When you consider the mechanism of action of the Covid 19 vaccines - mRNA is packaged in LPNs which travel systemically throughout the body to the heart, brain, all organs of the body. The mRNA codes for a foreign protein, the biologically active and toxic Spike Protein. Every cell in the body that expresses the spike protein will get attacked by the immune system. This is why we see heart inflammation, neurological damage and autoimmune disease. It also is the likely cause of sudden deaths 2 days after receiving the vaccines in the 18-45 age group. Now add SV40, plasmids, and DNA to the mix and as a result we are seeing increases in what is being referred to as turbo cancer. These turbo cancers are odd in that they go from stage 1 to 4 in a matter of weeks. The turbo cancers have never been seen before in patients prior to 2020. Which explains why experts suspect the vaccines.
Dr. Rancourt might be wrong regarding the 17 million deaths world wide as it could be more or it could be less. When you delve into how these shots work from an analytical standpoint it is apparent they cause more harm than good.
Dr. Høeg, if you have a different point of view please share. It is hard to see how the vaccines provide any health benefits. Also, it is suspicious that attorneys have to FOIA health agencies and the pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer to obtain data.
Considering that the potential deaths or other morbidities that could be caused by the putative mechanisms put forth relative the mRNA vaccines would manifest over many months or years, looking for, or only at, deaths near the vaccination time point (not finding or finding) would be a pretty big logic flaw.
my question for you is the following: 1) do you feel ANY deaths are attributable to the Vaxx? 2) If yes, what is your estimate given the ridiculous amount of data that are available world wide? 3) Do you feel based on these available data greater than 53 people died from the vaxx? Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
Tracy, @dobssi's Sweden chart appears outdated, as current ASMR data with 7 year pre-pandemic lin. trend (identical methodology to @dobbsi) shows: 2020: 8.4%, 2021: 1.1%, 2022: 3.3%.
For Denmark, and identical method, you can see: 2020: -0.7% 2021: 3.1% 2022: 6.8%
Measure excess deaths in countries that vaxxed the least or in populations where there is no vaxxing like the Amish. The whole pandemic was a HUGE LIE from start to finish, from where and how it originated, to who would get sick and die, to masking and mass jabbing, there was no safety or efficacy at any point along these death graphs and people are continuing to die because MRna spike protein stays in your system forever. You don't need science and statistics to prove 17 million people died, you need common sense.
There could be other factors which positively correlate with the injections. For example, drinking and drugs plus injection or genetic factors plus injection, etc. Also, it is possible that not all injections were identical in content, which is another confounding factor.
Dear Dr. Tracy, Thank you for your debate with Dr. Rancourt. Though I count myself as a supporter of his, I was disappointed he did not let you speak more. He wanted to win an argument rather than get at the truth as you would have preferred.
I believe that the reason those 17 countries was due to the striking rise in all-cause-mortality (ACM) during the 2022-23 summer in the southern hemisphere. It was a mystery to be solved. This rise was noticed in only one country to begin with but then looked for and present in every country with data for that period. However, the extrapolation to the whole world, over all rounds of jabs and 17M deaths struck me as jumping to conclusions too. It did not feel as if there were enough contemplation of possible confounding factors.
I'm a retired oil production operations man with no medical background at all but, if I may, I'd like to mention a point or two that did not come out. I am a Brit and have had one AZ jab and one mRNA before I decided I did not like the them in principle. Any gleanings of knowledge I've picked up have all been in the last 4 years.
1. The action of both kinds of jab is to strip the inner lining of the blood vessels (hence the fine blood clots) exposing the tissue behind it to autoimmune attack. This may be anywhere in the body. One cause, many effects and all of them only discoverable by histopathology. Not normally performed in routine autopsy.
2. It is particularly damaging if irreplaceable tissue is attacked: most strongly of all the eggs in woman's ovaries, closely followed by the heart, the brain and then the elastin of the larger arteries and the skin. Deaths in which the jabs have played an important role will not only be in the sharp ACM rises associated with roll-outs but also much longer term. Possibly years if DNA transfection is a fact.
3. As Dr. Geert VB has been at pains to point out, with the mRNA jabs the immune system response changes dramatically. By the 3rd jab (1st booster) the body becomes obliged to tolerate spike protein instead of clear it.
