HWFO August 2022 Housekeeping

And a soft rebuttal on "All Cause Mortality" vaccine discussions

Ordinarily I compose some kind of quick thought splat for the monthly housekeeping posts, but today I’m drawing a blank. There’s either too much or too little, depending on your perspective. Most of the things spinning around my social media spaces are things HWFO has already covered, so it feels redundant speaking about them again.

Joe Biden says you need an F-15 to fight the government. HWFO: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

California’s doing transgender drug testing on kids. HWFO: 1 2 3 4 5 6

NYC is driving signs around saying Times Square is a gun free zone. HWFO: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

One thing I’m seeing a lot of in my curated feed, however, is the claim that all cause mortality spiked after the Covid vaccine was rolled out, and has remained high afterwards. Several Substacks are pushing this narrative right now, such as this one which breaks down some numbers from Germany. I’m open to the idea, but I am absolutely not convinced. The most robust study on Covid-19 infection and response globally has been conducted in Israel, and Israeli scientists addressed this concern robustly here.

In most months of the pandemic, the non-COVID-19 mortality rates were not significantly different from those in 2017–2019. However, between November 2020 and March 2021, they were significantly lower for total population and Jews and Others, and hence the total excess mortality was less than that expected from the high COVID-19 mortality. Only in August 2021 was the rate of non-COVID-19 mortality significantly higher than 2017–2019, 5% (95% CI 1–9%) higher for the total population and a very significant 20% (8–33%) higher for the Arab population. In the Arab population the non-COVID-19 mortality was also significantly higher in May and September 2020 and September 2021, by 14% (3–27%), 19% (7–33%) and 18% (6–32%), respectively.

Israel had the highest vax rates in the world, and did a good job of separating Covid mortality from non-Covid mortality in their data. They saw no rise in non-Covid mortality across the time span where they vaxed.

Mortality rates for those vaccinated in 2021 were lower than the 2017–2019 average, significant at most ages. Total age adjusted mortality in this cohort was 14% (95% CI 12–15%) lower, 13% (11–15%) in males and 16% (14–18%) in females. Age specific mortality ratios were lowest for ages 45–54 in males (0.76, 95% CI 0.69–0.85) and 55–64 (0.70, 0.64–0.77) in females. The mortality ratios for these seven months in the vaccinated were also lower than those for the whole pandemic period presented in Table 2 at all ages, and for ages 55 and over showed lower rather than excess mortality.

Curiously, the lower-than-baseline mortality rates among the vaccinated population in 2021 may be because a bunch of sick and old people died off from Covid in 2020 so they got cleared out of the death queue.

Significantly higher excess mortality was found only for ages above 55, particularly high for males aged 65–74 (11% higher), maybe because deaths are less frequent in general at this age and they seem to have been more susceptible to severe COVID-19. It is also possible that the excess mortality was lower or not much higher in the oldest population (85 and above or 75 and above) than younger groups (65–74, 75–84) because many of them were very careful to self–isolate as recommended by the Israeli government, sometimes at significant emotional cost! At ages under 45, there was no significant excess, and mortality was significantly lower for ages 0–24, which may be a result of the protective effects of lockdown, and lifestyle changes due to COVID-19, on mortality in youth, children and newborns. Evidence for this can be seen, for example, in the reduction of visits to the emergency room in 2020 for all diagnoses at ages 0–17, particularly in the early months of the pandemic [5]. Similarly there was a reduction in traffic accidents with injury and mortality in 2020 compared to 2019 at all ages, a 26% reduction in mortality at ages 0–14 [6].

There’s also a relatively good “debunking” article on the idea regarding England’s numbers here, which I find intuitively compelling. I’m still not vaxxing my kids and I’m still not getting a booster because I don’t see the point. Omicron variant is no more damaging than influenza for anyone under the age of the median US Senator. But I also don’t currently find the case that the vax has indirectly killed lots of people particularly compelling.

