A recent post on the news and opinion site OpEdNews depicted Anthony Fauci and "Big Pharma" as mass murderers whose crimes against humanity demand a Nuremberg-style international tribunal, and a hanging. "Let's see them swing," the author concluded.
Similar claims appear frequently on OpEdNews, are commonplace on Fox News, circulate widely on social media and are fodder for right-wing political campaigns. In September, Wyoming State Senator Anthony Bouchard called for Fauci to be tried and executed, writing, "After the prosecution, the chair, the gallows, or lethal injection?" In November, Jackson Lahmeyer, a candidate for the US Senate from Oklahoma, echoed the same charges, calling Fauci a mass murderer and "the greatest con man in the United States of America." Lahmeyer, a pastor, more humanely just called for Fauci to be imprisoned.
Millions of Americans have swallowed the anti-vaccine Kool-Aid
The list of charges against Fauci is a long one, but the current ones center on his involvement both in creating the SARS-CoV-19 virus and forcing dangerous, death-dealing vaccines on the public. In anti-vaccine circles, the deadliness of the "clot shots" and "death shots" is an established truth from which the need to try and execute Fauci follows naturally. However, from time to time seemingly factual claims are made to bolster the case. For example, the OpEdNews post cited above includes the following striking assertions along with links to their sources:
"Airline pilots are dropping dead at an unprecedented 1750% higher rate than normal after the jab."
"Soccer players and other athletes are collapsing at sixty times the normal rate after the vax from heart failure."
"There is a "higher death rate from the clot-shots than from the disease".
Over the course of the pandemic, I've spent more time than I would have liked visiting such sources and fact-checking similar claims. I'd like to present what I've learned about a few of these seemingly authoritative pronouncements and, more importantly, about how such claims are generated--the recipe, so to speak, for the Kool-Aid that millions of Americans seem to have swallowed.
Claim: "Airline pilots are dropping dead at an unprecedented 1750% higher rate than normal after the jab."
This shocking indictment of the Covid vaccines didn't appear only on OpEdNews. I googled "airline pilots dying 1750% covid vaccine" and found 13,100,000 hits.
The story seems to have started on the Hal Turner radio show on December 8, 2021. His source was a real publication, the Airline Pilot Magazine, published by the Airline Pilots Association International (ALPA), which represents 61,000 active and retired pilots. Like many trade magazines, they publish an annual in memoriam list of members who have passed away. This year the list included the names of 111 pilots who died in 2021, 6 who died in 2020 and 1 who died in 2019.
Turner, copied avidly by everyone who has re-posted and who continues to spread this story, assumed that those numbers meant that 111 pilots died in 2021, following--and therefore linked to--the roll-out of the vaccines, a stunning number when compared to 6 in 2020 and just one in 2019. Those 105 excess deaths in 2021 compared to 2020 were both unnecessary and cruel; as Turner commented, "Pilots were coerced into taking the Covid-19 shots under threat of losing their jobs."
The 1750% number was apparently derived by comparing the difference between the 2021 and 2020 deaths to the 2020 deaths: 105/6 = 17.5. That factor of 17.5 was then made even more dramatic by reporting it as a percentage: 17.5 x 100 = 1750%.
It must be bitterly disappointing to many anti-vaxxers to learn that what the numbers actually mean is that ALPA received timely notices of the deaths of 111 of their members who died in 2021, somewhat belated notices about 6 pilots who had died in 2020, and an even more belated notice about a pilot who had died in 2019. As common sense would suggest, roughly similar numbers of pilots die each year.
Here's what ALPA has to say (complete with a lovely aviation-related turn of phrase):
In every edition of Air Line Pilot magazine, we honor ALPA pilots - both active and retired - who have flown west. Based on verified information provided by their families, we reported the loss of more pilots in both 2019 and 2020 than in 2021 [my emphasis]. We report the losses in our magazine as we receive information from the families. The information in one magazine edition does not provide a complete report of the total losses for each of the listed years. We salute every member for their service and honor their memories."
To put it bluntly, this claim, still flying around the internet, isn't just inaccurate or misleading, it's the exact opposite of the truth.
To his credit, the author of the OpEdNews piece that repeated this claim deleted it after I brought the truth to his attention. Interestingly, however, he didn't give up on the possibility (or perhaps the hope) that something similar might be true, adding, "It remains to be seen how many pilots will die from the 'vaccines.'"
The next claim in that post is also popular on anti-vax sites: "Soccer players and other athletes are collapsing at sixty times the normal rate after the vax from heart failure." A google search came up with 5,860,000 citations.
According to Reuters, the first source for this kind of claim was an article on the website of the Israeli edition of Real Time News, which listed 108 "professional athletes, coaches, college and youth athletes" who have died since December 2020, and which attributed those deaths to the Covid vaccines.