As an oil man I understand my oil plant through the following the process flow. The jabs go into the muscle. Some is absorbed there. The most is flushed to the lymph nodes which drain to the subclavian vein. The flow continues to heart and through the lungs (on the wrong side of the air/blood interface!) back to the heart again and so to the whole body with a side-stream filter called the spleen. And it dawns on me how we see the explosion of previously controlled cancers.
Enough. Before I start blathering. :-) Best wishes
I don't agree 💯 with Dennis but a source of variability could be the place, date of manufacture, and batch/lot of the vaccine. It seems both sides here may be seeking their own different sources of confirmation bias. But great to have a debate nonetheless 👍
In early 2023, Dr. Denis Rancourt et al and I 100% independently calculated the same numbers based on the increase in total death after the toxic Covid-19 “vaccines” were deployed - 13 million Covid-19 vax deaths to end 2022. Rancourt used Israeli and Australian total death data as his sample; I used Alberta total deaths.
I had never heard of Rancourt until after I published my results. We also independently agreed that there was NO REAL PANDEMIC. The IFR (Infection Fatailty Rate) was much like other seasonal flu's.
Denis estimated 17 million C-19 vax-deaths to end 2023. I estimated 19 million C-19 vax-deaths to end 2023, but that was a crude estimate. I defer to Denis' 17 million.
THE CULL TRILOGY – by Allan Malcolm MacRae
"The ability to correctly predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence."
I could only stomach 90 minutes of the debate and then shut it off. It was so poorly moderated there was little value in continuing. I've read his written response and here yours, and got that done in a fraction of the time. The debate should have been structured with an agreement in advance as to how to proceed, and how much time for each speaker to given their argument and the other to respond. Rancourt came prepared to go point by point through your critique, which seems a reasonable approach to me, and might have been for you as well. Instead, there was no structure and the moderators contributed to the chaos instead of helping. I wish we could have a do-over with a good moderator and structure because the debate is well worth having. Rancourt et al. have done extensive analysis and you have raised apparently valid criticisms, but we never got to hear any of those conflicts resolved. Frustrating!
I will say that reading your original response to the paper I noted some of the same apparent errors in your statements that Rancourt spoke of in the debate, such as where you wrote, "The first issue is the authors analyze only 17 countries. But why only 17 and why these 17? They don’t explain but should have." As Rancourt pointed out, they DID explain that in the paper. What I would expect two scientists to do in a discussion of a paper like this is for you to acknowledge that they DID explain their rationale, and then for you to explain why you felt that explanation was inadequate (if you still felt that way, as I think you did). But that didn't happen.
Turning to your new response here in this Substack, I'll just point out a couple examples where you are misrepresenting what he said in the debate, at least as I understood it. You write, "As you will hear, Rancout [sic] et al’s analysis attributes all of the post-vaccine rollout excess deaths in the 17 countries to the vaccines." No. He specifically differentiated this claim from what he was actually claiming, that there was an association with the vaccine roll-out, not with the vaccines. That's a difference, since vaccination roll-out could include other "assaults" to use the terminology he's used elsewhere. It would be nice if both of you used precise language when quoting each other and made sure you understood each other before responding. Again, the debate moderators failed at ensuring that, and the "speaking past each other" continues here in your response (and perhaps in his).
Another example here: Citing a figure from Collyer, you write, "Where are the 15,000+ excess deaths in Denmark due to the vaccines that the Rancourt analysis would predict? (I don’t see them)" But, Rancourt specifically gave a figure in the debate that was half that value! And he noted the proximity to the 6000 figure from the Danish government that you gave in your own initial critique. Now, you may respond that the timing doesn't match up, but why do you persist on saying his analysis leads to a prediction of 15,000+ excess deaths when he specifically said that wasn't his prediction during the debate? (In your defense, I think this happened when you were having some technical difficulties, though you said you heard everything during that time, so I don't know. Maybe you were distracted by that).
