I agree with your criticism of the skeptics. I could be classified as a skeptic because I challenge a lot of the mainstream narratives around Covid-19, but I've made those exact same criticisms of the "skeptic narrative".
You're not wrong for any of the false narratives of the mainstream medical community, but there are a few that needed to make the list:
1) Pandemic Management: The medical community threw out the pandemic playbooks of the WHO and CDC and made up all the pandemic measures out of thin air. Most egregious was the lack of any effort at balancing public health benefits and social costs. I covered it here: https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1317223302180593664?s=20
2) Acknowledgement of Risk Factors: This is a pandemic affecting people according to age, weight and general health. Somewhat accurate IFRs of age based risk were available as early as April 2020, but the medical community never factored these nuances into their policy recommendations. It's still happening today: it's absurd to encourage or mandate the vaccination of children.
The 1 thing that everyone misses is that the vaccines came about after a large percentage of people were already naturally immune. The only way to truly understand the efficacy of the vaccines is to know what percentage of the vaccinated were already naturally immune. All data for vaccine efficacy is bullshit without those numbers, which we will never have.
Hi Maxim - I really like what you're trying to do. A balanced and logical approach is what has been sorely missing over the last couple of years.
Two things I would challenge you on though - 1. 'but there are still the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines which use the old-fashioned method.'. I'm not sure you can say that the technology used in JNJ / AstraZeneca -recombinant adenoviral vector vaccines - is 'old fashioned'. As per this Nature article 'Like mRNA vaccines, Ad vaccines are a relatively new technology' (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-021-00356-x). Indeed according to wiki, pre covid there have only been two approved viral vector vaccines, both for Ebola, with relatively limited usage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine).
This article didn't address most of my skepticism.
1) No sources cited for cumulative excess deaths or how those stats were calculated. We can see from US total reported death statistics that the delta between the rise in deaths from previous years compared to pandemic years is negligible, so that automatically calls the US cumulative excess death data into question. US COVID data and vaccine injury data is of extremely poor quality. Looking at the total mortality data for a country by-passes any calculation bias and gives a much clear picture of what is going on. In Australia, the total deaths for 2020-21 are well above the 2015-19 range.
2) A major cause for my skepticism was never addressed. The behavior of the press and medical establishment to alternative treatments is completely unhinged. My doctor refused prescribe ivermectin off-label to me because he said the hospital administration would fire him and the state could possibly pull his medical license over it, despite it being a completely safe FDA approved drug with over 69 studies involving 50,000 patients authored by over 658 doctors showing it is effective as a treatment for COVID. Any reasonable response to a pandemic would look at all possible treatments, the fact that vaccines are being pushed as the only acceptable method of prevention raises massive alarm bells.
3) VAERS data is known to be massively under reported. It takes hospital staff a half hour per submission, and doctors are under administrative pressure not to report possible injuries as being vaccine related. Even with those severe limitations, reported deaths for the COVID vaccines are off the charts compared to other vaccines. Looking at all vaccine reported deaths for all vaccines in the VAERS database going back decades, we see 16,070 reported deaths of which 10,805 are COVID vaccine related. Billions upon billions of flu vaccines, polio vaccines, measles vaccines, etc.. given over decades of time have half the deaths reported of the COVID vaccines. This should raise major alarm bells.
4) According to Pfizer's own trial data, which they recently asked a court to keep hidden for 55 years, all cause mortality was HIGHER in the vaccinated group compared to the control group. We are seeing an uptick in young patients with cardiovascular problems post-vaccination. Young people face almost no risk from COVID. The risk of vaccine injury compared to COVID injury among young people shows a disproportionate risk from the vaccines compared to natural infection.
I could keep going on, but I don't have the time to write an essay about this. Take a look at the data on miscarriages in vaccinated women BY TRIMESTER. Women who get the vaccine in the first and second trimester have something like a 80 to 90% risk of spontaneous abortion. There's so much more.
Have you read this? I found it pretty convincing that the market hypothesis is indeed correct. Your evidence seems much more circumstantial in comparison. Not that it refutes the overall point about censorship- but it is certainly not as clear as you make it out that the truth was censored.
Pretty good, but putting skeptics on the same plane as the medical establishment is a great big steamy pile of horse puckey. Skeptics aren't making totalitarian laws, nor censoring the media people are allowed to read, nor the science workers are allowed to publish. Of course that doesn't make skeptics right, and your assessment (or say Scott Alexanders) is closer to reality than the average Alex Berenson acolyte is, but they're far from equivalent sets of problems. We need skepticism, as the medical establishment, as you have pointed out, is not credible at this point.
