covariants VS covid-19-the-economist-global-excess-deaths-model

"Publicly available data on the number of analyzed sequences over two-week windows for each country were extracted from covariants.org and Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) initiative databases [3, 4]."

This process has produced thousands of variants already, and a considerable number that have bypassed immunity to previous variants. https://covariants.org/

I've also found covariants to be pretty useful, especially if you're looking at other countries

Variants: As of June 13th, Canada is 56% BA.2, 29% BA.2.12.1,10% BA.5, and 5% BA.4. Although BA.4 and BA.5 are not yet dominant in Canada, they are rapidly replacing BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 as they were each at 2% on the last reporting of May 30th thus representing a ~>3x increased prevalence within that short period of time. As the growth of BA.4 and BA.5 is following an exponential growth pattern, I expect that in the next reporting (June 30th) they will both be dominant. I think it's safe to say that they are already dominant though based on this. Source: https://covariants.org/

A lot of scientists said that using an mRNA vaccine against a coronavirus was completely stupid to begin with. That mass vaccination would favor immune evasion and render the vaccines worthless. And that's exactly what happened. You can see that very clearly on covariants.org . We were lucky, the new variants were a lot less deadly than the old ones. If a variant like Marseille 4 popped up and took over, it would have been a slaughter. We gave it a shot. We saw very clearly that it didn't work, and moreso, that it was dangerous to use a mass vaccination strategy for a virus that mutates and recombines a lot. Cause as immune evasion occurs, and the vaccine shows to be a lot less efficient than we hoped, this makes people at risk just as vulnerable as before.

So it's not really hoping for the best. It's using the best tools we have to reach herd immunity, both natural and artificial. The problem when we mass vaccinate, with mRNA vaccines that focus on a spike, is that variants that can circonvolute the immunity put in place by the vaccine, have it a lot easier than before to take over. You can see this in the data on covariants.org very clearly. This renders the vaccine a lot less effective as those variants have no natural competition. Thus putting the people that really need the vaccine, the people at risk, in a lot more danger, even vaccinated. This is why a lot of experts advised since the start to not mass vaccinate like we did. Sadly they weren't heard.

Viruses are part of our eco-system. We evolve in a world with viruses, bacteria, etc... This means there is natural competition between them. And if you mass vaccinate people against a virus, like the original strain of covid from Wuhan, this makes that particular variant disappear. The variants that can circonvolute the immunity put in place by the vaccine have a lot more chances to take over as they don't have natural competition with the original strain. If you go on a website like covariants.org, you can see that variants take over a lot faster now than they did before the vaccination. Because they have a lot more freedom. These are phenomena that we already witnessed in vaccination of intensively bred chickens and that are well studied. This is why even scientifical authorities, that are part of the consensus and the official voices for the government and the scientific community, like Fauci or Delfraissy, had concerns since the start of the vaccine rollout about this. However, it was worth a shot. Since then, we learned that those doubts were founded. Yet we still prone mass vaccination as some kind of panacea against the pandemic.

It doesn’t have to be just a ‘coincidence’ though; seems bizarre to completely ignore something else that was occurring during this time—the Covid pandemic? If we look at the excess mortality, it showed a temporal correlation with Covid waves/mortality, and no temporal correlation with vaccine uptake. Same USA plot for age 18-64. The UK data also showed lower excess mortality in 2021 (all-cause, non-Covid, and Covid). On Euromomo you can plot z-scores for evidence of excess mortality over time by country, here are the plots for 15-44, and all ages. It doesn’t seem like there was excess mortality in the 15-44 age bracket (maybe except Hungary), or vaccine-related excess mortality, but it does appear there was pandemic-related excess. There are also data from many other countries you can check, e.g. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates, and the latest plots with Covid mortality and vaccine uptake available for 100 countries. In various countries it doesn’t look like there’s a temporal correlation with excess. Various countries like Australia, NZ, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Norway and more (mostly countries that were Zero/low-Covid and highly vaccinated) had little to no (or even negative) excess mortality. That doesn’t really reconcile with the possibility of vaccine-related excess, but it’s compatible with pandemic-related excess. The claim/narrative that the excess mortality may somehow be related to or driven by vaccination just seems really difficult to reconcile with the data.

> The obvious fearmongering and irrationality, especially from so-called "experts", was quite intense and prolific in Canada, too.

So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!

A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1].

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

It might be worth generating a version that excludes Russia and Ukraine.

https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa...

The official numbers in Russia are pure bullshit. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates is a better estimate.

Btw if we look at the excess mortality data, it showed a pretty good temporal correlation with Covid waves/mortality. Similar with UK data. There are also data from many other countries available, e.g. Economist, and latest plots for 100 countries. This would seem to reconcile with bodies like the USA CDC, UK ONS etc. claiming that the vast majority (>85%) of C19 deaths has C19 as the underlying cause.

There are also data from many other countries you can check, e.g. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates. Here are the latest plots with Covid mortality and vaccine uptake for 100 countries. In various countries it doesn’t look like there’s a temporal correlation with excess. Various countries like Australia, NZ, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Norway and more (mostly countries that were Zero-Covid/low-Covid, highly vaccinated, and relatively less affected by the pandemic) that had little to no (or even negative) excess mortality. This doesn’t really reconcile with the possibility of vaccine-related excess, but it’s compatible with pandemic-related excess. The claim/narrative that the excess mortality may somehow be related to or driven by vaccination seems a really difficult one to reconcile with the data.