The simplistic graph you post from Kevin Bass seems to make the vaccines into healthy supplements! The more the better! No, I'm not buying (and doubt you are either). I'd have expected better arguments than this. It is obvious that the countries on the right are the most economically advanced and wealthiest, and those on the left, the least so. There is a well-known healthy user bias that correlates well with income level, and this has been shown in peer-reviewed papers on flu vaccination and through analyses of COVID data in the U.S. (cf. Mathew Crawford's Substack series). I don't fault you for showing the graph, though wish you had pointed out this obvious issue (and there are probably others); but, far from defeating Rancourt's argument, it is consistent with his key claim that there is wide variability in response to the vaccine roll-out, and this varies by country due to different overall policies, plus the demographic variations. I wish there could have been a calm, rational discussion of things like this, but again, the moderators failed you and all of us.
You do raise some interesting arguments that I'd very much like to see debated, but only in a context where you could both first seek to understand each other, then respond, and in a structured, orderly manner. I agree with you that Rancourt's paper has the potential to discredit the "anti-vax" movement. On the other hand, if he is correct, we really need to know that and let the world know. Without a properly moderated forum, I doubt this will be resolved, and arguments and counterarguments will continue to fly back and forth, or maybe interest will just die out as everyone loses confidence in the vaccine arguments altogether as interest in the pandemic fades. Then we'll have to repeat the same mistakes the next time mRNA vaccines are rolled out in a crisis (real or imagined).
Thanks for debating with Rancourt. I hope you and others will continue to engage with him, but in a forum where we can reach clear resolution.
Rancourt's response to your critique utterly destroys your arguments, and instead of actually providing any counter evidence, you purposefully misinterpreted his paper, provided no large scale data to back up your alternate causal possibilities etc. Tracy is not a truth seeker at all, she's using controlled studies with serious flaws in them to hide the massive death toll the vaccines caused.
Dear Tracy. First, I really felt very sorry for you trapped in that hostage video. Your patience in that situation appears legendary. I generally avoid these types of forums, because there are those with very fixed beliefs on specific health topics using "data" more as wallpaper to make their personal opinions look more scientific.
It is not just with this topic, but could be with "Chronic Lyme disease" and excessive use of antibiotics, "safe supply" of heroin to "saves lives" (i.e., we don't know if it does because the only papers looking at short-term survival are conducted by advocates for safer supply), or premature approvals of oncological drugs using single arm trials with follow-up RCTs showing no benefit, etc.
I am not ideologically captured by the left or right, nor do I believe in conspiracies while still seeing an unhealthy corporate capture of drug regulatory process or the real plausibility of a SARS-CoV-2 lab leak (vs wet market), etc.
Yet, the "debate" that I listened to for three hours on the Illusion of Consensus felt more of a nasty lecture with you, Rav, and Kevin being schooled and scolded by a petulant Denis. Perhaps, what I found most disturbing was his extreme dismissiveness and chronic parking of valid issues that you (and Kevin) raised. There were clear limitations to his methods and analysis. Yet all he wanted to do was show more graphs, and not permit you to present alternate graphs to support your positions.
The fact that the Discussion section of his published paper provided no description of study limitations when using unlinked population-based datasets was a red flag. When he stated that providing a description of limitations to readers wasn't required but more of an editorial suggestion, it felt like he had little humility on this issue and was simply proselytizing a religious position rather than a scientific position. Limitations of your study is an editorial standard in all original scientific articles of good quality.
He also seemed to be accusing you of trying to mussel him from advocating that mRNA vaccines kill people, because you were simply raising valid questions about his findings in your rebuttal. This appeared to be the biggest beef that he had with your commentary on his article. He had an itch he wanted scratching, and you were fouling things up by giving him a bit of Gold Bond.
Denis then agreed with you that his study design and his actual findings could only suggest at best an association (not a correlation or prove causation). But then he immediately stated regardless of this important fact, he should then be permitted to misrepresent the findings as showing causation. It was a weird line of reasoning (or lack thereof).
When he then presented overlapping curves as ecological comparisons of different unlinked population-based datasets, he would point out a phenomenon that no one else could see. Sometimes a curve of booster vaccines rolled out in a given country preceded an increase in mortality, and sometimes not, or in reverse, with no consistent patterns - looking more like noise. There is a name for this phenomenon where one person sees something that no one else can see.
My hope for the debate was that it might have been an opportunity for various independent thinkers to respectfully discuss the findings of Denis article in a typical peer-review process. Instead it was more of a rant from a true believer, who doesn't appear open to the rigors of the scientific method anymore, which includes addressing dissenting opinions and being respectful and open to debate.
