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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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It's easy to prove that covid caused millions of deaths

IS it? There are many causes of so-called Covid deaths; very few people die of Covid alone. You need pulmonary co-morbidities like smoking; like decreased immune function; like the social pathology of Western medical praxis at keeping Grandma around, medicated up to the gills, long past her sell-by date already. Africa hardly had any Covid deaths, because they don't do the last one.

Saying "Covid is responsible for millions of deaths" is like packing someone's port authority warehouse with ammonium nitrate for years and then putting all responsibility for the inevitable explosion on "The unseasonable heat that day was responsible for 7000 deaths".

The spark doesn't cause the inferno; the kindling does. A novel bat virus is only a spark.

African countries are piss-poor at tracking COVID deaths. Their death rates from disease are an order of magnitude higher than ours, so excess mortality statistics are going to be very noisy. Yes, a lot of the deaths were in people that were already vulnerable as hell from old age or diabetes or smoking or something. Let's call that 90 percent of 'em. We still have 10 percent of the dead that would have lived for at least a decade or so in the absence of COVID.