Day 934: Excess Mortality, CDC Edition

After months of agitating on Twitter, the Ethical Skeptic has finally posted to his blog about American excess mortality and the CDC's delinquent death data:

Finally, we end with the most important chart of all – the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor Covid-19. The Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart. As one can see, we have lost 344,000 younger Americans to something besides Covid and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 6 August 2022. The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 or more per week (the database shows a most recent five-week, weekly average of 7,887 deaths – subject to lag of course) – which exceeds most weeks of the Covid pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods).

By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from Covid-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.

Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of US citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from Covid-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021. Our next task, and what will be outlaid in Parts 2 and 3 of this article series, is to employ these and other observed arrival distributions to winnow out the causal mechanism(s) behind this concerning trend in US mortality.

Having made significant progress on the second and third article already, we very much look forward to publishing for the reader, our next article in the series, ‘Houston, We Know the Mechanisms (Part 2 of 3)’.

Day 919: Bad Lots Again

Followers of all things apparently or truly wrong with the COVID vaccines may recall some concern over bad lots. Back in the day the hot lots theory was a bit of a Swiss cheese, but due to Aaron Siri's tireless FOIA requests, the bad batch bunch now have an official lot list to compare to the mass of lot typos that is VAERS.

The result is some serious allegations against Pfizer, for a bad manufacturing process or just a bad product resulting in lots of deaths in early 2021, then secretly doing something to address the carnage.

Strangely, there's no particular comment about Moderna, despite similar indications of bad lots. The bad batchers don't seem to have updated their How Bad is My Batch? website with the cleaned up batch numbers yet, either. Perhaps they're still working on it.

Day 911: Even the President Rebounds

CNN reports that the President's COVID is back, due to the usual a rare Paxlovid rebound.

P.S. The Babylon Bee responds.

Day 910: Vaxxcess Mortality

The usual suspects have been reporting on excess mortality associated with the COVID vaccines. In the latest volley, Alex Berenson reports on a pre-print showing a correlation between vaccination rates and excess mortality rates in the Netherlands.

The finding in the new paper is particularly striking because the Netherlands has very high Covid vaccination levels nationally, so the differences between cities are relatively small. Almost every city had vaccination rates between 70 and 90 percent - mostly mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna, along with some DNA/AAV vaccines.

The paper found a “vaccination-correlated mortality rate” of about 5 percent of total mortality, meaning that 5 percent of deaths were skewed in patterns that reflected vaccination rates.

As the paper explains, the pattern does not prove that vaccinations actually caused those deaths, merely that the correlation exists. Still, since last summer, highly vaccinated countries have generally posted non-Covid death increases of 5 to 10 percent, the 5 percent figure is far from implausible.

A 5 percent increase in deaths may seem small, but by historical standards it is a huge annual change. It would translate into almost 175,000 extra deaths annually in the United States and more in Europe.

The paper has not been peer-reviewed, and its author, Andre Redert, is a computer scientist, not an epidemiologist (which is arguably a point in his favor).

He also tweets about mortality running 12% above normal in England.

Although the mainstream news has ignored the excess mortality story, the anti-anti-vaxxers have tried to make a case against it using US data. The ever-watchful bad cat dedebunked them, citing various methods not unlike those of the Dutch paper, most notably the Ethical Skeptic's, who also observes that the CDC is suspiciously far behind on publishing US mortality data.

Dr. Meryl Nass continues the life insurance saga with record claims/payouts for 2021.

Day 908: Prions Again

A French preprint came out in June documenting 26 out of over 50 sudden cases of Creutzfeld Jakob disease (CJD) after vaccination with COVID vaccines. The preprint has since been taken down, but you can get it from the Wayback Machine if you're interested.

