So is your argument that the vaccines are effective at stopping covid deaths in some people but kill the same number of other people so that the two figures cancel each other out? That seems to be what you are saying to me but like @PontiusPrimate I am not sure I understand what you mean.
So is your argument that the vaccines are effective at stopping covid deaths in some people but kill the same number of other people so that the two figures cancel each other out? That seems to be what you are saying to me but like @PontiusPrimate I am not sure I understand what you mean.
This is actually a reply to @Evvy_dense but I realised I replied to @PontiusPrimate so ED might not see it… Adding this little comment to draw ED’s attention to my question. Sorry…
I would be incredulous too, in just the same way as I would if I remarked “They fuck you up your mum and dad…” ("… they may not mean to, but they do," etc) and got one of those looks. Ok, the four letter word could cause some to clutch their pearls but come on, who can not have heard of that…?
Paying other people a compliment is always a risk @JMC, which is a very sad reflection on our paranoid world.
Off to check out the link 
PS to the above: I was charmed to see that the Society’s main office is referred to as the Hatquarters. Excellent.
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At the time of writing, the latest interview with John O’Looney (it contains lots of new stuff)…
Hi JMC, thanks for taking an interest in this.
(Me) “There could be a lot more deaths caused by the vaccine if it is simultaneously stopping covid deaths”
You ask “So is your argument that the vaccines are effective at stopping covid deaths in some people but kill the same number of other people so that the two figures cancel each other out? That seems to be what you are saying to me but like @PontiusPrimate I am not sure I understand what you mean.”
Yes it is/was about cancellation. It wasn’t ‘my argument’ exactly - rather, one reason why you might not see much in the graph of total weekly deaths even though the two entities might be significant. The sum doesn’t have to be exactly 0 of course, just really means ‘no clear effect’, like PP’s ‘nada’.
Looking back at the context in which arose, I think I can now see what @PP is getting at.
Here is his graph again:
I think his reason for saying the vaccines reduced deaths from the graph is from the fall in the covid deaths part of the graph after the vaccine rollout started (ie the period about Feb-April). I don’t think this is correct as it happens, but I think it would explain our impasse. Because then the covid was arguably reduced after that and the (massively more) vaccinations that took place after that may not have had much covid deaths to stop (at least, relative to the higher number of covid deaths earlier, which might scupper a correlation).
It would also explain why the analysis in the Twitter post found no correlation between vaccination and deaths at all - the main ‘correlation’ was in the first few months, but if the Twitter poster used the whole range after the covid deaths fell, he wouldn’t get a correlation.
I’m not sure about that correlation - vaccines and covid deaths - between Jan and Mar, as I’m not sure why the red vaccinations line dips at the start. Perhaps it’s something to do with there being second doses (vaccinations started in December). Although (to me) the low percentage who were vaccinated while the covid deaths were falling (I recall a 30% figure in March from a Daily Expose analysis posted here) could not have explained much of the fall, nevertheless I think it likely explains what PP was driving at; if so it renders my cancellation suggestion redundant by removing the premise for it.
Cheers
ED
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Hi Jamie
Ok, I tend to agree with a lot of what you’re saying about the Precautionary principle. It’s why I don’t believe in vaccine mandates or a mass vaccination policy. I remain suspicious of the long term effects of these vaccines and I’m open minded (despite how it may seem) to the possibility that the vaccines are injuring and even killing some people.
I think we should be offering the vaccines only to those who are most vulnerable (and who want them). I think we should have a different policy for everyone else.
That doesn’t mean that I uncritically accept that 10s-100s of thousands of people are dying from the jabs. I want to look at the death records and see if that feels true… So far I don’t see the evidence.
That’s all I’m saying here.
As for VAERS, I have discussed it before. That is a database of people who had some negative effect after taking the vaccine. Perhaps they even died. I don’t challenge those numbers at all, and I am happy to accept that they might even be an undercount.
But a record in VAERS is a starting point that needs to be investigated, not a proof of a vaccine side effect… There is no causal link in VAERS just reports of illnesses.
