You probably won't believe it, but please join me venturing down this particular rabbit hole to learn how 'experts' lie by omission and legacy media continues to intellectually bed-wet by not asking…
Looks like Norway and Scotland - and everywhere else that's been heavily vaccinated - now have similar excess mortality issues, though Scotland seems even worse. The Scottish situation is documented at https://scottishunityedinburgh.substack.com/
and it shows that most of the excess deaths in Scotland happen at home rather than in hospital. This may be a consequence of the woeful state of the NHS in Scotland. Norway probably has a better health care system - one which can actually admit sick people to hospital - and that might be why it is struggling. BTW I'm grateful to the Norwegian Medicines Agency for their weekly report (Weekly report on suspected adverse drug reactions to coronavirus vaccines) which first raised alarm bells about these products back in January 2021.
Hmmm, I'm unsure if the dying at-home part is 'better' or worse than doing so in a hospital setting. I doubt there's much dignity to either, even though I acknowledge it's a--and perhaps the--essential part of the human condition (apart from procreation), but I'd add this: the official 'explanation', sudden adult death syndrome, just tells us that keeling over 'unexpectedly' at home would be a situation that's happening too fast for first responders to take you to a hospital where they pump you full with fluids and drugs and a few days later you die there.
Thanks for the link to Scotland; I'd suspect that northern countries with roughly comparable sunshine deprivation in winter would kinda experience this 'in sync', so this is interesting.
Life is not a survivable condition but if the mortality rates continue as they are then expected lifespan will be seriously reduced - and that also means quality of life. I don't want to go back to pre-enlightenment times. BTW it looks like they're having these issues in New Zealand too:
It's just possible that in smaller countries with a tradition of fastidious health incident recording we can tease out the causes of excess morbidity. It's in everyone's interest that the truth is revealed - but I don't expect it soon.
Oh, the Great Leveller will certainly tell his side of the story.
As to data from 'smaller' countries: I agree, perhaps there is the chance to 'shame' one or two of these into stopping this madness, which could, at least theoretically, have an impact on the grander scheme of things.
I suspect that at some point the facts on the ground will make themselves heard. We're not quite there yet, but we'll get there eventually.
Out here in the US, I am reading "The Invisible Siege", by Dan Werb. It chronicles the remarkable creation of the Covid vaccine, celebrating all the heroes of science who brought it to market and saved mankind in it's darkest hour (that's a literal paraphrase too!). It follows the brilliant Ralph Baric [1], Barney Graham, Anthony Fauci, and all the scientists who overcame the immense odds to produce a safe and effective vaccine that finally put an end to Covid once and for all.
It's timing is almost as bad as Andrew Cuomo's (Governer of NY, architect of NYC's disastrous Covid response, disgraced "me-too" politician) "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19"
As I read this book, I can't help but feel if the authors are wincing at allowing such passages to make it to print, now that we are close to 2 years of data showing a drastically different outcome than what they expected:
P97
"Baric knew that vaccines that didn’t accurately match their targets could weaken human resistance and inadvertently make people who were inoculated sicker."
...
“Baric was one of the few scientists who saw the stakes clearly. It wasn’t that an eventual SARS vaccine might work or not. It was that a vaccine could be either an antidote or a poison for a future pandemic-ready coronavirus, and there might be no way to tell them apart until it was too late."
P179
“Beyond it’s programmability, mRNA vaccines had one more potential advantage…. The worst-case scenarios, though, were serious enough. Could the mRNA, given it’s fragility, simply break down once it was introduced in our immune systems, rendering itself unusable? Would mRNA college with free-floating RNA strands present in our bodies, which research suggested might cause strokes? Would it produce a strong enough immune response?”
This of course is all true, as we have close to two decades of trying and failing to make SARS vaccines (let alone 80 years trying and failing to make RSV and Flu vaccines), all of our struggles well documented [2] so it shouldn't come as a surprise, but to your point, the incuriousness of the press is astounding when we have the own words of the pandemicists to hold them accountable to.
