46 Comments
Aug 11, 2022Liked by Daniel Kotzin

Another difference is that most of Africa either did not "lock down" or did so very partially and for short periods of time, basically because these are not laptop-economies and people need to get out and physically work.

Also, there was very little mask wearing in most of Africa, again for financial reasons.

Hmm ... no lockdowns, no masks and no injections ... most Africans should be dead of C19, right?

But, let's not allow incovenient evidence to get in the way of cute feel-good policy.

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Aug 11, 2022Liked by Daniel Kotzin

When you peddle gasoline as fire retardant you end up with a virtuous cycle for those profiting from selling the gas. The higher the flames, the more fire retardant is required. It never ends until the arsonists are arrested.

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One hypothesis is that Africa, as well as a set of other countries (east Asia) had pre-existing immunity from previous similar viruses, e.g., SARS, but also others that did not propagate widely in the rest of the world. @EthicalSkeptic (Twitter) has been analyzing data and presenting the (detailed) basis of this hypothesis. His mode of communication can be quite hard to parse -- but this is not a random guess, at any rate, whatever its merits. I have also seen other hypotheses involving the mainstream use of hydroxychloroquine in Africa. Hard to verify.

On your charts above, deaths in Africa were lower even pre-vaccine, so there would appear to be other factors involved.

Of course the mainline answer is that they just don't know how to count cases and deaths in the dark continent. Only the advanced West really knows how to do that, apparently. And therefore vaccines have to be shoved down their throats, unwillingly, per the WHO. A sort of benign colonialism, if you will.

The age differential explanation is not credible at least to my eyes given the enormous gap, per your comment above. But, again, note that it predates vaccine availability.

Jan Van Ruth: Thanks for the condescension; it's become the norm, and those of us who have been looking at the data, and seeking hypotheses that are consistent with the data, expect nothing less at this point. While we're at it, perhaps you should go ahead and report that misinfo is being spread. Also the norm. Keep the faith. The Science will save us.

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They will claim that Africa does not keep proper record.

The real control arm is the period before the vaccine started.

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no i am not.

nor do i want to be.

second hand car salesmen are nice.

if you are an asshole, i will say so.

nothing wrong with being straightforward.

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Your observation is NOT CORRECT and I do NOT AGREE with anything you write:

Strong correlation evidence has been posted between injections and deaths.

You have desperately tried to refute this by positing, falsely, that the African countries identified have some weird, perverse population distributions. This is FALSE.

You then tried to desperately say that IVM might be a reason but it is not used in Egypt as much as in the other cited African countries. Again, this is FALSE.

You have never presented any data or evidence to support your very outlandish, weird and bizarre attempts to undermine the very strong and explicit correlation between injections and deaths.

These weird ideas that bizarre population age distributions and IVM use can alone explain the strong correlation between injections and deaths, are YOUR IDEAS. Not mine.

You have never presented any evidence at all in support of YOUR IDEAS.

Because none exists.

End of.

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Just to re-cap:

This discussion started when Daniel Kotzin presented widely divergent death rates between Europe and Africa, along with widely divergent injection rates, and postulated a causal relationship.

He also presented significantly divergent injection rates between African countries, and showed there was a corresponding divergence in death rates there.

You countered that this must be because of age demographics, since sars-cov2 is only a significant risk to the elderly and those with acute underlying conditions.

I countered that, while age demographics in Africa are much younger than Europe, the difference in death rates is too large to be accounted for just by that, and asked what about the difference between African countries with similar age demographics, and gave the median ages.

You countered that median age may not be representative because some of these countries could have, somehow, skewed populations with large numbers of people over 70.

I then produced the data showing this is not the case and these countries have largely similar, normal distributions across age groups.

Now you are saying a main difference is that sub-Saharan African countries have an advantage over Egypt (that has a higher injection rate and a higher death rate) because of a drug routinely taken to combat Onchocerca Volvulus, aka "River Blindness".

The drug in question is of course Ivermectin (or "horse paste" according to the CDC) and you will find it was made by Merck, not Pfizer. The patent has since run out and it is now mass produced all over the world.

Ivermectin is effective at combatting many viral and parasitic conditions, such as head lice and scabies, very prevalent in Egypt and where you can get IVM for insignificant cost "over the counter". I know this, because that is where I sourced my supply.

Another freely available drug in these African countries, as well as Egypt (where I also got my supply) is the effective anti-malarial, Hydroxychloroquine, that was used to help treat Donald Trump when he got C19 (at the sprightly young age of 74).

Since there is obviously a problem establishing a causal relationship based on the strong correlation between injection rates and death rates, and since age demographics and IVM/HCQ use cannot explain that inbetween Africal countries (although it is probably a factor in the large difference between Europe and Africa), let me help by suggesting an alternative mechanism that can explain the difference in death rates between Africa and Europe, and inbetween African countries, and which has nothing to do with the miracle "safe'n'effective" injections:

Vladimir Putin.

People in Europe get very angry when they see pictures of Mr Putin, and this leads to a marked risk in myocarditis and other conditions, causing the elevated death rates. Heck, Vlad is so unpopular that top athletes have been known to drop dead just by casually thinking about him while running around playing fields.

But, and maybe because they have more active outdoor lives and don’t get to spend so much time glued to 24-hour “news” TV, people in Africa are not so exercised by the Ukraine conflict, except, that is, in Egypt, which buys most of its grain from Ukraine and whose resorts used to have lots of Ukrainian tourists.

So, that explains it all.

I am fairly confident that the "fact-checkers" at Reuters will back me up on this.

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i wonder what the average or median age is those countries............

how stupid do you think your audience is?

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