There were 4,084 documented lynchings of black people during the Jim Crow era South. Italians etc not included. This would make the BLM excess murders worse.
Steal away! ChatGPT gave me the 4,084 figure, so it was likely a hallucination. The NAACP (https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america) gives 4,743 documented lynchings from 1882 to 1968. Of the 4,743 lynchings, 3,446 were black and the rest Chinese, Mexicans, Italians, non-conforming whites etc.
Per capita, per year, and by ratio of the population, maybe. That last one might be harder since data won’t be too clean for that era. It probably won’t make a huge difference, since I doubt 5k over the period would be a relatively large percent of the black population, not like it would be 0.1% I shouldn’t think. (Just pulling a number for “relatively large” there.)
Jim Crow era lynchings occurred from about 1882 to 1968, so you'd also have to divide the lynchings by the ~90 years during which they occurred. Excess deaths from the withdrawal of policing due to BLM occurred over about two years. On a basis of deaths per year, the recent excess deaths were about 50x the rate during the lynching era. Taking the US population of ~62 million in 1890 vs ~350 million today, roughly 6x the size, that gets us to about 10x the rate of lynchings.
Good point, but look at percentages of the population. Multiply the number of lynchings by at least 10x, maybe 100x for the equivalent in today’s population.
US population of ~62 million in 1882, the start of Jim Crow. US population ~350 million now. So ~6x the population now. However, the Jim Crow era lasted about ninety years (1882-1968) so the rate per year was much lower than the rate of excess deaths in the two years after BLM.
Well, this should prove to be a popular article... 🤣🤣🤣
> if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments.
The people who were responsible for all of those excess deaths will never admit to it, and in truth, will never even reflect on their own part in that travesty of “doing the right thing.” They will just call you a racist for even suggesting their actions had this effect, because as you know, math is racist.
> For every 2,300 BLM protesters, one black person died because of the real world ramifications of ACAB and Defund. If you protested with BLM you shortened the life of a black person by 11 days on average.
Oooof. Yeah, nobody is going to look in the mirror and admit that.
From a psychological point of view, it's understandable. There have been any number of studies regarding confirmation bias, including a lecture by Daniel Kahneman when he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. It seems that once a person has started down a path of thought or philosophy, especially if that path is then accelerated by a person's surroundings, it takes a nuclear level event to move them in a different direction. It is very, very hard to stay out of social media echo boxes. When someone chooses to eliminate all outside influences, we get assassination attempts - starting(?) with Steve Scalise.
Considering everyone else's murder rate dropped during the pandemic, and this excess is based on a calc from baseline, the true number is definitely higher.
"If I were one of the people who promulgated this problem in 2020 I think I would look in the mirror, consider my own contribution to the deaths of black folk in the USA, and “do better” by not doing that again, and trying to keep my friends from doing it either."
Nice. Now do excess deaths due to red state anti-vaccine movements, and project forward starting from RFK, Jr.
That's good, I like it. But I had to wait four years for the numbers to all come in for Floyd so I guess we can check back on this in 2028, or perhaps a few years longer, if RFKJr does something specific and egregious that directly provokes a disease spike or a malnutrition event.
I have thought about running similar numbers on how many people died due to the Ds effort to delay the vaccines until after the 2020 votes were counted. But in the end the Covid vaccine wasn't efficacious enough to really be sure any of those deaths due to vaccine delay could have been averted anyway, so I think it's a less solid case.
What do you mean by how many people died due to the Ds effort to delay the vaccines until after the 2020 votes were counted? The first vaccine was ours, and it left the Building 41 warehouse as early as was humanly possible and that was on Dec 13, long after the election. What the fuck are you talking about?
I worked in active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) in Pfizer-Kalamazoo, not in drug product (DP). API is where the active ingredients and made, while DP is where the actual product you buy at the drug store are produced (formulated). So we make chemicals in drums, while the DP folks take the chemicals we make, combine them with the excipients to product the pills, ointments, injectables, inhalants, etc. We make one of the vaccine components in API, other come from our vaccine plants out west that came in with some merger 15 years ago or so ago IIRC.
But we do formulate the vaccine in DP at Kalamazoo in Building 41. I think our plant at Puurs in Belgium also made vaccine, though I might be getting Puurs mixed up with another European facility (Pfizer has many manufacturing facilities all over the world).
I was not involved in any of the vaccine projects. The scientist in the adjacent lab was involved in making one of the ingredients, but this was later, it did not occur to the vaccine project leaders who were concerned about getting enough formulation ingredients to ask us if we could make some (they finally did in December 2020).
This is my rough idea of the timeline. This is based on my memory. The vaccine was first produced in February-March. Lab batches were then made an a combined Phase 1-2 trials run in Apr-May (I think). By summer we had a product and clinical material for Phase 3 were being producing around July_Aug. Phase 3 trials began in last August with the first injections which continued into September. IIRC commercial lots started to be produced in September on one filling line. The trial won't give you results until enough time has elapsed for enough of the controls to have become sick in order to make a statistically significant assessment of effectiveness. At the time using the current infection rates I estimated it would take around 10 weeks for this to happen, so I expected a result in November. And I saw a press release from the company on Nov 18 providing the results.
I imagine they send the filing to the FDA shortly after this. It usually take 6-12 months for a filing to be evaluated, but they fast-tracked this, and we got approval in December and shipped out the first batches the next day IIRC.