The paper goes through the usual PLAAC analysis to detect a prion region in the older COVID spike protein used in the vaccines, and reassuringly documents that this region has disappeared from Omicron. It's perhaps more interesting for the 26 French case studies (out of over 50), along with another 16 cases from abroad. In a later edit they mention 19 CJD deaths recorded in VAERS through April, and link to a search that actually produces 33 CJD deaths out of VAERS when run on today's data. (If you're wondering whether health care workers have the time these days for differential diagnosis of CJD, there are more accurate, real-time tests now than the traditional "check the brain for holes on autopsy".)

Before you start worrying that you may already be a downer, the authors have more good news; the average time of onset in France was 11 days after vaccination, so you're probably in the clear as long as you avoid boosters. (Sadly there was no genetic analysis for the downer codon.)

CJD is a death sentence, and it took about five months for patients to die, though some died "sudden[ly]" after only 2.5 months. An addendum notes that they are all dead now; one unfortunate soul apparently lasted a year. The sudden onset and rapid death are enough to distinguish the cases from sporadic CJD (sCJD) or variant (mad cow) CJD (vCJD).

PlagueBlog pauses to suggest the abbreviation vxCJD.

Three of the French cases were associated with the AstraZeneca (non-mRNA) vaccine, though all the VAERS cases list mRNA vaccines. (This is not a result of high uptake of AstraZeneca, which is only about 5% of the doses given in France to date.) While COVID itself may have caused some rise in CJD cases pre-Omicron, PlagueBlog has found that case reports claiming so usually fail to note whether the patient had a spike-based vaccine about 11 days before onset of CJD symptoms, regardless of their COVID histories.

Note that this rash of vxCJD would not be the first vaccine disaster involving transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. A sheep vaccine caused a scrapie outbreak known as the 1935 Moredun Louping-ill Vaccine Disaster. Another contaminated vaccine caused a smaller scrapie outbreak in Italy in the 1990's.

Day 902: Even the President

President Biden, despite being double-vaxxed and double-boosted, has tested positive for COVID. According to news reports, he plans to take Paxlovid, the not particularly effective Pfizer antiviral best known for its rebound cases.

P.S. The Babylon Bee has the most unique coverage of this breaking story.

Day 895: No Evidence for Boosters

Vinay Prasad, among others, notes that the European CDC has rejected boosters for low-risk people because there's no evidence they would be of any benefit, while the Biden administration is making unscientific plans to push them on healthy Americans this fall.

Instead, the white house disregards these analyses and pushes this dose. The worry of course is that need to be seen as offering something for political rather than medical reasons. They need to limit cases right at the moment of the midterm elections.

The other concern is that clearly Pfizer has excess product, and this move will help them unload that supply. Are they merely working in Pfizer’s best interest? When the terms end for people like Marks-Walensky-Jha will they end up working for Pfizer? Serving on the board of directors?

The final concern is that they continue to play fast and loose with the FDA’s credibility. They are spending it like monopoly money. Unfortunately, the massive decline in public acceptance of other vaccines, which is in progress, will be, in part, attributable to their actions.

PlagueBlog notes that however tattered the FDA's credibility looks at the moment, it cannot compare to the shreds of the CDC's credibility.

Day 894: VAERS, What VAERS?

The management apologizes for our unintentional summer break here at PlagueBlog Headquarters. It was not due to ninja-COVID but to a mainframe breakdown; sadly the pandemic has in no way helped with the shortage of COBOL programmers and vacuum tubes.

We hope to report soon on case rates, the ongoing scourge of booster-driven OAS variants, jabbing defenseless infants with no scientific basis, and the vaccine-driven plunge in fertility in various countries that bother to publish their birth rates.

But the truly notable news of the past month came out of an FOIA request by Children's Health Defense, in which the CDC admits to never calculating their own standard adverse event statistic out of VAERS for the COVID vaccines. As usual, the bad cat said it best:

not only did they not perform the safety monitoring they were supposed to. at all. but they go on to claim that doing so is outside their purview and suggest asking the FDA instead. (who does not do this work, it’s supposed to be the CDC.)

this is just stunning.

what a complete and total fail and abrogation of duty and diligence.

either “most robust in US history” was a complete and total fabrication or wow have we been running around totally unprotected for decades. which one fills you with confidence?