Reuters fact checkers examined the list and found that it included American football players, archers, gymnasts, badminton players, ballet dancers, rugby, soccer, tennis, table tennis, baseball, cricket, ice and field hockey, handball, volleyball and basketball players, body builders, boxers, canoe racers, cyclists and weightlifters. The list ranged from young amateurs to retired professional athletes, and included ". . . four soccer coaches, . . ., one body building coach, one cricket teacher, one athletics trainer, a golf caddie, a marching band member and a doctor who died while out jogging."
Using the same approach of scouring news sources for athlete deaths, the story that the OpEdNews piece cited featured an even longer list published December 22 on the website of Global Research, a self-described anti-globalization organization. That story included brief news excerpts reporting on 187 athletes from a wide variety of sports worldwide who collapsed and/or died in 2021, followed by a separate list of another 180, again "from all over the world."
Those two lists combined are the source of the article's headline, "367 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, Serious Issues, 209 Dead, After Covid Shot."
Although many of the news snippets don't mention vaccination, and although some of the events took place long after vaccination, this article, like the earlier one, assumes a causal link between the vaccines and these events, leading to an urgent conclusion: "We are dealing with a crimes [sic] against humanity on an unprecedented scale. The Killer vaccine must be withdrawn immediately."
Of course this seemingly large number of deaths among athletes is meaningful only if it is in fact abnormal and represents an actual increase from previous years. The article presents that as self-evident, leading with the comment: "It is definitely not normal for young athletes to suffer from cardiac arrests or to die while playing their sport, but this year it is happening." The authors challenged potential fact-checkers to comb news reports from past years for comparable events, writing, "Where are the fact-checkers? . . . They are nowhere to be found because this number of athlete deaths is abnormal and they know it."
It turns out that fact-checkers don't have to count up news reports of similar deaths in past years because there's a much simpler way to find out if 209 sudden deaths among athletes in a year is unusual or not.
Not surprisingly, scientists have known about and studied sudden deaths among athletes long before Covid and the Covid vaccines. A literature review from June, 2017, published in the NIH National Library of Medicine, found that the rate of sudden cardiac deaths (SCDs) among college athletes is around one death per 50,000 athlete-years, and among high school athletes, one per 50,000 to 80,000 athlete-years. A similar study of older athletes, published in 2016, found a comparable rate of one sudden death per 50,000 athlete-years.
As we saw, the authors of the athlete death lists did not limit themselves to young athletes or athletes in the US alone. They scoured news reports for sudden deaths among active and retired athletes, coaches, trainers and other sports figures from pretty much every sport worldwide. The first 25 names on the Global Research list include soccer players from Egypt, France, Ghana, Portugal and Spain, runners from Norway and Scotland, handball players from Croatia and Portugal, volleyball players from India, a basketball player from the Philippines, a rugby player from Australia, a boxer, a cricket player and a bodybuilder from the US and a darts player from the UK.
According to the NCAA, there are 8 million US high school athletes and an additional 495,000 college athletes. We would expect 110 sudden cardiac deaths just among those young US athletes every year. It's estimated that 25 percent of Americans - around 82 million -- are active in at least one sport. If we conservatively estimate that their risk of sudden death is similar to that of healthy young athletes, 1 in 80,000 per year, we would expect more than 1000 such deaths every year in the US alone.
It turns out that the world is a very big place and there are a lot of athletes out there, orders of magnitude more than most of us would have guessed. It's estimated that worldwide there are 500 million active volleyball players, 450 million basketball players, 300 million table tennis players, 240 million registered soccer players, 220 million badminton players, 65 million baseball players, 60 million cricket players, 19 million handball players, etc., etc., etc.
So if, as the authors of the article do, we cast our net worldwide, we're looking at more than 2 billion athletes. Let's be even more conservative and assume that just one out of every 100,000 of them dies suddenly in a given year. That means there are probably 20,000 such deaths every year, including, of course 2021.
In other words, far more athletes--quite likely 100 times more--die suddenly every year than the paltry few that the authors of their shocking story documented in 2021. defined as abnormal, and with such certainty blamed on the vaccines. Had the authors of the two stories that were the source of the "60 times the normal rate" headline really done their homework, they could have stretched their list of athlete deaths in 2021 into the tens of thousands. But it's clear that they could have done the same for 2020, 2019, and earlier years as well.
The bottom line is that the lists of deaths on which this claim is based, although of course tragic, are absolutely meaningless as evidence of the alleged dangers of the Covid vaccines.
Not every anti-vaccine claim is as transparently wrong as those involving pilots and athletes. The assertion in the recent OpEdNews piece that "There is a 'higher death rate from the clot-shots than from the disease,'" provides a link to an actual article in an actual scientific journal, Toxicology Reports. And it's true that the authors of that article did say what the OpEdNews writer claimed, although just for people 65 and older. They concluded, "A novel best-case scenario [their emphasis] cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively [their emphasis] that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic."
The paper is extremely long and convoluted, with many questionable assumptions and analyses. After reading and re-reading the piece, I found that the authors had made three crucial assumptions that allowed them to reach their remarkable conclusion. Those involved VAERS--the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, how to interpret its numbers, and a unique way of calculating what they called true COVID-19 deaths.
