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Covid-19 Vaccine. (Photo: Rido/Shutterstock)

The Pandemic Is Over: Then Why Are There So Many More Californians Dying?

…the net ‘from COVID’ deaths may not be terribly different from the ‘from the COVID response’ death count

By Thomas Buckley, December 30, 2023 2:55 am

Note – the numbers used below are rounded for simplicity and come from state and federal sources.

COVID has claimed about 105,000 lives in the state since 2020.

In that same time period, 82,000 more Californians died from everything else than is typical.

Adjusted for the decline in population, that non-COVID “excess death” figure becomes even more concerning as the state has seen its population drop to about the same it was in 2015.

In 2015 – obviously there was no COVID – 260,000 of the then-39 million Californians died.  In 2023, not including November and December, 240,000 people died not from COVID (6,000 additional people died of COVID.)

Extrapolating the year-to-date figures for 2023 creates a final year-end of figure of 280,000 – 20,000 more people than died in 2015. That’s a non-COVID, population neutral jump of 8%.

In other words, despite the protestations of certain officials, the state’s death rate has NOT returned to “pre-COVID” levels – in 2019 the year before the pandemic, 270,000 people died with a population at least 400,000 greater than today.

Why?

Dr. Bob Wachter, medical chair at UC-SF and ardent supporter of tight pandemic restrictions, did not respond to an email from the Globe (away for work the auto-response said) but he did recently tell the San Jose Mercury News that in “’(T)he last three years, not only were there a lot of deaths from COVID, there were a lot of additional deaths from non-COVID causes, which are probably attributable to people not receiving the medical care that they normally would have received’ when ERs were overflowing with COVID patients (note – the truth of that ER assertion has not been verified), Wachter noted.”

In other words, the pandemicist Wachter admitted the pandemic response itself at least contributed to a significant number of excess deaths, a fact that was aggressively and roundly denied and – if mentioned – led to censoring and societal ostracization (and in many cases job losses) by the powers that be during the pandemic.

A second admission along these lines was recently made by former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins – Tony Fauci’s boss.  

In this video clip, Collins – who once called for a “devastating takedown” (see above) of those who questioned the hard pandemic response – said his DC and public health blinders, well, blinded him to the problems his pandemic response caused and is still causing:

“If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens, so you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from. Collateral damage. This is a public health mindset. And I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset — and that was really unfortunate, it’s another mistake we made.” 

Needless to say there is not even a half-hearted apology involved.  And Collins is/was wrong in the approach to public health he apparently subscribes to, as throughout modern history it has involved a cost/benefit analysis and a weighing of the impact on society.  

Public health, practiced properly, does not – and never before has – attached “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.”

“We had the exact wrong people in charge at the exact wrong time,” said Stanford professor of medicine (and one of the people Collins tried to “takedown”) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “Their decisions were myopically deadly.”

This is to remind Collins of the ramifications of his decision beyond the excess deaths.

Massive educational degradation.  Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal over-reaction.  The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering.  The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic.  The massive erosion of civil liberties.  The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates, etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbor.  The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street.  The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended.  The demonization of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus, or the absurdity of the useless public theater that made up much of the program.  The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends.  The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Bhattacharya) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey – https://nypost.com/2022/10/24/former-levis-top-exec-reveals-how-woke-mobs-took-over-corporations/ –  for daring to offer different approaches, approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable –  that had been tested and succeeded before.  

Nationally, pandemic “all cause” deaths spiked, for obvious reasons, but they remain stubbornly higher than normal to this day.

There could be mitigating factors to California’s numbers, specifically the issue of drug overdoses. Since 2018, the overdose death rate has doubled. The last overall figures available are from 2021 which showed 10,901 people dying of an overdose. While not specifically broken out for which drug, the vast majority are from opioid overdoes and the vast majority of those involve fentanyl. In 2022, there were 7,385 opioid-related deaths with 6,473 of those involving fentanyl.

But the overdose death increase would account for only about 25% of the total increase in “excess deaths,” meaning it has an impact but cannot explain the whole story.

There is also the issue of homeless deaths. Homeless people die at a far higher rate than the rest of the population and California has had a burgeoning homeless population for the last few years, despite the money being spent on the issue. However, at least a portion of that increase can – as with overdoses – be attributed to fentanyl and is therefore difficult to separate out as discrete numbers.

