you subtract off the covid bars, especially in the younger age brackets -- Fisch seems to take note of the here, but just kind of... shrugs it off?

I'd also note that Gato is using pretty narrow age bands already, so age-adjustment doesn't seem like it should make much difference.

I'll see if I can do a more adversarial reading later, but again the effect size is really large -- even Fisch notes ~10k excess non-Covid deaths over this period, which seems like kind of a fuckload?

if there is a 50-50 chance of excess deaths, then there is a 1/4 odds by chance alone of two consecutive years of excess deaths.

Naively, one might have predicted excess deaths to be unusually low, perhaps negative, following a pandemic which disproportionately and prematurely killed off so many elderly and unhealthy people. Instead, we have significant, consistent, and prolonged increases across all groups. There is a clear signal in the data, and it is not wrong to suspect the mRNA vaccines as a potential culprit. Unfortunately, the institutions which we depend upon to research these questions have strong incentives to avoid particular results, and they have proven themselves quite untrustworthy where such conflicts of interest are in play. We're left with a lot of anecdotes, hear say, conspiracy theories, and gut instincts to guide our action.

I mean, the pandemic is still ongoing. If COVID were suddenly gone, sure. And even then we might still expect excess deaths from long-term damage of the pandemic.

Covid will never be gone, nevermind suddenly gone. By that logic, the pandemic will go on forever. But almost everyone has had the virus; it's endemic now. We lost. The question is now just discovering how badly we lost, and how much of the damage was self-inflicted (if the virus was made in a lab, then I guess it was all self-inflicted, but you know what I mean).

the pandemic

Please define.

Covid infections "strongly" (arguable) above longterm YOY. "Abnormal" amounts of Covid.

LOL. The longterm is epsilon, since COVID didn't exist prior to 2019. If you're going to use that as a criterion, you're never going to declare the pandemic over. And your criteria are broken.

There's going to be a "new normal". I think we're still well above it.

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