Ultimately, people are angry with public health officials for fumbling through the worst pandemic in a Century, getting some things right, many things wrong, and now hindsight is 20:20. But regulatory capture of drug approvals is a problem, and there are many questions surrounding the level of evidence required to provisionally approve any of the COVID-19 vaccines regardless of the vaccine platform.
At the end of the day, the question regarding the safety of mRNA vaccine technology will be addressed sooner than later, since we are now in Year Three of the largest global prospective cohort study or natural experiment with billions of exposures to the vaccine in all age groups.
Perhaps instead of waxing various theories about what is happening at the microscopic or cellular level, perhaps we could instead focus on how to fix or improve the regulatory process so that future incidents are avoided or attenuated. Trust has been broken.
But like many other Americans, I have already become Homo mRNApien. Perhaps I will live longer but without a sense of smell. Perhaps nothing?
Ultimately, I appreciated your efforts regarding vaccine safety, Dr. Høeg. Your three hours of active listening was a masterclass on civility. Keep up your own good work and I wish you the best of health.
…and…a better analysis would be what the benefits of reallocating the pandemics spend / costs would have been if they were deployed against known medical interventions for other diseases / conditions that have been limited due to historical cost benefit cut-offs, e.g., must be less than $50,000 to 100,000 per quality adjusted life year (QALY). There have been estimates that COVID efforts cost $2 million to 20 million per QALY. Even if that is an order of magnitude too high, then half of efforts (or economic costs) should not have been thrown at COVID, and we would be much better off. (If those estimates are close to accurate, then had society could have either reduced COVID efforts or redeployed to other proven medical interventions by 90 to 99%). This is the tragedy of linear thinking by bush league leaders.
When you consider the mechanism of action of the Covid 19 vaccines - mRNA is packaged in LPNs which travel systemically throughout the body to the heart, brain, all organs of the body. The mRNA codes for a foreign protein, the biologically active and toxic Spike Protein. Every cell in the body that expresses the spike protein will get attacked by the immune system. This is why we see heart inflammation, neurological damage and autoimmune disease. It also is the likely cause of sudden deaths 2 days after receiving the vaccines in the 18-45 age group. Now add SV40, plasmids, and DNA to the mix and as a result we are seeing increases in what is being referred to as turbo cancer. These turbo cancers are odd in that they go from stage 1 to 4 in a matter of weeks. The turbo cancers have never been seen before in patients prior to 2020. Which explains why experts suspect the vaccines.
Dr. Rancourt might be wrong regarding the 17 million deaths world wide as it could be more or it could be less. When you delve into how these shots work from an analytical standpoint it is apparent they cause more harm than good.
Dr. Høeg, if you have a different point of view please share. It is hard to see how the vaccines provide any health benefits. Also, it is suspicious that attorneys have to FOIA health agencies and the pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer to obtain data.
Thanks for doing the video and all of the research Tracy. It is very interesting and valuable.
I believe you should be looking at the sharp decrease in standard health services provided during 20-22.
From some study about Europe I vaguely remember that in 2020 on average non-covid related patient exams and visits decreased by around 30-40%.
This must have had some relevant impact.
Considering that the potential deaths or other morbidities that could be caused by the putative mechanisms put forth relative the mRNA vaccines would manifest over many months or years, looking for, or only at, deaths near the vaccination time point (not finding or finding) would be a pretty big logic flaw.
my question for you is the following: 1) do you feel ANY deaths are attributable to the Vaxx? 2) If yes, what is your estimate given the ridiculous amount of data that are available world wide? 3) Do you feel based on these available data greater than 53 people died from the vaxx? Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
Tracy, @dobssi's Sweden chart appears outdated, as current ASMR data with 7 year pre-pandemic lin. trend (identical methodology to @dobbsi) shows: 2020: 8.4%, 2021: 1.1%, 2022: 3.3%.
For Denmark, and identical method, you can see: 2020: -0.7% 2021: 3.1% 2022: 6.8%
https://next.mortality.watch/explorer/?c=SWE&c=DNK&t=asmr_excess&ct=yearly&cs=bar&df=2009&dt=2022&bf=2013&bt=2019&bm=linear_regression&p=1&v=2
Measure excess deaths in countries that vaxxed the least or in populations where there is no vaxxing like the Amish. The whole pandemic was a HUGE LIE from start to finish, from where and how it originated, to who would get sick and die, to masking and mass jabbing, there was no safety or efficacy at any point along these death graphs and people are continuing to die because MRna spike protein stays in your system forever. You don't need science and statistics to prove 17 million people died, you need common sense.
