Thanks for a different look at the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Substack has been flooded daily with articles to the contrary, whose authors, I feel, are using the narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful to make money from those who believe everything is a conspiracy. You may well get some pushback.
It seems to me that the “pushback” as you term it misses the point. The point being that the vaccine was *mandated*, even if only through tacit coercion—when to my knowledge it has never been shown to *prevent* transmission of disease. Such was even disclaimed in the original safety studies in JAMA, so we cannot forgive our medical authorities for acting in such fashion, i.e., there was *no* societal benefit to mandating unwanted vaccinations. In a supposed free country, this situation is intolerable, or at least incongruent. We are not cattle to be raised and kept for the benefit the State.
Few folk I follow suggest the vaccine was “ineffective”, only that the cost/benefit of inoculation was woefully exaggerated—especially across age cohorts. The sides in this controversy have been drawn. The issue of “preventable” adverse effects of this vaccine is well established. Future “pandemics” will come to such a head sooner over any universal mandates. A frighten populous is a dangerous and despicable thing. An ignorant authoritarian medical body is deadly.
(the vaccine) "to my knowledge it has never been shown to *prevent* transmission of disease."
Among the many outstanding lies we were told about COVID and the vaccines, one of the few which they eventually had to admit was that the vaccines DO NOT prevent trasmission. AT ALL. They had to switch the narrative to "the vaccine reduces the symptoms and the risk of more serious consequences from getting COVID".
Actually, we now know that there is a positive correlation between the number of doses you received and the probability of getting infected and RE-infected.
Yes, and I might add that the safety study from Pharmacia that was published in JAMA and became their “use” label (which I read personally), specifically stated that the vaccine was not claimed as preventing spread of disease. This claim came from the CDC as was baseless at the time, and as near as I can tell, still is. The importance to my argument is that forcing vaccination had no foundation in societal necessity as well as being a violation of basic rights.
"Few folk I follow suggest the vaccine was “ineffective”, only that the cost/benefit of inoculation was woefully exaggerated—especially across age cohorts."
I don't care who you follow, what difference does that make? The people I am referring to are rabid about the Covid-19 vaccine's 'ineffectiveness', sometimes posting two or three articles a day about the same crap since they were first offered. Their obsession is ridiculous.
The comment refers to whether or not there is meaningful controversy wrt effectiveness of vaccine or whether you are seeing a small handful of fanatics with time on their hands who post myriad commentary disproportionate to their numbers or knowledge.
If I understand the debate that is developing today, the objection to the vaccines should not be whether or not they had a positive effect as defined by less surplus deaths during the COVID period (according to the article, they did), but whether the state can/should enforce vaccinations on individuals if there is no demonstrated reduction in the transmission of the virus.
I suspect that many of those most strongly criticizing the COVID policies of enforced or "strongly encouraged" mass vaccination are motivated by the idea of external enforcement on the individual by the state: they might, in fact, still object even if the vaccine was shown to be strongly effective at reducing transmission. For them, it is entirely a civil rights issue.
That's a valid objection, but many seek to bolster their argument's moral strength by claiming that: a) the vaccines were entirely ineffective, statistically; b) the vaccines were themselves harmful; c) the drive to vaccinate large portions of the population were primarily profit driven, with no benefit to those vaccinated. All of these are questionable at best, and completely inaccurate at worst. Those making such claims lose credibility and respect.
They should just stick to the argument that the individual has priority over social policies. That at least would be an honest position, demonstrating intellectual integrity.
Nah, I think you are one of the real ones who would be with me during the real zombie apocalypse. We would be at gun point forcing people to be vaccinated. Otherwise they could turn into zombies and kill us.
I have looked at your citation. Not sure it changes anything I’ve said. They have a point of view, but I have no idea who they are to evaluate credibility. People find sites that suit their biases. I tend to follow people I find authoritative. For example, Jay Bhattacharya, who has been picked as the Director of NIH recently I believe. He has been a critic of the COVID vaccination program since its roll out, but is not a critic per se of vaccines.
"I have looked at your citation. Not sure it changes anything I’ve said. They have a point of view, but I have no idea who they are to evaluate credibility."
Exactly. They feel free to pontificate verbosely about their suppositions. That is my point.
Yeah, but what can we do? You read and listen to my “rantings”, but who am I? That’s the problem with (true) free speech. You got to give it to the loons to preserve it for yourself. Another good example is our host for this exchange, Kirkegaard. He’d never see the light of day for most of his research/postings/commentary without such a forum as this.
A potential problem I see is something like a "healthy vaccine user bias". At least in a few countries that I know of, people who got more vaccines were significantly different than non users or people with less vaccines (more health conscious, higher socioeconomic status, ... ). A common finding with taking these things into account is a null finding for younger populations and a dampened advantage for older and other vulnerable populations (through still significant and absolutely enough to justify a recommendation).
This is a concern for case-control studies (person-level study within a country), but this is a between country-study. Healthy vaccinee bias here would mean that it just so happens that countries with more vaccines were also to begin with less susceptible to COVID for whatever reason. The most obvious point against this is that the more vaccinating countries are much older (r = 0.58), and older people are much, much more susceptible. If one wants to claim another unmeasured variable that goes in the other direction, it is hard to square with these numbers. What do you have in mind?
No, you are perfectly right. Seems like I was confused about what the underlying data actually is. Through the higher vaccine countries do seem to have better medical ressources on average (through if there is a significant impact, I can not see it clearly from your plot).
Well, hard to measure medical resources or efficiency, but GDPpc correlates also with vaccination rates and lower excess deaths (correlation matrix is in the bottom). But in the full model these are included, and they make the effect of vaccines slightly stronger, not weaker.
You generally are a great data analist but the way you set about proving the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines is surprisingly superficial and dare I say "lazy" and "ingenuous"...
After some of the harsherst and strictest (and still lingering) censorship ever, in February 2025 there just is too much scientific evidence proving how harmful the mRNA vaccines were and still are and how they possibly provided a net positive risk-benefit ratio to very very few people.
There is simply too much to write here about the problems with your approach let alone about the scientific evidence we already have about the harm the COVID vaccines have done and are still doing.
You and most everybody on your substack is smart enough to go find it if really interested (as you should be, especially if you are vaccinated).
The whole COVID delirium was an IQ test and if you took the vaccine you failed it.
One of the most interesting countries is Sweden. Sure, the fact that people were left to manage their own risk had a huge positive impact. An old Whitehall Civil Service study found that people given responsibility without the authority to solve the problems they were tasked with were most at risk of developing health problems- and depriving people of autonomy and choice through lockdowns during the pandemic probably had a similar effect.
But the other thing which was interesting about Sweden was that they decided to give everyone one dose, before delivering the second. Average time between vaccines was around 6 weeks. This seems to have mitigated the admittedly very rare vaccine deaths, and rare serious harms from vaccines. I just got plaque psoriasis (worst on my elbows) which is a minor inconvenience compared to protecting an immunosuppressed elderly mother with a 1 in 165 chance of dying from Covid (unvaccinated). The NHS still has it's QCOVID calculator up if anyone wants to know what their actual risks were from the pre-omicron variants.
My gripe is that Western governments obviously ran a cost-benefit analysis and then decided to manage people rather than keep them informed and well-armed with information. We know as much because the UK Covid Inquiry disclosed that the British Government set aside £1.6 billion to deal with medical costs arising from serious ADRs.
They got it wrong- massively. We can clearly see in the aftermath that those countries which were the least open with the public and failed to even admit extremely rare vaccine deaths have the greatest uptake of conspiracy theories and grossly exaggerated claims, whilst those who were most open and adopted a warts-n-all approach maintained the greatest levels of trust, especially in terms of the institutions.