How on earth anyone could have gone all that work done by early October to get an approval before the election in early November is beyond me. To argue that this record time for a new vaccine was somehow delayed is crazy pants.
Per the MIT technology review article, the approval was in fact specifically delayed to affect election results. We have to take that as a given because folks were bragging about it even in Time magazine. But that doesn't directly translate into dead people unless two other things are true:
1) the vaccine production itself was impacted by the approval delay, and
2) the vaccine actually works
#2 is a little bit questionable to me. It seems to work some as a targeted temporary immune booster but it obviously doesn't work as well as other "vaccines" in stopping spread of a virus, which to me means we shouldn't be calling it a vaccine at all.
#1 is also questionable - if the wheels were in motion to mass produce this thing no matter what on the presumption that the approval would be granted, then delaying the approval announcement to affect an election may be scummy but not deadly.
If (A) some of the major decisions about production ramp-up were being held until the announcement of approval, and also if (B) this caused slower vaccination leading to a certain number of people who died during the delay, only then could we say that the monkey business of electioneering the vaccine announcement lead to dead people. I'm not sure either A or B are true. And I value your insight into the production ramp.
Manufacturing necessarily begins well before approval so you have product to ship when approval is reached. So the idea that manufacturing was held up because of politics is bonkers. The only place where a holdup could happen would be in the approval process. But as I pointed out initial phase 3 trial results were obtained on November 18 and the first batches of vaccine shipped on December 13. That is very fast approval. There was *nothing* to approve before Nov 18 and that was AFTER the election.
As for the article where does it the approval was in fact specifically delayed to affect election results? And considering that we did not file until after the election, just how would that work?
I'm pretty sure there's enough excess death data during the pandemic to already make a comparison, at least with the same rigor of de-confounding that you did here. Certainly enough on which to base policy decisions...
RFK, Jr.'s impacts will definitely require a much longer timeframe, and will depend on the specific actions, although childhood disease might be an early bellwether. In the case of Gaza, Polio is already through the roof, but RFK,Jr. won't be denying vaccine access, I'd assume.
The anti-vaccine movement isn’t new, and until just recently, it was almost exclusively a phenomena of those on the extreme political Left, and was isolated to wealthy enclaves (e.g., Northern California). So there should already be data available on its effects.
I'll push back on this a little. The anti vaccine movement has always been a blend of hippie granola moms and christian homeschooler families. So it's a bit of a horseshoe effect.
I’d be curious to see some other factors too, I know unemployment went way up after 2020 and I’m not sure how fast it got back to normal, same thing with education getting disrupted and inflation getting worse. I think it’s possible those things also contributed to the increase in crime but there’s a reason HWFO’s the one doing the math and not me, I’m sure he considered those factors, kinda surprised to see him highlighting a positive impact of cops though
An insurrection would imply they were attempting to overthrow the government, not detach themselves from it. Ruby Ridge was not an insurrection for instance.
Isn’t part of the legal definition of insurrection preventing the courts from functioning? I rather recall that from looking up the relevant legislation a few months back, but I am not sure now (and I don’t want to look it up on my work pc).
If the courts could not bring themselves to add "insurrection" to the list of offenses for the thousand people charged over J6, then the definition is surely too narrow to levy against a bunch of cosplaying Seattle communists.
Possibly? The original legislative definition (such as it is... they seemed to think everyone pretty much knew what they meant) does seem to focus more on the working of government over time. So a week long 'occupation' impeding of the court's ability to function would be more relevant than over a weekend where the court wasn't working anyway.
Likewise the actual workings have to be impeded. I can set up an autonomous zone in the back acre or two of my dad's place, keeping all government officials out as a matter of course, and no one would even know. Hell, I can claim to have done so for the past 40 years no one would know the difference. Doing so in the actual court house, or state house, would be a much different issue.
I agree, though, that the legal definition doesn't seem understood enough to be used for anything but the most extreme cases, such as actual armed forces declaring independence. I am inclined to go the opposite direction, and say that "insurrection" shouldn't even be a legal class of behavior, but rather there should be specific other behaviors that are clearly defined and illegal, such that if someone tries an insurrection they will be guilty of a variety of other offenses. Much like "hate crime" I think insurrection itself won't ever be a useful category, and mostly will be used to attack people the government doesn't like.
In order to lead, the leadership of the country (at all levels, not just federal) needs some kind of police force to enforce the laws they enact. Burning down a police station is absolutely, unequivocally subverting the ability of elected leaders to lead.
It seems like your estimate is a bit on the low side -- my notes have it at 4,900 excess fatal shootings for 2020 alone (using 2019 as the baseline), and 2021, 2022, and 2023 were still elevated:
Plus you also have to account for excess car crash deaths, which spiked after the George Floyd protests, likely due to reduced police presence. Those accounted for perhaps another 1,000 victims per year.
All that said, I did not find that recognizing these patterns made voting much easier, for me. In 2020, the choice was between the party that condoned increased crime and the party that denied that the pandemic was real ("it's the Democrats' latest hoax", "it'll be over by Easter", "It'll just magically disappear someday"). The 2020 body count from Trump's botched covid response was far in excess of anything BLM did. In 2021, the biggest cause of preventable deaths was likely antivax misinformation, with about 200,000 preventable deaths had covid vaccines been more widely accepted.
