covid was not dangerous to the young and healthy until "something happened"

more "covid conspiracies" make the mainstream

back in the halcyon days of the 90’s, a young bill clinton played to perfection a certain form of crisis/criticism response:

deny, deny, deny, it’s old news.

the goal was simple: you lie and lie and lie some more. you do not expect to get away with it in the long run. you expect to get away with it long enough for people to stop caring and for it to become “old news.” and unfortunately, it works. well. because humans have the memory of goldfish and by the time it’s clear you were telling porkie pies, everyone is onto the next thing and no one cares anymore.

the modern version would seem to be:

it’s misinformation, it’s misinformation, it’s misinformation, it’s old news.

i, for one, would prefer that the increasingly obvious travesties, manipulation, and mendacity of the last 3 years not go gentle into some sort of societal goodnight and that perhaps a bit more discernment (if not rage) be sustained around here.

it’s becoming inescapably obvious what a complete goat rodeo of a pseudoscientific sham of suppression and shaping of facts the last 3 years have been and it’s important that we document this so that, if nothing else, people will know better than to blindly “trust the experts” next time.

so here we go:

we start in israel where recent lawsuits have unearthed some data that really drives home the simple claim made by so many since the beginning:

covid was not dangerous to young, healthy people.

israel is a nation of 9.4 million people.

guess how many people under 50 and without any serious underlying co-morbidities died of covid?

the answer is pretty stark:

this is not quite the absolute slam dunk it looks like as this is not a full dataset. but it is good sized and high quality one. it was also (as so many of the good data tidbits were) not provided freely and needed lawsuits to pry it loose.

that’s worth remembering in the future. health agencies played hide the ball and they are doing it still. (the pfizer data is still a drip feed, the vaxxes vs unvaxxed is tainted and slanted, and the birth data by vaxx status utterly absent)

The information was sparked by a freedom of information request filed by attorney Ori Xabi, who has been filing several such requests as he seeks to obtain information from the MOH regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19 policies.

The MOH emphasized that the data they have about the underlying diseases of patients is partial since it relies on information provided by the patients or their relatives, if they chose to do so. And then, only in cases in which the MOH conducted an epidemiological investigation.

and yet again, all the kinds of claims that got you booted from the bluebird in 2021 are now “obvious canon.”

Studies and other data, including a study led by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis, show that COVID-19 mortality, even with the original variant, was largely age-dependent.

“It was definitely a disease that actually only endangered the elderly,” Yehezkelli said.

Over the age of 60, mortality doubled every 5 years while under that age mortality was negligible, and “now we really see that it was zero under the age of 50, at least.”

The MOH’s response showed that the average age of the COVID-19 deceased is about 80 years of age, which also indicates that “this is a disease of the elderly, almost exclusively,” said Yehezkelli

this was not so much a pandemic as panic inducing performance art.

the israeli ministry of health is still refusing to release cardiac data and claiming that the study showing a 25% increase in EMS calls for heart issues concurrent with covid vaccine rollout is “fake news” and that “vaccines saved lives” but the news from other countries continues to make this appear a suspect claim.

consider this article from the cureus (springer nature) journal:

they used high quality actuarial methods to calculate expected mortality and then measure excess. there was none to speak of in 2020. but starting in april of 2021 “something must have happened.”

there’s a fine piece of tightrope walking, no?

the results are, frankly, fascinating in terms of how perfectly they align with some long suspected causes.

Figure 1: Yearly excess mortality.

The red bars show the excess mortality in 2020 (left panel), 2021 (middle panel), and 2022 (right panel) in different age groups. The gray bars are the total excess mortality.

2020 shows no meaningful excess deaths.

2021 shows a large rise (but misses 0-14 who, provocatively, were not vaxxed) biggest jumps are 40-79 and they are lower among the very old (also telling as the worst vaxx side effects were seen in younger/middle aged people)

2022 then gets even worse to the point where one wonders about either boosters being far more dangerous than initial course or antigenic fixation letting omicron run riot.

obviously, we have no counterfactual or control group here, but this sure does not look like “vaccines saved lives” and the notion that these vaccines were 80%+ effective in preventing deaths is all but impossible given this data. that kind of “safe and efficacious” would bend curves like crazy and not in this direction.

it sure looks like “something happened” and whatever that something was did not happen in 2020 when the covid variants were more lethal.

you can see it kick up like clockwork in april of 2021, not a time of year when covid would generally be raging. (germany has typical winter seasonality with early/mid jan peak)

covid deaths were way down for the summer (though like many places shows the telltale “2nd hump” that broke the gompertz shape and corresponds to known immune suppression from jab 1).

but “something else” was ramping up:

the alignment is near perfect.

just like in so many other places. (imposed lines are vaccination rates)

this pattern is not universal, but it’s far more common than not. common enough to warrant some significant questions.

that said, because there is seemingly always something weird in covid data for some reason, 50-9 had nearly zero excess death. i do not even have a theory on why (but would love to hear one if someone is feeling clever).

but even such circumspect folks as our authors here finally zoom in on the “source of the something” and note some inauspicious timing for the pro “vaccines saved lives” side, especially in 2022, the age of omicron which proved such a potent escape variant to vaxx induced immune response and boosters showed vastly higher adverse events profiles than d1 or d2.

“As is visible in Figure 8, the obvious hypothesis of a decrease in excess mortality with an increasing number of vaccinated persons is not correct. During periods when many persons were vaccinated, excess mortality seems to have increased more strongly compared to the same periods in the previous pandemic year.

…There seem to be negative long-term effects either of the SARS-CoV-2 infections, COVID-19 measures, the COVID-19 vaccination, or most probably a combination of these.”

and so science starts to catch up with “the amateurs'” and “conspiracy” becomes “consensus.”

i am as utterly exhausted with this game of pin the tale on the censor around covid as most of you probably are (perhaps more.)

this has been a long, rancorous slog to get back to “that which was always obvious.”

but that’s what is being counted on: us being too tired to get motivated to hold to account those who mislead us so seriously . they’d like to fade into memory and let the science go back to fusty journals and academic debate away from public notice.

please forgive a gato for banging on this drum yet one more time, but i do think it’s important that we remember.

it’s how we stop this from happening again.