By Bruce Webber
Posted 2024-03-31 in general
Since I wrote my first article about excess deaths, I added charts for more countries to the Excess Deaths Google Sheet I created. I also added a tab called Countries with high-level information about these countries to explore possible relationships.
I included GDP per capita from the World Bank to see if there are more excess deaths in poorer countries. I don’t see this relationship. Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic (three of the poorer countries on the list) have very low or negative excess deaths in 2023.
Is population growth distorting the excess death statistics? The OECD’s Methodological Note points out that population growth makes the calculated excess death percentages larger than they should be because the baseline is from 2015 to 2019. I included columns with population data from the United Nations and columns with excess death data. Population growth accounts for a small part of the excess death percentages.
Another possible factor is the COVID vaccine, which has caused adverse reactions, including death. I included a column showing the percentage of fully vaccinated people from Our World In Data. I do not see a relationship between vaccinations and excess deaths. Hungary, a country with negative excess deaths in 2023, has a vaccination rate close to that of the United States. (However, 65% of these were mRNA vaccines, while the remainder were adenovirus vector vaccines and inactivated vaccines.) The vaccination rates for Poland and the Slovak Republic, while lower than Hungary, are still significant.
A more sophisticated analysis, using more detailed data for more countries, might reveal correlations. This, however, is beyond my ability.
I return to the two questions I asked in my first article:
In 2023, hundreds of thousands of people in the United States died unexpectedly. Eric Weinstein uses the term “anti-interesting” to refer to stories that are fascinating and merit journalistic investigation but go unreported. Is this one of those stories?
I received the COVID vaccine in the spring of 2021 and the booster in the fall of 2021. Given the information I had then, I decided the risks of getting COVID outweighed the risks of the experimental vaccine.
I also continued taking a vitamin D3 supplement, which I had started years before the pandemic. The level of vitamin D in the blood has been correlated with acute respiratory infections and disease outcomes. In 2021, I began taking ivermectin twice a month as a prophylactic. Rather than an either–or strategy, I adopted a both–and strategy.
I have not had COVID. The strategy I followed may have contributed to this. I’ve likely been exposed to COVID, but like the flu, only a fraction of people exposed contract it.
Based on what I know now, I will not take another COVID booster or any mRNA vaccine. I am concerned that the mRNA vaccine can leave the injection site and damage other areas of the body.