Steve Kirsch Has a Taker on his New $1 Million Challenge!

Steve Kirsch has been putting out these challenges for months to debate people who don’t think the Covid vaccines are causing injury and deaths.

I'm willing to bet anyone in the world $1M that the COVID vaccines have increased all-cause mortality in the US. Any takers?

It looks like he has a taker! Ron Unz over at the Unz Review has an alternative explanation. In his article “Obesity and the End of the Vaxxing Debate,” he says:

In my latest article published last week, I noted that most anti-vaxxers have claimed that Covid vaccinations had produced a large wave of fatal heart attacks and strokes. However, although American deaths from those causes have indeed risen quite substantially from 2019, nearly all of that increase occurred in 2020, before the Covid vaccination drive began, while the numbers remained almost unchanged in 2021 and 2022. This suggested that the rise was caused by the Covid infections of 2020 rather than the vaccines later deployed to control them, and scientific studies have already demonstrated that even mild Covid infections lead to a greatly increased future risk of heart attacks and strokes. And if the massive amount of vaxxing and boosting that began early in 2021 had almost no impact upon such mortality totals, it seemed unlikely that they have been causing very many deaths.

I had summarized my findings in a few simple points:

1. Vaxxing only began on December 14, 2020, so it would have had almost no public health impact during that year.

2. Except for homicides and accidents, nearly all the major changes in American death rates occurred in 2020, so these must have been due to Covid.

3. Except for homicides and accidents, non-Covid deaths rates showed almost no change in 2021 and 2022, so the vaccines probably had no impact one way or the other.

I agree with Mr. Unz on point 1, though points 2 and 3 are sticky to me. Major changes in American death rates could be DUE to Covid MITIGATION MEASURES, not Covid itself. These are deaths from substance abuse and despair and suicide that might have been prompted by the dehumanizing measures instituted worldwide. On point 3 I am even more scratching my head. Non Covid death rates showed no change? Weren’t the vaccines supposed to save lives?

Covid mortality rates are very sharply age-skewed, with a huge fraction of the deaths concentrated in the elderly. Therefore, the particular age distribution of a country might easily overwhelm other factors in determining overall mortality rates, while focusing upon working-age individuals tends to minimize this distortion. Also, ordinary Covid deaths are relatively low in that age-range, allowing us to more easily detect the mortality impact of other possible factors such as vaxxing or “long Covid.”

I quickly discovered that many of those nations had actually experienced large “mortality deficits” for that age group during those years. Far fewer working-age individuals had died during 2021 and 2022 than would have been predicted in 2019.

“Some of the strongest examples of this remarkable effect included countries such as France, Sweden, South Korea, Denmark, Belgium, and Finland, but roughly half of all the countries using Western Covid vaccines had such noticeable mortality deficits. All of these countries were very heavily vaxxed, yet their working-age death rates had dropped below normal levels in those years, presumably because the lockdowns and social distancing had reduced deaths from other sorts of contagious diseases and from traffic accidents.”

Now this was all very surprising to me as I spend a lot of time on Our World in Data looking at overall mortality statistics. It was true that I had never generated an age adjusted mortality chart of this type for any of the countries he mentioned, though, in part because that dataset does not allow such segmenting by age. I also use the CDC’s mortality dashboard for related issues in the United States specifically.

I checked how Ron Unz had generated his data:

“I focused upon total deaths for working-age individuals age 15-64, used the average mortality rates for the years 2015-2019 as the reference, and examined the totals for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022.”

So I went to his dataset to generate some data of my own. The loading page defaulted to Austria 2022 all cause excess mortality. It was very high and sustained. The brown is bad (excess), and the blue is good (below average). As someone who has looked at hundreds of demographic charts of this type you usually see a tight grouping around the baseline, with slight peaks and valleys that rarely fluctuate more than 5% above or 5% below. That’s when taking out the effects of mass casualty events like war and famine, which often lead to sharp increases followed by sharp decreases, along with a boomerang like rebound in birth rates. The powers that be have not done a good job killing off large swaths of the global population with wars.

Here’s all cause mortality for Finland in 2017, for example. It looks like they had a bad flu season in January or so, but you can see some blue valleys later in the year.

Here is the same all cause mortality for Finland in 2022

This was one of the countries that Unz used in his commentary about lower 15-64 year old all cause mortality. I did not adjust out for age but I was trying to get to a baseline support for his numbers by using different data sets and ways of interpreting it in a process called triangulation. Virtually every country I looked at had something similar to Finland going on: sustained and elevated all age all cause mortality since 2021. The 2022 numbers were in general at least as bad if not worse than 2021. Not all countries had elevated all cause mortality in 2020, the Covid year. This is scary, scary stuff.