Those two increases, however, may explain the fact that the “all cause” excess death rate for those in the 25 to 44 year age bracket (it has comparatively higher overdose death and homelessness figures) have remained – except for two very recent weeks – above the typical historical range.

The increase in overdose (and alcohol-related deaths) has been directly tied to the pandemic response previously.  In California, there were about 3,500 more alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic response than before: 5,600 in 2019 (pre-pandemic,) 6,100 in 2020, 7,100 in 2021, 6,600 in 2022, and 2023 is on a pace to see about 6,000.

That still leaves roughly half of the excess deaths unaccounted for, raising questions about the safety of the COVID shot (a shot, not a vaccine) itself. The CDC lists 640 deaths in California directly from the shot and an increase in “adverse effects” from the shot compared to many other actual vaccines. The COVID shot “ adverse” rate was one in a thousand, while, for comparison, it’s about one in a million for polio vaccine.  

That means a person was more than 9 times as likely to die from the COVID shot as any other vaccine and 6.5 times to be injured by it in some fashion.

Still that is – according to state figures – not enough to explain the increase.

There are three other issues to note: first, many of the counting questions are around dying “from” COVID versus “with” COVID remain, meaning the COVID death numbers could be elevated if the “withs” are lumped in with the “froms.”

Second, there is the simmering matter of “iatrogenic” deaths, i.e. deaths caused by the treatment. Early on in the pandemic response, a push was made to “ventilate” patients mechanically.  From the above article (no caps in the original): 

“here’s an unsettling comparison: in NYC area, mortality rate for all COV ICU patients was 78%. in stockholm, the SURVIVAL rate was over 80%. this is a staggering variance. the key difference: ventilators. NYC used them on 85% of patients, sweden used them sparingly”

Combined with the placing of COVID patients in nursing homes, the number of actual “only” or “natural” (for lack of a better term) COVID deaths, again, may be elevated.

The state Department of Public Health declined to comment on the matter.

Which brings us back to the Wachter and Collins oblique, nearly accidental admission that the response itself may have caused significant and on-going damage across numerous personal and public sectors.

Comparing California to other states also shows a concerning trend, specifically when considering the aftermath of the pandemic response.  While increasing in population, for example, Florida’s excess death rate increase was/is lower than California’s as was its COVID death rate, a fact Gov. Gavin Newsom has been lying about for years.

During the pandemic itself, the nation saw an “all cause”  – including COVID – death rate increase of about 16% above normal. Using that metric, as it is clear the response itself had knock-on effects –  California’s was 19.4% and Florida’s was 16.7%, despite the wildly different pandemic responses.

Imagine, if you will, you own a baseball team and you have two shortstops, one that earns $10 million a year and one that earns $1 million. And it turns out that both are equally talented – errors, batting stats, etc. – and that maybe the cheaper one is actually even a bit more talented it turns out. Which shortstop was the better deal for the team?  The less expensive one, of course.

That is an apt analogy for states choosing how to respond to the pandemic – Florida cut the $10 million dollar player while California kept him. In other words, the two states got the same-ish performance but at wildly different societal costs.

This pattern seems to be borne out by many of the figures. Obviously, various states that ended up lower than the national average took very different approaches:  North Dakota and New Jersey saw roughly the same all cause mortality numbers, as did Washington (state) and South Dakota.  

This is true on the “high side” as well: California and Montana, Oregon and Arkansas are two pairs that had similar numbers with different approaches.

All of this raises a deeper question in that there appears to be little if any direct causative resultant difference between a draconian pandemic response and a softer touch.  

And that should not at all be the case: the lockdowns, the masks, the shots, the social distancing, the closing of schools and stores and churches and parks and everything else should have produced a clear and distinct difference – if the pandemicists were right.

If they were right, the difference in results should be stark and obvious to the naked eye. Miami should look like Genoa after the plague ships arrived while Los Angeles should seem like a New Eden.  If the much-maligned Swedish “soft” model was as dangerous as the pandemicists said, Stockholm should be a ghost town.

But that’s not at all true and that’s why the pandemicists are/were so evidently wrong: the harshest methods had little impact on the end results.

