Lessons from History - Austria
It turns out medical fascism still doesn't work.
Thanks to the Swedes1 we have a European benchmark for excess deaths against which to measure the effectiveness of interventions, including relative vaccination rates.
Personally, I don’t put any great weight on “confounders”. If COVID was as deadly as they say and interventions were as effective as they say, we should see this signal through the noise.
So, the benchmark is set at 10% of 1 year of mortality for the over 65s, and nothing for the unders.
Unless you have been sleeping in a cave for the last two years (or haven’t ventured past the mainstream media for your “news”), you will know that Austria is trying very hard to establish itself at the top of the pile in terms of authoritarian overreach and medical fascism - Nazism if you like.
Has it been for “the good of society”?
All cause excess death is the gold standard by which we will test this “hypothesis”.
Women over 65 encountered excess death (let’s attribute it all to COVID to be conservative) on exactly the 23rd October each year (2020 and 2021). See Figure 1. For the rest of both years, deaths were exactly in line with expectations.
I’m not going to dwell on the obvious except to suggest seasonality is probably the factor at play here rather than any experimental government interventions. Happy to be proved wrong.
Although the second wave was evidently smaller, if we ignore the natural course of viral attenuation as a major contributor and confer all this benefit on the vaccine, in the end, excess deaths were only 1% lower in 2021 than 2020 (Figure 2) as relatively more elderly women died throughout the year of other causes.
Although 2020 comes in under the 10% set by Sweden (across both sexes), together with 2021, it is apparent that Sweden’s light-touch policy was much the better one.
Similarly the old Austrian men had completely expected patterns of mortality throughout both 2020 and 2021 with the exception of the seasonal COVID events, also starting on 23rd October (Figure 3).
Unlike the women, however, there was the exact same excess death in 2021 as 2020 “despite” the vaccine and overall, twice as many elderly men have died unexpectedly than women (Figure 4).
Both years are way above the 10% benchmark. Sweden wins again.
As we should expect given the obvious heterogeneity of this virus in terms of age, the young Austrian women show barely a sign of unusual mortality except in the winter of 2020 (Figure 5).
And yet, in spite of this, 2021 is the only year that deserves attention in terms of excess for this cohort (Figure 6).
The 2% excess in 2020 could be considered “noise” but together with 2021, at 6% for the two year period compared with all the other two year periods that net around zero, it’s another victory for Swedish policy.
Finally, as we observe the deaths of young Austrian men, we can see the impact of a horrific medical emergency (Figure 7). There was a little bit of COVID impact in winter 2020 but 2021 has been a truly awful year for this cohort with deaths almost persistently more than two standard deviations above normal from the time that this cohort was vaccinated.
Looking at the summary stats in Figure 8, we can gauge the magnitude of the horror. Excess deaths of 5% in 2020, the year of natural COVID, rising to 13% in 2021, the year of the vaccine.
Sweden - 4, Austria - nul points!
So, while the Austrian public health authorities are scrambling around trying to prove that the COVID vaccine reduces COVID deaths, overall deaths are little different in the presence of it for young women and old folk.
Meanwhile, it is most likely causing significant deaths in young men who had little risk from the virus itself.
I think the word they call it is “democide”2. And I would say the actions of the Austrian authorities qualify them to be charged with it.
But while we’re about it, the same patterns are apparent in many other “developed” nations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
This must now be showing up in life insurance claims. Actuaries should be seeing this and panicking.
I think the Austrian government and at least some of the Austrian people are just fine with that ... not straying too far from their roots. I had an Austrian friend who told me the government should round up all the non-vaccinated and shoot them, to which I replied, did you not figure out some 80 or so years ago, gas is more efficient. Like I said, "had a friend". WWIII started several years ago. It does not pit country against country, rather tyrannical governments against freedom seeking people, most often in their own countries. Time to wake up.