Thank you Mathew for tying some good threads together. The evidence for HUB in the cases you describe appears strong.
I have the US county data in hand and have been able to reproduce the nice mortality trend graphs (yearly, with blue points) and those from T Coddington (which I presume are for 2022). However I remain puzzled by the leading graph with correlations floating between -0.1 and 0.1. Are they really much different from zero and isn't the mirroring just what we would expect from these well-known demographic variables? How are you computing theses correlations? The graphs with the blue points suggest correlations more like -0.55 or -0.6 (roughly taking square root of R^2). Also, fwiw for 2022, my state-level graphs for each month all look like your Q1 graph with no shifting trend later in the year.
Moving forward, with HUB well-recognized, the question then becomes how to best adjust for it and proceed to causal inference on key questions of interest such as a reasonable estimate of causal effect of the vax on excess mortality. This requires adjusting for all potential confounders, including those capturing HUB and spatial-temporal biases driving Simpson's paradox cases you have mentioned in the past (e.g. excess death spike in Aug-Sep 2021 in the South). This certainly seems doable although very few analysts appear to be pursuing really well-principled causal modeling. Denis Rancourt has some interesting work along these lines.
Thanks for citing some of my stuff. This prompted me to update a dashboard I created awhile back. In the below (best viewed on a large monitor, in full screen mode), you can plot county level outcomes (deaths, cases, hosp) vs. several health factors (vaccination, obesity, smoking, life expectancy, physical activity & income). Hope this can be helpful:
If every initial statistic relating to COVID is tainted and the PCR tests are at best unreliable and at worst a deliberate scam, then it conveniently makes it difficult to accurately detect if the massive fatalities and injuries are directly associated to the experimental mRNA toxin. This uncertainty gives big pharma and the security state hoodlums as well as all their other cohorts such as the state-run mainstream media the ability to take cover by lying with impunity and brazenly say all death and disability is caused by the actual virus and "not" the injection. This biosecurity nightmare will never end unless the COVID criminals are held accountable.
I am glad to have read this article. I really think that the way forward is to show lack of effectiveness. It’s just too hard to tell people they’ve taken a dangerous treatment ... I have this problem with relatives: I was so horrified that they were taking the latest booster that I did ask them not to take it again because of the heart problems (which are starting to be known about in the uk outside the skeptic community). However all All I ended up doing was making them upset with me. I don’t feel I can bring up the subject again, because they won’t accept it and I don’t want to lose the relationships. Even if they don’t believe me that the thing isn’t effective, at least they won’t be too scared even to consider it, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll have their eyes a little more open when things come out publicly.
"All correlation between vaccine uptake and COVID-19 mortality rates by county appears to be completely explained by income and education status."
Yes, but aren't education and income trivial because they each include lots of far more specific and therefore far more meaningful variables?
I'll bet looking at countries' income and education, rather than counties, will reverse that correlation because pharma-healthcare is more entrenched in the richer countries. What other variables are at play?
Consider that US COVID deaths are 3.9 times the global average while African deaths are way below the global average. Let’s not throw them out as outliers because outliers are good data.
Thanks for another great analysis. You’ve put some meat on the bones of a lot of things that have crossed my mind over the last year and a half. I’ve long suspected most of the apparent effectiveness is a form of statistical illusion. Possibly you’ve just confirmed my existing bias with your HUB/ZEH hypothesizes and that’s why I think you’ve done a great job 😀
I look forward to hearing from those that can add to your ideas and even more so those that disagree with your analysis. Nothing like a healthy respectful debate to sharpen the mind.
P.S. Does the ranked scatter plot have a formal name definition or explanation? It’s something I do myself but have never seen anyone else use it. I thought it was just something I made up myself to “eyeball the data”.
That optical illusion did FASCINATING things with my vision. I perceived all of the squares to almost randomly (but probably related to micro-movements shifting my point of focus) alternate convex and concave curves in a sort of pulse.
Great insights about the relationship between health and wealth--a little disconcerting too as it doesn't look like it's easy to be wealthy, and healthy without education. Bummer as it does seem there are a lot of unemployed educated people...in fact too many. So many great lines in your article, and I can't remember them all. Clearly, mixing in wealthy people to obscure statistics is one of the tricks the CDC has been playing on us to keep us blinded by their statistical analysis.
I’m skeptical of this HUB theory when it comes to these injections. I think HUB can only apply when the choice is voluntary which it wasn’t for a large percentage of people. I mean sure they may not have injected people who were on death’s door, but I’ve got to think also that there is a subset of people who are not too healthy and believed the injections would save them from Covid death. I for one am quite health conscious and was already well aware of Pharma misdeeds to know to stay far away from anything they were peddling. There was not ever a question in my mind. I believe a large chunk of the uninjected fall in this category.