Every day people wake up and walk into the sunshine (ok, not so much in England). Some of those people will die that day. If we started a database of everyone who got an illness or died we would very quickly have a huge database.
Did everyone in the database die from walking into the sunshine? Or were their deaths part of the natural mortality background, and the sunlight wasn’t a factor?
That’s the same question that needs to be asked and answered with VAERS. We’ve given out, literally, billions of doses of the vaccines. Any sample of billions of people will have loads of deaths and illnesses recorded. How many of those are attributable to the vaccine?
That’s what I’m trying to get at in this somewhat quanty way.
Cheers
PP
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Ah, thanks for clarifying and yes, I’m pretty much in agreement, although such measures and qualifiers would also apply to mortality rates from Covid and supposed death rate reduction from the ‘vaccine’.
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Yes, we should use the same standard to judge covid deaths and vaccine deaths and even whether the vaccines are, indeed, reducing death from Covid. I think we should apply an equally sceptical, data analysis appriach to all three questions.
Cheers
PP
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Yes, although I’m not sure the window we currently have is sufficient to give a meaningful answer, plus, of course, statistics…
There’s so much to keep up with, and with a lot of it I don’t even try to keep up, so it’s likely that I missed something that has been explained somewhere long ago, which makes me embarrassed to ask, but:
One thing that has bothered me from the start of all this is the way the BBC routinely reports the number of people who have “died within 28 days of a positive COVID test”.
I can’t imagine any listener to BBC radio bulletins (which I try to avoid, but often can’t miss) actually wanting to know that information, or having any way of knowing what it means.
Surely what we do all want to know is how many people have caught COVID and died and wouldn’t be dead if they hadn’t caught COVID.
Of course, that may not be a trivial matter to determine. But nor is it always a trivial matter to determine in cases of other possible causes of death, so why has the BBC - I mention them in particular only because it is their radio news bulletins that I am regularly exposed to - chosen to report this one illness in this way?
It’s been driving me nuts.
(Sorry if this derails the thread. If that seems to be happening, do start a new thread.)
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I think Brian Gerrish has interviewed him too, there was an extract on Wednesdays UKC.
Makes sense to me too.
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I’ve wondered about that too, @Twirlip
I don’t have a good answer but I did find these two blogs interesting
And
If be interested in anything more you or anyone, finds out about this
Cheers
PP
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Hi ED
Yes, that’s getting pretty close to what I was saying. Essentially the mass vaxx program began after the winter wave of 2020-2021 ended. We then went through a phase of pretty low covid rates (spring/summer 2021) before the rates started going up again. However this time even though covid rates started growing very fast, deaths did not. I see this as a clear vaccine effect. It’s not the only effect at play but it is a strong and observable effect. This is the period from August onwards. It’s from then onwards that I think the vaccines were really preventing deaths.
If (maybe a big if) the vaccines were stopping large numbers of people dying from Covid then what deaths did occur will not be from Covid and hence have a zero correlation with vaccine deployment. There is no correlation between a covid vaccination rate and a non-covid death… Unless the vaccine caused the death, and then there will be a correlation. That’s why zero correlation means something good for vaccines and a positive correlation means something bad.
That was what I was trying to say. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear and sorry if I’m still not clear.
The little bump in vaccine rollout was because the UK did a little pilot rollout in about Dec 2020 I think. Then they stopped and restarted for real in march '21.
Cheers
PP
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Hi PP
Thanks - perhaps we were running too quickly to bother firming up precise meanings and positions. Maybe we should retain the points of contention better.
Happy to drop the pace to keep the communication clear(er).
Your thoughts
I thought you were mainly attributing the big fall in the end of winter peak of covid deaths to the vaccine. Seems that you’re not, correct me if I’m wrong.
(i) What’s your basis for saying the data shows vaccines reduced covid deaths then - is it just that the case fatality rate went down? (and would I be right that it’s not in your graph)
(ii) I don’t know vaccination numbers but if there were 1m vaccinations a week then if there were, say, ten thousand vaccine deaths overall that’s only about 300 deaths per week (I’m counting 8 months of vaccinations but might change this).