[Some commentary and a screenshot of OpenVAERS data for the US omitted.]

quite literally any other vaccine in history would have been pulled off the market for 1/100th of this.

[...]

the agency whose specific purview and policy was to monitor this data just told you that everything was fine and their diligence the most robust in history while failing to do even the most rudimentary first pass work they were supposed to. they not only missed but misled about what is probably the single most severe safety signal in pharmaceutical history.

and then they said "not my job."

P.S. The state gave up the ghost on "daily" case reporting on July 8th, at which point cases were up a tenth of a percentage point.

Day 864: From Tragedy to Farce

The thirty-month-long Ays Rand novel that is the coronavirus pandemic leapt the shark recently, ascending from tragedy to farce via a thinly-veiled send-up of Pfizer on Dilbert. From the initial decision to become a big pharma company to Wally coming into his own to the most persuasive presentation pointy-haired boss has ever seen to eliminating the whistleblowers, it's two weeks of the most fun you can have combining epidemiology and cupidity in comic book form.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up an eighth of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 857: Buying Health

Mathew Crawford explains the illusion of vaccine efficacy caused by income disparities, a theory shared by the Ethical Skeptic (ES):

ES wins a grappling match by clean submission by showing that (still working at the U.S. county level) COVID deaths correlate to vaccination no more and no less after vaccination began as before. The pattern of results just…remains the same.

He does not touch on the possibility that the causal factor behind better health may not be the wealth itself but whatever caused the income and educational disparities in the first place.

Day 854: COVID Karate Kids

The bad cat deals the covidocracy a one-two punch with posts about the fakery that was martial arts before kickboxing—that is, the fakery that was epidemiology before bad cats on the Internet pooled their statistical chops, and the morass of confirmation bias that is public health even today.

From the former post (why public health "experts" never want to fight "the amateurs": what kung fu theater can teach us about public health):

from SAGE to the CDC, the UW to the NIH, it’s been complete and total woo-woo. their models did not just fail, they were so bad they were non-deterministic and could not even replicate their own results.

they rode in on big white woo-woo horses laden with credentials and made bold claims of their prowess and prescience. they legitimately had no idea they were not world champ top of the game stone cold epi-killahs. they had never been outside. it was 15 years of patty cake training to get ready for the gold medal round in olympic boxing.

total misses on swine flu and zika and dengue and “ebola comes to america” had been largely ignored.

they had no idea that they were, in reality, stunningly, embarrassingly bad at this.

and suddenly they were in the big leagues and got knocked out in the first round in front of everyone because they did not know any better than to jump in a ring for which they were unqualified. all their predictions were wrong, their recommendations false and ill advised. it was just jumping around and tossing out jargon and mathiness as though it implied knowing how to fight a disease.

and we watched this kung-fu theater die in real time.

And the latter post (we've reached the "we're not even going to pretend to prove this works, just do as you're told" stage of the pandemic: watch as the messaging shifts once more):

and that’s the stage of public health we are reaching, because they have lost the debate, been trounced on the data, and been caught lying and making up studies over and over but they are still sure they are experts (and there is no safe path down off the tiger onto which they have climbed in any event).

they are not going to change their minds nor in all likelihood can they without internal psychological crisis. imagine the psychic baggage of realizing that you just architected the most damaging and least effective public health response in human history while endlessly grandstanding about your knowledge and insight.

yowsa.

Yowsa, indeed.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 853: Vaxx For Thee But Not For Me

The latest celebrity charged in a Spanish counterfeit vaccine passport scheme is also the most ironic: José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, president of one of the largest pharmceutical companies in Spain. According to Steve Kirsch and the EuroWeekly News, it was a sliding fee scale, so he paid a lot not to take his medicine.