There could be other factors which positively correlate with the injections. For example, drinking and drugs plus injection or genetic factors plus injection, etc. Also, it is possible that not all injections were identical in content, which is another confounding factor.
Dear Dr. Tracy, Thank you for your debate with Dr. Rancourt. Though I count myself as a supporter of his, I was disappointed he did not let you speak more. He wanted to win an argument rather than get at the truth as you would have preferred.
I believe that the reason those 17 countries was due to the striking rise in all-cause-mortality (ACM) during the 2022-23 summer in the southern hemisphere. It was a mystery to be solved. This rise was noticed in only one country to begin with but then looked for and present in every country with data for that period. However, the extrapolation to the whole world, over all rounds of jabs and 17M deaths struck me as jumping to conclusions too. It did not feel as if there were enough contemplation of possible confounding factors.
I'm a retired oil production operations man with no medical background at all but, if I may, I'd like to mention a point or two that did not come out. I am a Brit and have had one AZ jab and one mRNA before I decided I did not like the them in principle. Any gleanings of knowledge I've picked up have all been in the last 4 years.
1. The action of both kinds of jab is to strip the inner lining of the blood vessels (hence the fine blood clots) exposing the tissue behind it to autoimmune attack. This may be anywhere in the body. One cause, many effects and all of them only discoverable by histopathology. Not normally performed in routine autopsy.
2. It is particularly damaging if irreplaceable tissue is attacked: most strongly of all the eggs in woman's ovaries, closely followed by the heart, the brain and then the elastin of the larger arteries and the skin. Deaths in which the jabs have played an important role will not only be in the sharp ACM rises associated with roll-outs but also much longer term. Possibly years if DNA transfection is a fact.
3. As Dr. Geert VB has been at pains to point out, with the mRNA jabs the immune system response changes dramatically. By the 3rd jab (1st booster) the body becomes obliged to tolerate spike protein instead of clear it.
As an oil man I understand my oil plant through the following the process flow. The jabs go into the muscle. Some is absorbed there. The most is flushed to the lymph nodes which drain to the subclavian vein. The flow continues to heart and through the lungs (on the wrong side of the air/blood interface!) back to the heart again and so to the whole body with a side-stream filter called the spleen. And it dawns on me how we see the explosion of previously controlled cancers.
Enough. Before I start blathering. :-) Best wishes
I don't agree 💯 with Dennis but a source of variability could be the place, date of manufacture, and batch/lot of the vaccine. It seems both sides here may be seeking their own different sources of confirmation bias. But great to have a debate nonetheless 👍
In early 2023, Dr. Denis Rancourt et al and I 100% independently calculated the same numbers based on the increase in total death after the toxic Covid-19 “vaccines” were deployed - 13 million Covid-19 vax deaths to end 2022. Rancourt used Israeli and Australian total death data as his sample; I used Alberta total deaths.
I had never heard of Rancourt until after I published my results. We also independently agreed that there was NO REAL PANDEMIC. The IFR (Infection Fatailty Rate) was much like other seasonal flu's.
Denis estimated 17 million C-19 vax-deaths to end 2023. I estimated 19 million C-19 vax-deaths to end 2023, but that was a crude estimate. I defer to Denis' 17 million.
THE CULL TRILOGY – by Allan Malcolm MacRae
"The ability to correctly predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence."
1. MURDER OF MULTITUDES
Covid & Climate Chronicles – The Big Cull
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CHR2Z38J
2. THE CLIMATE SCAM
Fifty Years of False Fears
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CK1ZZY7T
3, THE CORRUPTION OF OUR INSTITUTIONS
The New Dark Age
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CLVVW54G
I could only stomach 90 minutes of the debate and then shut it off. It was so poorly moderated there was little value in continuing. I've read his written response and here yours, and got that done in a fraction of the time. The debate should have been structured with an agreement in advance as to how to proceed, and how much time for each speaker to given their argument and the other to respond. Rancourt came prepared to go point by point through your critique, which seems a reasonable approach to me, and might have been for you as well. Instead, there was no structure and the moderators contributed to the chaos instead of helping. I wish we could have a do-over with a good moderator and structure because the debate is well worth having. Rancourt et al. have done extensive analysis and you have raised apparently valid criticisms, but we never got to hear any of those conflicts resolved. Frustrating!