For the most part, I've taken a moderate strategy of splitting my vote. At a local level, I voted for conservatives or moderates and shunned any of the "defund the police" psychos. At a national level, I still had to oppose Trump in 2020 (for his poor pandemic response) and in 2024 (both for his expected inability to respond well to another national disaster and for his decision to boost antivax psychos like RFK, Jr).
Trump did not "botch the Covid response." Trump was objectively the most pro-vax president the USA has ever had, if you look at the evidence instead of the spin. Evidence:
Further, The USA's Covid results per capita were on par with every other western European nation that has porous borders and relatively free trade with China. Math:
If Trump had been allowed to announce the vaccine in 2020 as his "October surprise," then he probably would have won the votes he lost in the age 60+ demographic, probably would have won the election, and then the rednecks would have been driving their pickup trucks around with flags that said TRUMPVAX demanding we reopen the economy while the blues still hid under their beds afraid of germs saying the vaccine can't be trusted, which was exactly what the blues were doing all summer of 2020. Evidence:
LOL at "porous borders". Why is everything about the border with you people? Do you really think that Mexican migrants made MAGA retards refuse to wear masks, social distance, or get vaccinated?
Covid mortality was initially higher in Democrat run cities (higher density + bad covid response in NYC) but gradually became much higher among Republicans:
I am somewhat sympathetic to your idea that Pfizer withheld their vaccine results around the election, there is some evidence for that. But I find your counterfactual fantasy where you imagine Republicans would have secretly become the pro-science pro-vaccine party another ludicrous form of cope. It's like you're saying, "but in my imaginary world the Trump voters are actually the reasonable people"
Nope, sorry, the party that didn't believe that the virus was real or serious was not about to become pro-science or pro-vaccine. With lower IQ, lower neuroticism, lower trust in science, and a narrative already in motion against taking covid seriously, MAGA would have never been the pro-vaccine party.
In reality, MAGA is just a low human capital movement with voters that are easily confused. Notice how easily RFK is slotting into the movement, and how every health guru and grifter is moving in to cash in on MAGA stupidity.
If anything, I'd think Pfizer made an excellent business decision to not have their vaccine labelled the Trump vaccine. If that had happened, you might get somewhat lower rates of Democrats taking it, without much increase in business from Republicans.
Why don't you attribute these extra lives lost to police malfeasance? Without a deliberate murder by police in front of many witnesses and a camera, there would have been no protests. Some think it was also the surge in guns.
Why aren't you counting all of the lowering of future abuse & murder by police, and the massively larger reduction in fear & lack of agency in the greater population? That was the goal of the protests, and of more clear news & court coverage of common police practices: That seems to have been very affective. Most of the protesters would believe that trade off was worth it, even if those were extra black deaths. However, looking at the graph above, the excess murders that year were fairly evenly distributed throughout the US, not just where there are higher concentrations of black people. The BLM protests were not everywhere, and did not have large effects everywhere.
People could have chosen any number of ways to protest police brutality, and they chose to do it by destroying neighborhoods and empowering criminals. Zero police officers were involved in that decision.
There are 8,682 black people that I would love to ask if they thought the consciences of a bunch of white protesters was worth their deaths, but they're, y'know, dead.
I think if the events of 2020 had a noticeable impact on the relative rate of unnecessary police killings, then we could run a similar analysis and compare the numbers. I have not looked into those numbers yet. Have you? My cursory look into this question seems to indicate that determining how many police killings are unnecessary is very difficult, but more importantly the total number of police killings has not gone down anyway.
> "Why aren't you counting all of the lowering of future abuse & murder by police, and the massively larger reduction in fear & lack of agency in the greater population?"
Please describe a scientifically rigorous method of calculating that number. It is otherwise difficult to "count" something. Though obviously the entire BLM movement was about feels, not reality, so I can understand why that argument might not resonate.
"Without a deliberate murder by police..." You mean Floyd? I watched the videos. I had a 300 lb person kneel on my (180 lb) neck on a concrete floor. I had no trouble breathing.
Floyd killed himself with drugs, and the cop didn't care enough to save him. That's a crime, sure, but the murder charge was always an exaggeration. And that exaggeration lead to... cops not wanting to patrol black areas. Which directly harmed black folks.
"Surge in guns"? By law abiding citizens buying guns for their own defense? In the face of an increase in criminality? You might see an increase in homicide, but the difference between homicide and murder is in the aggressor. The criminals already had guns.
I don't understand what you're asking. Floyd had drugs in his system, they appear to have been the cause of death. Chauvin, the cop, neither provided treatment, allowed treatment, nor even gave attention to other responders telling him that Floyd needed treatment. A cop has a duty to act, and this violated it, which is negligent homicide. Which I think satisfies the third degree charge with which Chauvin was convicted, but the second-degree charge was too much.
Whether Chauvin and the other police on the scene provided or allowed treatment is also an issue people seem to disagree about in this scenario.
I'm not sure the relative guilt of Chauvin matters, at least to me. What matters is the reaction to it. There are worse cases of police abuse weekly in this country.
The facts don't actually matter, what matters is the perception. If people think white cops are intentionally seeking out innocent black people to kill, that gets a different result from having *a* cop (race unspecified) be so jaded by the daily horrors that he just doesn't care any more that a criminal killed himself. The first is "institutionalized racism", the second is "we need mental health for our community defenders." You've pointed out many times, which one of those sells the clicks?