Not surprisingly, some famous athletes also paid the big bucks not to have to take the cure for soccer COVID. What was surprising is that the counterfeiting ring was broken not by a direct investigation, but as a side-effect of the campaign against the "dark web":

What is interesting is that the police did not uncover the scam through a local investigation, but rather through efforts to curb extremism on the dark web.

Enter policeman A, his name has not been made public. According to the Guardia Civil he made contact with an extremist Islamic group who he arranged to meet in France, but told them that he personally could not travel as he had not been vaccinated.

He said: “I don’t have a COVID-19 passport; I am not vaccinated. Allah does not allow me to put anything impure in my body.”

They replied that they could get him a passport and even get him registered on the National Registry of Vaccination, He was introduced to two Madrid residents, Álex, a former thief with a history of sexual assault and known to have contact with criminals in Madrid and Irene, an attractive woman who had been convicted and then pardoned for drug trafficking many years ago.

The police followed the two and noticed that Irene met a young man twice a week, after hours. That young man turned out to be Mario, a nursing assistant in the Hospital of La Paz.

An investigation online found that Mario was an active militant and a Covid-19 denier, which made them suspicious. But on checking they found he could not be the source of the false certificates as he would not have access to the database.

So they went about pretending to be potential customers to gather the evidence they needed. What they found was another nurse was being given a share to issue the certificates, with the money being put into cryptocurrency accounts to try and hide it.

But they also did spend it drawing further attention to themselves, with the network growing and the number of customers increasing.

In the end, the police arrested 15 people involved in the selling and issuing of false certificates.

What makes this case even more bizarre is that Mario contracted Covid-19 and need to be vaccinated to be able to return to work, but he couldn’t do that as a denier. So that’s when he approached his would be accomplice, who helped him out. It was at that point, Mario realised that they could make money offering the false certificates.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 849: The First Casualty of COVID is Duty

Vinay Prasad blogs at length about the pushback he got for taking the (actually) rational and scientific position on matters of COVID, rather than adopting pop-sci stupidity about masking children, closing schools, boosting the healthy, giving Moderna to anyone under 40, etc., etc.:

I'm trying not to use the word stupid to describe the people who hold the view that it helps. Instead, I will put it this way. I no longer respect any actual scientist who tells me that that it makes sense to make 2-year-olds wear a cloth mask in daycare except for the two hours they all nap together side by side. Anyone who believes that policy actually slows viral spread can be safely ignored.

But what can I do about bad policy? I thought about it, and slowly over the course of a year advanced a series of articles in places like Medpage today, and the Atlantic on this issue. I tweeted against the AAP when they said deranged things like there is no evidence that kids need to see faces.

This earned me great professional pushback, and headache. But you can't focus on that, you must focus on your duty. My duty, as a professor whose life is the arbitration of evidence, is to encourage people to use their rational, evidence-based medicine skills in pursuit of policy recommendations that benefit people. I can't be dissuaded if a bunch of people who aren’t thinking clearly decide to engage in mob Twitter.

Though the occasion of his post is obvious now, it goes unmentioned so we should note for posterity that armed guards hired to protect schoolchildren instead stood by at a school shooting in Texas this past week.

Massachusetts cases were up a fifth of a percentage point on Friday.

Interlude: The Orthopox That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Alex Berenson reports the impending sudden end to the monkeypox scare, as the news gets out that it's only affecting gay men, after gaining a foothold at a couple of gay raves in Europe:

The good news is that the public health authorities are now likely to pivot fast away from trying to scare people about monkeypox, for fear of stigmatizing gay men (by letting them know too much about what happens at these raves).

[...]

Added bonus: the same epidemiologists who wanted to lock you and your kids up for the last two years for Covid, a disease that poses approximately no risk to them, are now sure to let you know that MANDATES AND GOVERNMENT EFFORTS TO CHANGE BEHAVIOR NEVER WORK!