VAERS is a database jointly maintained by the CDC and the FDA. It solicits and receives reports from medical professionals and from the public about adverse events that occur after any kind of vaccination. As is clearly spelled out on the VAERS website, the system serves as "an early warning system that detects problems possibly related to vaccines." They point out that, since there is no unvaccinated control group to compare reported adverse effects to, "we can't use VAERS to calculate how often adverse effects occur," and "VAERS generally cannot determine if a vaccine was the cause of a reported adverse event." If the reported adverse events do suggest a problem, detailed case-by-case analysis and/or further, carefully designed and controlled research is needed to evaluate it, much as an early warning from NORAD must be carefully scrutinized before concluding that a nuclear attack is in progress.
You can get a sense of the challenge of sorting out deaths that might actually be caused by a vaccination from the following:
In the US more than two million people 65 and older die every year, out of a senior population of more than 54 million. That means that the average risk of death for a senior during a full year is 3.7 % percent, and the average risk of death for a senior on any given day is just about one in 1000. Almost all American seniors received at least one Covid shot in 2021, and many received two, That means that an average of 5500 seniors will die on the day they happen to get a Covid shot, and more than 38,000 will die during the week after getting a Covid shot, independently of any effects of the shot.
Some fraction of those deaths will seem suspicious enough to be reported to VAERS either by medical professionals or members of the public. In the course of 2021, VAERS received just over 10,000 such reports, covering all age groups. But which, if any, or those deaths might actually have been caused by the vaccines can only be determined by case-by-case medical evaluation and/or further research.
Despite the clear warnings about how to interpret VAERS data, the authors of this paper count every adverse event associated with a Covid vaccination as definitely caused by the vaccination.
As if that assumption were not enough, they then use some elaborate rationalizations about under-reporting to determine that every death reported to VAERS following a Covid vaccination not only is a vaccine death, but actually represents just one percent of the actual deaths from the vaccines. This allows them to multiply each Covid-related death reported to VAERS by100 to determine what they consider the true number of vaccine-caused deaths.
That sleight-of-hand still didn't get them to all the way to the conclusion they apparently were determined to reach, so they repeated the same trick in reverse to estimate how many people have died from Covid. Based on a CDC statement that some 94% of people who are recorded as having died from Covid have one or more co-morbidities, the authors re-attribute 94% of recorded Covid deaths to those pre-existing conditions, leaving just 6% as "true" Covid deaths. That neat trick allowed them to divide the officially reported deaths from Covid by 16.67.
Not surprisingly, if you count every death reported to VAERS following a Covid vaccination as if it were definitely caused by the vaccination, and then multiply that number by 100, you can make the vaccines look very dangerous. If at the same time you take the deaths officially attributed to Covid and divide them by 16.67, you can make Covid look much less dangerous than it really is.
Combining these two feats of legerdemain tilts the cost-benefit balance by a factor of 1667 in order to arrive at their "best-case," "very conservative" conclusion that the vaccines kill five times more seniors than die from Covid.
I sent a copy of this paper to an MD friend of mine, part of whose career involved reviewing the medical literature for papers whose findings might lead to a change in the practice guidelines of the large national HMO for which he worked. Here is his response:
"I couldn't force myself to get through the entire article, but there are red flags everywhere. Chief among them, this journal is open access and merely charges a fee for publication. One of the authors is the editor of the journal, and the associate editor was the peer reviewer. So many assumptions were biased that I found myself nauseated."
We could scrutinize even more dramatic anti-vaccine claims. For now, I'll just say that almost every time I've taken the time to look into any of the claims that are actually clear enough to be checked, I've found a similar pattern, an effective recipe for generating disinformation:
Find or make up something, some cherry-picked factoid, a few numbers taken out of context, a pronouncement from a seemingly reputable source, or as we just saw, a "scientific" article, that provides just enough basis for a seemingly damning proof that the vaccines are deadly.
Couch even the flimsiest claim as a catchy story and get it picked up and repeated by anti-vaccine websites, especially widely followed ones such as those run by RFK, Jr., Joseph Mercola, Robert Malone, etc.
Just wait. There are plenty of those sites, and plenty of people who avidly and uncritically accept and share whatever appears on them as a slam-dunk confirmation of their beliefs.
That seems to be all it takes to create extremely effective anti-vaccine propaganda.
All of this might only be of academic interest, a case study of confirmation bias or mass delusions, except for the fact that 825,000 Americans have died from Covid, many of whom would still be alive if they had gotten vaccinated. And except for the fact that such charges have become the "factual" basis for an alternate reality, one in which Fauci is firmly believed to be a mass murderer and the "death shots" his weapon of choice. How many more Americans will die needlessly? How many passionate calls for Fauci to be executed will it take before someone takes it upon himself to see that "justice" is done?
Just as at Jonestown, this disinformation-laced Kool-Aid kills.
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