___________________
[1] If bored, my Ralph Baric thesis in case you don't know who he is
1) Because it was written during 2021 when Covid cases and deaths were falling, so it appeared to the author, editors, and publishers that we had in fact solved the 20 year old mystery of why Covid vaccines didn't work. Likely their own echochamber precluded them from noticing that cases and deaths dropped regardless of country vaccination level. By the time it was going through final edits in late 2021 and everywhere highly vaccinated was seeing cases explode, there was still that belief it was only happening to unvaccinated.
Hmmm, so you're basically saying that these people were so successful in answering that 20 year-old question that reality proved them incorrect before the books were out? Talk about irony…
I think most likely #1, but damn there are so many passages in this book where I'm like "I can't believe I am reading this"* (see below another example).
Basically they did such a rushed set of experiments on the vaccine they didn't have time to realize it's effect would only be temporary, and the virus would simply adapt, mutate, and bypass the antibodies.
The rolled out the vaccines at the tail end of the seasonal trend, when cases and deaths were going to fall whether we gave an effective vaccine or a placebo, and decided it must be the vaccines making cases and deaths drop. This would be no different than tying an Onion on your belt at 5 a.m. and declaring this made the sun rise in the horizon.
They were too drunk on their own success.
____________
**Literally the book opens following the "harrowing" experience of Dr Nick Mark, and ICU doc in Seattle, Washington (pop ~700K, large city on our Western Coast) in the earliest phase of the pandemic (March 2020).
Keep in mind we know now that the total deaths in the state of Washington were completely normal. In 2019 for the first 20 weeks there were a total of 23,466 deaths compared to 24,139 in 2020. The highest week was 1305 deaths, but again, unexceptional - a quick jump to 2017 you can see the year opened with 1316, 1378, 1402, and 1339 deaths, yet not a single story in Seattle about how the city is "awash in death".
Yet given the completely normal hospital rates and death, we get this passage in the book:
"Mark knew the PPE was meant to keep him safe, but he couldn’t help feel anxious every time he was called to a patients bed and had to suit up yet again. Dressed in his cumbersome gear, he’d wash his hands, suggest treatments he thought (hoped) might inflect the course of their illness, exit the area, wash his hands again, and disrobe. Minutes later, he would have to do it all over again when, say, another infected patients lungs gave out and they came face-to-face with their imminent death. Again, frustratingly, Mark would have to don his PPE before he could try to help bring them back from the void. **There was so much more he could do, he knew, if only he could face the virus without protection.**"
I would love to know when he says "there was so much more he could do for his patients" if he didn't have to waste all that time in his ridiculous PAPR suit garb, what he means, but the book quickly moves on to fellate Dr Ralph Baric.
Awesome anecdote from Seattle: if only these docs didn't use PPE, you know, like doctors in the Global South. What a (heretical) thought.
An acquaintance (who since ceased talking to me after figuring out I'm not one of the silent majority--no loss to me), who's a MD at the university hospital, explained his pro-injection stance as follows: 'well, it's a pandemic', without a hint of irony while recommending to his cancer surviving wife not to take the jab.
I'm unsure what to think, still, even thought that occurred more than a year ago.
To quote an anonymous politician (whothe originator was is lost to time) and how bad many of them and their appointees in the civil services are at understanding math, let alone perform it:
"If 5% of the girls and 5% of the boys have tried drugs before age 15, that means 10% of all kids have tried drugs!"
As for caring for the elderly then and now: then, as in pre-1950s Sweden, it depended on your family's wealth and resources, same as in most places of the world both now and historically speaking.
Now, the quality of the nursing home depends on how rich you the individual is. If you're poor or even of average means, that means a municipal one - aka storage at Death's door. Morphine drips plus poor or no food and water plus low temperatures plus non-sweish uneducated minimum wage staff without job security - do the math.
