Random thought. Given that the internet is such a fertile playground for people with no expertise in statistical analysis, but people mistrust institutional expertise, I wonder how we might ascertain someone's fitness for the task. Does some kind of independently verified credential, recorded on the block chain, have a future solution role?
That's an interesting thought! Right now everything works through old-fashioned reputation networks, which could probably be made more efficient.
The closest thing that jumps to mind is people's prediction track records on sites like Metaculus -- though that's not quite the same, and relatively few have used it.
That's actually exactly the mode of thinking I'm considering, though. Now that so many institutions have burned through their reputational capital we seem to need a way to preserve the obvious benefits of genuine expertise. I like your idea a lot.
I'm sure it would be possible to identify who is better or worse at making predictions. But a track record of bad predictions doesn't seem to discredit any of the conspiracy theorists among their followers. Like, if they predict that ivermectin is going to work in trials and the trials fail, they just say that the trials were corrupt and are part of the conspiracy.
I'm not really sure what the answer is. Some people just want to believe, and some people pander to them. As long as there's demand for bad information, there will be supply.
For non-politicized conspiracy theories, it seems like support can settle at around 10-20%. If we have maybe 25% of people believing that covid vaccines are worse than covid (or 60% of people believing lab leak theory), then you'd think those numbers could go down, over time.
But we also live with more compartmentalized media than ever (personalized echo chambers). And some of these ideas are more politicized than ever. Like, one of the ways that DeSantis will distinguish himself from Trump is by being more anti-vax than Trump is. Once you make it part of your identity to be opposed to covid vaccines, it's unlikely that you just need to see better statistics.
(I do still appreciate you trying to post better statistics. I've done plenty of the same)
The data would suggest that the vaccines are worse than covid, for younger age groups at least.
All cause mortality in Europe shows no reduction since the vaccine roll out, and has shifted to younger age groups. That needs some explaining. Instead of calling anyone questioning it "antivaxxer" or "conspiracy theorist".
It may be something else, but given the experimental nature of these interventions is should be treated with suspicion.
It would not be a difficult task to compare non-vaccinated and vaccinated groups, but the authorities have chosen to ignore that and tried their hardest to eliminate any control group. Again, that should be treated with suspicion, this is not how science is done.
I've been looking into this with an open mind for 2 years now, and I've noted every case where the vaccines seem worse than covid. In particular, I've said that Moderna shouldn't be given to young people, the risk of myocarditis from that shot is higher than the risk from covid. Also, the myocarditis risk from Novavax happens to be higher than either of the mRNA vaccines, so that one should also not be given to young people:
The risk from Pfizer seems to be lower than the risk of Covid, in every age group. But I've only analyzed that for first shots, and I'm not if it makes sense to boost young people repeatedly. I personally skipped the latest booster.
That said, I don't think there is any data at all suggesting that vaccines kill young people more than covid. I've run several analyses of this. I looked at VAERS deaths by age:
Even if all the VAERS deaths are vaccine caused deaths, the vaccine is still 100 times less likely to kill you than covid. That's true for every age group.
I've also extensively gone looking for evidence of excess deaths from vaccines. All I've been able to find are covid deaths and a few other things like overdoses. Here's one good article to read:
I haven't looked at data from Europe as much as the US, but I'm pretty confident that you would find exactly the same situation there -- a small number of excess deaths in young people from covid and no obvious sign of vaccine deaths.
Your last point is close to my heart. I've long been writing that we treat disinformation as a supply-side problem when really it's a demand-side issue.
That is a very strange choice of countries, and wouldn't appear to compare like for like in other ways. Why did you choose those?I feel it would be far better to focus on Eastern versus Western European countries instead of the grab bag that you chose.
Also which countries were using mRNA vaccines, versus the attenuated virus (I believe the Chinese one was like this) and Adenovirus vectors (and their associated blood clots).
Spain does seem to be an outlier, and a lot of your article focuses on that. Why not Columbia, which seems to be an outlier in the other direction?
It's not cherry-picked -- these are all the places I could find 2022 data for. A "grab bag" is good because you get a diverse, relatively random sample.
If you know of any other countries with data, let me know, and I'll add them.
Spain is just the illustrative example -- the actual final conclusions are based on the bubble charts. Denmark is the illustrative example of a country with a fall, since that's one that the "cat" focused on.