From a psychological standpoint, lying (or even withholding information) has a long track record of being one of the worst ways to manage public trust. People always exaggerate risks when they are kept in the dark.
One has to remember that Sweden cultivated its high levels of public trust for decades, by keeping the public informed. Education levels have little to do with it. One example concerns a BBC article from 2018 which showed that of all rapes committed in the past five years (at the time), 58% were by the foreign-born. Most countries wouldn't even consider releasing such volatile and inflammatory information- but the Swedes do it because they know it is integral to maintaining a healthy society.
The Japanese are another example. They've virtually allowed their press walk in and take information on myocarditis vaccine deaths from vaccination, eliminating probable correlation vs causation- 1,400 from a double vaccinated population of 100 million. They even have a healthy and robust discussion about toxic (small) batches, probably arising from the Danish paper which so graphically demonstrates safety signals by batch size.
Thanks for raising an interesting point. Upon further investigation, I found that both Norway and Denmark quickly raised the interval between doses to 6 weeks, in the same manner as Sweden, for the same reasons.
Also it's worth noting that both performed a little worse than Sweden, although Norway was very close (4.4% vs 5.0%). Plus, Sweden made the same significant error with nursing homes as New York, and several other states- which somewhat skews the stats- although most would have likely died from exposure in any event. Most people drastically underestimated the prevalence of T-cell immunity comparable to that conferred by jabs at the outset of pandemic (50% in the UK, from a study of blood samples first reported by BBC Future), and drastically underestimated the virality of Covid as a result.
It was far, far more contagious than most of the models predicted. It's why the granular by location detail in the UK was so useful. It showed that the second wave was largely a product of the virus spreading into areas where it hadn't struck in the first wave, where the virus had exhausted most of its food supply.
The Chinese were the smart ones on this issue. At the time they were staging their pool parties and declaring victory, the satellite imagery showed that the furnaces were continuing to burn. What they were actually doing was creating herd immunity in a population which was almost completely unaffected. A bit like North Korea removing teeth in the novel World War Z.
If by 'made the same error with nursing homes as NY' did you mean ...sent infected people from hospital to nursing homes... very little of that happened here for the simple reason that people in the nursing homes, which are set up with their own mini-hospitals almost never go to the regular hospitals. The problem we had was that the nursing homes shared staff, everything from doctors to cleaning staff. And the staff ended up speading covid, from place to place, especially in the spring of 2020, when Sweden was hit very hard and did not have enough protective supplies to go around.
Oh, OK my bad. I had only looked at the aerial view- so I apologise. That being said, masks weren't very effective. Most of the studies conclude as much. If had FFP2 or FFP3 masks which didn't allow air to escape from around the cheek area, and didn't steam up glasses, then it might have helped. Otherwise, not. They were mainly used as a placebo to reassure people- although it's also likely that the did socially engineer some mildly positive behavioural changes. It's the reason for the abrupt U-turns in many countries.
There were a lot of established practices and infrastructure which countries found had been badly planned. In the UK we had built a fleet of new hospitals using PFIs (great for the investor, not so great for the taxpayer). Unfortunately, because they had been designed for the outside to be green- easy to heat or cool- they had made sure the none of the windows had vents or sashes which could be opened, because they didn't trust their staff. This was obviously terrible for ventilation, a key consideration in terms of viral load...
It was the FFP2 and FFP3 sort of masks that it was said could have made
a difference in our big government report about what went wrong. Practically noone in Sweden thought that the other sorts of masks did much of anything, once we found out that the virus was airborne. If it was spread by water droplets, there might have been some use for masking. But the results were very clear -- the people in the nursing homes, who weren't leaving and who weren't allowed visitors were catching covid from the infected staff members. A thing that could
have helped would have been to lock up the staff members as well, and make them stay inside, as was done some places in France. I think that the will to do this on the part of the nursing home staff was lacking.
Interestingly, some nursing homes were run by people who found out that you could get FFP2 masks from China that were not certified to be that airtight. They mostly were -- they just hadn't gone through the testing phase which was a real bottleneck. So, some of the nursing homes invested in these, reasoning that it would have to be better than nothing. The newspapers howled at the time, about the terrible risks of the uncertified equipment. But when these things finally got measured, there was an appreciable effect.
They should have shut down public transport. The viral loads were simply too high. In London perfectly fit bus drivers in their 30s were dying, because the viral loads were insane. The only comparable clusters were nurses in hospitals working close to ventilation systems fed from wards with Covid patients.
Here's an interesting titbit. In the UK we had the perfect example to test the hypothesis for structural racism causing minority deaths. We have British Hindus who enjoy high SES and Pakistani/Bangladeshi British who tend to be much lower in terms of SES. The two groups are very similar genetically. I was lucky enough to watch a documentary at the time and freeze-framed the data so I could peek. It showed around a 20% disparity between the two groups. The ONS didn't release this source, and instead chose to release Hindu death rates mixed with other groups. Hence we can judge that roughly 20% of disparities in death rates by ethnicity could conceivably be claimed to be structural racism through SES disparities. The rest was genetic, or epigenetic through factors like dietary preferences.
The Lancet claims that 40% to 50% of ethnic disparities can be explained by SES. The figure is too high. People are far too squishy when judging genetic differences not related to contentious matters. Immunity probably differs more wildly by ancestor group than any other factor in human populations. With Covid, Neanderthal DNA was a huge factor. We British originally planned to ship the Irish out to man the plantations in the Caribbean. They all died from diseases. It's also one of the reasons for the Acts of Union. All of the Scottish colonies were more southerly, with disastrous consequences for the Scottish settlers, meaning their nobles wanted access to English trade wealth.
The Chinese claimed they had no new vaccine deaths or cases. That was clearly a falsehood given their crematoriums continued to burn bodies at increased levels for a long period after they stopped declaring cases and deaths.
I have no skin in this game, but I *do* like to get a very clear picture. To do this, I like to evaluate the foundations of a claim or position. The claim is that the Chinese increased cremation, ostensibly due to COVID deaths, and that this was detectable in some fashion and can be seen in some sort of statistic.
Can you point toward any possible supporting sources for this sort of data?
Thanks. Again, I don't care one way or the other, but I *do* want to get it right.
1. A way more interesting country is Belarus, the ONLY country in Europe where they had ZERO lockdowns, ZERO mask mandates and, most importantly, ZERO vaccines.
Today, Belarus is NOT seeing its young athletes, very young children, the youth and generally speaking other seemingly healthy people of whatever age suddenly dropping dead or developing serious heart or circulatory problems of all kinds, "turbo cancers" (an expression Western oncologists invented to describe what they began to see since the vaccines) i.e. extremely aggressive cancers rapidly spreading and metastasizing and cancers which were seemingly succesfully treated and in remission suddenly aggressively reactivating, nervous system problems, autoimmune diseases which were latent (like your psoriasis) or in their remissive phase reactivating and so on.
2. How did you protect your immunosuppressed elderly mother when we know that, among the many outstanding lies we were told about COVID and the vaccines, one of the few which they eventually had to admit was that the vaccines DO NOT prevent trasmission? AT ALL. They had to switch the narrative to "the vaccine reduces the symptoms and the risk of more serious consequences from getting COVID".
Actually, we now know that there is a positive correlation between the number of doses you received and the probability of getting infected and RE-infected so if anything you put your mother at greater risk (and you activated your latent psoriasis to boot, which may have or may have not ever entered its active phase).
>Actually, we now know that there is a positive correlation between the number of doses you received and the probability of getting infected and RE-infected so if anything you put your mother at greater risk (and you activated your latent psoriasis to boot, which may have or may have not ever entered its active phase).
Second time you claimed this. What is the evidence?
P.S. Forgot to add: the link I sent is also very important to highlight the true nature of the COVID hoax and how much it all was really driven by "science"...
