The mRNAs didn’t end Covid, Omicron did

The proof in one amazing chart

Sometimes the answer just needs to be color-coded.

For years, mRNA advocates have tried to give the jabs credit for ending the pandemic, despite massive evidence they stopped working within months and the observational data showing lower deaths among the vaccinated is hopelessly biased.

But earlier this month, the Society of Actuaries released an updated report on deaths during the pandemic that shows what really slayed Covid.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t come from Pfizer or Moderna.

—

(The news you need, the charts you need more. For 20 cents a day.)

—

The Society of Actuaries (actual slogan: Empower Your Actuarial Journey) is a 30,000-member group of, you guessed it, actuaries - the folks who help insurance companies assess risk. Every few months, it has put out reports on trends in American deaths during Covid.

The reports tend to focus on the number of insured people who have died, rather than the entire population. But the actuaries have access to enough big insurers to make the data a reasonable proxy for full national data - and they present it much more quickly and in a more useful way.

Their most recent report, released earlier in November, covers the period through the second quarter of 2023, ending June 30. Among other interesting data, it includes depictions of both Covid and non-Covid deaths stratified by quarter and by age.

The trends in non-Covid deaths are messy, especially in people under 50, because overdoses have exploded since 2020. (There is some evidence that the fall 2022 bivalent booster rollout led to more non-Covid deaths in older people, but it’s far from definitive.)

—

But the trends in Covid deaths could not be clearer.

Below is the same chart presented twice - once cropped, the second time in full view. The chart shows deaths over time, stratified by age: the top line is people 0-24, and each band below that is another decade, with the bottom band people 85 and up.

As you can see, Covid deaths were relatively low in the spring of 2021 - the happy vaccine valley, the brief period when the mRNAs worked as advertised.

They then soared in the summer, or Q3 2021. What’s notable is that they jumped in ALL ages, including the highly vaccinated (the bottom three bands, representing people 65-74, 75-84, and over 85).

And although Covid deaths fell in younger people through the fall and winter, they kept rising from their spring 2021 lows in the older people most at risk from Covid. As a result, overall Covid deaths rose too - roughly tripling between spring and fall 2021, despite all the boosters and the mandates.

This point can’t be emphasized enough: the soaring deaths in older people came even though nearly every senior in the United States was vaccinated.

Then, in the spring of 2022… Covid ended. All the cells turned green, all at once! Covid ended for older people, for the middle-aged, and for the young. It ended and it has not come back (except slightly for older people, which is not a point in favor of the jabs).

See for yourself.

—

(One chart to rule them all. Cropped:

(And the full chart. Green means go:

—

What accounted for this miraculous end to the plague of all plagues?

Not vaccines.

They were given in early 2021, a year before the tide rolled out, and even their backers concede they don’t work well against Omicron.

No, what happened was Omicron itself. It swept through the United States in the winter of 2022, the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Its mortality rates were overall much lower than the earlier variants - probably in the range of 0.05-0.1% - though its transmissibility meant that the winter of 2022 still saw a lot of deaths (particularly in older people, no matter that they were jabbed).

Ever since, various not-very-lethal Omicron strains have bounced around a population that has real (aka natural) immunity, helping make them even more of a nothingburger.

In the end, the vaccines were a sideshow. SARS-Cov-2 sought and found a truce with its human hosts (assuming the IgG4 class switch doesn’t come back to haunt the mRNA-jabbed).

Virus gonna virus.

And nature gonna nature.