An absolute mystery:
In the year ending April 30, 2023 – 14 months after the last of several pandemic waves in the United States – at least 104,000 more Americans died than expected, according to Our World in Data. In the U.K., 52,427 excess deaths were reported in that period; in Germany, 81,028; France, 17,731; Netherlands, 10,418; and Ireland, 2,640… “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference in January 2022. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/08/11/more-americans-dying-than-before-pandemic-covid-deaths/70542423007/
Absolutely incomprehensible. I’m sure nobody can venture any guess whatsoever.
Clarissa's Blog 
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/08/11/more-americans-dying-than-before-pandemic-covid-deaths/70542423007/
Ahem.
“But why? And Why Aren’t We Searching for Answers?”
Gosh, what could it possibly be?
These people couldn’t find their own arses if you gave them a flashlight, a map, and good directions.
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I love the way that in the USA today piece they are finally, actually, looking at the insurance company data (that the rest of us have known about for a year already), noting the higher death rates in white-collar workers v blue collar, and then…. it’s climate change of course.
Because comfortable middle class whitecollar workers in their air-conditioned offices are so much more susceptible to the mysterious effects of… climate change.
MSM is its own punchline these days.
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…though on second glance, the article is by Pierre Kory, who knows exactly what’s going on, so this article is really just a measure of how much you have to self-censor to get published in USAtoday 😉
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Yep, that’s a real head-scratcher…
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This mystery will forever remain unsolved.
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OT: peak anti-nation-state…. the top one is apparently a real ad in London…. (I’m a bit skeptical, but….).
England is no longer a place with its own history and culture but just a place to extract money from so you can send it to a place you actually care about….
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Pierre Kory (author of article) comments on the thing more candidly here:
https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/i-published-an-op-ed-in-usa-today
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I have several comments for this…
First, I find it fascinating how isolated different bubbles are. I honestly did not get what you are hinting at until Methylethyl provided an additional link. Because in my bubble the vaccines are just considered useless because they do not catch up with new mutations and the government is downplaying the still existing COVID. So from the viewpoint of my bubble, any excess mortality is ascribed to COVID and its complications and long-term consequences. (With essentially a reversal of 2020 situation going on – while in 2020 anybody who died of anything while having COVID was counted as dying of COVID, now everybody who dies of COVID while having something else is counted as dying of something else.)
Based on my personal experience, I have a suspicion that vaccine shook my system too much and turned something dormant/chronic into acute. Which was pretty bad and I had a significant chance of dying. On the other hand it is clear that a) vaccine did not cause my condition in the first place- cannot develop that fast, and b) COVID could have the same effect. Anyway, I have no personal reason to dispute that vaccines can be dangerous. As a side note, one consequence of my health problems is that I have reduced immunity. So (in reference to some other post of yours) I actually appreciate it when someone warns people they interacted with that they tested positive for COVID. You know, respecting others right to make informed decisions and all that jazz…
What neither of these models explain (at least at the first glance) is why the excess mortality is manifesting predominantly in people of working age, while elderly people were both more vulnerable to COVID and more likely vaccinated.
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It’s a really good question, and I’m not sure anybody knows the answer except perhaps drug companies and government health agencies, and they’re obfuscating. Remember how Pfizer tried to get its trial data sealed for 75 years?
There is still excess mortality among the elderly. Not as high above baseline as younger groups but still larger in absolute numbers– probably for several reasons. The most obvious being that they were more vulnerable to the virus itself, which probably culled out a couple years’ worth of the weakest. Any time you have a pull-forward event like that, with deaths, you’d reasonably expect deaths to be below baseline at least for a little while once the crisis has passed. That has not happened.
The interesting thing that the insurance data shows is that in the younger cohorts, mortality rose more in white-collar workers, who also had a significantly higher vax uptake… AND this uptick is more strongly associated, temporally, with the shots than with the virus.
The frustrating thing about the whole situation is that at least some government datasets DO track death rates in vaxd and unvaxd subsets– the UK in particular– but they stopped releasing that data to the public shortly after the vax rollout, and only very recently release the first numbers on that– which are obfuscated by the form (deaths per 100k life-years or somesuch) they were released in. This doesn’t inspire confidence. The rest of us peons have been trying for over a year now to get at those numbers in every sideways way imaginable– comparing mortality (and disability) rates in any category that might be used as a proxy for vax rates– income, employment, age, etc. Results are very suggestive, but lack the data quality to be conclusive. The fact that governments that have this data have not released it to quell public fears about the shots speaks volumes, IMO.
Personally, I’ve been trying to ferret out post-vax maternal/infant mortality/morbidity stats for over a year, and running into the same blockade. Countries like Canada, that release these numbers on a regular schedule… are way, way behind schedule on that now. Did everybody in the office die? Or are they withholding information deliberately?
Meanwhile, we all seem to have that friend/relative who had a stroke or got a-fib right after the booster…
Kory’s got a follow-up post on the subject here:
https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-may-2023-society-of-actuaries
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God, I’m so sorry you were ill.
I’m waiting for the time when people will calm down and there will be serious medical studies of both COVID and the vaccines. For instance, I’d be interested to know how many people had positive effects from COVID, like I did. I’d like to know how it works and why it had such an effect. Maybe I’m an outlier. Or maybe not and this can be used in some way.
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