It's Death Day!

There's some cautious optimism here. The data we have suggests deaths came down a lot in the last week or two. Vaccinations are staying ahead of new infections.

And, MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL, we're still beating Europe!

somebody's gonna give me an @ about that

Obviously this optimism is very cautious. Latest-week declines are capricious things and often fail to pan out. But the trajectory of cases and positivity would seem to support that too. And the extent of vaccinations among high-risk people *should* take a bite soon!

Canada released new excess mortality data on February 8 and it is LULZ in terms of the eccentric data incompletions in it. Unfortunately nothing past October is really reliable for Canada yet. Canada's winter spike has been very bad though. https://twitter.com/jhfenton/status/1360339933609746433

Reconstructing plausible monthlies from province-level historic ascertainment rates of deaths and reported deaths suggests Canada's deaths ran 15% above normal in November, 20% in December, and 23% in January.

This would put Canada's Feb 2020-Jan 2021 cumulative excess at about 9%, so higher than in the last data I showed, but still a lot below Europeans or Americans.

I mean, y'all.

BUT MUH HURD UHMOONITY

Here's exposure rates for states with highest/lowest exposures.

All things considered, here's two different looks at where we are in terms of cumulative COVID exposure in the US, as well as the share with at least a first vaccine dose.

So the vaccinated share in rising fast, and is already a non-trivial population share.... but it's gotta rise faster.

We should be aiming for *at least* 2 million people getting vaccinated each day, not the 1 million we're doing now.

Here it is by cause. You can see that respiratory causes continue to dominate the story.

Obviously, that's weekly excess, cumulative excess, and the weekly excess rate.

My view of things right now is that at the pace things are going, excess mortality is likely to persist well into March. Unless vaccine rollout can be ramped up much bigger and faster, or an effective treatment delivered (???ivermectin???), the spring is looking wrecked.

"Excess mortality in April" is not something we can rule out at this point.

TWO

MILLION

PEOPLE

PER

DAY

That's what it's gotta be.

My modest proposal would be for a gang of hardened criminals looking to make a quick buck to team up with ex-special forces guys with a dark past but wanting to redeem themselves to come up with an elaborate heist to steal huge amounts of vaccines and distribute them somehow.

Now, I want to address two things I've seen floating around.

First, "leap weeks." This has become prominent because of @MLevitt_NP2013 drawing attention to the fact that 2020 technically has 53 weeks while most years have 52.

I will admit, I do not understand exactly what calculation is happening for his unclear statement about "only 2% excess mortality."

If we compare weeks 1-52 of 2019 and 1-52 of 2020, there's still huge excess mortality.

In weeks 1-52 of 2019, there were 2.84 million deaths. In weeks 1-52 of 2020, there were 3.32 million. That's a 16.6% increase. So I don't really know what the point being made is.... but folks "leap weeks" are not driving the estimates of excess deaths.

Next point I want to bring up is about ADVERSE VACCINE REACTIONS.

I've noticed a rising volume of people citing data from the CDC's adverse reactions database, which you can find here:
https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html 

Here's the thing about vaccines.

Vaccines 1) have huge public health benefits if everyone gets them but 2) occasionally can result in bad reactions.

To deal with this, the government collects a small tax on every vaccine dose and puts it into a liability fund.

This fund handles adverse reaction claims about vaccines in an expedited and centralized fashion, protecting companies from excessive liability, and guaranteeing that money exists to pay for potential future claims. It's actually a really good system.

So if you want to get compensated for an adverse reaction you think you had to a vaccine, how do you do that? Well, here's instructions: https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html

When you do that filing, a very common thing you also do (and indeed any lawyer would make you do it) is to file a vaccine adverse revent report, here: https://vaers.hhs.gov/ 

Here's the form.

Go ahead. If you want, you can fill out an adverse reaction form!

Wanna know a crazy thing?

There's absolutely no verification process! https://vaers.hhs.gov/esub/index.jsp 

But IN PRACTICE, most of these reports come from healthcare providers.

Any time a healthcare provider administers a vaccine, they MUST REPORT if the patient dies or worsens in a certain time frame.

Wanna know the crazy thing?

You can read the reports! here's the actual report text of DEATH adverse events associated with COVID vaccines!

Let me be clear.

THIS IS INSANE.

I honestly have no idea how this system passes any of CDC's privacy rules. I have seriously contemplated submitted spam to it to see what happens, but I'm a dutiful citizen, so I wouldn't do that.

(but if someone did, tell me how it went!)

Now, what I want you to note is that's.... a lot of text!

Here's an example of a filing.

Here's two more.

You can look it up yourself. These things run the gamut. Some are like 1 word. Some run for paragraphs.

Here's the issue. If you pan through, you'll notice a TON of them basically say, "Patient already had COVID. We vaccinated in the hopes it would save them. It didn't."

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

These reports are overwhelmingly coming from either a) family members with little medical information or b) medical providers who were making compassionate use of vaccines on already sick people.

Now, look again at the reports of COVID adverse outcomes below. Then look at the non-COVID ones.

Difference: non-COVID tend to be 1) short 2) lots of medical abbreviations 3) entered in batches.

(also a lot of the non-COVID cases are children and y'all they are DDDAAAAARRRRKKK)

My point here is that the COVID vaccine reports are coming from different people: not medical providers, not mandatory reporters. They have no verification.

So why am I telling you all this?

Welll... because I've started to see data from VAERS get cited to say that COVID vaccines are killing people.

Why would they say this?

Because according to VAERS, there have been ***602*** people with an adverse reaction of "death."

Here's historical data on alleged deaths from vaccines.

Before you go "WOW COVID" notice the runup in the 1980s.

Did vaccines get deadlier in the 1980s?

NO!

1986 is when the Feds set up a special fund to pay out for vaccine-related claims.

The Feds offered to pay, and so claims rose in response.

Folks, the Federal government pays almost $200 million every year in claims through this program. The excise tax that pays for it has collected $8 billion in revenues since 1988, and paid out just $4.2 billion.

Here's the insane thing.

That fund has paid out nearly 1,000 claims *for vaccine-related autism*.

Y'all.

Vaccine-related autism *is not a thing*. It's fake. There's no science to it.

But to get claimants to go away, sometimes they get paid.

This is a system you can make a run on, and it's sitting on several billion dollars in assets. There's a low burden of proof, an easy claim filing process, and it's *not unreasonable* to think new vaccines might end up causing *some* kind of claimable damage someday!

And if you can build enough buzz around a *totally fake* adverse reaction (like vaccines causing autism), you may get a payout just to shut you up!

So why have we seen so many adverse events reported to VAERS from COVID vaccines?

Simple: there's buzz, there's money, and this program has a demonstrated track record of paying out for totally bogus claims.

Let me be clear.

"Adverse events" reported to VAERS have absolutely no importance as public health barometers or reliable indicators of vaccine risks.

So did the COVID vaccine kill 600 people?

No.

Some unspecified number of people are guessing that running up unverifiable claims in VAERS (and possibly formally filing with NVICP) is a way to generate a narrative and/or support spurious claims for compensation.

Yeah, the longer you look at VAERS the weirder it gets. 65 year olds reporting birth defects because of COVID vaccines is hardly the weirdest thing you'll find. https://twitter.com/elkton97/status/1360361960513150976