You ask about Colombia. The charts for every country are at the end. Columbia saw its fall *before* vaccination started.
Exact vaccine breakdown data is pretty scarce, but in general the high-vax western countries use more of mRNAs, which suggests that the chart would have an even greater pro-vaccine trend if only mRNAs were considered. Countries like Kazakhstan (a country with a big fall) mostly used their own non-mRNA vaccine.
The vaccines a complete failure. All cause mortality is not down since the rollout. And it excess death has shifted to younger age groups despite most people having caught covid by now.
This "stop doing big pharmas shilling for free" logic is how you build a bubble community where everyone wrongly thinks vaccines do every bad thing -- because nobody would point out if a theory were false, for fear of "doing big pharmas shilling."
It's analogous to what the woke people have created in universities.
Anyway, I do agree that those are interesting graphs in your link, and I'm interested in seeing/doing a more detailed breakdown of cause of death. And, perhaps, a bubble chart correlating different EU countries' youth vaccination and excess mortality rates would be interesting.
Unfortunately the biggest "bubble community" is the pro-vax movement, that continues to 'shill' for the government and big pharma despite an enormous and continuously growing body of evidence that the vaccines weren't much more than a criminal enterprise, bordering on genocide given how aggressively the harms have been swept under the rug, and how aggressively they continue to spread blatant propaganda about their safety and effectiveness.
You won't see a more detailed breakdown, because the authorities are desperate to cover things up, because they are guilty of crimes against humanity and violating the Nuremberg code.
There is a control group, but they have done their best to try and get rid of it. Excluded them from society, shamed them, called them names. That isn't science.
Here is an example from Scotland. Investigating the spike in neonatal deaths, yet are excluding the vaccine from the investigation. An absolute disgrace.
Experiencing that first hand whilst being aware of all the data and prior scientific studies, and watching the blatant lies and narrative changes going on throughout... all of the totally illogical policies etc... it’s been eye opening and life changing. The hardest thing to understand now is how some (most) ‘seemingly’ smart people are still hypnotised and defending the vaccines... as well as the people who pushed them on us. Literally everything about it all was wrong on every level. From basic human rights to political corruption to criminal pharma to fraudulent scienctific studies that did everything wrong, to forcing the vaccine on people at zero risk including children and babies... knowing full-well there were significant risks from the vaccines.
Mass formation psychosis is not a conspiracy theory. It’s very real, and it’s scary to even begin to understand what it says about humans on the whole. We are incredibly weak and malleable in the right conditions (fear). It is going to keep happening again and again and again, because of the type of people that are still lining up for boosters, wearing masks, defending vaccines, and telling people they are following the science. They are ushering in authoritarian government through their consent.
Indeed. I know a lot of scientists, working mostly in genetics research. I would have expected them to start calling out the nonsense, but they just parroted the establishment narrative as hard as everyone.
Look into the WHO's new pandemic treaty and international health regulations, they are trying to take away or freedoms in the name of "safety".
Defending vaccines despite all the data, science, evidence of fraud and corruption and government overreach, personal experience etc. is the sort of thing one would (or should) regret on their deathbed. Probably similar to siding with the Nazi agenda in the 1930's (which a lot of people did).
I understand. Good on you for doing what you've done. It was just a response to the previous guys comment about the vaccines being a failure. They absolutely have been a failure... and were going to be ineffective and dangerous from day 1. They never have worked against a virus, never will, and have always been dangerous and ineffective in every animal trial. The amount of fraud and corruption that was committed to get them through an EUA is mind-boggling (they never would have stood up to a 10-12 year study like all other vaccines). I'd like to see you apply your skills to all-cause-mortality and births data from the highly vaxxed countries, vs. the very low vaxxed countries. The more smart people that are WILLING! to look at the reality of our situation, the better.
Random thought. Given that the internet is such a fertile playground for people with no expertise in statistical analysis, but people mistrust institutional expertise, I wonder how we might ascertain someone's fitness for the task. Does some kind of independently verified credential, recorded on the block chain, have a future solution role?
That's an interesting thought! Right now everything works through old-fashioned reputation networks, which could probably be made more efficient.
The closest thing that jumps to mind is people's prediction track records on sites like Metaculus -- though that's not quite the same, and relatively few have used it.
