Domino Theory
With vs. From? Why are we so mystified about the cause of excess deaths during a pandemic?
Two men are arguing in a tenth floor apartment. The argument is heated and one of them pulls out a pistol and fires it at the other. The other man, startled at being shot, lurches backwards and falls out an unsecured window and into a trash dumpster below. Paramedics retrieve his crumpled body and rush it to a hospital.
(Credit: The Hudsucker Proxy)
Three weeks later the victim dies. The immediate cause of death is listed as sepsis — systemic infection
Why did he die?
It’s complicated. It always is.
An autopsy reveals that the bullet wound was largely superficial, having passed through no major organs or blood-carrying vessels. The police have interviewed the building superintendent who informs them the building policy is always to have exterior windows firmly latched shut and that, apparently, a window-washer had inadvertently left the window unsecured earlier in the day.
An autopsy reveals that the trash in the dumpster substantially broke his fall. While there is some blunt-force trauma, it is not considered to be serious enough to have caused death. Moreover the autopsy reveals an extensive malignant spread of cancer from the victim’s lungs. The victim was known to have been a heavy smoker and the cancer is thought to be a result of his smoking.
The cancer compromised the victim’s immune system sufficiently to allow garbage in the dumpster to cause the sepsis — the immediate cause of death.
Everyone from the original shooter to the window washer and the dumpster leasing company lawyers up.
The shooter insists the victim died with incidental gunshot wound, not from incidental gunshot wound. The window washer insists the victim died with open window, not from open window. The dumpster leasing company says the victim died with garbage on him, not from garbage on him.
Finally the lawyers from the tobacco company (yes, they showed up as well) say the victim’s death is his own fault as everyone knows smoking kills. In other words, he died with smoking not from smoking.
And he died of his own choice. Not because of firearm prevalence. Not because of a lack of building safety regulations. Not because garbage is being stored on the streets. And not because health care in the US is so rationed that he couldn’t even afford to get his lung cancer diagnosed, much less treated.
It was his fault, not society’s fault, that he died.
How to hide a pandemic in plain sight
In The Murderer and the Shire-Reeve we showed that the attribution of death is about the attribution of responsibility for death. And why whenever someone dies it’s always in a lot of people’s interest to be able to claim they are not responsible for the death. That they had only an incidental role and that role was no more than correlated with the death.
It didn’t cause the death.
In the pandemic this avoidance of responsibility is nowhere better illustrated than in the entirely manufactured and artificial distinction between dying “with” something and dying “from” something. The argument goes that the thirty million people Worldwide who are thought to have perished from SARS-CoV-2 infections did not actually die from those infections but rather only with those infections.
What actually killed them was something else. What that something actually is is fluid and variable. Maybe it’s an uptick in broken legs and appendicitis among children that are killing them, not SARS-CoV-2 infections. Maybe it’s deaths from 5G cellular transmission towers, not SARS-CoV-2 infections. Maybe it’s deaths from despair when people realized that, for a few weeks four years ago, they would not be able to sit down for a meal at the neighborhood Applebees.
Whatever it was, the thinking goes, it wasn’t COVID. ABC. Anything But COVID.
Death is messy
The death certificate of our unfortunate gunshot/accidental fall/blunt force trauma/septic smoker with lung cancer might look like this:
Part I of a standard death certificate is what is termed an “etiology.” It is simply the chain of events that lead back from the immediate cause of death (sepsis in this case) to the underlying cause of death (assault). The underlying cause of death is that initiating event that terminated in the death of the individual (the immediate cause).
Between the underlying cause and the immediate cause are consequential events. What is important is that the death would not have occurred if not for every event in part I.
There is also a part II. Part II are significant conditions without which the death also would not have occurred — but which are not part of the etiological chain. In our example death certificate we list smoking as being a significant condition contributing to death. Remember, the person attesting to the death certificate did not believe the individual would have developed sepsis if not for an immune system compromised by cancer itself the result of heavy smoking.
This is not an atypical example. In fact, the average death certificate involving septicemia lists 3.9 causes of death:
Another study found that among those 45-64 the average number of different causes of death listed on a death certificate was 2.5:
(Source: Multiple Causes of Death, Statistics Canada)
The Domino Effect
The grim reaper is no maverick. Death is never from just one cause. There is always a conspiracy of causes involved in any death and without any one of the conspirators, the death would not have happened.
