Shot through the heart? Post-booster excess deaths in Japan (updated 8 October)

Last week, I detailed Prof Kojima’s attempt to make sense of the statistical shenanigans of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID). Oddly enough, although NIID researchers seem more than willing to link Covid deaths to insufficient vaccination in children, they don’t seem very interested in linking excess deaths at the start of 2022 to excessive vaccinations in adults. Prof Kojima, on the other hand, is a bit more inquisitive. And with excess deaths vastly outnumbering Covid deaths from January to June, who can blame him.

Blue: Cumulative excess deaths. Orange: Cumulative Covid deaths

With a certain sick irony, excess deaths rose most steeply after Kishida had told other world leaders in January that Japan’s ban on new foreign entries was needed to protect the elderly and weak.

Making Waves @MakingC19Waves

Kishida told the WEF that “I’d like you to understand that we’ve taken a cautious approach based on the high value Japanese society places on looking after the elderly and weak” and “The people are strongly calling for strict border controls.”

Paul @PantsuVor

@MakingC19Waves I literally read this less than two hours ago in Japanese class. I'm amazed they still won't let tourists in but Japanese people can travel as much as they won't. How blind can you be to facts?

One argument the NIID makes is that other countries don’t show a temporal association between vaccine doses and excess deaths. But that isn’t actually true. Economist John Gibson found a pretty clear temporal association between boosters and excess deaths in New Zealand, estimating “16 excess deaths per 100,000 booster doses.”

The age-group data suggests it wasn’t a total coincidence.

The rise in excess mortality in the last four months of the April-to-March year was experienced by all ages except the 0-29 years group, who are mostly ineligible for boosters (Table 1). From the pre-booster era to the booster era excess mortality p-scores rose by seven percentage points for the 30-59 and 60-79 age groups and by ten percentage points for the oldest age group. In other words, the age groups most likely to use boosters show large rises in excess mortality after boosters are rolled out.

To see if he could replicate Gibson’s findings, Kojima plotted Japan’s cumulative excess deaths and booster rate for Jan-March.

Blue line/left axis: Cumulative excess deaths. Orange line/right axis: Booster rate

But correlation doesn’t equal causation, right? Couldn’t these excess deaths be unconfirmed Covid deaths? If that were the case, we’d expect to see very high numbers of excess deaths from respiratory causes. We don’t. [Source]

Deaths from respiratory causes

But we do see lots of excess deaths from circulatory (cardiovascular) causes.

Deaths from circulatory causes

Consumers of mainstream media may respond that many things can cause cardiovascular deaths.

But the average Substack reader is probably aware that the mRNA jabs give new meaning to the phrase “shot through the heart”. Take for example emergency calls for cardiac arrests among 16-39 year olds in Israel, which just so happened to rise and fall along with the 1st and 2nd doses and then rise and fall again after doses for recovered individuals.

Cardiovascular mortality was also higher in vaccine recipients in the hastily conducted Stage 3 clinical trials for both mRNA jabs too.

One thing that makes Japan’s booster campaign unique is the large number of heterologous boosters, i.e., people getting a Moderna booster after 2 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech. Up to 1st Feb, 175.5 million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech had been injected compared with only 33 million doses of Moderna. But between 1st Feb and 1st April, the Japanese injected 27 million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and 23.5 million doses of Moderna.

I bring this up because

1) Moderna (mRNA-1273) causes myocarditis more often than Pfizer/BioNTech (BNT162b2) and

2) BNT162b2 followed by mRNA-1273 causes myocarditis even more often.

This is shown in data from Scandinavia…

Abbreviations: IRR, adjusted incidence rate ratio.

…and Ontario, Canada.

I think we may be close to the heart of the matter (heh heh), but a cravat needs to be added here. This data is for particular cardio-related adverse events in young males after heterologous jabs for Doses 1 and 2, so we can’t simply use it as absolute proof that Dose 3 led to the excess circulatory deaths in older adults. It may be just one more coincidence.

But if the third jabs did indeed cause excess deaths at the start of the year, the fourth jabs for over 60s would be expected to cause excess deaths this summer too. And it looks like they did. (Thanks to Sendai City releasing its September mortality figures early and minimal_125 for plotting the data.)

All-cause deaths in Sendai City

So what can we conclude from all this data? Well for some people, it’s going to be a long winter. But for many elderly people soon to become eligible for their fifth jab, it’s going to be quite short.

Update 8 October

The Florida Department of Health has just released an analysis showing 18-39 males had a 84% increased risk of cardiac-related mortality with 28 days of an mRNA injection in 2021. Males over 60 had a 10% increased risk. Worth noting this was for the initial two doses; boosted people were omitted. The way to a man’s heart is apparently through his upper arm.