At this point, no, my belief that the second-degree was overcharged matters as much as a raindrop to the ocean.
People take the anecdote as the data. As another example: Rittenhouse. There was PLENTY of video available for people to get the facts. But through a combination of prejudice and not knowing the law, people came to many different conclusions.
Maybe so, though it's my understanding that the drugs WERE the cause of death. As to prosecuting a police officer for behavior during a challenge -- we're demanding perfection?
It depends on who you ask. The jury that convicted Chauvin of second degree murder was convinced that Chauvin was the cause of death.
"Perfection"? No. But I do expect the cop to care that someone is literally dying beneath his knee. When the other cop says "I can't find a pulse", and the medical professional says "he is dying", I expect Chauvin to say "oh, yeah, that means I have a duty to do something, even if it is to get out of the way."
You ever see that episode of Breaking Bad where Walt just watches as a girl chokes on her own vomit? Yeah, he doesn't have any duty to act, but he's not portrayed as panicking or unsure. He calmly and rationally watches it happen. Similarly, Chauvin appeared to have the necessary information and the time and space to process it, and he made the wrong choice. As a cop, I believe he DOES have a duty to act. I expect better than that.
But just to cover all facets, I know this is not a job I could do.
Well that’s one way to say the “ends justify the means.” Careful, history has proven that sometimes that point of view works both ways and the law of unintended consequences doesn’t discriminate between evil or stupid.
Nice analysis. When I first thought about this, I noted that the fraction of white homicide victims who were killed by police were 2-3 times higher than the fraction of black homicide victims killed by police. That is white people at risk for becoming homicide victims faced a greater threat from police than black people at risk.
As an example, if you are dude minding your own business, you are more likely be killed in a case of mistaken identity by an assassin whose intended target was someone else if you're black. This is simply because a gangbanger looking to revenge-kill someone is more likely to be looking for a black dude than a white one. So, if you are an innocent black dude, you are at greater risk than if you are an innocent white dude. This happened to the husband of a former foster kid of ours.
Most of the time I've seen anyone do a careful "per incident" or "per encounter" analysis, police killings of white people and black people fall at about the same ratio. The actual issue with disproportionate killings of blacks relative to overall population ratio is the disproportionate number of police encounters, which is related to disproportionate crime.
Now whether we do the racist thing with that data (blame black people) or we do the smart thing (try and fix the motivations for crime) is separate, but the fact that black folks commit more crime is fundamental to even begin to solve anything.
Right after the George Floyd incident I looked around for stats on police killings and race. There were two solid, careful studies. Google will find them easily. One was based on FBI death info and the other augmented this with other info I don't recall. Both came to the same conclusion: they couldn't detect any positive signal in the hypothesis that white police officers kill more blacks than other races per capita. One detected a slight negative signal (meaning they tended to kill fewer. Black police officers had higher rates, but not by much.
The evidence for your conclusion is…underwhelming to say the least. But let’s run with it and see where it goes. Black people shutting their mouths and putting up with all the $#!+ that entails is safer than Black people standing up and saying they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
Kinda sounds like…chattel slavery times. Uncle Tom was certainly much less likely to be killed than an enslaved person who said…they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
Logic suggests that If we (USA) were to let a foreign power take us over, the casualties would be far fewer than if we fought back. So…that means we should allow it to happen?
A BLM-free alternate history with thousands fewer Black (and other) deaths, is a nice fantasy. But achieving that imaginary world might require hard things of us. How about we as a nation take responsibility for institutional racism and address, for example, the gap in generational wealth between Blacks and Whites directly resulting from racist policies and practices?
I believe that genes at least mostly explain why blacks are on average duller than whites are, which I suspect in turn explains the intergenerational wealth gap between blacks and whites, at least to a substantial extent.
You need to start the calculation in 2015. BLM's effect on policing and thereby excess murders of African Americans started on earnest as the Ferguson Effect in 2015.
By my calculations, the number excess murders of African Americans amounts to about 15,000 between 2015–2021, with no real alternative explanation than BLM.
There were 4,084 documented lynchings of black people during the Jim Crow era South. Italians etc not included. This would make the BLM excess murders worse.
Oh that's a great comparison I didn't even think of before publishing. Well done. You think like an HWFOer.
I may steal this and edit it in. It's too good not to amplify somehow.
Steal away! ChatGPT gave me the 4,084 figure, so it was likely a hallucination. The NAACP (https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america) gives 4,743 documented lynchings from 1882 to 1968. Of the 4,743 lynchings, 3,446 were black and the rest Chinese, Mexicans, Italians, non-conforming whites etc.
Well, ideally you'd want to normalise it per capita.
This is a reasonable critique ^
Per capita, per year, and by ratio of the population, maybe. That last one might be harder since data won’t be too clean for that era. It probably won’t make a huge difference, since I doubt 5k over the period would be a relatively large percent of the black population, not like it would be 0.1% I shouldn’t think. (Just pulling a number for “relatively large” there.)
Jim Crow era lynchings occurred from about 1882 to 1968, so you'd also have to divide the lynchings by the ~90 years during which they occurred. Excess deaths from the withdrawal of policing due to BLM occurred over about two years. On a basis of deaths per year, the recent excess deaths were about 50x the rate during the lynching era. Taking the US population of ~62 million in 1890 vs ~350 million today, roughly 6x the size, that gets us to about 10x the rate of lynchings.