The first official guidelines regarding immunodepressed individuals (and I am one) throughout the West (generally speaking, I don't know the specifics of each and every country) were that they were exempted from the vaccine because it probably wouldn't have worked and it was not worth the marginal risk THEN it was recommended just like for the rest of the people because the vaccines were "safe and effective" and THEN the official guidelines actually called for MORE doses for immunodepressed individuals...
As if they didn't know how the vaccines actually worked (despite ALWAYS maintaining the same official line and explanation) and/or how the immune system of both healthy and immunodepressed individuals work.
Testing for antibodies (pre and after vaccine) was also not only not required or advised or left to the individual but it was actually discouraged!
Bunch of criminal clowns!
I didn't take anything and I am as good as I was before this COVID IQ test.
Sorry for the late reply but the notification for this got lost among others, I will keep this short because I am not sure if you are going to read it.
Briefly: I don't keep a record of everything that I read and where to find it again, I found those studies (from reputable "boomer tech" institutions...) most probably through Substack but I follow a bunch of people and I use in general very many sources (or content aggregators who provide sources) and I couldn't find them.
You have been given by others a few pointers through which you can also find other sources on this matter if this really interests you.
BUT: even though Google is pretty bad in finding articles on Substack and also trying a general search to directly find those studies on the matter at hand is not surprisingly basically useless just like for all of the other subjects they want to push a certain narrative about, something usually slips through so I found this:
The study referenced on the US National Library of Medicine - National Center for Biotechnology Information shows how the more doses of vaccines you inject the more your immune system gets weakened and the more probable it is that you get infected and reinfected by COVID.
Granted, the study is about immunocompromised (but with a WORKING immune system) subjects but if you have a basic medical knowledge and you read the study you know that the EXACT SAME processes and dynamics work for individuals with a healthy immune system, and the 2 studies I read and can't find right now in fact showed the exact same results for individuals with a healthy immune system [and BTW in medical terms in Italian we would call the subjects of the study linked "immunodepressed" because "immunocompromised" more properly identifies individuals whose immune system is working in different ways/differently because of various reasons instead of simply just working "less well", immunocompromised individuals are a subset of immunodepressed ones].
‘National Estimate (March 2020–March 2021): The Cyber Partisans hacker group, analyzing data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs' passport database, reported over 32,000 excess deaths nationwide during this period. This figure is approximately 14 times higher than the official COVID-19 death count reported by the Ministry of Public Health for the same timeframe.’
Plus, the vaccine wasn’t entirely ineffective at limiting virus spread. The information which did manage to slip through the censorship industrial complex in the UK and in France (Google missed our region on this one particular point) showed that it reduced the blocking of the capacity to spread to 60%. That’s bloody useless if you’re exposing yourself to multiple potential vectors every day. But if your total number of indoor contacts are five people a week, it at least helps a little.
I only took the initial double dose. I stopped mum’s vaccines with the onset of omicron. I had read the literature from John Hopkins on the immunosuppressed, and was willing to balance the risk of increased IgG4 antibodies, against the likelihood that her immune response to the vaccine was initially very low. Plus, her initial injections were Astra Zeneca (the risk was about one in 650K for that particular vaccine, BTW) She has weekly methotrexate injections.
I am a 50yo with a serious primary (basically meaning genetic) immunodeficency whose onset was 10 years ago (up to that time I had been extremely healthy my whole life), I also developed secondary (basically meaning as a "consequence" of my immunodeficency) Sjogren Sindrome, a terrifiyng autoimmune desease which for me is way worse than the immunodeficency itself and thank God has been in remission for the last few years.
I have done some medical studies and I know enough to understand how certain things work and to understand medical studies.
Living at the time in Italy I and my wife went through HELL for refusing to take the vaccine, which we never did.
The end result was that I am still alive and still exactly as (un)healthy as I was 5 years ago and this after my wife (a heathy 34yo) got the Delta variant (supposedly the worst one to hit Europe) in October 2020 (which for her was no worse than a mild influenza and which I either didn't get or I was one of those famous "asymptomatics" even though we did ZERO "social-distancing"...), we wore masks only when actually forced, we had "illegal" parties with friends (ALL of whom but one were vaccinated and all of whom had COVID, many of them multiple times especially since Omicron, and after one of those parties, when we celebrated the 2022 New Year, several of the attendees came down AGAIN with COVID but not I and my wife nor the other unvaccinated friend who already had had COVID once).
My father is 86, not vaccinated and either never got COVID or was asymptomatic, my sister is 49 not vaccinated and got the Omicron variant with very mild simptoms, my mother is 76, vaccinated with 3 doses and got a stroke, her mild diabetes became more serious, started to suffer much worse cardiovascular hypertension, developed a benign tumor in the nose and got COVID twice one with mild symptoms and the other one with more serious ones, my brother and his GF, both 42 and vaccinated with 2 doses got COVID thrice, always with mild symptoms, and suddenly developed various illnesses. As for my immediate family from my wife's side, her brother (and his wife) and her parents did not get vaccinated (they fled to Russia from the Donbas and were all living there at the time) and they don't even know if they ever got COVID since nobody were interested to test for it (which was free and encouraged) when they got the usual cold in the winter... Needless to say, they all were and are, as we say in Italy, "healthy as a fish".
You have my deepest sympathies for your condition and the vile treatment you received. Of those who worked for the NHS and refused the vaccine, many had serious autoimmune disorders. It's a problem with organisations at scale- a large corporation or government are equally likely to dehumanise people, although government takes the edge for possessing more power.
A part of its stems from distance, the degrees of separation, but the bigger part is the tendency to categorise and systematise people. Categorisation and systematise are generally of great use in solving problems, but people aren't problems and they shouldn't be solved. It's dehumanising and inhumane.
It won't surprise you to know that a recent survey of UK small businesses showed that workers polled stated they were either very happy or extremely happy with their workplace. Large corporations and governments are the reverse.
The other thing that irks is that it's so unprofessional. It only takes the most basic research online to recognise that serious autoimmune disorders are a problem in terms of vaccinations.
Why do you think these matter? Age is already taken into account in the model. In any case, you can just look at e.g. Euromomo to see that almost all excess deaths in 2020-2023 are in the oldest cohorts.
If you look, you see that no country had any excess deaths in the age cohort 14-, and most countries have one or more waves of excess deaths in the 65+ cohort.
Exactly. In the early days of the scamdemic, accurate stat’s were hard to come by, but after the first year, the best evidence was that most all the populous would not benefit from the vaccine. This of course was unacceptable to “big pharma”. It’s as simple as that. They captured our regulatory authorities and killed/injured 10’s of thousands of ignorant and frightened people to the overall benefit of no one except their stock holders.
To prove that “some people benefited” is to insult all those who now suffer from the vaccine’s adverse “side effects” or the “lock downs”.
"We investigated the validity of claims of the healthy vaccinee effect (HVE) in COVID-vaccine studies by analyzing associations between all-cause mortality (ACM) and COVID-19 vaccination status." https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2024.02.019
While this undermines the conclusions from the case-control studies, it also funnily suggests that vaccine refusers are even more unhealthy to begin with. Own goal?
So what? The claim in question in your post is about the vaccine, not about correlates to rebelliousness (&etc.).
The fundamental suspicious thing is why didn't a placebo arm run longer in the RCTs? Could it be that, in Pfizer's adult RCT for example, all cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group? "there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the COMIRNATY group and 17 in the placebo group" https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download#page=23
So the pharma companies and government can claim "well, the RTC was unclear" while we argue about correlations and confounds.
They didn't because their data indicated the vaccine protects against the surrogate measures and legal regulations stipulate it is unethical to continue trials when evidence of benefit is clear (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study).
It's hard to say whether or not there were any benefits for older people considering how many died in nursing homes during the eight or nine months of lockdown before the gene therapies (not vaccines) were released. In other words, those who had the worse health may have already been culled, so to speak.