Remember, during the initial trials they quickly eliminated the control groups. Caution was thrown to the wind, once the scoundrels secured a non-indemnity clause.
"The idea that vaccination to generate antibodies in the blood stream has an effect on respiratory viruses has long been a controversial one. And as we've seen, it appears that the influenza vaccines never worked, which bolsters the argument that such antibodies fail to work at the right location—the mucosal membrane. This has been pointed out by Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Ryan Cole, and others. Dr. Joseph Lee puts it thusly,
Never mind, I'll let you off the hook. No bet. The COVID antibody was barely present in 2020. The COVID antibody doesn't seem to have a path through the lung barrier into the lung alveolar cell area. The lung barrier can stop water molecules that are 18 Daltons in size and the COVID antibody is a gargantuan 145,000 Daltons in size. The lung barrier can stop WATER molecules. This barrier MUST be passed by the COVID antibody in order to reach the lung alveolar cells. But, this barrier WILL stop the COVID antibody.
However, the virus itself can effectively penetrate lung epithelium by infecting those cells, being replicated therein, and coming out the other side with replicated virus, which presumably the antibodies produced by the mRNA could stop, if the virus were the same, or very nearly so, as the original wild type virus - which has been extinct since a month after the rollout - the vaccines might have had an effect on virus which got out into the blood. Same case for the fourth shot, the virus for which it might have been effective went extinct soon after rollout, leaving those spike protein variants for which it was not effective, and leaving the door open for systemic infection. In the case of broad-based natural immunity, T-cells would be produced which would produce antibodies for nucleocapsid, membrane, ORF, and non-structural proteins - which tend not to mutate (and if they did, the variant would most likely be not replication competent), and those antibodies would destroy the infection as has been seen, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8253687/ and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z.
There is a vaccine which promises to produce this sort of broad-based immunity - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8791831/ - but testing was halted for lack of money to perform the Phase III trials... pharma wasn't interested, for some reason or other.
Nature. 2022; 601(7894): 617–622.
Published online 2021 Nov 23. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04232-5
PMCID: PMC8791831
PMID: 34814158
"A COVID-19 peptide vaccine for the induction of SARS-CoV-2 T cell immunity", Walz, J. et al.
All of this extensive statistical analysis isn't needed, and it can be a huge distraction. All that needs to be known is that the vaccines were no more effective during trials than placebo, and that lots of vaccinated people got infected with the virus. If 92% of the hospital inpatient population with COVID were vaccinated, then that's all you need to show that the vaccines didn't work. If this were TB, and 92% of hospitalized TB patients were vaccinated against TB with a certain sort of vaccine, it would be obvious that that vaccine didn't work, and that it should be taken off the market. The fact that the medical and "public health" establishments aren't picking up on this is astounding, they need to have their licenses to practice revoked and sent back to school and retake their medical boards...
I asked the following question in an earlier article (The Challenge of Quantifying the Healthy User Bias), and it was not answered:
How can there be a relationship between all-cause mortality and income by county in the pre-COVID era, unless there are also age distribution differences and/or people keep moving to other counties to skew the age distributions? Since the probability of each person dying is 1, how can some counties consistently have lower all-cause mortality based on income alone?
And, by the way, "thusly" is not a proper word. The word "thus" (meaning "in this way") is sufficient.
It used to be the Governments of wealthy nations scammed and exploited the poorer nations. They have reduced their plunder of the poor nations, and have decided to crank up the always running plunder at home.
Do these pirates even have a home?
Isla Tortuga? Jamaica? Monkey Island?
Do they have undead monkeys there?
A debate between LeChuck and Guybrush Threepwood on the merits of fractional reserve banking?
I personally think this (efficacy) is and will continue to be the most difficult aspect of COVID19 and the MRNA vaccines for people to understand.
I had a friend this weekend demand of me whether I thought the MRNA vaccines saved lives or not, after getting frustrated with my insistence that the MRNA vaccines were causing the health troubles that some friends within our circle are experiencing. It was a very difficult discussion for my friend as he is convinced that his decision to get vaccinated was a righteous one (yes, righteous).
In my experience, while many are willing to believe there are or will be side effects to the MRNA vaccines, very few are willing to even entertain that the purported efficacy isn't true. Even when I point out all of the previously "known" facts that are now failures, this efficacy theology is a very difficult one to dismantle.
Thank you Mathew for tying some good threads together. The evidence for HUB in the cases you describe appears strong.