Every successful conspiracy involves every member of the conspiracy. In the pandemic you often hear of individuals with “co-morbidities” such as age, existing disease, obesity, etc.
Make no mistake: when people talk of deaths during the pandemic and invite discussion of “co-morbidities,” it’s not about the unrestrained transmission of a deadly virus, it’s not about deflecting responsibility from society to the individual. It’s an attempt to escape responsibility and hide the pandemic. We’re not in this together, it’s individual responsibility.
You do you, I’ll do me.
Think of death as a line of dominoes. The last domino is a casket with your body in it.
The first domino is the underlying cause. In between the first and last domino are the contributing causes. The first domino cannot cause the last domino to fall unless every domino between them is in place and ready to get knocked over.
In a conspiracy every conspirator is equal but some are more equal than others. The ringleader in any conspiracy of death is always going to be the underlying cause of death. In the ringleader’s employ are any number of co-conspirators or co-morbidities.
We accumulate death’s co-conspirators as we age. We develop contributing conditions like hypertension, cancers, respiratory illnesses and immune exhaustion as a natural byproduct of aging. In fact, by the time that most of us are in our fifties, we’ve accumulated several co-morbidities without really doing anything to deserve them.
Those co-morbidities then wait, patiently, for the ringleader to show up. In the pandemic, the ringleader is the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s the first domino. Death is the last.
In a just world, every death certificate would list that etiology neatly and ascribe to the virus its proper responsibility in starting the chain that caused the death. In a just world, every death from COVID would look something like this:
But the world is not just. In our world every attempt is made to deflect responsibility for the deaths of thirty million people from incompetent politicians and ruthless health providers to the individual. In our world every attempt is made to show that irrespective of having been infected with a BSL-3 virus encouraged to run amuck, any death is merely a death “with” COVID, not “from” COVID.
Harping on arbitrary distinctions of dying “from” a given cause vs. dying “with” a given cause is fundamentally unhelpful. As we have seen, death is never only from one cause. Death is a conspiracy of causes all of which you died “with.”
We can see this quite dramatically in the statistics. This chart shows the annual number of deaths from any disease other than COVID in the 18-44 year old demographic. Notice the year 2020-2023 numbers.
In 2019 there were 101,095 deaths from disease in the 18-44 year old demographic. In 2023 there were 123,742 deaths. Again, these death counts are deaths from any disease other than COVID. That’s 22,647 more deaths in 18-44 year olds in 2023 than in 2019.
Those 22,647 deaths aren’t from COVID, because we already removed the officially reported COVID deaths in 2023. So what then caused these deaths?
The answer is SARS-CoV-2 infections. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that is responsible for COVID. It spread worldwide in 2020, and deaths have been elevated above the pre-pandemic baseline since then. Yet the death certificates for these deaths didn’t list either SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID.
These are deaths from COVID that never even made it onto a death certificate.
In other words, COVID deaths are not overcounted — the implicit assertion that anyone who spouts the “with” vs. “from” nonsense is trying to make. COVID deaths are systematically undercounted.
The data could not be more clear. But if you still need a little convincing, here is some more.
This chart is of what are called “excess” deaths. Excess deaths are simply deaths in a given period that are either in positive or negative excess from what is expected for the period. What is “expected” is established by a baseline. In the chart above the baseline are the months in the years from 2015 through 2019 — the five years prior to the pandemic.Again, notice that the excess deaths went up sharply starting in March 2020 and have stayed up since then. Guess what happened in March 2020?
Our software creates a model of what are normal deaths for every month of the year. This model accounts for population growth as well as any up or down trends within the baseline period and then extrapolates that baseline into the future (the right hand side of the chart) so that we can compare the actual number of deaths with what we should expect, given the baseline.
In this case the chart is expected deaths in those aged 18 to 44 years old where the death is classified as a death from circulatory/cardiovascular disease. As you can clearly see, deaths from circulatory/cardiovascular disease in those aged 18-44 were fairly steady from 2013-2019.
But in 2020 they rose dramatically (the second graph shows the same information as the first but expressed as absolute numbers of deaths instead of a percentage deviation from the baseline). The observant among you will not that the rise in circulatory/cardiovascular deaths among those aged 18-44 started, like someone flipped a light switch, in March of 2020.