That's why Covid took its toll among the elderly - the lethality peaked in municipal care homes or in municipalities where private for-profit contractors provides the service for the municipality (neoliberalism, when you just have to add murder by negligence to up the profit margins), especially in municipalities run by coalistions between the Moderates and the Socialist Democrats; whereas it leveled out in those nursing homes that were completely privately run, and in one municipality: Sweden Democrat ruled Sölvesborg (hence the media going mute about these things).
The 1970s GDR-style nursing homes were far better than today's.
Short version: she asked the doctor in charge locally and delivered what was needed based on the response.
Longer version: Louise Erixon who sat as local chancellor for SD basically asked the local doctor in charge of public health in matters relating to major outbreaks and epidemics (smittskyddsläkare, smitta = contagious disease, skydd = protection/schutz, and läkare = medical doctor - I think its the same in norwegian, but for english speakers I included this) how dangerous Covid looked to be ad what measures were needed to protect those especially vulnerable.
And the she delivered the asked-for resources.
So, a politician who asked a trained and liable professional what was needed to do the job right.
Needless to say, the Socialist Party has focused a lot of resources at the municipality of Sölvesborg, and espeically the coalition-partner of the Sweden Democrats, the Moderte party, leading to the local representatives of the Moderate party to demand equal number of seats in the local council, despite being about half the size of the Sweden Democrats.
This led to the Socialists being able to entice the Moderates to form an alliance with them instead and take over after last elections.
The underlying reason is that thanks to Swden Democrat rule, Sölvesborg as been an exemplary municipality, with low taxes (by swedish metrics...), virtually no crime, very few social problems, good health care for elders, and good order and discipline in the schools. Also, no trash or vandalism due to zero tolerance.
And as you know from DDR and other such places, no alternatives to the Socialist Party line and version of reality can be allowed to exist, since their flaws then becomes obvious - thus the total blackout on how well Erixon handled Covid.
It would appear that, at least locally in that place, the SD would be the preferred option to 'clean up' the mess others made…sadly, there's a bunch of comparable places with 'far-right' parties in charge elsewhere, which didn't work out as well.
Be that as it may, and you perhaps know that, too, poli-sci have developed the notion of 'systemic' opposition parties with respect to 'authoritarian' nations, such as Russia. I do think we should use these analytical tools to better understand our own 'system', esp. with regard to the role of 'far-right' factions, such as SD, the Austrian Freedom Party, or the German AfD. We might even learn something about ourselves…
The thought occurred to me how much easier for the working class people to have a lot less retirees draining their accounts. Back in the old days I could imagine tribes would just leave the useless old people out in the cold - another barbarian practice.
That particularly appalling thought occurred to me, too. What a 'convenient' way to 'solve' the problem of the impending bankruptcy of most Western pension/retirement funds…I'm just unsure if that's not equally barbaric.
Sure is. I can't imagine what death by injection would feel like without morphine once the barbarians decide to not provide it to those not able to pay.
Not much of a difference, according to anecdotal evidence shared by one of my friends who's working in such environments: many seniors in 'nursing homes' are already on God knows how many drugs, hence for many if probably won't make much of a, if indeed any, difference. That is, until it does, doesn't it
Also, from what I 'hear' from 'refugee centres' in Austria, the same shenanigans have been applied to (unwitting) Ukrainians who just arrived: take this injection, it's good for you, nevermind 'informed consent' or the ethics of any of this.
Looks like Norway and Scotland - and everywhere else that's been heavily vaccinated - now have similar excess mortality issues, though Scotland seems even worse. The Scottish situation is documented at https://scottishunityedinburgh.substack.com/
and it shows that most of the excess deaths in Scotland happen at home rather than in hospital. This may be a consequence of the woeful state of the NHS in Scotland. Norway probably has a better health care system - one which can actually admit sick people to hospital - and that might be why it is struggling. BTW I'm grateful to the Norwegian Medicines Agency for their weekly report (Weekly report on suspected adverse drug reactions to coronavirus vaccines) which first raised alarm bells about these products back in January 2021.