Interesting, but you simply do not have the medical depth to properly analyze this. You enjoy being the contrarian but when you move out of your field of expertise you tend to flail. Your autism is just better diagnosis is won example of a major fail. This is another. Read Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson here on Substack. Or better yet debate them. Each present your evidence and hash it out. I challenge you to reach out to them.
I think "This is simply the number of vaccine shots given per 100 persons. Maybe one should use instead % of people with at least 1 shot, or those with 'complete coverage' (1-2 depending on vaccine type)." is doing much of the work here. How the count of "number of shots given" is developed is tricky, because many approximate that using number shipped/produced/purchased, some try counting the number given which is awkward because of multiple shots per person and fake shots, and telling which is which across countries is very difficult. That's even before you get to outright data fraud. When I see a bad metric used like shots per 100 persons instead of percentage of vaccinated vs nonvaccinated, a number that should be available, I start to suspect that the people making the data available have distinct preferences about what the analysis says, or that the analysts are picking the data set that best produces their preferred outcome.
I don't mean to accuse you of bias in your numbers; I think you do very good work. One should instead be very suspicious of why such a clunky and obviously flawed metric as number of shots per 100 persons would be the available metric, and why people would be saying "nah, this is good enough". I am an economist, and if the government said 'Look, we don't have data on individual or household income at the state level, but we have data on how many cars people own per capita by state, and that's just as good!" I would be highly suspicious. (I am pretty suspicious of most government data in general, but that would be a huge red flag with "Look for lies here!" on it.)
The data are public, so I invite you to download the other vaccine metrics and try those. I know economists like trying every variant of some metric and it is sensible to check for consistency. This post is not an academic paper however, at least not yet.
Yes, a coronavirus may have been circulating, but the IFR was somewhere between 0.1% (John Ioannidis) to 0.26% (CDC). Of course, the infection rates were based on the PCR test which seems to have been set up to provide a higher case rate than what may have actually occurred. As Norman Fenton, Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler recently explained, the PCR test used to detect Covid seems to have been designed to cross-react with other viruses, that it was " actually testing a single genetic characteristic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus rather than two or more as required, and one that might be similar to those present in other viruses."
In other words, the flu may not have disappeared, nor did rhinoviruses or adenoviruses. They were simply placed called Covid.
Lockdowns should never have been instituted, even if everything the powers-that-be claimed about Covid had been true. Know why? Evolution. Respiratory viruses mutate quickly, and they always mutate into less virulent strains. This is because people who are sick enough to stay home and stay in bed... who have a more virulent strain... are less likely to spread the virus than people who feel well enough to go to work or to the grocery store because they were infected by one of the weaker strains. People who are exposed to the weaker strains also develop some immunity against the more virulent strains. This is why people should have been allowed to continue with their normal routines.
Regarding the "jab", first, it is not a vaccine. It is an experimental gene therapy. The FDA even lists the Pfizer and Moderna "jabs" as gene therapies when issuing the "emergency authorization". Second, other people have run the numbers, including Fenton, Neil and Mathew Crawford, and came up with a different conclusion. Also, considering how the PCR test was abused, we really don't know the infection rate for Covid, or how many deaths were caused by the isolation (especially among the elderly) due to lockdowns, bacterial infections caused wearing useless and reused face masks, or due to iatrogenic disorders caused by ventilators, Remdesivir, and so on.
At this point, the only question regarding Covid should be why damn near every government put into place such draconian measures for a virus that was no worse than a bad flu and maybe not even that bad. I have some theories, including a perceived need by the parasites at the top to put into place a controlled collapse of the economy, or to use vaccine (vexxine?) mandates to con people into going along with the installation of digital IDs, digital currency and a social credit score.
Is it correct to say that if you were a young healthy male, getting vaccinated probably did not help you much but would benefit older or otherwise morbid populations?
Or did a young man’s vaccination status have neutral/no impact on older/morbid populations?
If you were a normal <40 year old, there was almost no health benefit in taking the vaccine, and it might have been net negative health wise due to rare side effects.
What people often forget is that in early 2020 in the west, as the infections spread and mortality was portrayed in the media as high, populations were panicky and the governments made policy whose primary function was to suppress incipient panic.
It's easy to now say that younger healthy adults had little to fear from a COVID infection *even if unvaccinated*. But at the time the policies erred on the side of caution and especially reassurance.
In early 2020, we didn't know the age dependency of the mortality well, so it made sense to be pro-lockdown. I was pro-caution then. But after wave 1, it was clear, at least in Denmark, that mortality was basically 0 in younger people, so what was the point of lockdowns? Nothing really.
But I'm old enough to expect such silliness from what passes as "leadership" in the post-Modern west. They basically stood up as "experts" and went the cautious route, then refused to lose face by essentially admitting that they overdid it.
Thanks for the analysis and article. The right has legitimate criticisms over lock down and the behavior of elite institutions. But social pressure and non-autism prevents them from acknowledging that the vaccine was a success.
This analysis, with its acknowledged limitations, does counter claims that the mRNA shots (distinctly different from all previous vaccines) cause deadly harm to some people, but I'm concerned that it says nothing about non-lethal effects. The harm to some portion of the population under, say, 30 years old is now documented, despite being suppressed earlier. In North America, especially in Canada, there were campaigns to administer the Covid shots, including boosters, to even young children. I haven't seen any sign that the serious health damage that resulted for some has been researched, but it's clear that death isn't the only negative outcome that has occurred. The adverse events databases may not be sufficiently informative or reliable to support meaningful analysis similar to what you've done for excess deaths, but it would be a very valuable analysis.
V neat study. BUT, correlational so at best suggestive of possible causalityy. More important, its country level and county level and individual level correlational results are often at variance; and here it's the individual level that really matters. The real issue here is that all vaccines have risks, and of course possible benefits. That benefits outweight harms needs to be eestablihsed by a large, ideally long term, placebo (an inert placebo too) double bllind control trial. This was not done for Covid vacccines, indeed very few vaccines in current use have been adequatleyy tested to ensure their safety or relative benefit (as other drugs have to be before they can be approved). On top of this vaccine makers have been granted total immunity from being sued for any harms caused (something other drugs do not have). Vaccine sceptics are simply asking that vaccines be adequatelu tested before being approved and rolled out at enormous financial cost to populatinios (but of course enormous financial benefit to pharma).
Thanks for a different look at the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Substack has been flooded daily with articles to the contrary, whose authors, I feel, are using the narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful to make money from those who believe everything is a conspiracy. You may well get some pushback.
It seems to me that the “pushback” as you term it misses the point. The point being that the vaccine was *mandated*, even if only through tacit coercion—when to my knowledge it has never been shown to *prevent* transmission of disease. Such was even disclaimed in the original safety studies in JAMA, so we cannot forgive our medical authorities for acting in such fashion, i.e., there was *no* societal benefit to mandating unwanted vaccinations. In a supposed free country, this situation is intolerable, or at least incongruent. We are not cattle to be raised and kept for the benefit the State.
Few folk I follow suggest the vaccine was “ineffective”, only that the cost/benefit of inoculation was woefully exaggerated—especially across age cohorts. The sides in this controversy have been drawn. The issue of “preventable” adverse effects of this vaccine is well established. Future “pandemics” will come to such a head sooner over any universal mandates. A frighten populous is a dangerous and despicable thing. An ignorant authoritarian medical body is deadly.
(the vaccine) "to my knowledge it has never been shown to *prevent* transmission of disease."
Among the many outstanding lies we were told about COVID and the vaccines, one of the few which they eventually had to admit was that the vaccines DO NOT prevent trasmission. AT ALL. They had to switch the narrative to "the vaccine reduces the symptoms and the risk of more serious consequences from getting COVID".