I have the US county data in hand and have been able to reproduce the nice mortality trend graphs (yearly, with blue points) and those from T Coddington (which I presume are for 2022). However I remain puzzled by the leading graph with correlations floating between -0.1 and 0.1. Are they really much different from zero and isn't the mirroring just what we would expect from these well-known demographic variables? How are you computing theses correlations? The graphs with the blue points suggest correlations more like -0.55 or -0.6 (roughly taking square root of R^2). Also, fwiw for 2022, my state-level graphs for each month all look like your Q1 graph with no shifting trend later in the year.
Moving forward, with HUB well-recognized, the question then becomes how to best adjust for it and proceed to causal inference on key questions of interest such as a reasonable estimate of causal effect of the vax on excess mortality. This requires adjusting for all potential confounders, including those capturing HUB and spatial-temporal biases driving Simpson's paradox cases you have mentioned in the past (e.g. excess death spike in Aug-Sep 2021 in the South). This certainly seems doable although very few analysts appear to be pursuing really well-principled causal modeling. Denis Rancourt has some interesting work along these lines.
Thanks for citing some of my stuff. This prompted me to update a dashboard I created awhile back. In the below (best viewed on a large monitor, in full screen mode), you can plot county level outcomes (deaths, cases, hosp) vs. several health factors (vaccination, obesity, smoking, life expectancy, physical activity & income). Hope this can be helpful:
https://public.tableau.com/shared/YSFN6KP68?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link
If every initial statistic relating to COVID is tainted and the PCR tests are at best unreliable and at worst a deliberate scam, then it conveniently makes it difficult to accurately detect if the massive fatalities and injuries are directly associated to the experimental mRNA toxin. This uncertainty gives big pharma and the security state hoodlums as well as all their other cohorts such as the state-run mainstream media the ability to take cover by lying with impunity and brazenly say all death and disability is caused by the actual virus and "not" the injection. This biosecurity nightmare will never end unless the COVID criminals are held accountable.
I am glad to have read this article. I really think that the way forward is to show lack of effectiveness. It’s just too hard to tell people they’ve taken a dangerous treatment ... I have this problem with relatives: I was so horrified that they were taking the latest booster that I did ask them not to take it again because of the heart problems (which are starting to be known about in the uk outside the skeptic community). However all All I ended up doing was making them upset with me. I don’t feel I can bring up the subject again, because they won’t accept it and I don’t want to lose the relationships. Even if they don’t believe me that the thing isn’t effective, at least they won’t be too scared even to consider it, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll have their eyes a little more open when things come out publicly.
"All correlation between vaccine uptake and COVID-19 mortality rates by county appears to be completely explained by income and education status."
Yes, but aren't education and income trivial because they each include lots of far more specific and therefore far more meaningful variables?
I'll bet looking at countries' income and education, rather than counties, will reverse that correlation because pharma-healthcare is more entrenched in the richer countries. What other variables are at play?
Consider that US COVID deaths are 3.9 times the global average while African deaths are way below the global average. Let’s not throw them out as outliers because outliers are good data.
Thanks for another great analysis. You’ve put some meat on the bones of a lot of things that have crossed my mind over the last year and a half. I’ve long suspected most of the apparent effectiveness is a form of statistical illusion. Possibly you’ve just confirmed my existing bias with your HUB/ZEH hypothesizes and that’s why I think you’ve done a great job 😀
I look forward to hearing from those that can add to your ideas and even more so those that disagree with your analysis. Nothing like a healthy respectful debate to sharpen the mind.
P.S. Does the ranked scatter plot have a formal name definition or explanation? It’s something I do myself but have never seen anyone else use it. I thought it was just something I made up myself to “eyeball the data”.
That optical illusion did FASCINATING things with my vision. I perceived all of the squares to almost randomly (but probably related to micro-movements shifting my point of focus) alternate convex and concave curves in a sort of pulse.
Mathew: Thank you for ". . .there is no "proof" in science or statistics. . . ." I suspect few people know or understand this, but it is crucial.
Great insights about the relationship between health and wealth--a little disconcerting too as it doesn't look like it's easy to be wealthy, and healthy without education. Bummer as it does seem there are a lot of unemployed educated people...in fact too many. So many great lines in your article, and I can't remember them all. Clearly, mixing in wealthy people to obscure statistics is one of the tricks the CDC has been playing on us to keep us blinded by their statistical analysis.
I’m skeptical of this HUB theory when it comes to these injections. I think HUB can only apply when the choice is voluntary which it wasn’t for a large percentage of people. I mean sure they may not have injected people who were on death’s door, but I’ve got to think also that there is a subset of people who are not too healthy and believed the injections would save them from Covid death. I for one am quite health conscious and was already well aware of Pharma misdeeds to know to stay far away from anything they were peddling. There was not ever a question in my mind. I believe a large chunk of the uninjected fall in this category.