Good point, but look at percentages of the population. Multiply the number of lynchings by at least 10x, maybe 100x for the equivalent in today’s population.
US population of ~62 million in 1882, the start of Jim Crow. US population ~350 million now. So ~6x the population now. However, the Jim Crow era lasted about ninety years (1882-1968) so the rate per year was much lower than the rate of excess deaths in the two years after BLM.
Well, this should prove to be a popular article... 🤣🤣🤣
> if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments.
Pokemon Fever?
2016
Ah, well, so much for that alternate hypothesis. Alas.
The people who were responsible for all of those excess deaths will never admit to it, and in truth, will never even reflect on their own part in that travesty of “doing the right thing.” They will just call you a racist for even suggesting their actions had this effect, because as you know, math is racist.
> For every 2,300 BLM protesters, one black person died because of the real world ramifications of ACAB and Defund. If you protested with BLM you shortened the life of a black person by 11 days on average.
Oooof. Yeah, nobody is going to look in the mirror and admit that.
I mean, they *should*. But they're not gonna.
From a psychological point of view, it's understandable. There have been any number of studies regarding confirmation bias, including a lecture by Daniel Kahneman when he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. It seems that once a person has started down a path of thought or philosophy, especially if that path is then accelerated by a person's surroundings, it takes a nuclear level event to move them in a different direction. It is very, very hard to stay out of social media echo boxes. When someone chooses to eliminate all outside influences, we get assassination attempts - starting(?) with Steve Scalise.
"Monkeys act in tribally cohesive ways, film at eleven"
Since I live in the city where the police station was burned down, it is hard to disagree with this article.
I suspect for a certain amount of BLM "supporters" this was a positive outcome.
THAT dare not be spoken! (Apparently abortion, aka (in practice) eugenics is/was insufficient.)
Considering everyone else's murder rate dropped during the pandemic, and this excess is based on a calc from baseline, the true number is definitely higher.
"If I were one of the people who promulgated this problem in 2020 I think I would look in the mirror, consider my own contribution to the deaths of black folk in the USA, and “do better” by not doing that again, and trying to keep my friends from doing it either."
Nice. Now do excess deaths due to red state anti-vaccine movements, and project forward starting from RFK, Jr.
That's good, I like it. But I had to wait four years for the numbers to all come in for Floyd so I guess we can check back on this in 2028, or perhaps a few years longer, if RFKJr does something specific and egregious that directly provokes a disease spike or a malnutrition event.
I have thought about running similar numbers on how many people died due to the Ds effort to delay the vaccines until after the 2020 votes were counted. But in the end the Covid vaccine wasn't efficacious enough to really be sure any of those deaths due to vaccine delay could have been averted anyway, so I think it's a less solid case.
What do you mean by how many people died due to the Ds effort to delay the vaccines until after the 2020 votes were counted? The first vaccine was ours, and it left the Building 41 warehouse as early as was humanly possible and that was on Dec 13, long after the election. What the fuck are you talking about?
https://www.wxyz.com/news/coronavirus/watch-trucks-with-first-covid-19-vaccine-in-us-ready-to-roll-from-michigan-plant
I mean the link RenOS posted. What date did manufacture for the vaccine begin? I've always been curious about that.
I worked in active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) in Pfizer-Kalamazoo, not in drug product (DP). API is where the active ingredients and made, while DP is where the actual product you buy at the drug store are produced (formulated). So we make chemicals in drums, while the DP folks take the chemicals we make, combine them with the excipients to product the pills, ointments, injectables, inhalants, etc. We make one of the vaccine components in API, other come from our vaccine plants out west that came in with some merger 15 years ago or so ago IIRC.
But we do formulate the vaccine in DP at Kalamazoo in Building 41. I think our plant at Puurs in Belgium also made vaccine, though I might be getting Puurs mixed up with another European facility (Pfizer has many manufacturing facilities all over the world).
I was not involved in any of the vaccine projects. The scientist in the adjacent lab was involved in making one of the ingredients, but this was later, it did not occur to the vaccine project leaders who were concerned about getting enough formulation ingredients to ask us if we could make some (they finally did in December 2020).
This is my rough idea of the timeline. This is based on my memory. The vaccine was first produced in February-March. Lab batches were then made an a combined Phase 1-2 trials run in Apr-May (I think). By summer we had a product and clinical material for Phase 3 were being producing around July_Aug. Phase 3 trials began in last August with the first injections which continued into September. IIRC commercial lots started to be produced in September on one filling line. The trial won't give you results until enough time has elapsed for enough of the controls to have become sick in order to make a statistically significant assessment of effectiveness. At the time using the current infection rates I estimated it would take around 10 weeks for this to happen, so I expected a result in November. And I saw a press release from the company on Nov 18 providing the results.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-conclude-phase-3-study-covid-19-vaccine
I imagine they send the filing to the FDA shortly after this. It usually take 6-12 months for a filing to be evaluated, but they fast-tracked this, and we got approval in December and shipped out the first batches the next day IIRC.
How on earth anyone could have gone all that work done by early October to get an approval before the election in early November is beyond me. To argue that this record time for a new vaccine was somehow delayed is crazy pants.