Actually, we now know that there is a positive correlation between the number of doses you received and the probability of getting infected and RE-infected.
Yes, and I might add that the safety study from Pharmacia that was published in JAMA and became their “use” label (which I read personally), specifically stated that the vaccine was not claimed as preventing spread of disease. This claim came from the CDC as was baseless at the time, and as near as I can tell, still is. The importance to my argument is that forcing vaccination had no foundation in societal necessity as well as being a violation of basic rights.
"Few folk I follow suggest the vaccine was “ineffective”, only that the cost/benefit of inoculation was woefully exaggerated—especially across age cohorts."
I don't care who you follow, what difference does that make? The people I am referring to are rabid about the Covid-19 vaccine's 'ineffectiveness', sometimes posting two or three articles a day about the same crap since they were first offered. Their obsession is ridiculous.
But I am against mandating vaccines.
The comment refers to whether or not there is meaningful controversy wrt effectiveness of vaccine or whether you are seeing a small handful of fanatics with time on their hands who post myriad commentary disproportionate to their numbers or knowledge.
They have a very strong following.
If I understand the debate that is developing today, the objection to the vaccines should not be whether or not they had a positive effect as defined by less surplus deaths during the COVID period (according to the article, they did), but whether the state can/should enforce vaccinations on individuals if there is no demonstrated reduction in the transmission of the virus.
I suspect that many of those most strongly criticizing the COVID policies of enforced or "strongly encouraged" mass vaccination are motivated by the idea of external enforcement on the individual by the state: they might, in fact, still object even if the vaccine was shown to be strongly effective at reducing transmission. For them, it is entirely a civil rights issue.
That's a valid objection, but many seek to bolster their argument's moral strength by claiming that: a) the vaccines were entirely ineffective, statistically; b) the vaccines were themselves harmful; c) the drive to vaccinate large portions of the population were primarily profit driven, with no benefit to those vaccinated. All of these are questionable at best, and completely inaccurate at worst. Those making such claims lose credibility and respect.
They should just stick to the argument that the individual has priority over social policies. That at least would be an honest position, demonstrating intellectual integrity.
That is what I said.
Nah, I think you are one of the real ones who would be with me during the real zombie apocalypse. We would be at gun point forcing people to be vaccinated. Otherwise they could turn into zombies and kill us.
Here is an example of the type of article I was referring to. This is rehashed ad nauseam.
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/the-fall-of-the-biopharmaceutical?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=m4hsd&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I have looked at your citation. Not sure it changes anything I’ve said. They have a point of view, but I have no idea who they are to evaluate credibility. People find sites that suit their biases. I tend to follow people I find authoritative. For example, Jay Bhattacharya, who has been picked as the Director of NIH recently I believe. He has been a critic of the COVID vaccination program since its roll out, but is not a critic per se of vaccines.
"I have looked at your citation. Not sure it changes anything I’ve said. They have a point of view, but I have no idea who they are to evaluate credibility."
Exactly. They feel free to pontificate verbosely about their suppositions. That is my point.
Yeah, but what can we do? You read and listen to my “rantings”, but who am I? That’s the problem with (true) free speech. You got to give it to the loons to preserve it for yourself. Another good example is our host for this exchange, Kirkegaard. He’d never see the light of day for most of his research/postings/commentary without such a forum as this.
"That’s the problem with (true) free speech. You got to give it to the loons to preserve it for yourself."
True, but I never suggested taking it away from them. I should have worded my last sentence better.
Here is my position on speech. There are two kinds of speech: free and controlled. I most definitely prefer the former.
A potential problem I see is something like a "healthy vaccine user bias". At least in a few countries that I know of, people who got more vaccines were significantly different than non users or people with less vaccines (more health conscious, higher socioeconomic status, ... ). A common finding with taking these things into account is a null finding for younger populations and a dampened advantage for older and other vulnerable populations (through still significant and absolutely enough to justify a recommendation).
This is a concern for case-control studies (person-level study within a country), but this is a between country-study. Healthy vaccinee bias here would mean that it just so happens that countries with more vaccines were also to begin with less susceptible to COVID for whatever reason. The most obvious point against this is that the more vaccinating countries are much older (r = 0.58), and older people are much, much more susceptible. If one wants to claim another unmeasured variable that goes in the other direction, it is hard to square with these numbers. What do you have in mind?
No, you are perfectly right. Seems like I was confused about what the underlying data actually is. Through the higher vaccine countries do seem to have better medical ressources on average (through if there is a significant impact, I can not see it clearly from your plot).
Well, hard to measure medical resources or efficiency, but GDPpc correlates also with vaccination rates and lower excess deaths (correlation matrix is in the bottom). But in the full model these are included, and they make the effect of vaccines slightly stronger, not weaker.
You generally are a great data analist but the way you set about proving the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines is surprisingly superficial and dare I say "lazy" and "ingenuous"...
After some of the harsherst and strictest (and still lingering) censorship ever, in February 2025 there just is too much scientific evidence proving how harmful the mRNA vaccines were and still are and how they possibly provided a net positive risk-benefit ratio to very very few people.
There is simply too much to write here about the problems with your approach let alone about the scientific evidence we already have about the harm the COVID vaccines have done and are still doing.
You and most everybody on your substack is smart enough to go find it if really interested (as you should be, especially if you are vaccinated).
The whole COVID delirium was an IQ test and if you took the vaccine you failed it.
Your comment reads as very much a mid to low wit response. Confirmed by your last sentence.
I take it you too failed it...
Proof that you can find evidence for any pet theory. Ridiculous.
One of the most interesting countries is Sweden. Sure, the fact that people were left to manage their own risk had a huge positive impact. An old Whitehall Civil Service study found that people given responsibility without the authority to solve the problems they were tasked with were most at risk of developing health problems- and depriving people of autonomy and choice through lockdowns during the pandemic probably had a similar effect.
But the other thing which was interesting about Sweden was that they decided to give everyone one dose, before delivering the second. Average time between vaccines was around 6 weeks. This seems to have mitigated the admittedly very rare vaccine deaths, and rare serious harms from vaccines. I just got plaque psoriasis (worst on my elbows) which is a minor inconvenience compared to protecting an immunosuppressed elderly mother with a 1 in 165 chance of dying from Covid (unvaccinated). The NHS still has it's QCOVID calculator up if anyone wants to know what their actual risks were from the pre-omicron variants.
https://www.qcovid.org/
My gripe is that Western governments obviously ran a cost-benefit analysis and then decided to manage people rather than keep them informed and well-armed with information. We know as much because the UK Covid Inquiry disclosed that the British Government set aside £1.6 billion to deal with medical costs arising from serious ADRs.
They got it wrong- massively. We can clearly see in the aftermath that those countries which were the least open with the public and failed to even admit extremely rare vaccine deaths have the greatest uptake of conspiracy theories and grossly exaggerated claims, whilst those who were most open and adopted a warts-n-all approach maintained the greatest levels of trust, especially in terms of the institutions.
From a psychological standpoint, lying (or even withholding information) has a long track record of being one of the worst ways to manage public trust. People always exaggerate risks when they are kept in the dark.
One has to remember that Sweden cultivated its high levels of public trust for decades, by keeping the public informed. Education levels have little to do with it. One example concerns a BBC article from 2018 which showed that of all rapes committed in the past five years (at the time), 58% were by the foreign-born. Most countries wouldn't even consider releasing such volatile and inflammatory information- but the Swedes do it because they know it is integral to maintaining a healthy society.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45269764
The Japanese are another example. They've virtually allowed their press walk in and take information on myocarditis vaccine deaths from vaccination, eliminating probable correlation vs causation- 1,400 from a double vaccinated population of 100 million. They even have a healthy and robust discussion about toxic (small) batches, probably arising from the Danish paper which so graphically demonstrates safety signals by batch size.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13998
I agree Sweden was exemplary in this regard. How rare! And Sweden ended up with about the rate excess deaths as the rest of Scandinavia.