The vaccines are mostly dangerous to young people, just as the virus is mostly dangerous to old and extremely unhealthy people, so these things should be factored into any such models of the utility of the vaccines. If you give something to kids that gives them a 1/5000 chance of damaging their tickers, when they have a 1/100,000 chance of ill effects from a respiratory ailment, you fucked up. That's more or less the case with current month public health doctrine as far as I can tell. Civilized countries have mostly banned Moderna on young people: they should probably ban them all on young people.
A french study looked for changes in heart attack, stroke and lung blood clots in some 4 million medical records of those who had been vaccinated. They found a slightly lower rate than normal.
In an online seminar I asked when Delta was first detected in India. I was told Nov 2020. If true that is before vaccines were used anywhere other than trials.
Nice article. #8 gotta throw China data out. Why? See #5. It will be interesting to see if New Zealand, Australia see more waves after actually opening up. Also, Florida…do you account for average age per capita? I heard when you account for Florida dramatic age there numbers are low in terms of death.
"DISCLAIMER: Above is not medical advice, but rather my best attempt to lay out the most important data using my statistics knowledge. If you see any NEW important data, or anything I missed, or mistakes, please let me know in the comments."
Overall a great deep-dive!
I agree with your criticism of the skeptics. I could be classified as a skeptic because I challenge a lot of the mainstream narratives around Covid-19, but I've made those exact same criticisms of the "skeptic narrative".
You're not wrong for any of the false narratives of the mainstream medical community, but there are a few that needed to make the list:
1) Pandemic Management: The medical community threw out the pandemic playbooks of the WHO and CDC and made up all the pandemic measures out of thin air. Most egregious was the lack of any effort at balancing public health benefits and social costs. I covered it here: https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1317223302180593664?s=20
2) Acknowledgement of Risk Factors: This is a pandemic affecting people according to age, weight and general health. Somewhat accurate IFRs of age based risk were available as early as April 2020, but the medical community never factored these nuances into their policy recommendations. It's still happening today: it's absurd to encourage or mandate the vaccination of children.
In my first comment, I forgot to say thank you for a thought-provoking article, even if I disagree with the general drift.
There is another point I want to dispute thought.
You ask
" Has there ever been a vaccine that caused side effects that only kicked after more than a year? I can’t find any."
Well I ask,
"Has there ever been a vaccine that you had to take every 3 months? I can't find any."
And I think it's not unreasonable that my gut tells me that this repeated injection of a vaccine might not be good for me in the long term .
A lot of thoughtful comments here! I haven't had time yet to respond, but, I will as soon as I can
The 1 thing that everyone misses is that the vaccines came about after a large percentage of people were already naturally immune. The only way to truly understand the efficacy of the vaccines is to know what percentage of the vaccinated were already naturally immune. All data for vaccine efficacy is bullshit without those numbers, which we will never have.
Great article. Regarding lockdowns, we have never as a society quarantined healthy people. It should never happen again.
Hi Maxim - I really like what you're trying to do. A balanced and logical approach is what has been sorely missing over the last couple of years.
Two things I would challenge you on though - 1. 'but there are still the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines which use the old-fashioned method.'. I'm not sure you can say that the technology used in JNJ / AstraZeneca -recombinant adenoviral vector vaccines - is 'old fashioned'. As per this Nature article 'Like mRNA vaccines, Ad vaccines are a relatively new technology' (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-021-00356-x). Indeed according to wiki, pre covid there have only been two approved viral vector vaccines, both for Ebola, with relatively limited usage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine).
2. 'First, has there ever been a vaccine that caused side effects that only kicked after more than a year? I can’t find any.'. Here are some: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/four-times-history-vaccines-failed-lessons-coronavirus-vaccine-166116. Also in the UK, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/19/swine-flu-vaccine-narcolepsy-uk. Note that this was c. 4 years after the widespread roll out of this vaccine. Arguably the risk of the covid vaccines is more elevated given they all use relatively new technology - and they are also the first ever vaccines for a Coronavirus.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
This article didn't address most of my skepticism.