Per the MIT technology review article, the approval was in fact specifically delayed to affect election results. We have to take that as a given because folks were bragging about it even in Time magazine. But that doesn't directly translate into dead people unless two other things are true:
1) the vaccine production itself was impacted by the approval delay, and
2) the vaccine actually works
#2 is a little bit questionable to me. It seems to work some as a targeted temporary immune booster but it obviously doesn't work as well as other "vaccines" in stopping spread of a virus, which to me means we shouldn't be calling it a vaccine at all.
#1 is also questionable - if the wheels were in motion to mass produce this thing no matter what on the presumption that the approval would be granted, then delaying the approval announcement to affect an election may be scummy but not deadly.
If (A) some of the major decisions about production ramp-up were being held until the announcement of approval, and also if (B) this caused slower vaccination leading to a certain number of people who died during the delay, only then could we say that the monkey business of electioneering the vaccine announcement lead to dead people. I'm not sure either A or B are true. And I value your insight into the production ramp.
Manufacturing necessarily begins well before approval so you have product to ship when approval is reached. So the idea that manufacturing was held up because of politics is bonkers. The only place where a holdup could happen would be in the approval process. But as I pointed out initial phase 3 trial results were obtained on November 18 and the first batches of vaccine shipped on December 13. That is very fast approval. There was *nothing* to approve before Nov 18 and that was AFTER the election.
As for the article where does it the approval was in fact specifically delayed to affect election results? And considering that we did not file until after the election, just how would that work?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
I'm pretty sure there's enough excess death data during the pandemic to already make a comparison, at least with the same rigor of de-confounding that you did here. Certainly enough on which to base policy decisions...
RFK, Jr.'s impacts will definitely require a much longer timeframe, and will depend on the specific actions, although childhood disease might be an early bellwether. In the case of Gaza, Polio is already through the roof, but RFK,Jr. won't be denying vaccine access, I'd assume.
The anti-vaccine movement isn’t new, and until just recently, it was almost exclusively a phenomena of those on the extreme political Left, and was isolated to wealthy enclaves (e.g., Northern California). So there should already be data available on its effects.
I'll push back on this a little. The anti vaccine movement has always been a blend of hippie granola moms and christian homeschooler families. So it's a bit of a horseshoe effect.
The Christian homeschoolers in my area kept teaching their kids and didn't muzzle them for two years despite government edict.
If a couple of their sick old people died slightly earlier due to COVID I think their approach still came out way ahead.
Better save room for the excess deaths due to the vaccine. That's the gift that keeps on giving.
This is also a very difficult number to calculate.
I’d be curious to see some other factors too, I know unemployment went way up after 2020 and I’m not sure how fast it got back to normal, same thing with education getting disrupted and inflation getting worse. I think it’s possible those things also contributed to the increase in crime but there’s a reason HWFO’s the one doing the math and not me, I’m sure he considered those factors, kinda surprised to see him highlighting a positive impact of cops though
Other countries had lockdown based unemployment and their murder rates fell dramatically.
"Founding of an anarchist autonomous zone" is awfully clunky. Why not just call it an insurrection?
An insurrection would imply they were attempting to overthrow the government, not detach themselves from it. Ruby Ridge was not an insurrection for instance.
Isn’t part of the legal definition of insurrection preventing the courts from functioning? I rather recall that from looking up the relevant legislation a few months back, but I am not sure now (and I don’t want to look it up on my work pc).
If the courts could not bring themselves to add "insurrection" to the list of offenses for the thousand people charged over J6, then the definition is surely too narrow to levy against a bunch of cosplaying Seattle communists.
Possibly? The original legislative definition (such as it is... they seemed to think everyone pretty much knew what they meant) does seem to focus more on the working of government over time. So a week long 'occupation' impeding of the court's ability to function would be more relevant than over a weekend where the court wasn't working anyway.
Likewise the actual workings have to be impeded. I can set up an autonomous zone in the back acre or two of my dad's place, keeping all government officials out as a matter of course, and no one would even know. Hell, I can claim to have done so for the past 40 years no one would know the difference. Doing so in the actual court house, or state house, would be a much different issue.
I agree, though, that the legal definition doesn't seem understood enough to be used for anything but the most extreme cases, such as actual armed forces declaring independence. I am inclined to go the opposite direction, and say that "insurrection" shouldn't even be a legal class of behavior, but rather there should be specific other behaviors that are clearly defined and illegal, such that if someone tries an insurrection they will be guilty of a variety of other offenses. Much like "hate crime" I think insurrection itself won't ever be a useful category, and mostly will be used to attack people the government doesn't like.
Common sense alert!
Because neither the goal nor the effect of it was to threaten to subvert or replace the leadership of the country.
In order to lead, the leadership of the country (at all levels, not just federal) needs some kind of police force to enforce the laws they enact. Burning down a police station is absolutely, unequivocally subverting the ability of elected leaders to lead.
Or someone has a personal ax to grind with that police station (just throwing that in for completeness).
Oh, is that the standard?
It seems like your estimate is a bit on the low side -- my notes have it at 4,900 excess fatal shootings for 2020 alone (using 2019 as the baseline), and 2021, 2022, and 2023 were still elevated:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls
Plus you also have to account for excess car crash deaths, which spiked after the George Floyd protests, likely due to reduced police presence. Those accounted for perhaps another 1,000 victims per year.