Isn’t that just 0.03% of the vaccinations? So my second question is:
How would you expect an increase in vaccine deaths to show in your graph - what are you comparing?
I wouldn’t expect the weekly vaccine deaths to increase week on week, it would be a similar percentage of the vaccinations, after some time lag. There would be a little jump at the beginning in the ‘true’ figure, likely hidden by other variables, then a new steady rate but slightly higher than before.
There would be no correlation between the data sets, more a small before and after effect - which as I say would be hard to spot. For example it looks like the starting point may have run into the peak covid deaths.
My thoughts on your thoughts
Here’s another thought on that case fatality rate.
Tests to 16/1/21: 63,139,169
Tests to 16/10/21: 318,440,917
Five times as much testing this year - wouldn’t that lead to a much lower CFR?
My general thoughts
UK has a low CFR but high cases.
UK running right now at 7th highest weekly cases per head in world - vaccine clearly not stopping transmission?
UK weekly deaths running at 37th highest per head in world.
Overall the situation with vaccination doesn’t look any better, even counting only covid.
That’s leaving out hypotheses that the vaccine makes (or will make) people more vulnerable to covid, and also that it may have ushered in the new variant.
A need for boosters every six months is a blow to the pro-vaccine case, as immunity from the virus almost certainly lasts much longer. Also of course we don’t know if boosters will increase risks!?
Cheers
ED
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It’s gobsmacking how the Presstitutes can still keep a straight face about this, after an avalanche of fear porn over the last 18 months…
But perhaps even more amazing is how the general public have continued to believe all this bullshit.
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Morning ED
I’ll split my thoughts about vaccine efficacy and vaccine mortality into two sections
Vaccine mortality
- In a general sense you’re right about the 300/week, but in a more precise sense that’s not right. Imagine if the vaccines were 100% fatal (just for argument). As the vaccine rollout picks up steam, the deaths will massively increase as everyone who gets the vaxx dies. As it drops, the deaths will decrease. The pattern of deaths should follow the pattern of the vaccine rollout. Averaging will remove that pattern, which is a key fingerprint I’m looking for. Even if the vaccine is 0.1% fatal (40K deaths), we should still see the same pattern emerge, and a close look at the data should reveal it.
- I think we should still be able to detect 10K deaths, as I would expect the majority of them to occur between mid-March and mid-June for a couple of reasons. 10K extra deaths over that period should be visible, especially as deaths in other categories have been supressed by the large number of Covid deaths. It should have been (and it was) a period of low mortality, following the last big wave. That would have made a new source of
excessdeaths very visible, even for “only” 10K deaths. - If we are under 10K deaths, especially if we are significantly under 10K deaths (ONS reckons 8 deaths total so far), then this will not be visible at all on the graphs I posted. But, this puts an upper limit on what the real number of vaccine deaths could be - a few hundred to a few thousand. A few thousand is a few hundredths of a percent or 1 in about 10,000, and a few hundred is a thousandth of a percent. Still a bad result though, I do agree.
- If we are talking about those kinds of numbers then I agree that this analysis is no use - we need to look at other arguments. There are other types of surveillance I would expect to pick this up, but that’s for a different discussion.
All this means that it seems most likely to me that at most the vaccines could have killed a few thousand people, and it could be much lower. Any much larger number (10s of thousands) seems so implausible as to be almost impossible.
Vaccine efficacy
- yes, the end of the winter peak happened “naturally” so to speak. The vaccine effect didn’t kick in until some months later.
- yes (again). As the cases in the country spiked in August/September (and now), deaths remained far lower than would have been expected without the vaccines. You can see that effect pretty clearly in the second graph I posted above, and it’s not clear in the first one (as I said at the time).
- yes (again!) I am using mortality - essentially CFR - as a measure of vaccine efficacy.
