I suspect that many of you will see another ‘Rigger’ email in your inbox and wonder what the Dickens he’s going to be blathering on about today.
Today, I want to talk about the miracle of the 21st century, the greatest invention of humankind, the gift from above, the supreme blessing that has been so munificently bestowed upon us - the great and glorious, almost Godly, Goo.
Remember when the Goo was announced? There was weeping in the streets, people raised their hands in praise, parties were had (but only those jabbed could attend), and joyful pictures of jabbed arms were taken and posted on social media in their millions. No longer would we have to be restricted to our houses to get shit-faced on a Friday night, in a few short months we would be able to jet off to Ibiza and get shit-faced.
Just the expectation itself was enough to give people myocarditis (although the Goo probably did it better).
Science, newly powered by the saintly benevolence of big pharma, had been languishing in the almost medieval doldrums of ignorance that was the pre-covid era. But it upped its game and came to our rescue. Rank greed and rapacious capitalism, in the form of Pfizer (and others) had rushed in to save the day, and science. Who could criticize the glory of large corporate entities ever again? The traditional ‘leftist’ distrust was gone forever.
Bah, humbug.
Dickens was a bit of a Nostradamus - here he is talking about the Goo in Great Expectations :
Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!
For some, nothing could shake their new-found faith. Half of their face stopped working and, still, the Goo was a miracle to be praised above all. Even God published an amendment to his commandment
Thou shalt have no other god before me (unless it’s a vaccine)
At this point in my writing I looked for a decent meme for “the wurst of times” and found this - not relevant to anything, but I liked it
So what am I blathering on about today?
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK finally got round to publishing some data on the vaccines this week. It’s only 7 months late. Presumably, Albert the janitor had to churn it out in his spare time in between fixing the boiler and unblocking the loos.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m just a teensy-weensy bit suspicious of this extraordinary time delay. What the fuck were they doing with the data? Did it really take them this long to craft it into the best possible ‘version’ to make the vaccines look like they did anything?
Apparently it did do something (according to the ONS). Behold! the Lord Bourla has bestowed upon us his grace
This chart ‘shows’ that getting the jab (the ever-vaccinated means anyone who has been jabbed with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, . . etc doses) worked. The filthy science-denying, anti-vaxx, loons were dying in their conspiratorial droves.
But not so fast - this is a Tale of Two Cities. The glorious ‘city’ that the ONS want to convince you to live in, and the more down-to-earth ‘city’ that we’re actually living in, are two different things.
The chart above is taken from Joel Smalley’s latest piece (if you haven’t subscribed to Joel’s Stack yet, then why the hell not?)
Joel did something very interesting and took a peek at the percentages of deaths for all-cause mortality in the vaxxed, and compared this to vaxxed percentage. Here’s what he found for the 18-39 age group
With a similar story for the other age groups.
So, in this age group, after mid 2022 we have the vaccinated making up 70% of the population (of this group) and yet accounting for over 80% of all the deaths in this group.
It was the ‘best’ of vaccines (ONS) it was the ‘worst’ of vaccines (the data). Make up your mind!
Well, it’s not a choice - because we can work shit out. We can work out what we expect to see if the vaccine ‘worked’. The point Joel is making is that the black line in the above chart should be below the blue line if the vaccines were beneficial.
If you’re not interested in the math, you can skip the next bit where I give a ‘proof’ of this1.
Proof (Squiggly Bit)
So, we’re going to imagine a population that has a constant mortality rate (in the absence of some pandemic). We’re going to adopt a kind of ‘box model’ for our pandemic wave - the dread BaloneyVirus strikes and elevates the mortality rate for a period of time.
Thankfully, however, we were ahead of the curve (or, in this instance, the box) and developed a 100% effective vaccine. Unfortunately, not everyone got jabbed.
The picture is going to look a bit like this. On the left we have the chart for the total population (both vaxxed and unvaxxed) which can be split into 2 charts; one for the unvaxxed and one for the vaxxed. Remember that we have assumed a 100% effective vaccine so that the vaxxed die at the normal rate - for them there’s no pandemic because they have been vaxxed.
We’re going to need to firm this up a bit. Let’s suppose the normal (non-pandemic) mortality rate is M, and the elevated (pandemic) rate is B. Let’s suppose that a fraction p of the population, N, get vaccinated. The total death, D, can be split up into 2 bits; deaths in the vaxxed plus deaths in the unvaxxed.
The fraction (the same as the percentage divided by 100) of vaxxed deaths to the total number is therefore
where a = B/M. This number a is always greater than or equal to 1 (the death rate in the pandemic ‘box’ is higher than the normal death rate). If we rewrite the denominator a bit in the above expression we see that
which means that
This shows that the fraction (percentage) of vaxxed death to the total death should be lower, in general, than the fraction (percentage) of people who have been vaxxed.
It will be equal if there’s no pandemic (B = M) or the vaccine is wholly ineffective (and safe). In this case, in the vaxxed group, the mortality rate is not M, but B (and so is effectively the same as the replacement B = M).
What if the vaccine were less than 100% effective? The calculation plays out much as above - we don’t get a different conclusion - just more algebraic tedium.
End of Squiggles
We can see that the UK data shows us that this death percentage is above the vaxxed percentage.
What does this mean? It means that the vaccine has made things worse, overall.
There are some options here2. The vaccine could have done nothing against covid - in which case it’s all dangerous side effect. Or it could have helped against covid - in which case the side effects are even more dangerous. Or it could have made people more likely to die of covid. Or a variety of these kinds of things.
The point is that in terms of your overall death probability - you’ve upped it if you take the vaccine. There’s no overall benefit in being vaccinated - only woe, and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth (but only from half of your face). In the best case scenario you’re not going to die of covid, but you’re more likely to die of something else caused by the vaccine.
So, even the ONS’s own data shows that the Great Expectations of the Goo were an illusion. We dreamed the impossible dream, and it turned out to be a nightmare.
OK - it’s only a proof for the specified assumptions and conditions, but making things more ‘realistic’ isn’t going to change the conclusion.
Bear in mind that we can’t trust any chart with a label of ‘covid death’. They fucked up the data collection on this so badly that it’s more or less useless, except perhaps for indicating general trends. Neither can we trust any statement about percentage vaxxed.
Thanks for that mate. I say that with regret.
Being a geeky engineer, I did similar calculations a long time ago. Many others haven't. Yet. Among those were my beautiful wife. My three wonderful children. My sister. Her children My old army mates. My colleagues. My friends. Pretty much everybody.
I can't say this to them because what's the point...but I greatly fear that they're fucked. I may bury my children, something no man should have to do. Based on the tragic fertility numbers (something worth thinking about) I probably won't get to hold any grandchildren in the years to come. Etc sad etc...
I''m older than my wife. I had hoped that when I was a wrinkly old bastard and on my last wobbly legs, she would be there to hold my hand and comfort me as I breathed my last. Now...I fear it will be the other way around.
This makes me very very sad. And angry. If I have to bury my wife or my children then....well...there will be consequences.
Thanks for the squiggly bit. As Mr Jaggers advised Pip, “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.” Too bad the boy didn’t listen and ended up with a “mild case of myocarditis,” as they say.