Hmmm, I'm unsure if the dying at-home part is 'better' or worse than doing so in a hospital setting. I doubt there's much dignity to either, even though I acknowledge it's a--and perhaps the--essential part of the human condition (apart from procreation), but I'd add this: the official 'explanation', sudden adult death syndrome, just tells us that keeling over 'unexpectedly' at home would be a situation that's happening too fast for first responders to take you to a hospital where they pump you full with fluids and drugs and a few days later you die there.
Thanks for the link to Scotland; I'd suspect that northern countries with roughly comparable sunshine deprivation in winter would kinda experience this 'in sync', so this is interesting.
Life is not a survivable condition but if the mortality rates continue as they are then expected lifespan will be seriously reduced - and that also means quality of life. I don't want to go back to pre-enlightenment times. BTW it looks like they're having these issues in New Zealand too:
https://expose-news.com/2022/11/16/open-letter-investigate-excess-deaths-in-nz/
It's just possible that in smaller countries with a tradition of fastidious health incident recording we can tease out the causes of excess morbidity. It's in everyone's interest that the truth is revealed - but I don't expect it soon.
Oh, the Great Leveller will certainly tell his side of the story.
As to data from 'smaller' countries: I agree, perhaps there is the chance to 'shame' one or two of these into stopping this madness, which could, at least theoretically, have an impact on the grander scheme of things.
I suspect that at some point the facts on the ground will make themselves heard. We're not quite there yet, but we'll get there eventually.
Out here in the US, I am reading "The Invisible Siege", by Dan Werb. It chronicles the remarkable creation of the Covid vaccine, celebrating all the heroes of science who brought it to market and saved mankind in it's darkest hour (that's a literal paraphrase too!). It follows the brilliant Ralph Baric [1], Barney Graham, Anthony Fauci, and all the scientists who overcame the immense odds to produce a safe and effective vaccine that finally put an end to Covid once and for all.
It's timing is almost as bad as Andrew Cuomo's (Governer of NY, architect of NYC's disastrous Covid response, disgraced "me-too" politician) "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19"
As I read this book, I can't help but feel if the authors are wincing at allowing such passages to make it to print, now that we are close to 2 years of data showing a drastically different outcome than what they expected:
P97
"Baric knew that vaccines that didn’t accurately match their targets could weaken human resistance and inadvertently make people who were inoculated sicker."
...
“Baric was one of the few scientists who saw the stakes clearly. It wasn’t that an eventual SARS vaccine might work or not. It was that a vaccine could be either an antidote or a poison for a future pandemic-ready coronavirus, and there might be no way to tell them apart until it was too late."
P179
“Beyond it’s programmability, mRNA vaccines had one more potential advantage…. The worst-case scenarios, though, were serious enough. Could the mRNA, given it’s fragility, simply break down once it was introduced in our immune systems, rendering itself unusable? Would mRNA college with free-floating RNA strands present in our bodies, which research suggested might cause strokes? Would it produce a strong enough immune response?”
This of course is all true, as we have close to two decades of trying and failing to make SARS vaccines (let alone 80 years trying and failing to make RSV and Flu vaccines), all of our struggles well documented [2] so it shouldn't come as a surprise, but to your point, the incuriousness of the press is astounding when we have the own words of the pandemicists to hold them accountable to.
___________________
[1] If bored, my Ralph Baric thesis in case you don't know who he is
https://covidreason.substack.com/p/why-did-they-do-it-why-this-virus/comment/10231755
[2] Sample of studies openly discussing how hard it is to make a SARS vaccine and why it probably won't work:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094954/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/12/sars-vaccine-linked-liver-damage-ferret-study
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/706717_1
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0605438103
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23563-threatwatch-could-a-mers-vaccine-make-people-sicker/
Hi, thanks for the quotes--this is awesome.