Day 843: Boosting Severity

The bad cat counts up adverse effects of boosters in VAERS and finds them even deadlier than the original shots:

the surge of boosters in the US began in September 2021.

this is precisely the same time the spike in deaths and hospitalizations per day per dose per day started.

so this is NOT an artifact of just dosing more, we’ve already controlled for that. the per dose incidence of death and hospitalization rose 4X immediately, seems to have plateaued for a minute, then found another step function spike in late january early feb and basically increased 5X from its already 5X elevated level. that is actual exponential growth in propensity for severe bad outcomes per dose.

such a thing is extremely unusual to see and would appear to be of such magnitude as to make a simple rise in reporting rates appear highly unlikely, especially as the overall reports figure does not mirror this pattern, retains linearity, and shows no major moves during this spike in more severe outcomes.

[...]

VAERS is supposed to function as a tripwire, a warning system. it’s the canary in the vaccine coal mine.

american public health officials appear to be literally treading on a carpet of dead songbirds so thick that feet have not touched floor in nearly two years.

In an afterthought he realizes what the second spike might be:

addendum (post publication) another possibility just occurred to me: this second surge in severe outcomes might be associated with 4th doses (second booster). i have no data on prevalence or timing there, but if this is the cause, then we’d have real cause for alarm as it would imply that each incremental boost looks 5X worse than before. purely speculative, but perhaps fertile ground for inquiry.

In other VAERS news, Children's Health Defense reports the illicit deletion of 10,000 severe adverse reactions to COVID vaccines from the database.

P.S. In other vaccine news, the FDA rubber-stamped another booster today, this time for five-year-olds, without any clinical trials for efficacy, and with minimal safety data. It did not reconvene the advisory panel because the advisory panel already said not to do that.

Here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, we follow the science, not political decisions made by the FDA against scientific advice.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent on Friday.

Day 832: Scrapieing the Bottom of the Barrel

If you've heard the wild stories about experimental mRNA vaccines causing cancer and prion disease but brushed them off because the mechanism by which they might have such outrageous effects is unclear, the bad cat has some bad news for you:

a nasty ringer is the emergence of the GGGG quadruplex (made easier by adding more G’s) which can cause neurological disease and bind to prions.

this may actually be quite a lot worse in that it appears that you do not even need a full quadruplex for this to happen. duplexes will do if the protein can fold in such a way as to generate what is effectively a quadruplex binding site and thus based on THIS study, all of these sites can play this role: (i) d(TGGGGT), (ii) r(GGAGGAGGAGGA) and (iii) d(GGAGGAGGAGGA) can serve as a quad.

this appears to facilitate the transition of PrPc into its pathologic isoform.

that’s bad.

If you don't recognize PrPSc in the above, just keep in mind that now is not the time to take up cannibalism. And in the future, avoid new technologies that have gone down in flaming failure with horrific side-effects in every previous trial, but are allegedly working perfectly this time.

Speaking of the trials, Steve Kirsch, not content with breaking the news of all-cause mortality being up for the vaccinated in Britain by their own numbers, has also publicized evidence of what the internet cats call pfraud in the latest data dump: Pfizer fraud? Or just great execution? He waffles on whether what happened in Argentina was actual fraud, but of course there were yet more side effects that never made it onto the label:

Neither Augusto’s pericardial effusion, nor another volunteer’s penile vein thrombosis, appear to have found their way into the reported side effects of this trial.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a third of a percentage point today.

Day 829: Counterproductive Boosting

Eugyppius goes into the German and some Israeli data on the pointlessness (lit., stupidity) of spring boosting, and of boosting the young at any time. He also talks a bit about why he isn't blogging much at this low-COVID moment.