All that said, I did not find that recognizing these patterns made voting much easier, for me. In 2020, the choice was between the party that condoned increased crime and the party that denied that the pandemic was real ("it's the Democrats' latest hoax", "it'll be over by Easter", "It'll just magically disappear someday"). The 2020 body count from Trump's botched covid response was far in excess of anything BLM did. In 2021, the biggest cause of preventable deaths was likely antivax misinformation, with about 200,000 preventable deaths had covid vaccines been more widely accepted.
For the most part, I've taken a moderate strategy of splitting my vote. At a local level, I voted for conservatives or moderates and shunned any of the "defund the police" psychos. At a national level, I still had to oppose Trump in 2020 (for his poor pandemic response) and in 2024 (both for his expected inability to respond well to another national disaster and for his decision to boost antivax psychos like RFK, Jr).
Trump did not "botch the Covid response." Trump was objectively the most pro-vax president the USA has ever had, if you look at the evidence instead of the spin. Evidence:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/want-a-vaccine-elect-a-nationalist
Further, The USA's Covid results per capita were on par with every other western European nation that has porous borders and relatively free trade with China. Math:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/does-the-usa-have-the-worst-covid
If Trump had been allowed to announce the vaccine in 2020 as his "October surprise," then he probably would have won the votes he lost in the age 60+ demographic, probably would have won the election, and then the rednecks would have been driving their pickup trucks around with flags that said TRUMPVAX demanding we reopen the economy while the blues still hid under their beds afraid of germs saying the vaccine can't be trusted, which was exactly what the blues were doing all summer of 2020. Evidence:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-red-ink-blue-ink-problem
LOL at "porous borders". Why is everything about the border with you people? Do you really think that Mexican migrants made MAGA retards refuse to wear masks, social distance, or get vaccinated?
Covid mortality was initially higher in Democrat run cities (higher density + bad covid response in NYC) but gradually became much higher among Republicans:
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/19/1098543849/pro-trump-counties-continue-to-suffer-far-higher-covid-death-tolls
Yes, that's still true even when controlling for age (to pre-empt your next bad argument):
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617
I am somewhat sympathetic to your idea that Pfizer withheld their vaccine results around the election, there is some evidence for that. But I find your counterfactual fantasy where you imagine Republicans would have secretly become the pro-science pro-vaccine party another ludicrous form of cope. It's like you're saying, "but in my imaginary world the Trump voters are actually the reasonable people"
Nope, sorry, the party that didn't believe that the virus was real or serious was not about to become pro-science or pro-vaccine. With lower IQ, lower neuroticism, lower trust in science, and a narrative already in motion against taking covid seriously, MAGA would have never been the pro-vaccine party.
In reality, MAGA is just a low human capital movement with voters that are easily confused. Notice how easily RFK is slotting into the movement, and how every health guru and grifter is moving in to cash in on MAGA stupidity.
If anything, I'd think Pfizer made an excellent business decision to not have their vaccine labelled the Trump vaccine. If that had happened, you might get somewhat lower rates of Democrats taking it, without much increase in business from Republicans.
Why don't you attribute these extra lives lost to police malfeasance? Without a deliberate murder by police in front of many witnesses and a camera, there would have been no protests. Some think it was also the surge in guns.
https://www.vox.com/22344713/murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus
Why aren't you counting all of the lowering of future abuse & murder by police, and the massively larger reduction in fear & lack of agency in the greater population? That was the goal of the protests, and of more clear news & court coverage of common police practices: That seems to have been very affective. Most of the protesters would believe that trade off was worth it, even if those were extra black deaths. However, looking at the graph above, the excess murders that year were fairly evenly distributed throughout the US, not just where there are higher concentrations of black people. The BLM protests were not everywhere, and did not have large effects everywhere.
The murders themselves happen in disproportionately black areas, and cops quit patrolling in black areas so they wouldn't get fired.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/geographic-evidence-that-gun-deaths
People could have chosen any number of ways to protest police brutality, and they chose to do it by destroying neighborhoods and empowering criminals. Zero police officers were involved in that decision.
There are 8,682 black people that I would love to ask if they thought the consciences of a bunch of white protesters was worth their deaths, but they're, y'know, dead.
I think if the events of 2020 had a noticeable impact on the relative rate of unnecessary police killings, then we could run a similar analysis and compare the numbers. I have not looked into those numbers yet. Have you? My cursory look into this question seems to indicate that determining how many police killings are unnecessary is very difficult, but more importantly the total number of police killings has not gone down anyway.
> "Why aren't you counting all of the lowering of future abuse & murder by police, and the massively larger reduction in fear & lack of agency in the greater population?"
Please describe a scientifically rigorous method of calculating that number. It is otherwise difficult to "count" something. Though obviously the entire BLM movement was about feels, not reality, so I can understand why that argument might not resonate.
"We had good intentions, so it's okay that we got a bunch of black people killed."
I mean, it definitely *is* a position that a person could take...
"Without a deliberate murder by police..." You mean Floyd? I watched the videos. I had a 300 lb person kneel on my (180 lb) neck on a concrete floor. I had no trouble breathing.
Floyd killed himself with drugs, and the cop didn't care enough to save him. That's a crime, sure, but the murder charge was always an exaggeration. And that exaggeration lead to... cops not wanting to patrol black areas. Which directly harmed black folks.
"Surge in guns"? By law abiding citizens buying guns for their own defense? In the face of an increase in criminality? You might see an increase in homicide, but the difference between homicide and murder is in the aggressor. The criminals already had guns.
Good but, "Floyd killed himself with drugs, and the cop didn't care enough to save him. That's a crime, sure" Really?