I will say that reading your original response to the paper I noted some of the same apparent errors in your statements that Rancourt spoke of in the debate, such as where you wrote, "The first issue is the authors analyze only 17 countries. But why only 17 and why these 17? They don’t explain but should have." As Rancourt pointed out, they DID explain that in the paper. What I would expect two scientists to do in a discussion of a paper like this is for you to acknowledge that they DID explain their rationale, and then for you to explain why you felt that explanation was inadequate (if you still felt that way, as I think you did). But that didn't happen.
Turning to your new response here in this Substack, I'll just point out a couple examples where you are misrepresenting what he said in the debate, at least as I understood it. You write, "As you will hear, Rancout [sic] et al’s analysis attributes all of the post-vaccine rollout excess deaths in the 17 countries to the vaccines." No. He specifically differentiated this claim from what he was actually claiming, that there was an association with the vaccine roll-out, not with the vaccines. That's a difference, since vaccination roll-out could include other "assaults" to use the terminology he's used elsewhere. It would be nice if both of you used precise language when quoting each other and made sure you understood each other before responding. Again, the debate moderators failed at ensuring that, and the "speaking past each other" continues here in your response (and perhaps in his).
Another example here: Citing a figure from Collyer, you write, "Where are the 15,000+ excess deaths in Denmark due to the vaccines that the Rancourt analysis would predict? (I don’t see them)" But, Rancourt specifically gave a figure in the debate that was half that value! And he noted the proximity to the 6000 figure from the Danish government that you gave in your own initial critique. Now, you may respond that the timing doesn't match up, but why do you persist on saying his analysis leads to a prediction of 15,000+ excess deaths when he specifically said that wasn't his prediction during the debate? (In your defense, I think this happened when you were having some technical difficulties, though you said you heard everything during that time, so I don't know. Maybe you were distracted by that).
The simplistic graph you post from Kevin Bass seems to make the vaccines into healthy supplements! The more the better! No, I'm not buying (and doubt you are either). I'd have expected better arguments than this. It is obvious that the countries on the right are the most economically advanced and wealthiest, and those on the left, the least so. There is a well-known healthy user bias that correlates well with income level, and this has been shown in peer-reviewed papers on flu vaccination and through analyses of COVID data in the U.S. (cf. Mathew Crawford's Substack series). I don't fault you for showing the graph, though wish you had pointed out this obvious issue (and there are probably others); but, far from defeating Rancourt's argument, it is consistent with his key claim that there is wide variability in response to the vaccine roll-out, and this varies by country due to different overall policies, plus the demographic variations. I wish there could have been a calm, rational discussion of things like this, but again, the moderators failed you and all of us.
You do raise some interesting arguments that I'd very much like to see debated, but only in a context where you could both first seek to understand each other, then respond, and in a structured, orderly manner. I agree with you that Rancourt's paper has the potential to discredit the "anti-vax" movement. On the other hand, if he is correct, we really need to know that and let the world know. Without a properly moderated forum, I doubt this will be resolved, and arguments and counterarguments will continue to fly back and forth, or maybe interest will just die out as everyone loses confidence in the vaccine arguments altogether as interest in the pandemic fades. Then we'll have to repeat the same mistakes the next time mRNA vaccines are rolled out in a crisis (real or imagined).
Thanks for debating with Rancourt. I hope you and others will continue to engage with him, but in a forum where we can reach clear resolution.
Rancourt's response to your critique utterly destroys your arguments, and instead of actually providing any counter evidence, you purposefully misinterpreted his paper, provided no large scale data to back up your alternate causal possibilities etc. Tracy is not a truth seeker at all, she's using controlled studies with serious flaws in them to hide the massive death toll the vaccines caused.
Dear Tracy. First, I really felt very sorry for you trapped in that hostage video. Your patience in that situation appears legendary. I generally avoid these types of forums, because there are those with very fixed beliefs on specific health topics using "data" more as wallpaper to make their personal opinions look more scientific.