While there were differences between states they cannot necessarily be directly tied to a specific policy construct (save Hawaii, which can be discounted considering their isolated geography,).  Hard or soft pandemic response, in the long run it didn’t seem to matter much in the COVID death tolls.

Where it did – and still does – matter is the immediate and long-lasting damage the more tyrannical responses had on society as a whole.

And – if California’s excess death numbers are an indicator – the pandemic response itself is still killing people.

And that, too, definitely shouldn’t be happening – if the pandemicists were right.

It is even more problematic – and even more ethically abhorrent –  if the COVID death figures are inflated; the number of COVID deaths of 105,000 is only about 20% higher than the other non-COVID excess death figure of 82,000.  

In other words, the net “from COVID” deaths may not be terribly different from the “from the COVID response” death count.

And that possibility is the most terrifying of all.

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21 thoughts on “The Pandemic Is Over: Then Why Are There So Many More Californians Dying?

  1. Serious question: Does anyone really die from Covid, or does Covid accentuate an issue they already had or cause a condition where some other issue causes death?

    1. There are actual COVID alone, as it were, deaths, just as there are with other respiratory illnesses.
      And there is no question that it caused death by exacerbating pre-existing issues – https://thomas699.substack.com/p/the-weight-of-covid ,
      There is also no question that someone having COVID was completely coincidental to a person’s death.
      That issue is an on-going debate, hence the uncertainty regarding the number, i.e. did a person listed as a COVID death die “from” COVID” rather than just “with” COVID.
      And I’m not sure that will ever be resolved as every death certificate would have to reviewed in detail and the people who are best positioned – access to the records, time availability, and financial resources – are the same people who under no circumstances want that answer to be known by the public.

  2. Fantastic article!! Thank you. The baseball analogy really helped. California has the highest paid baseball players that aren’t athletic and can’t even play sports. So grateful that even with all of the totalitarian threats and bullying that there were still some people that risked everything to do what was right and kept asking reasonable questions. Happy New Year!!

  3. COVID kills essentially ZERO kids. San Diego County (3.4 million people — larger than 22 states) has had THREE Covid-related deaths under age 20 since COVID started in 2020.
    All 3 had SERIOUS comorbidity problems (obesity, diabetes, heart problems, etc.).

    Kids should NOT be vaccinated for COVID. Too many serious side effects.

  4. From what I’ve read, the excess death rates are on a rising trend. This, I believe, is happening for two reasons. First, the mRNA gene therapies (they are not vaccines) have created a situation similar to Marek’s disease in chickens (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous). The shots are driving the evolution of the virus toward ever more virulent and dangerous strains – and it’s mostly the ‘vaccinated’ who are contracting them and dying. Second, these shots are doing exactly what they were designed to do – cull the human population (https://rumble.com/v3zvzjv-dr.-michael-yeadon-britsk-parlament-4122023.html). I think that before 2030, 4-5 billion people will have died, and a significant portion of the survivors will find that they are infertile. Two people you should look up are Michael Yeadon, former President and chief science officer at Pfizer, and Edward Dowd, former Blackrock financial analyst. Ignore the six pages of “fact checker” drivel you’ll have to scroll past to get to the real info; those are the same MSM lap dogs who call Dr. McCullough a quack and Thomas Buckley a right wing terrorist. That, by the way, is why the general public is still so slow to catch on. The size of the still ongoing gaslighting campaign against the public is absolutely breathtaking.

  5. I knew (past tense) many people who have died suddenly or who died of turbo cancer. All of them got the shot.
    Then there are the young healthy people who got myocarditis.

  6. Most covid deaths were outright murder. Denying people care that worked, the death protocols and putting sick people in nursing homes for the elderly is and was monstrous .

    Then there is the fact that covid was developed in a lab with taxpayer money for the express purpose of killing people.

    1. Why?
      Because the Social Security system has been bankrupted by the very pols who wish to run every aspect of your lives…
      What better way to reduce the payout population AND remove a big thorn in their side, by the fraudulent (s)election of the current White House occupant and the removal of 45???

