Ron Unz Asks “Vaxxing Deaths or COVID Deaths?”

Ron Unz of The Unz Review has a knack for marshaling strong arguments supporting heretical perspectives on history and current events. His latest intervention “Vaxxing Deaths or COVID Deaths?” is doubly heretical, managing to offend both vaccine skeptics (or at least those who think the COVID vaccines are a threat on par with or greater than COVID itself) and guardians of orthodoxy (who won’t appreciate Unz’s claim that COVID emerged from a US bio-attack on China and Iran).

In “Vaxxing Deaths or COVID Deaths?” Unz notes that the upticks in overall deaths and specifically cardiac/stroke deaths in the US both began in 2020, the year of COVID, rather than 2021, the year of the vaccine rollout. Since there is no apparent spike in cardiac/stroke deaths, or deaths of any kind, coinciding with the vaccine rollout, Unz concludes that the persistently high levels of cardiac/stroke deaths since 2020 are probably attributable to lingering effects of COVID itself, rather than the vaccines.

My Best Attempt at a Rebuttal

Unz’s interpretation of the US statistics could be at least partially mistaken. If we assume that COVID did its worst in 2020, before vaccines and omicron emerged in early and mid-2021 respectively, we would expect to see the death rate rise sharply in 2020 and then drop almost as sharply, perhaps below 2019 levels, in the second half of 2021 and stay down in 2022. Why? Because in 2020 COVID killed off the weak and elderly “low-hanging fruit,” the people who would have otherwise contributed the most to the death rates of 2021 and 2022.  So the persistence of high death rates in 2021 and 2022, despite vaccines and omicron, seems quite surprising. This problem of surprisingly high post-2020 death rates coincides with the vaccine roll-out. So why attribute the post-2020 high death rates to lingering effects of COVID rather than vaccines? Couldn’t it be the result of both, as Joel Hirschhorn argues? (Or, at the very least, doesn’t it suggest that the vaccines didn’t help much with overall longevity?) And what can statistics from other countries, like the New Zealand data Unz cites in his article, tell us?

Best Rebuttal Wins Three Free Unz Books!

I am not entirely convinced by my own rebuttal. Please help! Email your evidence-based rebuttal to Ron Unz’s article to TruthJihad(at)gmail{dot}com. Be clear, concise, and specific. The best rebuttal wins hard copies of Ron Unz’s three new books Our COVID-19 Catastrophe, Encountering American Pravda, and Conspiracy Theories. Note: Only US addresses are eligible to win these books; foreign rebuttals are welcome but I can’t afford to ship books overseas.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com