Now, question is, I suppose, why would these books be published and pushed? By the very same people (legacy media) who pushed all the other crap.
Let's follow the money in legacy media and publishing, I suppose.
I have 2 theories.
1) Because it was written during 2021 when Covid cases and deaths were falling, so it appeared to the author, editors, and publishers that we had in fact solved the 20 year old mystery of why Covid vaccines didn't work. Likely their own echochamber precluded them from noticing that cases and deaths dropped regardless of country vaccination level. By the time it was going through final edits in late 2021 and everywhere highly vaccinated was seeing cases explode, there was still that belief it was only happening to unvaccinated.
2) Dan Werb is blinking at us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg
Hmmm, so you're basically saying that these people were so successful in answering that 20 year-old question that reality proved them incorrect before the books were out? Talk about irony…
Thanks for the link, I'll have a look!
I think most likely #1, but damn there are so many passages in this book where I'm like "I can't believe I am reading this"* (see below another example).
Basically they did such a rushed set of experiments on the vaccine they didn't have time to realize it's effect would only be temporary, and the virus would simply adapt, mutate, and bypass the antibodies.
The rolled out the vaccines at the tail end of the seasonal trend, when cases and deaths were going to fall whether we gave an effective vaccine or a placebo, and decided it must be the vaccines making cases and deaths drop. This would be no different than tying an Onion on your belt at 5 a.m. and declaring this made the sun rise in the horizon.
They were too drunk on their own success.
____________
**Literally the book opens following the "harrowing" experience of Dr Nick Mark, and ICU doc in Seattle, Washington (pop ~700K, large city on our Western Coast) in the earliest phase of the pandemic (March 2020).
Keep in mind we know now that the total deaths in the state of Washington were completely normal. In 2019 for the first 20 weeks there were a total of 23,466 deaths compared to 24,139 in 2020. The highest week was 1305 deaths, but again, unexceptional - a quick jump to 2017 you can see the year opened with 1316, 1378, 1402, and 1339 deaths, yet not a single story in Seattle about how the city is "awash in death".
Yet given the completely normal hospital rates and death, we get this passage in the book:
"Mark knew the PPE was meant to keep him safe, but he couldn’t help feel anxious every time he was called to a patients bed and had to suit up yet again. Dressed in his cumbersome gear, he’d wash his hands, suggest treatments he thought (hoped) might inflect the course of their illness, exit the area, wash his hands again, and disrobe. Minutes later, he would have to do it all over again when, say, another infected patients lungs gave out and they came face-to-face with their imminent death. Again, frustratingly, Mark would have to don his PPE before he could try to help bring them back from the void. **There was so much more he could do, he knew, if only he could face the virus without protection.**"
I would love to know when he says "there was so much more he could do for his patients" if he didn't have to waste all that time in his ridiculous PAPR suit garb, what he means, but the book quickly moves on to fellate Dr Ralph Baric.
Awesome anecdote from Seattle: if only these docs didn't use PPE, you know, like doctors in the Global South. What a (heretical) thought.
An acquaintance (who since ceased talking to me after figuring out I'm not one of the silent majority--no loss to me), who's a MD at the university hospital, explained his pro-injection stance as follows: 'well, it's a pandemic', without a hint of irony while recommending to his cancer surviving wife not to take the jab.
I'm unsure what to think, still, even thought that occurred more than a year ago.
To quote an anonymous politician (whothe originator was is lost to time) and how bad many of them and their appointees in the civil services are at understanding math, let alone perform it:
"If 5% of the girls and 5% of the boys have tried drugs before age 15, that means 10% of all kids have tried drugs!"
As for caring for the elderly then and now: then, as in pre-1950s Sweden, it depended on your family's wealth and resources, same as in most places of the world both now and historically speaking.