Here in New England we're having a high-COVID moment during everyone else's low-COVID moment. The bad cat has made a series of posting asking why:

• a funny thing happened on the way to herd immunity
• is new england covid hospitalization data being retroactively adjusted down?
• meanwhile, back in the northeast

From his latest (Saturday):

[the northeast] continues to be about the only CONUS cases hotspot going (apart from what seems to be some border crossing issues in TX)

and it’s flowing into the hospitals. but it’s, for the most part, only affecting the old. and the pattern looks the same pretty much everywhere (and may be understated in recent days as this series can take time to fully update)

[...]

this looks nothing at all like herd immunity. this looks like the other thing…

[...]

i keep hoping this is not going to be the awful set o[f] outcomes that seem emergent and i could, of course, still be wrong, but in the battle of biology vs ideology, biology remains undefeated and the intersection of leaky vaccines and antigenic fixation is a very high risk place and that risk rises over time.

no one seems to want to talk about this trend just now, but i think it bears serious watching.

something untoward is going on in the northeast and if it keeps getting bigger at this rate, it’s going to pop back up on the radar soon.

Day 826: 1001 Collapses

On the cure for soccer front, the Good Sciencing count has hit 1001 unusual collapses in and around sportsball, with 649 deaths. If you haven't checked them out in a while, they've added some spontaneous soccer death statistics from before the vaxx plague; it turns out that an average year doesn't quite equal January of a vaxx plague year.

The Washington Post reports on efforts to vaccinate more people in Infected Shenzhen. They explain the low vaccine uptake among China's elderly: unlike the West, China focused on those likely to spread the virus and not on reclusive retirees.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent today.

Day 823: When Masks Kill

New in Medicine is the eponymous Foegen effect, a mechanism by which facemasks contribute to the COVID-19 case fatality rate, by Dr. Zacharias Fögen. (The things people put their own names on these days...)

A parallelization analysis based on county-level data showed that in Kansas, counties with mask mandate had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without mask mandate, with a risk ratio of 1.85 (95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.51–2.10) for COVID-19-related deaths. Even after adjusting for the number of “protected persons,” that is, the number of persons who were not infected in the mask-mandated group compared to the no-mask group, the risk ratio remained significantly high at 1.52 (95% CI: 1.24–1.72). By analyzing the excess mortality in Kansas, this study determines that over 95% of this effect can solely be attributed to COVID-19.

These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.

The cause of this trend is explained herein using the “Foegen effect” theory; that is, deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions caught in facemasks as droplets can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. While the “Foegen effect” is proven in vivo in an animal model, further research is needed to fully understand it.

The latest batch of Pfizer data came out yesterday, but so far no smoking guns have been spotted.

Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 814: Negative Efficacy Numbers

PlagueBlog apologizes for taking a spring break during an exciting week that saw the end of federal transportation mask mandates as well as a damning preprint (hosted by The Lancet) RCT meta-study showing excess mortality caused by Pfizer's mRNA vaccine. (That is, it killed more people with side effects than it saved from COVID.) The bad cat has the details:

this rush to EUA not only allowed a seriously rigged drug trial methodology to be used (ignoring or misattributing the ill effects of immuno-suppression post dose 1 and for 7 days post dose 2, both know[n] and serious issues deliberately designed out of assessment despite the fact that all those getting the jabs would experience them) but also more or less ignored the overall mortality data despite the fact that it was not only available, but unfavorable.

certain felines were heard to describe it as “not so much as a vaccine study as an instagram selfie”

it appears these danish researchers are coming around to this viewpoint as well.

this was always available data. there were few deaths in the pfizer trial overall as the enrollees were generally young and healthy. 79% had zero comorbidities.

and they clearly played some games. they called a death in the vaxx arm “covid pneumonia” to avoid having a “covid death” and excluded it when calculating VE.

there was also a significant cardiovascular risk signal. this is why more people died overall in the active arm than in placebo. in the moderna trial, overall mortality was exactly equal in the 2 arms.

It is surprising that Moderna, which is known for having more side effects from its larger dose, actually broke even in the save-grandma/kill-grandson trade-off, but even more surprising is that Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine the regulators actually pinned a few deaths on and (occasionally) regulated, was the safest and most effective of the bunch.

This must be what the kids these days mean by "clown world".

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a seventh of a percentage point on Friday.