Thanks for raising an interesting point. Upon further investigation, I found that both Norway and Denmark quickly raised the interval between doses to 6 weeks, in the same manner as Sweden, for the same reasons.
Also it's worth noting that both performed a little worse than Sweden, although Norway was very close (4.4% vs 5.0%). Plus, Sweden made the same significant error with nursing homes as New York, and several other states- which somewhat skews the stats- although most would have likely died from exposure in any event. Most people drastically underestimated the prevalence of T-cell immunity comparable to that conferred by jabs at the outset of pandemic (50% in the UK, from a study of blood samples first reported by BBC Future), and drastically underestimated the virality of Covid as a result.
It was far, far more contagious than most of the models predicted. It's why the granular by location detail in the UK was so useful. It showed that the second wave was largely a product of the virus spreading into areas where it hadn't struck in the first wave, where the virus had exhausted most of its food supply.
The Chinese were the smart ones on this issue. At the time they were staging their pool parties and declaring victory, the satellite imagery showed that the furnaces were continuing to burn. What they were actually doing was creating herd immunity in a population which was almost completely unaffected. A bit like North Korea removing teeth in the novel World War Z.
If by 'made the same error with nursing homes as NY' did you mean ...sent infected people from hospital to nursing homes... very little of that happened here for the simple reason that people in the nursing homes, which are set up with their own mini-hospitals almost never go to the regular hospitals. The problem we had was that the nursing homes shared staff, everything from doctors to cleaning staff. And the staff ended up speading covid, from place to place, especially in the spring of 2020, when Sweden was hit very hard and did not have enough protective supplies to go around.
Oh, OK my bad. I had only looked at the aerial view- so I apologise. That being said, masks weren't very effective. Most of the studies conclude as much. If had FFP2 or FFP3 masks which didn't allow air to escape from around the cheek area, and didn't steam up glasses, then it might have helped. Otherwise, not. They were mainly used as a placebo to reassure people- although it's also likely that the did socially engineer some mildly positive behavioural changes. It's the reason for the abrupt U-turns in many countries.
There were a lot of established practices and infrastructure which countries found had been badly planned. In the UK we had built a fleet of new hospitals using PFIs (great for the investor, not so great for the taxpayer). Unfortunately, because they had been designed for the outside to be green- easy to heat or cool- they had made sure the none of the windows had vents or sashes which could be opened, because they didn't trust their staff. This was obviously terrible for ventilation, a key consideration in terms of viral load...
It was the FFP2 and FFP3 sort of masks that it was said could have made
a difference in our big government report about what went wrong. Practically noone in Sweden thought that the other sorts of masks did much of anything, once we found out that the virus was airborne. If it was spread by water droplets, there might have been some use for masking. But the results were very clear -- the people in the nursing homes, who weren't leaving and who weren't allowed visitors were catching covid from the infected staff members. A thing that could
have helped would have been to lock up the staff members as well, and make them stay inside, as was done some places in France. I think that the will to do this on the part of the nursing home staff was lacking.
Interestingly, some nursing homes were run by people who found out that you could get FFP2 masks from China that were not certified to be that airtight. They mostly were -- they just hadn't gone through the testing phase which was a real bottleneck. So, some of the nursing homes invested in these, reasoning that it would have to be better than nothing. The newspapers howled at the time, about the terrible risks of the uncertified equipment. But when these things finally got measured, there was an appreciable effect.
They should have shut down public transport. The viral loads were simply too high. In London perfectly fit bus drivers in their 30s were dying, because the viral loads were insane. The only comparable clusters were nurses in hospitals working close to ventilation systems fed from wards with Covid patients.
Here's an interesting titbit. In the UK we had the perfect example to test the hypothesis for structural racism causing minority deaths. We have British Hindus who enjoy high SES and Pakistani/Bangladeshi British who tend to be much lower in terms of SES. The two groups are very similar genetically. I was lucky enough to watch a documentary at the time and freeze-framed the data so I could peek. It showed around a 20% disparity between the two groups. The ONS didn't release this source, and instead chose to release Hindu death rates mixed with other groups. Hence we can judge that roughly 20% of disparities in death rates by ethnicity could conceivably be claimed to be structural racism through SES disparities. The rest was genetic, or epigenetic through factors like dietary preferences.
The Lancet claims that 40% to 50% of ethnic disparities can be explained by SES. The figure is too high. People are far too squishy when judging genetic differences not related to contentious matters. Immunity probably differs more wildly by ancestor group than any other factor in human populations. With Covid, Neanderthal DNA was a huge factor. We British originally planned to ship the Irish out to man the plantations in the Caribbean. They all died from diseases. It's also one of the reasons for the Acts of Union. All of the Scottish colonies were more southerly, with disastrous consequences for the Scottish settlers, meaning their nobles wanted access to English trade wealth.
"At the time they were staging their pool parties and declaring victory, the satellite imagery showed that the furnaces were continuing to burn."
Can you clarify this statement, please?
The Chinese claimed they had no new vaccine deaths or cases. That was clearly a falsehood given their crematoriums continued to burn bodies at increased levels for a long period after they stopped declaring cases and deaths.
I have no skin in this game, but I *do* like to get a very clear picture. To do this, I like to evaluate the foundations of a claim or position. The claim is that the Chinese increased cremation, ostensibly due to COVID deaths, and that this was detectable in some fashion and can be seen in some sort of statistic.
Can you point toward any possible supporting sources for this sort of data?
Thanks. Again, I don't care one way or the other, but I *do* want to get it right.
https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1760?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/20/crematoriums-in-china-struggle-as-covid-spreads?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/china-withholds-indicator-of-covid-deaths-as-cremation-data-not-released-123061600453_1.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
A couple of quick points:
1. A way more interesting country is Belarus, the ONLY country in Europe where they had ZERO lockdowns, ZERO mask mandates and, most importantly, ZERO vaccines.
Today, Belarus is NOT seeing its young athletes, very young children, the youth and generally speaking other seemingly healthy people of whatever age suddenly dropping dead or developing serious heart or circulatory problems of all kinds, "turbo cancers" (an expression Western oncologists invented to describe what they began to see since the vaccines) i.e. extremely aggressive cancers rapidly spreading and metastasizing and cancers which were seemingly succesfully treated and in remission suddenly aggressively reactivating, nervous system problems, autoimmune diseases which were latent (like your psoriasis) or in their remissive phase reactivating and so on.
2. How did you protect your immunosuppressed elderly mother when we know that, among the many outstanding lies we were told about COVID and the vaccines, one of the few which they eventually had to admit was that the vaccines DO NOT prevent trasmission? AT ALL. They had to switch the narrative to "the vaccine reduces the symptoms and the risk of more serious consequences from getting COVID".
Actually, we now know that there is a positive correlation between the number of doses you received and the probability of getting infected and RE-infected so if anything you put your mother at greater risk (and you activated your latent psoriasis to boot, which may have or may have not ever entered its active phase).
>Actually, we now know that there is a positive correlation between the number of doses you received and the probability of getting infected and RE-infected so if anything you put your mother at greater risk (and you activated your latent psoriasis to boot, which may have or may have not ever entered its active phase).
Second time you claimed this. What is the evidence?
P.S. Forgot to add: the link I sent is also very important to highlight the true nature of the COVID hoax and how much it all was really driven by "science"...
The first official guidelines regarding immunodepressed individuals (and I am one) throughout the West (generally speaking, I don't know the specifics of each and every country) were that they were exempted from the vaccine because it probably wouldn't have worked and it was not worth the marginal risk THEN it was recommended just like for the rest of the people because the vaccines were "safe and effective" and THEN the official guidelines actually called for MORE doses for immunodepressed individuals...
