A rolling disaster

From Swedish birthrate data: November update by el gato malo.  The subheading is Rates remain severely depressed and the associations on cause are provocative.  

He has, by dent of focus on data, been persistently prescient throughout the Covid-19 fiasco.  When he suggests that the data looks like the mRNA vaccines are driving a 20% reduction in birthrates, it is worth paying attention to.

It may still be wrong or only temporary but it is inescapably alarming and outraging.  

I really truly hope this hypothesis is incorrect and that we see recovery instead, because frankly this sort of society scale sterilization would be a horror unseen in modern times, perhaps ever.

20% of the population unable to have children due to profoundly bad governance, unspeakably bad science, and grotesque suppression of our guaranteed natural rights would be a tragic outcome.  As he says, we can pray that this is not the end state outcome but the data is suggesting that it might be.

All of which goes to the larger issue of the veil of ignorance which seems to be drifting around.

Male sperm motility issues.  Women with disrupted menstrual cycles.  Young men with strikingly high excess mortality rates.  All the data is pointing us to look carefully at what was done and what is happening and yet the authoritarian decision-makers seem to be fighting back hard to avoid having the data that would allow us to know whether the situation is bad and how bad it might be.

I have seen a lot of cheap but easy reporting around Died Suddenly.  Young people, primarily young men in their prime, dying suddenly and unexpectedly without any prior indicators.  

But the news is dominated by recency bias and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or the frequency illusion, on top of innumeracy.  Are young people really dying at such a great rate compared to the past?  Such deaths are uncommon but they are not zero.  You could have a couple of thousand a year in normal times and to the extent we are aware of them, we treat them as tragic one-off exceptions.  

Just because you can find young deaths does not mean the rate of death has increased.

My suspicion from patches of data is that there is a real phenomenon to be concerned about but I do not have great confidence in the magnitude.  I had hoped to get answers from The Epidemic of #DiedSuddenly by Vinay Prasad John Mandrola.  The subheading is Why is the public turning to ominous explanations for tragedies like Damar Hamlin’s collapse? Two doctors explain.

Unfortunately they outline the issue but do not provide the numbers.  Their focus is more on the fact that the government and public health institutions have more than fully justified public skepticism of expert opinions.  The Swedish birthrate data merely reinforces their point.

They do discuss why getting to an empirical answer is challenging.  Just one aspect is disentangling the causal effects of lockdowns from the possible causal effects of the mRNA vaccines.  

A recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal asserted that there were many “excess deaths” —that is, more than the number normally expected—during 2020 and 2021 that were not attributable to Covid. These non-Covid deaths were strikingly high, 30 percent above expectations, the authors say, for those between the ages of 18 to 64. They attribute these deaths to the deadly effects of lockdown: deaths from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and homicide, as well as from diseases like diabetes and heart disease. They write: “The CDC data show the rate of non-Covid excess deaths in the first half of 2022 was even higher than 2020 or 2021. These deaths therefore likely already exceed 250,000, disproportionately among young adults.”

But we don’t know anything about how many of the heart-related deaths of the past two years can be attributed to vaccines, as opposed to the harms of lockdown, or multiple other causes. To establish this would require painstaking statistical work. Moreover, the best efforts would have to take advantage of what are known as natural experiments—that is, variations that have occurred between otherwise comparable groups for essentially random events. Economists make a living looking for such events, and their skills are desperately needed here.

Critically, our government and public health institutions seem locked into a strategy of justifying current and past decisions rather than focusing on public health outcomes.  Even to the detriment of public health outcomes.

For example, when the evidence emerged that myocarditis in young males was linked to the mRNA vaccines, the Biden administration denied it: We have not seen a signal and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given,” Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, said last April. This was despite the fact that it had been reported by researchers in Israel two months earlier. 

When further studies confirmed a link to heart inflammation in younger males, instead of acknowledging that the evidence was concerning and requiring changes to vaccination recommendations to protect this group, officials pivoted. They asserted that vaccine-related myocarditis was not a big concern. Walensky described the myocarditis findings as “these mild, self-limited cases.” They also pushed the line that infection with Covid-19 itself—as is true of many viruses—can cause myocarditis, and that this was a far bigger danger. 

We dispute both claims. The majority of young people with vaccine-related myocarditis are hospitalized, and then given long lists of activities to avoid. That is serious. And the evidence for the assertion that a Covid-19 infection is a big heart risk for young people is unconvincing.

The decisions and behaviors our regulators, government and public health institutions are petrie dishes for wild theorizing and conspiracy speculation.  Not because the public is stupid.  The collective wisdom has been pretty reliable all along.  The problem is that the decisions and authoritarianism of the regulators, government and public health institutions justify such wild theorizing and conspiracy speculation.  Much of the wild theorizing and conspiracy speculation had ended up being factual.