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Thank you for the response, but it doesn't really address what I was saying. You claimed that "if the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there." and that "This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported."
I showed you that clinical trials (the best kind of data!) found a significant increase in serious adverse events after vaccination (health risk!) and increased deaths in the vaccinated group compared with controls (vaccination=higher mortality).
Your response that cites a study with different results may indicate that the situation is complex, with contradictory studies supporting different positions, but it does not show that the "correlation isn't there" - it's there in the randomized clinical trials (RCTs), which represent the best type of evidence. Your initial claim was very very strong, and it is what I'm contesting. You did not just say that there are contradictory studies on COVID vaccine health risk, you said that the claim of health risk is so thinly supported it's hard not to be condescending about that claim, when in fact the clinical trials that were used to approve the vaccines show both a serious health risk and that vaccination=higher mortality.
The study you quoted here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm) is not a RCT and thus immediately weaker evidence than the clinical trials, but let's look at it more closely. The study has a very surprising result, namely that vaccine recipients had lower non-COVID mortality than the unvaccinated. Unless you want to claim that the COVID vaccine magically protects against all forms of death, the study has missed something or introduced some kind of bias in their study design that skewed the results.
One explanation that immediately springs to mind when reading the study stems from this decision in the study design:
"To ensure comparable health care–seeking behavior among persons who received a COVID-19 vaccine and those who did not (unvaccinated persons), eligible unvaccinated persons were selected from among those who received ≥1 dose of influenza vaccine in the last 2 years."
So they only included unvaccinated persons who were vaccinated against the flu but were not vaccinated against COVID. The majority of the healthy population does not vaccinate against the flu - some healthy people do, of course, but it's primarily given to older or sick and thus vulnerable people. Among the people who were vaccinated against the flu due to being sick, but did not vaccinate against COVID, some proportion did not receive COVID vaccination because they had gotten sicker in the meantime, and thus COVID vaccination was deemed too risky. It is possible that this group was large enough (you don't need that many such people to skew the results) to lead to the result that unvaccinated people died from non-COVID causes more often more than the vaccinated - because a proportion of the sample was unvaccinated due to being too sick to receive the vaccine, thus resulting in more deaths among the unvaccinated group.
Of course, this explanation is not a certainty, but the decision to only include flu vaccine recipients in the unvaccinated group, without controlling for initial health status and with no mention of ensuring that the vaccinated were also flu vaccine recipients, was very questionable. It may have skewed the results of this study, leading to the result that COVID vaccines seem to magically protect from non-COVID death. Even if this is not the explanation of this weird result, the results of this study just make no sense - something is happening that the study doesn't account for, even if the result were to be correct. I therefore rate the reliability of this study a fairly low - definitely lower than the reliability of RCTs that show vaccination=higher mortality.
To summarize, the study you quoted here has a weird result that indicates some unknown factor at play that is skewing the results, and they made a questionable decision in study design that they did not match in both samples.
In any case, randomized controlled trials are stronger evidence, and they do indeed show vaccination=higher mortality and that there's a health risk from vaccination (16% increase in serious adverse events).
This contradicts your original very strong claim that there is no correlation indicating a health risk from COVID vaccines and that believing that is something it's hard not to be condescending about because it's so thinly supported. That claim is what I'd be interested in hearing you defend.
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