What caused Japan’s excess deaths in early 2022?

Round up the usual suspects!

In case you weren’t aware, in Jan-March 2022, Japan had about 38,000 more deaths than in Jan-March 2021 but only about 9,700 Covid deaths.

So what caused this increase in non-Covid mortality?

Was it the jabs?

Here we have a repeat offender who was in the vicinity: excess deaths were highest in Feb-March, when the boosters were being given out.

So case closed, right? Not so fast. For one thing, there’s no correlation between booster rates and year-on-year (YoY) mortality increases across Japan’s 47 prefectures (hat-tip to https://twitter.com/Wataru__Inoue for the graphs below).

And if the jabs were the guilty party in Japan, you’d expect to see the same temporal association between boosters and excess deaths across the Sea of Japan in South Korea. But you don’t. South Korea boosted its elderly a few months before excess deaths kicked into overdrive.

So if the jabs have an alibi…

Was it Covid?

Although YoY deaths don’t correlate with boosters, they do with cumulative cases per million.

A map of Japan will come in handy at this point.

YoY deaths are clearly highest in metropolitan regions like Kanto (in and around Tokyo) and Kinki (in and around Osaka) where Covid prevalence is highest and are lowest in rural regions like Tohoku where Covid prevalence is lowest.

And Covid deaths and excess deaths have a temporal relationship in not only Japan but also South Korea.

So is cryptic Covid the culprit?

Let’s investigate Osaka, which had the highest YoY increase in all-cause deaths, over 4000. Osaka also happens to breakdown its 1755 Covid deaths during the Omicron wave up to 11 April into Covid as cause of death (CoD) (orange), non-Covid CoD with Covid as contributing factor (yellow), and unrelated to Covid (light blue). Age groups are along the left, and the total is in the red box.

If over one-third of Osaka’s Covid deaths are actually deaths from other causes, then Covid is unlikely to have caused the other excess deaths in Osaka or the rest of Japan.

This case seems to be going cold. But…

I think we have a new lead. If you haven’t already read this post, I suggest you do so.

Vaccine-Induced Tolerance to Spike Protein ...

But if you can’t be bothered, I’ll sum it up. The hypothesis is that the Covid jabs prevent severe Covid by causing spike protein tolerance: rather than the immune system overreacting and generating a cytokine storm and the like during Covid infection, this tolerance leads to the immune system under-reacting, which is why the vaccinated take longer to clear the virus and can’t acquire lasting immunity.

After presenting scientific evidence in support of this hypothesis, “Mark L” quoted in the post goes on (bold added by me): “As immunity wanes and new antibody-resistant variants emerge, vaccinated people will be more vulnerable to long-term/chronic infection with high viral loads. Due to the protective effects of tolerance this will likely manifest not as typical severe Covid-19 illness (pneumonia, ventilators, cytokine storms, multiorgan failure) but rather as spike protein toxicity. So we should watch for an increase in clotting, strokes, heart attacks, myocarditis, neurological problems, etc. Vaccinated patients dying of these conditions may not be tested for Covid-19 and so likely will not be counted as covid deaths, and the myth of vaccine efficacy may persist based on the original definition of “preventing severe Covid-19 disease” even as we experience a wave of mysterious illness and death.”

Bear in mind “Mark L” wrote that in September 2021. A lot of this seems to fit: vaccine-derived immunity certainly wanes, Omicron was definitely an antibody-resident variant, Japan had fewer severe cases than in prior waves, and the wave of death was mysterious. It could also explain why excess deaths correlate with cases but not boosters in Japan and why excess deaths were temporally associated with infections but not boosters in South Korea. It may even explain why South Korea’s excess mortality was so much higher than Japan’s: South Korea’s elderly were far more boosted when Omicron arrived, whereas Japan was only just starting to boost.

But the defense might say this is at best circumstantial evidence and point out that much of highly boosted Europe saw hardly any excess death during the Omicron wave. A counter-argument could be that Europe’s susceptible population had been depleted in previous waves. On the other hand, Japan and SK may have built up theirs by making their elderly wear masks and refrain from socialising for two years, which even Japanese TV admits will weaken your immune system.

Honey, you screwed your immune system

So Covid and the jabs might have been accomplices, with Covid measures as an accessory. But to strengthen the case, we’ll need the CoD data for Feb-March, which won’t be published for a few months. They do say the wheels of justice turn slowly.

Will there be enough evidence for a conviction? I’ll let you be the judge.