I don't understand what you're asking. Floyd had drugs in his system, they appear to have been the cause of death. Chauvin, the cop, neither provided treatment, allowed treatment, nor even gave attention to other responders telling him that Floyd needed treatment. A cop has a duty to act, and this violated it, which is negligent homicide. Which I think satisfies the third degree charge with which Chauvin was convicted, but the second-degree charge was too much.
Whether Chauvin and the other police on the scene provided or allowed treatment is also an issue people seem to disagree about in this scenario.
I'm not sure the relative guilt of Chauvin matters, at least to me. What matters is the reaction to it. There are worse cases of police abuse weekly in this country.
The facts don't actually matter, what matters is the perception. If people think white cops are intentionally seeking out innocent black people to kill, that gets a different result from having *a* cop (race unspecified) be so jaded by the daily horrors that he just doesn't care any more that a criminal killed himself. The first is "institutionalized racism", the second is "we need mental health for our community defenders." You've pointed out many times, which one of those sells the clicks?
At this point, no, my belief that the second-degree was overcharged matters as much as a raindrop to the ocean.
People take the anecdote as the data. As another example: Rittenhouse. There was PLENTY of video available for people to get the facts. But through a combination of prejudice and not knowing the law, people came to many different conclusions.
Maybe so, though it's my understanding that the drugs WERE the cause of death. As to prosecuting a police officer for behavior during a challenge -- we're demanding perfection?
It depends on who you ask. The jury that convicted Chauvin of second degree murder was convinced that Chauvin was the cause of death.
"Perfection"? No. But I do expect the cop to care that someone is literally dying beneath his knee. When the other cop says "I can't find a pulse", and the medical professional says "he is dying", I expect Chauvin to say "oh, yeah, that means I have a duty to do something, even if it is to get out of the way."
You ever see that episode of Breaking Bad where Walt just watches as a girl chokes on her own vomit? Yeah, he doesn't have any duty to act, but he's not portrayed as panicking or unsure. He calmly and rationally watches it happen. Similarly, Chauvin appeared to have the necessary information and the time and space to process it, and he made the wrong choice. As a cop, I believe he DOES have a duty to act. I expect better than that.
But just to cover all facets, I know this is not a job I could do.
Well that’s one way to say the “ends justify the means.” Careful, history has proven that sometimes that point of view works both ways and the law of unintended consequences doesn’t discriminate between evil or stupid.
Nice analysis. When I first thought about this, I noted that the fraction of white homicide victims who were killed by police were 2-3 times higher than the fraction of black homicide victims killed by police. That is white people at risk for becoming homicide victims faced a greater threat from police than black people at risk.
As an example, if you are dude minding your own business, you are more likely be killed in a case of mistaken identity by an assassin whose intended target was someone else if you're black. This is simply because a gangbanger looking to revenge-kill someone is more likely to be looking for a black dude than a white one. So, if you are an innocent black dude, you are at greater risk than if you are an innocent white dude. This happened to the husband of a former foster kid of ours.
Most of the time I've seen anyone do a careful "per incident" or "per encounter" analysis, police killings of white people and black people fall at about the same ratio. The actual issue with disproportionate killings of blacks relative to overall population ratio is the disproportionate number of police encounters, which is related to disproportionate crime.
Now whether we do the racist thing with that data (blame black people) or we do the smart thing (try and fix the motivations for crime) is separate, but the fact that black folks commit more crime is fundamental to even begin to solve anything.
Right after the George Floyd incident I looked around for stats on police killings and race. There were two solid, careful studies. Google will find them easily. One was based on FBI death info and the other augmented this with other info I don't recall. Both came to the same conclusion: they couldn't detect any positive signal in the hypothesis that white police officers kill more blacks than other races per capita. One detected a slight negative signal (meaning they tended to kill fewer. Black police officers had higher rates, but not by much.
What explains the other spikes on the graph?
But BLM provided so many people with an occasion for feeling morally superior. How can you put a price on that?
The evidence for your conclusion is…underwhelming to say the least. But let’s run with it and see where it goes. Black people shutting their mouths and putting up with all the $#!+ that entails is safer than Black people standing up and saying they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
Kinda sounds like…chattel slavery times. Uncle Tom was certainly much less likely to be killed than an enslaved person who said…they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
Logic suggests that If we (USA) were to let a foreign power take us over, the casualties would be far fewer than if we fought back. So…that means we should allow it to happen?
A BLM-free alternate history with thousands fewer Black (and other) deaths, is a nice fantasy. But achieving that imaginary world might require hard things of us. How about we as a nation take responsibility for institutional racism and address, for example, the gap in generational wealth between Blacks and Whites directly resulting from racist policies and practices?
I suspect that genes are more likely to be responsible for the generational wealth gap. But maybe I'm mistaken?
Just how much generational wealth did Ashkenazi Jews have prior to emancipation?
I’m not following your logic at all. Care to explain further?
I believe that genes at least mostly explain why blacks are on average duller than whites are, which I suspect in turn explains the intergenerational wealth gap between blacks and whites, at least to a substantial extent.
You need to start the calculation in 2015. BLM's effect on policing and thereby excess murders of African Americans started on earnest as the Ferguson Effect in 2015.
By my calculations, the number excess murders of African Americans amounts to about 15,000 between 2015–2021, with no real alternative explanation than BLM.