That's actually exactly the mode of thinking I'm considering, though. Now that so many institutions have burned through their reputational capital we seem to need a way to preserve the obvious benefits of genuine expertise. I like your idea a lot.
I'm sure it would be possible to identify who is better or worse at making predictions. But a track record of bad predictions doesn't seem to discredit any of the conspiracy theorists among their followers. Like, if they predict that ivermectin is going to work in trials and the trials fail, they just say that the trials were corrupt and are part of the conspiracy.
I'm not really sure what the answer is. Some people just want to believe, and some people pander to them. As long as there's demand for bad information, there will be supply.
Agreed, that will still exist. Is there a middle group out there which might be swayed, though?
Scott’s post here is relevant and suggests that there is: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism
There are definitely some persuadable people.
For non-politicized conspiracy theories, it seems like support can settle at around 10-20%. If we have maybe 25% of people believing that covid vaccines are worse than covid (or 60% of people believing lab leak theory), then you'd think those numbers could go down, over time.
But we also live with more compartmentalized media than ever (personalized echo chambers). And some of these ideas are more politicized than ever. Like, one of the ways that DeSantis will distinguish himself from Trump is by being more anti-vax than Trump is. Once you make it part of your identity to be opposed to covid vaccines, it's unlikely that you just need to see better statistics.
(I do still appreciate you trying to post better statistics. I've done plenty of the same)
The data would suggest that the vaccines are worse than covid, for younger age groups at least.
All cause mortality in Europe shows no reduction since the vaccine roll out, and has shifted to younger age groups. That needs some explaining. Instead of calling anyone questioning it "antivaxxer" or "conspiracy theorist".
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
It may be something else, but given the experimental nature of these interventions is should be treated with suspicion.
It would not be a difficult task to compare non-vaccinated and vaccinated groups, but the authorities have chosen to ignore that and tried their hardest to eliminate any control group. Again, that should be treated with suspicion, this is not how science is done.
I've been looking into this with an open mind for 2 years now, and I've noted every case where the vaccines seem worse than covid. In particular, I've said that Moderna shouldn't be given to young people, the risk of myocarditis from that shot is higher than the risk from covid. Also, the myocarditis risk from Novavax happens to be higher than either of the mRNA vaccines, so that one should also not be given to young people:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/is-the-novavax-vaccine-safer-than-pfizer-it-doesnt-seem-so-558d7d461141
The risk from Pfizer seems to be lower than the risk of Covid, in every age group. But I've only analyzed that for first shots, and I'm not if it makes sense to boost young people repeatedly. I personally skipped the latest booster.
That said, I don't think there is any data at all suggesting that vaccines kill young people more than covid. I've run several analyses of this. I looked at VAERS deaths by age:
https://medium.com/an-idea/how-safe-is-the-covid-vaccine-5a61d7d6d91a
Even if all the VAERS deaths are vaccine caused deaths, the vaccine is still 100 times less likely to kill you than covid. That's true for every age group.
I've also extensively gone looking for evidence of excess deaths from vaccines. All I've been able to find are covid deaths and a few other things like overdoses. Here's one good article to read:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/2021-excess-deaths-in-the-us-pinpointing-where-they-come-from-5ca1386e108c
I haven't looked at data from Europe as much as the US, but I'm pretty confident that you would find exactly the same situation there -- a small number of excess deaths in young people from covid and no obvious sign of vaccine deaths.
Hope that helps!
Your last point is close to my heart. I've long been writing that we treat disinformation as a supply-side problem when really it's a demand-side issue.
I found one other amusing thing about El Gato Malo. He's a writer at Brownstone:
https://brownstone.org/author/el-gato-malo/
Holy cherry picked data batman!
That is a very strange choice of countries, and wouldn't appear to compare like for like in other ways. Why did you choose those?I feel it would be far better to focus on Eastern versus Western European countries instead of the grab bag that you chose.
Also which countries were using mRNA vaccines, versus the attenuated virus (I believe the Chinese one was like this) and Adenovirus vectors (and their associated blood clots).
Spain does seem to be an outlier, and a lot of your article focuses on that. Why not Columbia, which seems to be an outlier in the other direction?
It's not cherry-picked -- these are all the places I could find 2022 data for. A "grab bag" is good because you get a diverse, relatively random sample.