Unz said this regarding what inspired his work:

“First, a very level-headed commenter from Iceland calling himself “Niceland” noted that except for the elderly, his own country’s population had experienced no noticeable increase in deaths during the last couple of years, despite the very heavy vaxxing regime it had followed. He then checked, and discovered that the same was true of Denmark and a couple of other nearby European countries. Since the overwhelming majority of the populations were vaxxed, and those younger than about 65 showed no significant excess mortality, it seemed unlikely that vaxxing had caused any substantial number of deaths.”

Iceland, it should be noted, is tiny population wise, with 373,000 citizens or so. That is far less people than the least populated US state of Wyoming with its 586,000 residents. Most of the countries Ron Unz noted are Nordic, small, and in close proximity to each other. When a small country is segmented out to a population that should not be dying in high numbers a lot of statistical noise can be created. Here is the excess mortality chart for Iceland for 2022, for 15 to 64 year olds:

I am seeing some blue valleys, but there are still a surprising number of brown peaks considering this was his baseline country he used for the there is no excess mortality or if there is it’s all Covid argument. But look at the total number of deaths: the highest peak week was 16 deaths, with a low valley week of two. The baseline appears to be around six deaths per week in this age range in Iceland. It doesn’t take much to move the needle here. If one wants to play around with charts until you get some blue valleys there’s plenty of ways to do it.

There could be all kinds of explanations for these numbers, but it does look like cherry picking. I use Our World in Data for my excess mortality statistics. I decided a long time ago to just look at the big big picture. I usually only focus on excess all age all cause mortality. I do this because Covid can be incentivized on or off a death certificate in many ways by many different countries. I am hard pressed to think of a single category of death that absolutely 100% cannot be tied to either Covid mitigation measures or vaccine side effects. If lockdowns caused a spike in suicides or starvation or sustained economic depression, shouldn’t those who implemented them take the blame? Killing four people to save one has never and will never be a reasonable policy in public health.

My favorite big meta picture data charts that I like to generate is cumulative all cause all age excess mortality. This number almost always reverts close to 0% over the course of a few years. The only time it does not is usually during war. I ran it in Our World in Data on several different countries since the pandemic began. Here are my results for selected ones. It looks like we’re at war.

Japan is the closest to 0% excess all age all cause mortality. Perhaps they should stop the booster campaign and quit while they are ahead. These numbers are terrifying. Almost every country is way above baseline cumulative all cause mortality. The trend is not abating in any meaningful way. Ron Unz does mention the many countries that are seeing rises in excess mortality (like, almost all of them). His explanation for that is that the excess mortality is tied to Covid deaths, and bad Covid death rates are tied to obesity:

More than thirty of the countries whose mortality statistics are available on the HMD website also have their obesity rates shown by the World Populations Review website. It’s not difficult to produce a table providing these along with their working-age mortality results for 2020-2022, listed by descending obesity percentages, and also including the fully-vaxxed percentages of their populations:

Although the match is far from perfect, there does seem to be a strong relationship between the obesity of the countries and their relative mortality rates for 2020-2022. All the countries with the highest obesity rates had high or very high mortality rates, while the countries with the lowest obesity rates generally had low or very low mortality rates.

On a quantitative basis, if we compare the national obesity figures to the working-age excess mortality percentages across those countries, we get moderately strong correlations:

Since we know that the severity of the Covid illness is heavily influenced by obesity, this strongly reinforces our conclusion that Covid infections were the main driving factor in these mortality differences. And although there are some exceptions, nearly all the countries whose working-age populations had high mortality results in 2021 and 2022 had also had high mortality results in 2020, before the vaccinations had begun. This suggests that the combination of Covid infections with obesity had been responsible rather than the vaccinations.

I recently discussed all these issues with Kevin Barrett on his show, and here’s a link for those who would like to listen to our hour-long discussion:

Unless anti-vaxxers can produce a more plausible explanation for this very strong international pattern, their hypothesis that the vaccines rather than the lingering consequences of Covid infections are causing significant numbers of deaths seems to have been decisively refuted. Thus, I think that the bitter vaxxing debate of the last couple of years may now be nearly over.

In the past I’ve been told that prominent critics of the Covid vaccines such as Steve Kirsch and Bret Weinstein have challenged anyone to debate them on the issue, and some had suggested that I do so, but I’ve always demurred. Although my very occasional columns on the subject have been strongly skeptical of the anti-vaxxing position, I’ve never felt that they made a sufficiently strong affirmative case on the other side to be worth presenting.

However, I do now regard my recent pair of articles as quite conclusive on the subject, and I would welcome an opportunity to debate my analysis with Kirsch, Weinstein, or any other prominent anti-vaxxers.

I don’t think Unz is wrong that obesity is generally more killer. Yet I can think of one not very fat at all country, that being Thailand, that has pronounced excess mortality. I ran the numbers myself there on both births and deaths:

Thailand's Demographic Collapse

Does anyone else want to take on this guy? I’m having trouble coming up with rosy numbers no matter how I do it.

Buy me a ko-fi