As if they didn't know how the vaccines actually worked (despite ALWAYS maintaining the same official line and explanation) and/or how the immune system of both healthy and immunodepressed individuals work.
Testing for antibodies (pre and after vaccine) was also not only not required or advised or left to the individual but it was actually discouraged!
Bunch of criminal clowns!
I didn't take anything and I am as good as I was before this COVID IQ test.
Sorry for the late reply but the notification for this got lost among others, I will keep this short because I am not sure if you are going to read it.
Briefly: I don't keep a record of everything that I read and where to find it again, I found those studies (from reputable "boomer tech" institutions...) most probably through Substack but I follow a bunch of people and I use in general very many sources (or content aggregators who provide sources) and I couldn't find them.
You have been given by others a few pointers through which you can also find other sources on this matter if this really interests you.
BUT: even though Google is pretty bad in finding articles on Substack and also trying a general search to directly find those studies on the matter at hand is not surprisingly basically useless just like for all of the other subjects they want to push a certain narrative about, something usually slips through so I found this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10821957/
The study referenced on the US National Library of Medicine - National Center for Biotechnology Information shows how the more doses of vaccines you inject the more your immune system gets weakened and the more probable it is that you get infected and reinfected by COVID.
Granted, the study is about immunocompromised (but with a WORKING immune system) subjects but if you have a basic medical knowledge and you read the study you know that the EXACT SAME processes and dynamics work for individuals with a healthy immune system, and the 2 studies I read and can't find right now in fact showed the exact same results for individuals with a healthy immune system [and BTW in medical terms in Italian we would call the subjects of the study linked "immunodepressed" because "immunocompromised" more properly identifies individuals whose immune system is working in different ways/differently because of various reasons instead of simply just working "less well", immunocompromised individuals are a subset of immunodepressed ones].
Ciao
I meant in terms of going on the information we had available at the time. We mostly shielded until omicron arrived.
‘National Estimate (March 2020–March 2021): The Cyber Partisans hacker group, analyzing data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs' passport database, reported over 32,000 excess deaths nationwide during this period. This figure is approximately 14 times higher than the official COVID-19 death count reported by the Ministry of Public Health for the same timeframe.’
Chat GPT 4.0
Plus, the vaccine wasn’t entirely ineffective at limiting virus spread. The information which did manage to slip through the censorship industrial complex in the UK and in France (Google missed our region on this one particular point) showed that it reduced the blocking of the capacity to spread to 60%. That’s bloody useless if you’re exposing yourself to multiple potential vectors every day. But if your total number of indoor contacts are five people a week, it at least helps a little.
I only took the initial double dose. I stopped mum’s vaccines with the onset of omicron. I had read the literature from John Hopkins on the immunosuppressed, and was willing to balance the risk of increased IgG4 antibodies, against the likelihood that her immune response to the vaccine was initially very low. Plus, her initial injections were Astra Zeneca (the risk was about one in 650K for that particular vaccine, BTW) She has weekly methotrexate injections.
I am a 50yo with a serious primary (basically meaning genetic) immunodeficency whose onset was 10 years ago (up to that time I had been extremely healthy my whole life), I also developed secondary (basically meaning as a "consequence" of my immunodeficency) Sjogren Sindrome, a terrifiyng autoimmune desease which for me is way worse than the immunodeficency itself and thank God has been in remission for the last few years.
I have done some medical studies and I know enough to understand how certain things work and to understand medical studies.
Living at the time in Italy I and my wife went through HELL for refusing to take the vaccine, which we never did.
The end result was that I am still alive and still exactly as (un)healthy as I was 5 years ago and this after my wife (a heathy 34yo) got the Delta variant (supposedly the worst one to hit Europe) in October 2020 (which for her was no worse than a mild influenza and which I either didn't get or I was one of those famous "asymptomatics" even though we did ZERO "social-distancing"...), we wore masks only when actually forced, we had "illegal" parties with friends (ALL of whom but one were vaccinated and all of whom had COVID, many of them multiple times especially since Omicron, and after one of those parties, when we celebrated the 2022 New Year, several of the attendees came down AGAIN with COVID but not I and my wife nor the other unvaccinated friend who already had had COVID once).
My father is 86, not vaccinated and either never got COVID or was asymptomatic, my sister is 49 not vaccinated and got the Omicron variant with very mild simptoms, my mother is 76, vaccinated with 3 doses and got a stroke, her mild diabetes became more serious, started to suffer much worse cardiovascular hypertension, developed a benign tumor in the nose and got COVID twice one with mild symptoms and the other one with more serious ones, my brother and his GF, both 42 and vaccinated with 2 doses got COVID thrice, always with mild symptoms, and suddenly developed various illnesses. As for my immediate family from my wife's side, her brother (and his wife) and her parents did not get vaccinated (they fled to Russia from the Donbas and were all living there at the time) and they don't even know if they ever got COVID since nobody were interested to test for it (which was free and encouraged) when they got the usual cold in the winter... Needless to say, they all were and are, as we say in Italy, "healthy as a fish".
You have my deepest sympathies for your condition and the vile treatment you received. Of those who worked for the NHS and refused the vaccine, many had serious autoimmune disorders. It's a problem with organisations at scale- a large corporation or government are equally likely to dehumanise people, although government takes the edge for possessing more power.
A part of its stems from distance, the degrees of separation, but the bigger part is the tendency to categorise and systematise people. Categorisation and systematise are generally of great use in solving problems, but people aren't problems and they shouldn't be solved. It's dehumanising and inhumane.
It won't surprise you to know that a recent survey of UK small businesses showed that workers polled stated they were either very happy or extremely happy with their workplace. Large corporations and governments are the reverse.
The other thing that irks is that it's so unprofessional. It only takes the most basic research online to recognise that serious autoimmune disorders are a problem in terms of vaccinations.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
And best wishes to you and your mother for your health problems.
If only you had age-stratified death stats.
Why do you think these matter? Age is already taken into account in the model. In any case, you can just look at e.g. Euromomo to see that almost all excess deaths in 2020-2023 are in the oldest cohorts.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
If you look, you see that no country had any excess deaths in the age cohort 14-, and most countries have one or more waves of excess deaths in the 65+ cohort.
Exactly. In the early days of the scamdemic, accurate stat’s were hard to come by, but after the first year, the best evidence was that most all the populous would not benefit from the vaccine. This of course was unacceptable to “big pharma”. It’s as simple as that. They captured our regulatory authorities and killed/injured 10’s of thousands of ignorant and frightened people to the overall benefit of no one except their stock holders.
To prove that “some people benefited” is to insult all those who now suffer from the vaccine’s adverse “side effects” or the “lock downs”.
"We investigated the validity of claims of the healthy vaccinee effect (HVE) in COVID-vaccine studies by analyzing associations between all-cause mortality (ACM) and COVID-19 vaccination status." https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2024.02.019
While this undermines the conclusions from the case-control studies, it also funnily suggests that vaccine refusers are even more unhealthy to begin with. Own goal?
This is the pushback I mentioned.
So what? The claim in question in your post is about the vaccine, not about correlates to rebelliousness (&etc.).
The fundamental suspicious thing is why didn't a placebo arm run longer in the RCTs? Could it be that, in Pfizer's adult RCT for example, all cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group? "there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the COMIRNATY group and 17 in the placebo group" https://www.fda.gov/media/151733/download#page=23
So the pharma companies and government can claim "well, the RTC was unclear" while we argue about correlations and confounds.
They didn't because their data indicated the vaccine protects against the surrogate measures and legal regulations stipulate it is unethical to continue trials when evidence of benefit is clear (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study).