Now, the quality of the nursing home depends on how rich you the individual is. If you're poor or even of average means, that means a municipal one - aka storage at Death's door. Morphine drips plus poor or no food and water plus low temperatures plus non-sweish uneducated minimum wage staff without job security - do the math.
That's why Covid took its toll among the elderly - the lethality peaked in municipal care homes or in municipalities where private for-profit contractors provides the service for the municipality (neoliberalism, when you just have to add murder by negligence to up the profit margins), especially in municipalities run by coalistions between the Moderates and the Socialist Democrats; whereas it leveled out in those nursing homes that were completely privately run, and in one municipality: Sweden Democrat ruled Sölvesborg (hence the media going mute about these things).
The 1970s GDR-style nursing homes were far better than today's.
Oh, yes, innumeracy (the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy) is a very big problem.
Interesting factoid about Sölvesborg: would you mind sharing some more details as to what the SD did or didn't do?
Short version: she asked the doctor in charge locally and delivered what was needed based on the response.
Longer version: Louise Erixon who sat as local chancellor for SD basically asked the local doctor in charge of public health in matters relating to major outbreaks and epidemics (smittskyddsläkare, smitta = contagious disease, skydd = protection/schutz, and läkare = medical doctor - I think its the same in norwegian, but for english speakers I included this) how dangerous Covid looked to be ad what measures were needed to protect those especially vulnerable.
And the she delivered the asked-for resources.
So, a politician who asked a trained and liable professional what was needed to do the job right.
Needless to say, the Socialist Party has focused a lot of resources at the municipality of Sölvesborg, and espeically the coalition-partner of the Sweden Democrats, the Moderte party, leading to the local representatives of the Moderate party to demand equal number of seats in the local council, despite being about half the size of the Sweden Democrats.
This led to the Socialists being able to entice the Moderates to form an alliance with them instead and take over after last elections.
The underlying reason is that thanks to Swden Democrat rule, Sölvesborg as been an exemplary municipality, with low taxes (by swedish metrics...), virtually no crime, very few social problems, good health care for elders, and good order and discipline in the schools. Also, no trash or vandalism due to zero tolerance.
And as you know from DDR and other such places, no alternatives to the Socialist Party line and version of reality can be allowed to exist, since their flaws then becomes obvious - thus the total blackout on how well Erixon handled Covid.
Thanks for the (swift) update.
It would appear that, at least locally in that place, the SD would be the preferred option to 'clean up' the mess others made…sadly, there's a bunch of comparable places with 'far-right' parties in charge elsewhere, which didn't work out as well.
Be that as it may, and you perhaps know that, too, poli-sci have developed the notion of 'systemic' opposition parties with respect to 'authoritarian' nations, such as Russia. I do think we should use these analytical tools to better understand our own 'system', esp. with regard to the role of 'far-right' factions, such as SD, the Austrian Freedom Party, or the German AfD. We might even learn something about ourselves…
Covid the Barbarian!
The thought occurred to me how much easier for the working class people to have a lot less retirees draining their accounts. Back in the old days I could imagine tribes would just leave the useless old people out in the cold - another barbarian practice.
That particularly appalling thought occurred to me, too. What a 'convenient' way to 'solve' the problem of the impending bankruptcy of most Western pension/retirement funds…I'm just unsure if that's not equally barbaric.
Sure is. I can't imagine what death by injection would feel like without morphine once the barbarians decide to not provide it to those not able to pay.
Not much of a difference, according to anecdotal evidence shared by one of my friends who's working in such environments: many seniors in 'nursing homes' are already on God knows how many drugs, hence for many if probably won't make much of a, if indeed any, difference. That is, until it does, doesn't it
Sigh.
Sigh.
Also, from what I 'hear' from 'refugee centres' in Austria, the same shenanigans have been applied to (unwitting) Ukrainians who just arrived: take this injection, it's good for you, nevermind 'informed consent' or the ethics of any of this.
Double sigh.