Italian excess deaths and scientific debate around the jab

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Earlier this year an article (Allesandria et al.) gained some attention for unexpected (depends if you’ve been called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or not) discoveries concerning the Italian province of Pescara and COVID-19 vaccines: “We found all-cause death risks to be even higher for those vaccinated with one and two doses compared to the unvaccinated and that the booster doses were ineffective. We also found a slight but statistically significant loss of life expectancy for those vaccinated with 2 or 3/4 doses.” Source. In looking for explanations, they became among the first to mention revelations from JECP4, that vaccine effectiveness is likely being inflated due to counting window issues.

Famed Italian epidemiologist Eugenio Paci was not impressed, so he published a response in the online Italian science journal, Scienza in rete. He was more taken with Hulme et al. (source), which included a little study on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness. Source. Given my interest in case counting window biases, as well as other biases like the healthy vaccinee bias, and how this has led to exaggerated claims about the jabs, the original authors reached out to me to see if I could find such issues with Hulme et al. There was a game-breaking bug of an issue:

• The authors of Hulme et al. admit to what appears to be a devastating problem with their study somehow finding that vaccine effectiveness is very high within the first 3 days of vaccination. Then it goes down during the 2nd week, only to rise again. They do admit this makes no sense, and recognise that this “suggests that estimated effectiveness immediately after vaccination was biased due to unmeasured confounding (for example, postponement of vaccination when people presented with respiratory symptoms)”. I reached out to some of the authors, and they do seem to think this is the healthy vacinee bias at play. However, they think that counting window issues aren’t playing a role…

• Even though they play a big role in pretty much every other study, including studies Hulme et al. cite (one of these we will have to discuss later, as it singlehandedly justifies my concern that negative effectiveness might have been present from the beginning). And governments all around the world cook the books in this way too, such as in Italy, and Australia.

So Allesandria and friends addressed Paci’s other ill-informed comments, combined them with the above, and we ended up getting a response to the response published. Source. The whole thing is worth the read, including the agreement that there are issues with what is counted as a COVID-19 death. It is nice to see that the Italians are apparently slightly more ready for a serious debate over the jabs. In Australia, they just censor me and others. And in the US, establishment figures like Hillary Clinton want people who spread such ‘misinformation’ jailed:

This is the so-called party of freedom. Source. Freedom to do whatever our overlords tell us to do.

Okay then.