1) No sources cited for cumulative excess deaths or how those stats were calculated. We can see from US total reported death statistics that the delta between the rise in deaths from previous years compared to pandemic years is negligible, so that automatically calls the US cumulative excess death data into question. US COVID data and vaccine injury data is of extremely poor quality. Looking at the total mortality data for a country by-passes any calculation bias and gives a much clear picture of what is going on. In Australia, the total deaths for 2020-21 are well above the 2015-19 range.
2) A major cause for my skepticism was never addressed. The behavior of the press and medical establishment to alternative treatments is completely unhinged. My doctor refused prescribe ivermectin off-label to me because he said the hospital administration would fire him and the state could possibly pull his medical license over it, despite it being a completely safe FDA approved drug with over 69 studies involving 50,000 patients authored by over 658 doctors showing it is effective as a treatment for COVID. Any reasonable response to a pandemic would look at all possible treatments, the fact that vaccines are being pushed as the only acceptable method of prevention raises massive alarm bells.
3) VAERS data is known to be massively under reported. It takes hospital staff a half hour per submission, and doctors are under administrative pressure not to report possible injuries as being vaccine related. Even with those severe limitations, reported deaths for the COVID vaccines are off the charts compared to other vaccines. Looking at all vaccine reported deaths for all vaccines in the VAERS database going back decades, we see 16,070 reported deaths of which 10,805 are COVID vaccine related. Billions upon billions of flu vaccines, polio vaccines, measles vaccines, etc.. given over decades of time have half the deaths reported of the COVID vaccines. This should raise major alarm bells.
4) According to Pfizer's own trial data, which they recently asked a court to keep hidden for 55 years, all cause mortality was HIGHER in the vaccinated group compared to the control group. We are seeing an uptick in young patients with cardiovascular problems post-vaccination. Young people face almost no risk from COVID. The risk of vaccine injury compared to COVID injury among young people shows a disproportionate risk from the vaccines compared to natural infection.
I could keep going on, but I don't have the time to write an essay about this. Take a look at the data on miscarriages in vaccinated women BY TRIMESTER. Women who get the vaccine in the first and second trimester have something like a 80 to 90% risk of spontaneous abortion. There's so much more.
Jay Bhattacharya has been right about a lot. His trade-off analysis of lockdowns versus economic normalcy is spot-on.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic
Have you read this? I found it pretty convincing that the market hypothesis is indeed correct. Your evidence seems much more circumstantial in comparison. Not that it refutes the overall point about censorship- but it is certainly not as clear as you make it out that the truth was censored.
Pretty good, but putting skeptics on the same plane as the medical establishment is a great big steamy pile of horse puckey. Skeptics aren't making totalitarian laws, nor censoring the media people are allowed to read, nor the science workers are allowed to publish. Of course that doesn't make skeptics right, and your assessment (or say Scott Alexanders) is closer to reality than the average Alex Berenson acolyte is, but they're far from equivalent sets of problems. We need skepticism, as the medical establishment, as you have pointed out, is not credible at this point.
The vaccines are mostly dangerous to young people, just as the virus is mostly dangerous to old and extremely unhealthy people, so these things should be factored into any such models of the utility of the vaccines. If you give something to kids that gives them a 1/5000 chance of damaging their tickers, when they have a 1/100,000 chance of ill effects from a respiratory ailment, you fucked up. That's more or less the case with current month public health doctrine as far as I can tell. Civilized countries have mostly banned Moderna on young people: they should probably ban them all on young people.
FWIIW my list as of August: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-establishment-got-wrong-about-wuhan-coof/
A french study looked for changes in heart attack, stroke and lung blood clots in some 4 million medical records of those who had been vaccinated. They found a slightly lower rate than normal.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2786667
In an online seminar I asked when Delta was first detected in India. I was told Nov 2020. If true that is before vaccines were used anywhere other than trials.
Zvi Mowshowitz has also been very good.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/omicron-post-4/
Lots of good info. I'd add #5.5 that Pharma knew they would need boosters, but didn't tell anyone back in early 2021. https://tomkom2.substack.com/p/boosters-whos-going-to-tell-92-million?r=qrie2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
Nice article. #8 gotta throw China data out. Why? See #5. It will be interesting to see if New Zealand, Australia see more waves after actually opening up. Also, Florida…do you account for average age per capita? I heard when you account for Florida dramatic age there numbers are low in terms of death.
"DISCLAIMER: Above is not medical advice, but rather my best attempt to lay out the most important data using my statistics knowledge. If you see any NEW important data, or anything I missed, or mistakes, please let me know in the comments."
Appreciate it.