All-Cause Mortality Lives Matter Too

A medicine is supposed to prevent people from dying, yes?

Wrong answers only for why that blue line is higher than the green line.

“From Dose 1 through the March 13, 2021 data cutoff date, there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the COMIRNATY group and 17 in the placebo group.”

We are going on a thought experiment here, so please bear with me for a bit, before we get back to the significance of this quote and the numbers found within it. 

If you were going to propose a medicine that would be used to combat a potentially life threatening disease, what would you consider to be the ultimate judgement of success for that medicine? So, if you had to pick one thing to measure, one thing that at the end of the day you can hang on your hat on to say “yep! It worked guys!”, what would it be?

Would it be the number of incidences of that disease that the medicine prevented — for example, number of ‘infections’? And if so, across what period of time would we judge its ability to prevent incidences of that disease? 6 months? If it stopped doing this prevention after a while — or, in a surprising plot twist, it was later found that regions where this medicine was used more seemed to also have higher incidences of this disease — would we have to call it a failure in that regard?

(If you haven’t guessed which medicine we are referring to, you must be new here.)

Let’s choose a different indicator, then. What about the ability of that medicine to stop the person who takes the medicine from causing the disease in someone else? I know that sounds a bit convoluted and slightly witchcrafty — and perhaps an unfair expectation to place on a medicine — but these are nonetheless the terms that have been set. 

But then… what if our society had also at that time accepted that, in the near future, everyone would have to have this disease anyway? Is it really a suitable basis to judge a medicine by its ability to slightly delay the occurence of this disease? Probably not, when even the proponents of this medicine have pretty much admitted that the medicine has stopped doing this.

What we really want to look at is severity of disease, when people do experience that disease. That’s what medicine is ultimately about, after all. 

Sooo… severity. Do we measure hospitalisations, then? That seems a bit tricky, and very location dependent, and in practice varies, and is unreliable. In fact, in reality, there is so much variation in data that there are few somewhat accurate measures we have left. 

I know! Let’s just simplify the whole thing, take it back to basics. If we could preemptively design a trial where we have two controlled, comparable groups — one who used this medicine and one who didn’t — we would expect less people in the medicined group to have left this mortal plane of existence within a defined time period. 

Is that a fair enough measure to judge a medicine by — good ol’ fashioned all-cause mortality — especially when the disease in question has been so relentless promoted to us as being an existential threat to our mortality?

Thank the Science lord, then, that we have our official randomised control trial for this medicine to keep tabs on this vital statistic. Unfortunately, this is where things get tricky for the proponents of this medicine — in what I thought was the most recent update report of the results of this trial (hidden away in the appendices of course): we we are informed that 15 people who took the medicine were found to have died, compared to 14 who did not. 

But wait, there is more. The US FDA recently released a short document justifying their approval of said medicine. On page 23, we find an interesting passage, none other than our quote from the start:

“From Dose 1 through the March 13, 2021 data cutoff date, there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the COMIRNATY group and 17 in the placebo group.”

Let’s leave aside the mystery of why these numbers are different than those originally reported. Let’s stick to the numbers we are now given: 4 more people died who got the medicine then those who didn’t. This is despite what we have been told is the 90+% efficacy of this medicine from preventing an illness that is allegedly striking down with random impunity even the Hercules and Xena’s of our society. All that protection from a deadly disease for what, exactly? 

And let’s also remember that we have been told that this trial is the gold standard for assessing the efficacy of this medicine — a trial that it is now alleged was skewed in the favour of that medicine — hence leaving literally no wriggle room for people to make excuses for why this number might actually be artificially inflated in those medicined. Hmm. Maybe that’s the real reason why they unblinded this trial?

In an After Delta apocalyptic scientific landscape where meaningful and reliable datasets are failing faster than jibby jab efficacy, blunt instrument numbers like all-cause mortality are some of the few remaining statistical strongholds we have; a dead person is a dead person, at the end of the day. This is why the above finding is so troubling, particularly when it correlates with rises in all-cause mortality in the real world. As summarised by Charles Eisenstein:

“In 29 countries in Europe, excess mortality in the last four months for people age 15-44 is running at nearly double what it was in 2020. For age 45-65 it is more than 50% higher, and age 65-74 some 40% higher. This is despite (or because of?) vaccination rates of at least 70% across Europe. In the USA, all-cause excess mortality is about 50% higher (so far) than 2020, but for people age 25-44 and 45-64 it is about 85% higher; for people under 25 excess mortality is nearly double last year. The only age group that died in smaller numbers this year in the US were those 85 and older.”

A medicine is supposed to be stopping people from dying, right? Because at the moment, it is starting to look a bit like it is doing the opposite.