Now it’s fashionable to say that correlation doesn’t equal causation. But it’s also fashionable to note that, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Note that these deaths are not deaths classified as being from COVID. They are deaths from cardiovascular disease.
However we know that COVID is a disease of the vasculature (and not a “respiratory disease”). So it should not surprise us that SARS-CoV-2 infections, which cause COVID, are correlated strongly with death from vascular causes.
Oh, what is a vascular disease? It’s a disease that affects your vasculature. What is your vasculature? This is your vasculature.
SARS-CoV-2 infections not only exacerbate existing vascular disease in your body but they also can generate new vascular disease in those individuals not yet suffering from vascular disease. Again, that should not surprise anyone.
What should surprise everyone, however, is that deaths from SARS-CoV-2 infections where those deaths are classified as vascular disease are not deaths also classified as from COVID infection only with COVID.
And sometimes not even with — currently 5,000 deaths a year in the 18-44 year old age range are being attributed to cardiovascular disease but not also being attributed to the SARS-CoV-2 infection that caused them.
The Murderer and the Shire-Reeve
We have tried to make clear the relationship between the assignment of a cause of death and the assignment of responsibility for that death. Where a death is assigned to a “natural cause” — such as an infection in our death certificate above — we can lay responsibility for the death at Nature’s feet. The ringleader in the death conspiracy is none other than Mother Nature and, well, the sheriff ain’t gonna put Mother Nature in jail for killing you.
But what if your death isn’t the fault of Mother Nature? What if responsibility for your death could be placed on an individual or even an institution? Wouldn’t that be something? Yes it would.
Imagine our death certificate read like this:
Woah. “Inadequate infection control measures?” That’s the underlying cause of death? Infection control measures sounds like something in the control of an individual or an institution like a hospital or a school or an office building. It sounds like an instance of, if not outright murder, then at least of negligent homicide.
Friedrich Engels defined the term “social murder” to refer to avoidable deaths caused not by Nature and not as a consequence of individual action but as a consequence of collective negligence and/or collective criminality:
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
The Condition of the Working Class in England
It is critically important to understand that the assignment of a cause of death is an assignment of responsibility for causing that death. We want to assign '“natural causes” to each and every death because if we say a person died from natural causes it gives the death a sense of inevitability. More important, it absolves us individually and as a collective from responsibility for the death of another.
Once you understand this it becomes impossible to not understand it. It becomes impossible to view the resistance of hospitals to the use of effective face coverings (masks) as anything other than an attempt by hospital administrators to avoid liability for allowing infection in the first place,
It becomes impossible to see the retraction of public data set upon public dataset — datasets that are critical to understanding the extent and velocity of the pandemic in real time — as anything other than an attempt by public health officials to avoid liability for allowing infection in the first place.
It becomes impossible to not see attempts to downplay the effects of unrestrained infection in children, such as when Dr. Anthony Fauci declared in December 2021 that the surge of children in hospitals then was not because they were infected with a deadly BSL-3 virus that may have escaped from laboratory…
…but because they were in the hospitals for "incidental” reasons, like a broken leg or an appendicitis. They were in the hospital “with” COVID, not “from” COVID.
It was complete bullshit. The month after Fauci declared that children were in hospitals for broken legs, not a BSL-3 virus, more children died of that BSL-3 virus in a single month than normally die of influenza in an entire year.
Those in power are by definition invested heavily in the status quo. And it is the maintenance of that status quo that those in power refer to when they implore the rest of us of the “urgency of normal.” The urgency is an urgency to return to old social norms of adults crowded into unsanitary office spaces while their children are subjected to compulsory infection in classrooms pregnant with a BSL-3 vascular pathogen.
All under the blind eye of a public health apparatus that is beholden to the politicians it serves and responsive only to the singular rejection of responsibility.
That is what Social Murder looks like.
Our purpose in this series is to give you, the reader, the tools necessary to decipher the pandemic. And to recognize the many ways in which our institutions conspire to hide and suppress the actual extent of the pandemic. Nowhere is this more pernicious than the artificial distinction between dying “with” and dying “from” something.
Whenever someone trots out that falsehood they are not engaging in a well-intentioned search for truth. They are seeking a method by which they can deny their own culpability for the devastation of an unchecked pandemic in its fourth year. Or they are working for an organization — such as a hospital or a school system — that desperately needs an excuse for its own negligent and reckless abandonment of responsibility.