  7. Johns Hopkins in-house researched produced a spread sheet late 2020, plotting 10 years of CDC morbidity data with the goal to learn how many new deaths presumably from “covid” were occurring during this new “pandemic”

    What she found confounded her own expectations: She found no change in the average all-cause morbidity numbers over this 10 year time period . What she did find was a change in cause-of-death classifications; in direct correlation numbers of death now reported as “covid”, compared to a subsequent drop in numbers of prior causes of death reports.

    Increase in “covid” death numbers were reported to CDC, while number of deaths as a result of cancer, heart disease, CPOD, kidney disease, diabetes, etc dropped in virtually equal numbers during the first “covid year – 2020.

    She asked other researchers to review and critique her methodology as these findings were a surprise to her. Johns Hopkins withdrew her study claiming “the public would not understand”. And later some fellow Johns Hopkins colleague allegedly discredited her study methods. However, there was no explanation why.

    It was a fairly simple, CDC data spread sheet, comparing 10 years of public data. But it certainly gave me pause from day one of this 2020 election year Zombie Apocalypse. I relate this tale often.

    1. It is valuable specifics such as this that confirm what many suspected was happening at the time; that the designation of Covid death REPLACED other reported causes of death. Seems to me the subject came up when people were wondering what happened to 2020’s flu season and any deaths that would have resulted as in previous years; suddenly not reported or deemed newsworthy. Your specifics add other diseases and conditions that dropped off. Which is damning. Like a smoking gun would be.
      Thanks for posting this Jaye.

  8. The covid scamdemic was instituted to scare gullible people into taking experimental mRNA shots that have left millions injured and dead depending on the toxicity of the batch they received. It’s was all part of the globalist agenda to stealthy reduce population and we’re now witnessing the results? How many of us have friends and family die after taking the shots or be stricken with deadly aggressive cancers?

      1. Scroll down on article above and watch the Ed Down video. Judge for yourself whether this guy is sensible and credible in his conclusions and predictions or not. Many of you know all about this already I know, but many likely do not.

        1. Thanks for posting this–Ed Dowd has courageously exposed the ongoing carnage that has resulted from the experimental mRNA death shots. In another interview, he mentioned that he’s seen first hand the devastating effects that the shots have had on some family members and friends.

          1. TJ – Yes, thank goodness for Ed Dowd and his work. It’s still going to be a long road but because of Dowd’s credibility and “just the facts” approach his contribution has been beyond valuable.

            Interesting, when it comes to the personal stories of clot shot effects this is even further complicated by an inability or unwillingness of many of the vaxx-victims themselves to make the connection between, e.g., their heart attack, stroke, seizure, or ‘turbo’ cancer, etc. and the vaxx, as I’m sure you know. And they will deny to the death that it is the vaxx. This is what we’re up against because of the schemes of these monsters. And so much more of course. Sigh.

  9. Very good article, bringing up important issues with the “pandemic” that wasn’t. It wasn’t a “pandemic” since there were treatments for it that the powers that be wouldn’t allowed to be used; ie: Ivermectin, HCQ, and others. Many physicians were using these with great success before they were shut down.
    From the beginning, numbers were manipulated to show more deaths from “covid” than there actually were. I remember seeing a video from a physician who held up a directive from the CDC stating that if a patient tested “positive” for covid (and we know how faulty lots of those tests were), no matter what other condition they had that caused their death, it was to be counted as a covid death. Physicians who balked at that were disciplined!! I know several people who were hospitalized for other ailments, and while there were “tested” and told they had covid, then when they died of the other ailments, covid was listed as the cause of death. Of course, the fact that a huge bonus, using our taxpayer dollars were going to hospitals, for covid deaths, was a great incentive!
    Steve Kirsch has done extensive research into the covid shots and found that about a million people in the US have been killed by them. Not so curiously, the CDC has withheld statistics on this, so he had to get his info from other sources. New Zealand has published their statistics, so he has all of that. The excess deaths in California, and elsewhere, can mostly be attributed to the shot, although medical examiners, along with other medical professionals, have either been bribed into silence, or are scared to tell the truth. Most of the time a “sudden death” is just written off and not autopsied at all. This week I had a discussion with my nurse practitioner and she admitted that she wasn’t allowed to tell the truth to patients or give exemptions, for fear of losing her license. She said she never knows if the patient is a plant or legitimate. I told her that I don’t trust most medical professionals anymore, for that exact reason. Neither my husband nor I would submit to going to any hospital either.

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