Debate: Dr D Rancourt vs Dr TB Høeg. Do we have sufficient data to say the covid vaccines *caused* 17 million deaths worldwide?

I take the side of "no" and provide supplemental material to the recording below

It was an unusual Saturday night recording between 5 and 9pm PST with Rav Arora, Kevin Bass and Denis Rancourt. I really enjoyed getting to know all three of them and was grateful for their time and insights. I love the work Jay and Rav do on Illusion of Consensus, so it’s been such an honor to become a little part of their exciting project.

I came to Saturday’s debate to discuss my issues (most of which I documented here on Illusion of Consensus sutbstack) with Dr. Rancourt’s team’s analysis attributing 17 million excess deaths worldwide to the vaccines alone.

You can watch the debate here

The Rancourt et al estimate was popularized recently by Bret Weinstein during his interview on Tucker Carlson. I think that claiming that “the vaccines” killed 17 million people - or over 3,000 people per every million people vaccinated- is quite a claim. As you will hear, Rancout et al’s analysis attributes all of the post-vaccine rollout excess deaths in the 17 countries to the vaccines (though they adjust for pre-vaccine rollout increases in all cause mortality).

But the essential math is here: 17 million deaths /5.55 billion vaccinated = 0.31% of all vaccinated people died from being vaccinated. This is absolutely mind bogglingly high if real.

Proper classification of causes of death is important. Those who wanted this for Covid deaths should also want it for the vaccines. And there are many other things that can kill people than Covid and vaccines (!). I hope listeners who are interested hang on for the last hour of the debate when, not to give it away, but Denis admits they don’t have data to prove causality in spite of what they write in their paper:

In other words, my understanding was he admitted they should not have implied the vaccines caused the deaths when it was an inconsistent association. (I mention it’s akin to saying masks caused lower rates of covid in certain school districts when inexplicably in other districts they didn’t - except obviously 17 million deaths attributable to a medical product would be a much bigger deal. )

Denis clarified they found an association and some amount of lethality is plausible. He gets into his reasons for writing “causality proven” in the paper. It seems they wanted the paper to be attention grabbing- and indeed it was. I gave my opinions about the importance of accurate wording in scientific papers during the podcast.

Supplementary Figures to the Debate

I mention multiple lines of data during the debate, which I was not able to show so I am including some of them here as a supplement to the podcast.

First, the black line below is Sweden’s mortality rate from 2010 through 2022. This is not excess mortality; it’s just deaths per 100,000 (y axis is deaths/100,000). According to Rancourt’s estimates, we should have seen upwards of 25,000 excess deaths in Sweden considering their vaccination rate and demographics. Sweden did not see anything close to this and mortality rate has in fact continued to decline in spite of an aging population

Here are the all cause mortality rates age standardized in Sweden (green) compared with the baseline rate (blue). As you can see, the major increase was in 2020, prior to the vaccine rollout in 2021.

Below are deaths/100,000 of Swedish males between the ages of 25 and 49 during the vaccine rollout (black line is initial vaccine rollout).

Here are how the peaks in mortality in Sweden correspond with the vaccine rollout. As you can see, there is no peak during the initial rollout.

This was in contrast to countries like Malaysia where there was a corresponding peak, which in the Rancourt analysis would have “counted” as entirely attributable to the vaccine.

But the patters were all over the place from country to country and I did not think Dr. Rancourt was able to reconcile this. But you can be the judge.

I’ve covered the below study from Circulation on this substack before, but looking at half a million NCAA athletes each year over the last 20 years, we did not see an increase of 300/100,000 deaths in 2021-2022. Though this population is younger, this gives you an idea of what types of numbers the Rancourt analysis would estimate if all of these athletes were vaccinated. The increase in Non CV death in 2021 might have been 1/100th of this and none in CV death

Denmark’s data- an update

I appreciate Paul Collyer (@dobssi) making this figure of the age standardized mortality rate in Denmark in response to the figure immediately below it, which I had posted on Illusion of Consensus. This new figure nicely shows the importance of age standardization when it comes to showing mortality rates. Where are the 15,000+ excess deaths in Denmark due to the vaccines that the Rancourt analysis would predict? (I don’t see them)

Lack of correlation between vaccine doses and excess mortality in Europe

The below figure shows no correlation between vaccine doses administered and excess deaths in European countries. This is an extremely strong argument against all excess deaths being caused by the vaccines, as Denis Rancourt argues in his analysis: not only is there no correlation, there’s an inverse correlation between amount of vaccination and excess mortality (more vax doses correlate with lower excess mortality). Thanks to Kevin Bass for posting this on X.

Estimates of vaccine-induced deaths

I made a table for my lower bound estimates for vaccine-induced deaths for my Substack for Illusion of Consensus. I have early on been forthright about the fact covid vaccines appear to have caused deaths. We knew this very early on from reports form Israel. It’s hard to make a good estimate, though, due to publication bias and coverups of deaths due to the covid vaccines; most of us can agree about this. This is why I say “lower bound” also because the study from England has clear healthy vaccinee bias.

I already received some data from Germany (in response to the above) which I need to look at more carefully.

I gave some examples during the debate of other potential causes of death that increased during the vaccine rollout and one is drug and alcohol overdoses in the US, which are difficult to attribute to the vaccines - or covid.

This is a topic for another substack and, honestly, many long research papers, but I would love to see good data on increasing causes of death that may explain the excesses we are seeing- particularly in poorer countries (and the USA!). I would love to see a group like Collateral Global take on a project like this (Kevin Bardosh, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya et al are doing amazing work there).