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Index by Topic

General

HWFO in Other Media 

So Long Medium 

Beautiful Death 

She Did Not Go Gently 

Things Jordan Peterson’s Rehab Taught Me 

The Economics of Being a Teacher, by State 

Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth

Intuition Reigns Supreme

Inflation for Dummies

Peace in Ukraine and Universal Healthcare in One Go

The Land Development Market Crashes This Year

Case Study of a Chinese Pig Butchering Scam

Finnegan’s Business Plan

The Compu-Crypto-Darwinist Case for Free Will

Guns

The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

The Gun Solution

Explaining the USA Pro Gun Position to a Foreigner

Guns and Protofascism

Eleven Fewer Dead People

Everybody’s Lying about the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide

The Left is Making the Wrong Case on Gun Deaths

Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural 

The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn’t

The Magic Gun Evaporation Fairy

Gun Buybacks Don’t Work if you Believe in Math

Real Talk about School Shootings

Visualizing the State of US Gun Law

Doctors are Wrong about Firearm Effectiveness in Mass Shootings 

The “Sabika Sheikh Firearms Licensing and Registration Act” Fails Third Grade Math

The Gun Lane We Need Doctors In, and Government Out

Analyzing the Ryan Thomas Balch Account of Kenosha 

Justice Breyer’s Dissent on Bruen is a Mathematical Shitshow

Weighing US Homicide Rates vs European Genocide Rates

Egregores

Memespace Egregores and Nuclear War

Memespace Egregores and Maajid Nawaz

Memespace Egregores and Google Maps

Memespace Egregores and the Covid-19 Sensemaking Crisis

Memespace Egregores are Not Controlled

Surviving Egregore Apotheosis

Culture

87,000 Racists

Accelerationist TERF War Strategy

A New Unit of Measure for Civil Unrest

Unnecessary Mastectomy Math

Graphing the Gender Wage Gap

We Are All Apes Behaving Like Ants

The Human Tool 

The Many Flavors of Wokeness 

Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America - a 20 Year Introspective 

We Gave Them Everything They Needed to Defend Their Country Except a Country 

Weird Ideas About Afghanistan 

Playbook to Fight Woke School Board Takeovers 

A Detailed Look at Woke Update Mechanics 

Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion 

Game Theory on the Second Civil War 

Real Talk About Meritocracy 

Science Says Sam Harris is Alt-Right 

The Two Confusing Definitions of Racism 

The Five Confusing Definitions of Racism

Explaining the Social Justice “Woke Anti-Semitism” Paradox 

Spot the True Believer 

Modeling the Socioeconomic Future with Dungeons and Dragons

Conversations with Black Folks about Cops 

Stop Calling it a “Coup” 

Deplatforming, Sargon, MAGA Hat Kids, and the Kulturkampf 

Rape Math 

Don’t Read This 

The Purge Will End in Violence 

Visualizing the Costs of Government in Border Walls 

Abolish the Federal Government and Realign the Nation Based on Football 

An Outside Look at Election Fraud 

No Uterus No Opinion? No Opinion No Obligation 

Explaining Systemic Racism to the Right, with Guns

Latinx is Done 

The HWFO / Jordan Hall Game B Dialogue

US - Europe Abortion Law Comparisons, Revised

Yumi Nu and the Sports Illustrated Cover

Tracking the Heat Level of the TERF War

Media

I Offer You Joe Rogan’s Head on a Pike

Aural Hypertext and the Memory of Man

A Case Study of Memetic Compression Rates

Facebook is Shiri’s Scissor 

The Social Media Catastrophe 

The Media Engine of Chaos 

I Just Made $100 off Some Dead Kids, and That’s the Problem 

The Long Problem 

Can Fortnite Rescue Humanity from the Attention Economy War? 

Rittenhouse as a Litmus for Adult Disagreement 

Covid

The Trailing End of the Ivermectin War

Omicron Anecdotes

The Covid-19 Sensemaking User Guide

Everyone is Wrong About Covid-19 For a Reason

Data From the Texas Prison Delta Outbreak Fits the Vax Narrative 

The Covid-19 Red Ink Blue Ink Problem 

The Vaccine Might Kill You and That’s Fine 

HWFO Covid-19 After Action Report 

Want a Vaccine? Elect a Nationalist 

Does the USA have the Worst Covid-19 Response? Not at All 

Covid-19 Stands to be Done by the Summer 

Environmentalism

An Illustrated Guide to Plastic Straws 

Nuclear Power and Hot Air Balloons

Bezos is the Greenest Man Alive 

Concept Design for the World’s Dumbest Reservoir