- On the question of tests, there are 3 sources that I look at. The tests recorded by PHE, and the 2 national surveys that use a slightly different methodology - ONS and the ZOE app. They all agree that there has been a large surge in the spread of Covid since August. According to ZOE, we are currently getting 70,000 new syptomatic cases of Covid each day!
In short, several sources agree that Covid cases have spiked sharply in the UK, but there is no such spike in deaths. The last time we saw such a spike in cases, there were comparable spikes in deaths, but not this time. A major part of the reason for that is that vaccines stop the disease from killing you.
I do agree with you that the vaccines do not stop transmission, and if they lose their potency in a few months then that is a bad blow. I’ll be honest - I don’t really understand the complexities of the immune system. I have heard that natural immunity only offers a 60% chance of protecting you from re-infection (similar to the AZ vaxx) and I have heard that the reduction in antibodies we see in the vaxxed is normal, and is not necessarily representative of what kind of immune response a vaxxed person could still mount based on T-cells etc. I don’t have the basic understanding to interpret these issues correctly… It seems pretty complex, and it seems like there are a huge amount of unknowns still at play. Additionally there is the question of long Covid that seems to be affecting a large number of people (~1 million I think?) in the UK. AFAIK the vaccines also protect you from long Covid - but that’s another discussion. So does Ivermectin, I believe.
All this inclines me to be cautious about the vaccines, and - as Dr Malone suggests - give them only to the most at-risk groups. But the main point of my arguments above is simply that I don’t see evidence that the vaccine is killing multiple 10s of thousands of people in the UK (or hundreds of thousands in the USA). I still don’t see that evidence.
Cheers bwana
PP
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Perhaps this is of interest (I haven’t read it, but I’ve just ordered a copy):
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They really have no shame.
an increasing number of people experience hallucinations and delusional thinking amid the stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic
And, in tomorrow’s Guardian (still less per day than a tankard of cold urine): Bear Spotted Sidling Out Of Copse Looking Relieved.
Thanks PP.
Just to take the first part of your post
“In a general sense you’re right about the 300/week, but in a more precise sense that’s not right. Imagine if the vaccines were 100% fatal (just for argument). As the vaccine rollout picks up steam, the deaths will massively increase as everyone who gets the vaxx dies”
Whether large or small the weekly number wouldn’t increase week on week. Instead there would be a jump at the beginning - after that, about the same number would die week to week, depending on the number vaccinated.
And covid itself with its steep rises and falls is a ‘massive’ complication in the data.
“I think we should still be able to detect 10K deaths, as I would expect the majority of them to occur between mid-March and mid-June for a couple of reasons.”
Could you elaborate on these reasons as I can’t see them.
(Eg, there could well be more deaths when it was the elderly, that noise was after all coming out of care homes at the start of the rollouts.)
This period you refer to is taken from this diagram you posted, along with your comment:
“From March to July - just as the vaccine rollout was at its greatest, and the covid wave had ended - the death rate was consistently below the 5-year average. No excess deaths hiding there - just as I have been saying over and over. This is exactly the period that we should see vaccine deaths most clearly - there are no other major confounding factors - just background mortality. We don’t see anything though.”
It’s a great diagram 
That circled period in March to July. As I said I’m not clear why more deaths should occur here.
But also, why is it a given that there aren’t vaccine deaths here? That drop below the zero line, that signifies fewer people dying than on average, is because the peak attributed to covid took out the most vulnerable, who weren’t around when they were more likely to die. It’s a well known after-effect I think, and you can see from the graph it happened the year before.
Granted these 2021 deaths reached farther into the negative excess death range than they did in 2020, but it fell about 8K max from the ‘covid’ peaks, whereas last year the maximum fall was 12K. So maybe it had farther to fall?
I’m just on this one point; I don’t think 300 or so new weekly vaccine deaths would be seen among thousands of others, and I think weekly deaths would jump by whatever this amount is, and hold steady at that level, with variations due to other factors. These variations I would expect to drown the initial jump of 300 out.
Cheers
ED