If you know of any other countries with data, let me know, and I'll add them.
Spain is just the illustrative example -- the actual final conclusions are based on the bubble charts. Denmark is the illustrative example of a country with a fall, since that's one that the "cat" focused on.
You ask about Colombia. The charts for every country are at the end. Columbia saw its fall *before* vaccination started.
Exact vaccine breakdown data is pretty scarce, but in general the high-vax western countries use more of mRNAs, which suggests that the chart would have an even greater pro-vaccine trend if only mRNAs were considered. Countries like Kazakhstan (a country with a big fall) mostly used their own non-mRNA vaccine.
The vaccines a complete failure. All cause mortality is not down since the rollout. And it excess death has shifted to younger age groups despite most people having caught covid by now.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
Stop doing big pharmas shilling for free.
This "stop doing big pharmas shilling for free" logic is how you build a bubble community where everyone wrongly thinks vaccines do every bad thing -- because nobody would point out if a theory were false, for fear of "doing big pharmas shilling."
It's analogous to what the woke people have created in universities.
Anyway, I do agree that those are interesting graphs in your link, and I'm interested in seeing/doing a more detailed breakdown of cause of death. And, perhaps, a bubble chart correlating different EU countries' youth vaccination and excess mortality rates would be interesting.
Unfortunately the biggest "bubble community" is the pro-vax movement, that continues to 'shill' for the government and big pharma despite an enormous and continuously growing body of evidence that the vaccines weren't much more than a criminal enterprise, bordering on genocide given how aggressively the harms have been swept under the rug, and how aggressively they continue to spread blatant propaganda about their safety and effectiveness.
You won't see a more detailed breakdown, because the authorities are desperate to cover things up, because they are guilty of crimes against humanity and violating the Nuremberg code.
There is a control group, but they have done their best to try and get rid of it. Excluded them from society, shamed them, called them names. That isn't science.
Here is an example from Scotland. Investigating the spike in neonatal deaths, yet are excluding the vaccine from the investigation. An absolute disgrace.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23259523.expert-review-mystery-spike-scots-baby-deaths-begins/
Experiencing that first hand whilst being aware of all the data and prior scientific studies, and watching the blatant lies and narrative changes going on throughout... all of the totally illogical policies etc... it’s been eye opening and life changing. The hardest thing to understand now is how some (most) ‘seemingly’ smart people are still hypnotised and defending the vaccines... as well as the people who pushed them on us. Literally everything about it all was wrong on every level. From basic human rights to political corruption to criminal pharma to fraudulent scienctific studies that did everything wrong, to forcing the vaccine on people at zero risk including children and babies... knowing full-well there were significant risks from the vaccines.
Mass formation psychosis is not a conspiracy theory. It’s very real, and it’s scary to even begin to understand what it says about humans on the whole. We are incredibly weak and malleable in the right conditions (fear). It is going to keep happening again and again and again, because of the type of people that are still lining up for boosters, wearing masks, defending vaccines, and telling people they are following the science. They are ushering in authoritarian government through their consent.
Indeed. I know a lot of scientists, working mostly in genetics research. I would have expected them to start calling out the nonsense, but they just parroted the establishment narrative as hard as everyone.
Look into the WHO's new pandemic treaty and international health regulations, they are trying to take away or freedoms in the name of "safety".
Defending vaccines despite all the data, science, evidence of fraud and corruption and government overreach, personal experience etc. is the sort of thing one would (or should) regret on their deathbed. Probably similar to siding with the Nazi agenda in the 1930's (which a lot of people did).
This isn't about "defending vaccines" or "opposing vaccines", it's about objectively analyzing a particular concern about vaccines.
I understand. Good on you for doing what you've done. It was just a response to the previous guys comment about the vaccines being a failure. They absolutely have been a failure... and were going to be ineffective and dangerous from day 1. They never have worked against a virus, never will, and have always been dangerous and ineffective in every animal trial. The amount of fraud and corruption that was committed to get them through an EUA is mind-boggling (they never would have stood up to a 10-12 year study like all other vaccines). I'd like to see you apply your skills to all-cause-mortality and births data from the highly vaxxed countries, vs. the very low vaxxed countries. The more smart people that are WILLING! to look at the reality of our situation, the better.