It is not just with this topic, but could be with "Chronic Lyme disease" and excessive use of antibiotics, "safe supply" of heroin to "saves lives" (i.e., we don't know if it does because the only papers looking at short-term survival are conducted by advocates for safer supply), or premature approvals of oncological drugs using single arm trials with follow-up RCTs showing no benefit, etc.
I am not ideologically captured by the left or right, nor do I believe in conspiracies while still seeing an unhealthy corporate capture of drug regulatory process or the real plausibility of a SARS-CoV-2 lab leak (vs wet market), etc.
Yet, the "debate" that I listened to for three hours on the Illusion of Consensus felt more of a nasty lecture with you, Rav, and Kevin being schooled and scolded by a petulant Denis. Perhaps, what I found most disturbing was his extreme dismissiveness and chronic parking of valid issues that you (and Kevin) raised. There were clear limitations to his methods and analysis. Yet all he wanted to do was show more graphs, and not permit you to present alternate graphs to support your positions.
The fact that the Discussion section of his published paper provided no description of study limitations when using unlinked population-based datasets was a red flag. When he stated that providing a description of limitations to readers wasn't required but more of an editorial suggestion, it felt like he had little humility on this issue and was simply proselytizing a religious position rather than a scientific position. Limitations of your study is an editorial standard in all original scientific articles of good quality.
He also seemed to be accusing you of trying to mussel him from advocating that mRNA vaccines kill people, because you were simply raising valid questions about his findings in your rebuttal. This appeared to be the biggest beef that he had with your commentary on his article. He had an itch he wanted scratching, and you were fouling things up by giving him a bit of Gold Bond.
Denis then agreed with you that his study design and his actual findings could only suggest at best an association (not a correlation or prove causation). But then he immediately stated regardless of this important fact, he should then be permitted to misrepresent the findings as showing causation. It was a weird line of reasoning (or lack thereof).
When he then presented overlapping curves as ecological comparisons of different unlinked population-based datasets, he would point out a phenomenon that no one else could see. Sometimes a curve of booster vaccines rolled out in a given country preceded an increase in mortality, and sometimes not, or in reverse, with no consistent patterns - looking more like noise. There is a name for this phenomenon where one person sees something that no one else can see.
My hope for the debate was that it might have been an opportunity for various independent thinkers to respectfully discuss the findings of Denis article in a typical peer-review process. Instead it was more of a rant from a true believer, who doesn't appear open to the rigors of the scientific method anymore, which includes addressing dissenting opinions and being respectful and open to debate.
Ultimately, people are angry with public health officials for fumbling through the worst pandemic in a Century, getting some things right, many things wrong, and now hindsight is 20:20. But regulatory capture of drug approvals is a problem, and there are many questions surrounding the level of evidence required to provisionally approve any of the COVID-19 vaccines regardless of the vaccine platform.
At the end of the day, the question regarding the safety of mRNA vaccine technology will be addressed sooner than later, since we are now in Year Three of the largest global prospective cohort study or natural experiment with billions of exposures to the vaccine in all age groups.
Perhaps instead of waxing various theories about what is happening at the microscopic or cellular level, perhaps we could instead focus on how to fix or improve the regulatory process so that future incidents are avoided or attenuated. Trust has been broken.
But like many other Americans, I have already become Homo mRNApien. Perhaps I will live longer but without a sense of smell. Perhaps nothing?
Ultimately, I appreciated your efforts regarding vaccine safety, Dr. Høeg. Your three hours of active listening was a masterclass on civility. Keep up your own good work and I wish you the best of health.
…and…a better analysis would be what the benefits of reallocating the pandemics spend / costs would have been if they were deployed against known medical interventions for other diseases / conditions that have been limited due to historical cost benefit cut-offs, e.g., must be less than $50,000 to 100,000 per quality adjusted life year (QALY). There have been estimates that COVID efforts cost $2 million to 20 million per QALY. Even if that is an order of magnitude too high, then half of efforts (or economic costs) should not have been thrown at COVID, and we would be much better off. (If those estimates are close to accurate, then had society could have either reduced COVID efforts or redeployed to other proven medical interventions by 90 to 99%). This is the tragedy of linear thinking by bush league leaders.