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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

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

The smarter corners of the heret-o-sphere are taking this in stride and postulating that given rates of COVID infection are getting very low, so too should rates of long-covid/excess deaths in the near future.

The demographic breakdown of the excess deaths in the EuroMOMO stats that I posted a couple of weeks ago is still very weird under the "Long COVID" theory -- why would we see this effect particularly pronounced in the demographic that is least susceptible to severe effects from COVID, and also pretty unlikely to have a heart attack for more normal reasons? (I don't think they break this down by sex, but the male/female divide might be useful to look at here; AIUI men are quite a bit less likely to report 'Long-COVID' symptoms, and quite a bit more likely to suffer from vaccine-induced cardiovascular issues)

Evidence is somewhat less than solid. Study is comparing people diagnosed with something post-COVID with uninfected controls, and noting that the former are sicker.

I think at least some of this is stress from lockdowns and the economic uncertainty of people dealing with job losses and potentially business losses. There’s also the uncertainty of when or if anything will go back to normal. Basically everyone in society had their lives upended and didn’t know what would happen with any of it. This would cause a lot of stress and stress isn’t good for longevity.

This is a strong candidate for a contributing factor to deaths. For example, I'd argue that loss of job due to a vaccine mandate will carry worse outcomes than actually receiving a vaccine, or getting Covid unvaccinated. So in a way, our own public health response could be responsible for causing harm to people

It's the binding site of the virus. The ACE2 receptor, its more common in muscles and the heart is loaded with it. The reason the vaccine fucks your shit up is micro clots and autoimmune shenanigans, the reason the virus fucks your shit is damage to muscles and also auto immune shenanigans.

There is no "long covid" all of the symptoms of it are consistent with clot/hypoxia damage to nerves and fine veins.

I don’t know the science specifically but this explanation makes sense to me.

It seems to me vaxxes and virus fuck up your heart. Which if the vaccine is only working 4 months at a strong effect raises big questions to me on how much we should be vaxxing. And could explain continual excess deaths.

This is not the right take.

You should be much more concerned about the size, shape, and ability to move through your body compartments with a Vaccine, than with a virus entering your mucosa.

The virus, if anything, is very limited by ACE2 receptors, whereas the lipid nature of the mRNA droplet allows it to merge into literally any cell and make it into an antigen producing cell. Much more than ACE2

The virus, if anything, is very limited by ACE2 receptors, whereas the lipid nature of the mRNA droplet allows it to merge into literally any cell and make it into an antigen producing cell. Much more than ACE2

This is sort of like saying "the antibiotic, which can get into every cell" or "the air conditioner, which can change the room temperature in a way that affects every cell". You're writing as though you think it's significant that it affects every cell, but you give no reason why that's actually significant.

Now I think I'll go eat a hamentash. The carbohydrates in it, entering my body, will affect the synthesis of ATP in every cell in my body.

Well, the carbohydrates will not fold into a protein. Carbohydrates mainly going to enter the blood stream as glucose, simple principle of digestion and metabolism in human physiuology.

Using your muscle cells, vs. using one of your cardiac muscle cells, is why you do not want mRNA droplets in your blood stream interacting non-specifically with your organs

My understanding of the way the mRNA vaccine works, is that it induces cells to generate proteins that match the one of the virus, so your immune system can attack, and train on it. If the virus' structure limits what kind of cells it can attack, and the vaccine has no such limits, and thus can trigger an immune response against any type of cell, that would mean it can cause greater damage.

There can of course be other factors that could turn all that around, and still have damage done by the virus be worse than the damage done by the vaccine, but the argument cannot be dismissed by sheer snark.

Yes. Imagine someone saying "Let's try injecting the antigens into their heart!"

Well, we know the mRNA enters the bloodstream, so it could transfect any cell...

This is not all proven - the vaccine entering body tissues because there's no known characterization of nanolipid particle pharmacokinetics is the main issue her. There's no concentrated ACE2 receptor in testicles, but the nanolipid particle will be exposed to the testicles via the blood stream (at the testicle blood barrier, which the vaccine can cross).

I want to make a separate point to bring up your blue tribe distinction.

Every time Covid-19 vaccines come up, very low level "pro-vax" discussion starts occurring. I see extremely washingtonpost or Foxnews tier discussion of these products.

If you check my post history, I have a complete throw down against the mRNA products. Currently, the pro-vax perspectives coming in this thread could have been completed by Reuters fact checks or some other political organization.

So, I offer the following:

  1. Astroturfing in the provax camp is occurring on the Mott OR

  2. Only less educated, less biologically inclined 'pro-vaxxers' are appearing in these threads with years old talking points and critical obfuscations of what happened during the mRNA / adenovirus vaccination campagin.

  • -16

"Everyone who disagrees with me is astroturfing or ignorant" is much too partisan and "boo outgroup" to throw out there unless you are willing to bring some serious evidence (not just "refer to my post history").

While it may not be appropriate to call it astroturfing, I wanted to point out that it is uncommon to see a detailed pro-vax analysis on the motte. It uses very quick "off lamps" that are supported by fact checking / expert trust / credentialling institutions.

Rather than say AstroTurf, I'd say there is a peppering of shallow, short cut arguments that never develop fully into an authentic, organic long form idea.

Agreed, I will be much more careful to use a short cut like that, and avoid needless linking to an outgroup that's not the main topic of my concern.

When has the motte had a pro-vaccine post? I can’t remember one. I think most have been throwing concerns at vaccines.

I don’t think this post was pro-vaccine. At best it was an attempt to explain a lot of excess deaths to COVID related organ damage (which vaccine clearly does too).

There were a bunch of them back in the day, and one of the regulars here evidently has domain expertise.