"Vaccines were good...". No. It is age and risk dependent. No need for a healtjy young person to take the vaccine. Oldsters yes.
OK, but that's the same thing I said in my post.
It's hard to say whether or not there were any benefits for older people considering how many died in nursing homes during the eight or nine months of lockdown before the gene therapies (not vaccines) were released. In other words, those who had the worse health may have already been culled, so to speak.
Interesting, but you simply do not have the medical depth to properly analyze this. You enjoy being the contrarian but when you move out of your field of expertise you tend to flail. Your autism is just better diagnosis is won example of a major fail. This is another. Read Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson here on Substack. Or better yet debate them. Each present your evidence and hash it out. I challenge you to reach out to them.
"Your autism is just better diagnosis is won (sic) example of a major fail.
Speaking of failure.
So profound
"So profound"
Indeed it is. And it is so sad that you mistook won for one.
I think "This is simply the number of vaccine shots given per 100 persons. Maybe one should use instead % of people with at least 1 shot, or those with 'complete coverage' (1-2 depending on vaccine type)." is doing much of the work here. How the count of "number of shots given" is developed is tricky, because many approximate that using number shipped/produced/purchased, some try counting the number given which is awkward because of multiple shots per person and fake shots, and telling which is which across countries is very difficult. That's even before you get to outright data fraud. When I see a bad metric used like shots per 100 persons instead of percentage of vaccinated vs nonvaccinated, a number that should be available, I start to suspect that the people making the data available have distinct preferences about what the analysis says, or that the analysts are picking the data set that best produces their preferred outcome.
I don't mean to accuse you of bias in your numbers; I think you do very good work. One should instead be very suspicious of why such a clunky and obviously flawed metric as number of shots per 100 persons would be the available metric, and why people would be saying "nah, this is good enough". I am an economist, and if the government said 'Look, we don't have data on individual or household income at the state level, but we have data on how many cars people own per capita by state, and that's just as good!" I would be highly suspicious. (I am pretty suspicious of most government data in general, but that would be a huge red flag with "Look for lies here!" on it.)
The data are public, so I invite you to download the other vaccine metrics and try those. I know economists like trying every variant of some metric and it is sensible to check for consistency. This post is not an academic paper however, at least not yet.
If I get some free time I will if something interesting can't be pulled together.
Covid was a psyop and nothing more.
Yes, a coronavirus may have been circulating, but the IFR was somewhere between 0.1% (John Ioannidis) to 0.26% (CDC). Of course, the infection rates were based on the PCR test which seems to have been set up to provide a higher case rate than what may have actually occurred. As Norman Fenton, Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler recently explained, the PCR test used to detect Covid seems to have been designed to cross-react with other viruses, that it was " actually testing a single genetic characteristic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus rather than two or more as required, and one that might be similar to those present in other viruses."
In other words, the flu may not have disappeared, nor did rhinoviruses or adenoviruses. They were simply placed called Covid.
Lockdowns should never have been instituted, even if everything the powers-that-be claimed about Covid had been true. Know why? Evolution. Respiratory viruses mutate quickly, and they always mutate into less virulent strains. This is because people who are sick enough to stay home and stay in bed... who have a more virulent strain... are less likely to spread the virus than people who feel well enough to go to work or to the grocery store because they were infected by one of the weaker strains. People who are exposed to the weaker strains also develop some immunity against the more virulent strains. This is why people should have been allowed to continue with their normal routines.
Regarding the "jab", first, it is not a vaccine. It is an experimental gene therapy. The FDA even lists the Pfizer and Moderna "jabs" as gene therapies when issuing the "emergency authorization". Second, other people have run the numbers, including Fenton, Neil and Mathew Crawford, and came up with a different conclusion. Also, considering how the PCR test was abused, we really don't know the infection rate for Covid, or how many deaths were caused by the isolation (especially among the elderly) due to lockdowns, bacterial infections caused wearing useless and reused face masks, or due to iatrogenic disorders caused by ventilators, Remdesivir, and so on.
At this point, the only question regarding Covid should be why damn near every government put into place such draconian measures for a virus that was no worse than a bad flu and maybe not even that bad. I have some theories, including a perceived need by the parasites at the top to put into place a controlled collapse of the economy, or to use vaccine (vexxine?) mandates to con people into going along with the installation of digital IDs, digital currency and a social credit score.
Is it correct to say that if you were a young healthy male, getting vaccinated probably did not help you much but would benefit older or otherwise morbid populations?
Or did a young man’s vaccination status have neutral/no impact on older/morbid populations?
If you were a normal <40 year old, there was almost no health benefit in taking the vaccine, and it might have been net negative health wise due to rare side effects.
What people often forget is that in early 2020 in the west, as the infections spread and mortality was portrayed in the media as high, populations were panicky and the governments made policy whose primary function was to suppress incipient panic.
It's easy to now say that younger healthy adults had little to fear from a COVID infection *even if unvaccinated*. But at the time the policies erred on the side of caution and especially reassurance.
They were trying to *look* like they had a plan.
In early 2020, we didn't know the age dependency of the mortality well, so it made sense to be pro-lockdown. I was pro-caution then. But after wave 1, it was clear, at least in Denmark, that mortality was basically 0 in younger people, so what was the point of lockdowns? Nothing really.
Yes, it appeared that way to me, too, in the US.
But I'm old enough to expect such silliness from what passes as "leadership" in the post-Modern west. They basically stood up as "experts" and went the cautious route, then refused to lose face by essentially admitting that they overdid it.
Thanks for the analysis and article. The right has legitimate criticisms over lock down and the behavior of elite institutions. But social pressure and non-autism prevents them from acknowledging that the vaccine was a success.
Vaccines were good, lockdown was very bad. Opposition to COVID measures results in opposition to both but that's a mistake.
Vaccines were okay for the old. Useless to harmful for the young. Vaccine mandates were also very bad.
This analysis, with its acknowledged limitations, does counter claims that the mRNA shots (distinctly different from all previous vaccines) cause deadly harm to some people, but I'm concerned that it says nothing about non-lethal effects. The harm to some portion of the population under, say, 30 years old is now documented, despite being suppressed earlier. In North America, especially in Canada, there were campaigns to administer the Covid shots, including boosters, to even young children. I haven't seen any sign that the serious health damage that resulted for some has been researched, but it's clear that death isn't the only negative outcome that has occurred. The adverse events databases may not be sufficiently informative or reliable to support meaningful analysis similar to what you've done for excess deaths, but it would be a very valuable analysis.
One of the few government-sponsored studies of government response to the pandemic that included review of vaccination campaigns was done for Alberta, Canada: https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/88bbf80e-f8c8-4355-b751-c2086e204b34/resource/73efb35c-41d9-4264-881d-15a1f76861d3/download/hlth-albertas-covid-19-pandemic-response-2025-01-revised-biographies.pdf
It resulted in Alberta suspending the use of Covid vaccines, based on risk-benefit data.
More mRNA vaccines.
India has given vaccine but as per the graph, there aren’t excess mortality.
India has also supplied to many nations and if a study is made it will make a case against mRNA industry
V neat study. BUT, correlational so at best suggestive of possible causalityy. More important, its country level and county level and individual level correlational results are often at variance; and here it's the individual level that really matters. The real issue here is that all vaccines have risks, and of course possible benefits. That benefits outweight harms needs to be eestablihsed by a large, ideally long term, placebo (an inert placebo too) double bllind control trial. This was not done for Covid vacccines, indeed very few vaccines in current use have been adequatleyy tested to ensure their safety or relative benefit (as other drugs have to be before they can be approved). On top of this vaccine makers have been granted total immunity from being sued for any harms caused (something other drugs do not have). Vaccine sceptics are simply asking that vaccines be adequatelu tested before being approved and rolled out at enormous financial cost to populatinios (but of course enormous financial benefit to pharma).