Remember, during the initial trials they quickly eliminated the control groups. Caution was thrown to the wind, once the scoundrels secured a non-indemnity clause.
"The idea that vaccination to generate antibodies in the blood stream has an effect on respiratory viruses has long been a controversial one. And as we've seen, it appears that the influenza vaccines never worked, which bolsters the argument that such antibodies fail to work at the right location—the mucosal membrane. This has been pointed out by Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Ryan Cole, and others. Dr. Joseph Lee puts it thusly,
Never mind, I'll let you off the hook. No bet. The COVID antibody was barely present in 2020. The COVID antibody doesn't seem to have a path through the lung barrier into the lung alveolar cell area. The lung barrier can stop water molecules that are 18 Daltons in size and the COVID antibody is a gargantuan 145,000 Daltons in size. The lung barrier can stop WATER molecules. This barrier MUST be passed by the COVID antibody in order to reach the lung alveolar cells. But, this barrier WILL stop the COVID antibody.
However, the virus itself can effectively penetrate lung epithelium by infecting those cells, being replicated therein, and coming out the other side with replicated virus, which presumably the antibodies produced by the mRNA could stop, if the virus were the same, or very nearly so, as the original wild type virus - which has been extinct since a month after the rollout - the vaccines might have had an effect on virus which got out into the blood. Same case for the fourth shot, the virus for which it might have been effective went extinct soon after rollout, leaving those spike protein variants for which it was not effective, and leaving the door open for systemic infection. In the case of broad-based natural immunity, T-cells would be produced which would produce antibodies for nucleocapsid, membrane, ORF, and non-structural proteins - which tend not to mutate (and if they did, the variant would most likely be not replication competent), and those antibodies would destroy the infection as has been seen, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8253687/ and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z.
There is a vaccine which promises to produce this sort of broad-based immunity - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8791831/ - but testing was halted for lack of money to perform the Phase III trials... pharma wasn't interested, for some reason or other.
Nature. 2022; 601(7894): 617–622.
Published online 2021 Nov 23. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04232-5
PMCID: PMC8791831
PMID: 34814158
"A COVID-19 peptide vaccine for the induction of SARS-CoV-2 T cell immunity", Walz, J. et al.
All of this extensive statistical analysis isn't needed, and it can be a huge distraction. All that needs to be known is that the vaccines were no more effective during trials than placebo, and that lots of vaccinated people got infected with the virus. If 92% of the hospital inpatient population with COVID were vaccinated, then that's all you need to show that the vaccines didn't work. If this were TB, and 92% of hospitalized TB patients were vaccinated against TB with a certain sort of vaccine, it would be obvious that that vaccine didn't work, and that it should be taken off the market. The fact that the medical and "public health" establishments aren't picking up on this is astounding, they need to have their licenses to practice revoked and sent back to school and retake their medical boards...
I asked the following question in an earlier article (The Challenge of Quantifying the Healthy User Bias), and it was not answered:
How can there be a relationship between all-cause mortality and income by county in the pre-COVID era, unless there are also age distribution differences and/or people keep moving to other counties to skew the age distributions? Since the probability of each person dying is 1, how can some counties consistently have lower all-cause mortality based on income alone?
And, by the way, "thusly" is not a proper word. The word "thus" (meaning "in this way") is sufficient.
It used to be the Governments of wealthy nations scammed and exploited the poorer nations. They have reduced their plunder of the poor nations, and have decided to crank up the always running plunder at home.
Do these pirates even have a home?
Isla Tortuga? Jamaica? Monkey Island?
Do they have undead monkeys there?
A debate between LeChuck and Guybrush Threepwood on the merits of fractional reserve banking?
Isn't EVERYTHING confounded by the two week and longer period during which vaccinees are technically unvaccinated?
Excellent article.
I personally think this (efficacy) is and will continue to be the most difficult aspect of COVID19 and the MRNA vaccines for people to understand.
I had a friend this weekend demand of me whether I thought the MRNA vaccines saved lives or not, after getting frustrated with my insistence that the MRNA vaccines were causing the health troubles that some friends within our circle are experiencing. It was a very difficult discussion for my friend as he is convinced that his decision to get vaccinated was a righteous one (yes, righteous).
In my experience, while many are willing to believe there are or will be side effects to the MRNA vaccines, very few are willing to even entertain that the purported efficacy isn't true. Even when I point out all of the previously "known" facts that are now failures, this efficacy theology is a very difficult one to dismantle.