I recall ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor had some very good ones.

He's never been pro-vax in the "mindlessly repeats CDC talking points" way though -- I'm pretty anti(MRA subunit)vax, and he always has been interested in what I've dug up, and provided informed pushback.

If you want to see literal astroturfing, the SSC sub is a great place for it -- to this day there's people (?) on there following that "how to convert skeptics to vaxxmaxxers through psychological manipulation" checklist that was circulating.

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.

Should be noted that for large stretches of the crisis, Finland actually had less stringent measures than Sweden.

The oxford stringency index is alright for large-scale studies where you use the entire dataset to mine for trends, but it falls short when making individual comparisons. The reason being the differential in enforcement and on-paper laws were quite varied from locale to locale, and this adds a tremendous amount of noise to the data. To make sure a comparison you would have actually had to be on the ground in both countries and carried out a detailed study taking those things into account. I don't want to give examples now because covid talk is tiring, but one simple example is Japan, they had no legal mask mandates, but did it feel like such on the ground, there definitely was a social one. Or in India there were on-paper mandates/restrictions for all kinds of things, but people stopped giving a shit altogether 2 weeks after they were put on paper.

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.

Good point, Sweden is doing well despite giving the mRNA vaccines. I'm happy you found a single western country that used mRNA and is not experiencing a precipitous increase in death. And they have excellent foresight to avoid giving risky vaccines to children.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-recommending-covid-vaccines-kids-aged-5-12-2022-01-27/

I know Sweden acknowledges that the risks of the vaccines are only useful when comparing against the risks of the virus.

"Conspiracy theorists." Why are you drawing conclusion on a single countries demographics? This is not a good faith accusation to people who are worried the novel mRNA vaccine is causing unnecessary morbidity and mortality, even Sweden has decided to stop putting children at risk. Is this responsible for their better mortality statistics? Hard to tell but I know you need to update your priors here.

There is a radical difference in allowing 5 year olds, and 12 years olds, to receive nanolipid particle injections. And you failed to mention that.

Lingering effects of novel viral illnesses have been well-documented, particularly in the case of the Spanish Flu. Woodrow Wilson's bad case of influenza is believed by some to have contributed to the stroke that later incapacitated him during the negotiations to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. While many cases of long covid are likely some form of generalized anxiety or culture-bound illness, I have no doubt that some are real. I see no reason, however, to think that covid vaccines could ever do anything worse than give certain people an extremely mild case of a disease they would have inevitably caught regardless. Either way whatever excess deaths we see will, in the absence of other confounding variables, slowly decrease to baseline over the course of several years and are not really worth worrying about.

Inaccurate. If you look at the mRNA vaccines in particular, they can cause a heart condition that can cause death. Its a well recognized condition called peri-myocarditis. Are those deaths worth protection from covid? That's the argument that's falling apart right now.

"Lingering effects of novel viral illnesses have been well-documented" Did you mean to use the word novel? There are lingering effects possible of all viral illnesses, not just novel ones. I would not compare this to Spanish Flu, compare it to The Russian Flu/Corona of 1800s..

The idea that nascent respiratory infection would have killed someone that had a "mild" reaction to the mRNA is completely unsupported, and conveniently forgets the introduction of the novel nanolipid particle that delivered this first generation vaccine.

The risk of myocarditis from covid infection is greater than the risk from covid vaccination. It is true that all viral illnesses may have lingering effects. I was more implying that we may expect a greater amount from one to which we are immunologically naïve than from something like the common cold or annual influenza. I was not implying that any specific individual with a mild vaccine reaction would have been killed by a covid infection, only that it would have been slightly more severe. At a population-scale that results in a greater overall number of deaths and complications. It is also unclear to me by what mechanism the nanolipid particle is supposed to be harmful outside of causing minor inflammation at the site of injection.

"Electronic databases (MEDLINE, Scopus, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the WHO Global Literature on Coronavirus Disease) and trial registries were searched up to May 2022"

This is old data now, and every single undetected case of Coronavirus during that time period was not counted into that rate. This is what all the health authorities used to make light of the heart damage that mRNA can cause, just like you are doing now. There's incidentally been hundreds of millions of natural infections since then, undetected, making the rate of myocarditis by covid essentially become asymptotic to 0 as everyone becomes naturally immune, possibly twice.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

Here's a post-mortem that shows the same WBC in your injection site, infiltrating the tissue of the heart and causing sudden death. You must not keep up with Pathology journals about people found dead after the mRNA vaccination, or they're not talked about or published in your countries.

"The relative risk (RR) for myocarditis was more than seven times higher in the infection group than in the vaccination group"

Even at best: you're telling me we are giving a vaccine that causes heart damage, only one order of magnitude less than a novel clade of beta-coronavirus that spilled out so fast we couldn't even count all the cases? And that's a good thing?

And that's a good thing?

That's a shift in the question from: "Are those deaths worth protection from covid?"

People entering the medical system and producing positive incidental Covid-19 infections are already likely to be sick.

"It was based upon nearly 154,000 patients with Covid (median age 60, 90% male)"

How can this be related to a 21 year olds decision to avoid getting a mRNA vaccine, known to have cardiac side effects, when the study looks at an already unhealthy patient population?

Not even trying anymore, Mr. Topol may be right that Covid causes problems, but his whole basis reeks of damage control.

The vaccines, with their side effects, need a deadly disease to be worthwhile giving. We are riding out the last days of accepting a chance of heart damage to be immunized against a contagious disease that you get exposed to at the bar, grocery store, and in your home.

I aggressively don't care. Everyone should stop paying attention and be less sensitive to slight changes in rates of deaths; we got into this stupid situation due to exactly this sort of anxious over-sensitivity.

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