Here's what the media are blaming for the catastrophic rise in heart attacks
The potential causes vary wildly between sources, yet these sources all agree what the culprit isn't. Also, a (perhaps too bright) light in the darkness
On February 13, CBS News did a segment on the recent rise in heart attacks in younger Americans. The network was careful to repeatedly mention one of the two major new ingredients in the public-health stew since 2020—the coronavirus—while studiously avoiding any mention of the other new ingredient for the entire three minutes and twenty-two seconds of the segment.
Since only the other ingredient has been definitively linked to alarming rates of myocarditis and other cardiac problems, especially in younger men, one would expect a group of journalists to be eager to explore every potential driver of this dire trend. Not only is this their job, but one of their colleagues, a 44-year-old CNN reporter who had followed all of the government’s covid-related guidelines, recently suffered a bout of myocarditis and was off the air for weeks. Okay, so what if that episode was attributed to a common cold? Surely other things must be contributing to the coronary mayhem, since we’d all be dead by now if colds typically sent our tickers into states of extreme distress or dysfunction.
There are no useful studies linking the coronavirus to a significant rise in these events; if there were, you’d see these trumpeted in headlines. Also, the incidence of heart attacks didn’t start increasing until 2021, whereas the virus and its variants began circulating in the United States in the beginning of 2020. That should help narrow things down a little! Was it a new POTUS and his moribund, shambling vibe that was causing thirteen young people to have heart attacks for every ten that previously did?
That’s not a ratio anyone could ignore, or else I wouldn’t be writing this. The entire corporate media has engaged in a ferocious and transparent “non-denial denial” campaign ever since it became impossible to contain the amount of people experiencing cardiac arrest, especially the ones who died.
The government and its allies can hide a lot of things, but they can’t hide dead bodies, especially teenaged and young-adult bodies. Therefore, they have to produce explanations for how these and other American bodies come to exist in permanently deceased states. The CDC does this via its longstanding and highly detailed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which is how actuaries and others have kept themselves informed of cause-of-death statistics trends.
The CDC, if it chooses, can hide or delay specifying anyone’s cause of death by ordering the event ne assigned a code that amounts to “unknown, will specify later.” This practice, which is neither legal nor ethical, can in theory be used to artificially flatten a rising death curve attributable to a known and specific cause. Later, the temporary code can be replaced by one matching the real cause of death.
Provided the CDC distributes some of these events over an artificially extended period while backlogging others toward eternity, members of the public—those who even know where to hunt—will see no apparent spike in, say, fatal blood clots, or fatal strokes, or fatal heart attacks. And it looks like this is what’s been happening.
The obligatory result of this deviant practice is a rise in literally unexplained or “excess” natural-cause deaths, of which something like 550,000 have amassed in the U.S. since early April of 2021. To detect this glut of unexplained corpses despite the CDC’s relentless obfuscation, data manipulation, and purposeful inaction since the start of the “pandemic” requires a rare combination of time, expertise in data analysis, and determination. The Ethical Skeptic is rich in these traits, and I recommend digging into this post (though this is the site’s magnum opus to date).
If you have a low tolerance for graphs or numerical narratives and subplots, the post is not worth wading through, and neither is the rest of The Ethical Skeptic's work. But it’s not difficult to understand, just slow reading and rife with unfamiliar insurance-code and other jargon. I think it’s a great treatise on how systematically diabolical the U.S. Government truly is. That syphilitic leviathan is filled with crooks and hacks, and every last shifty operative should be sent to either the guillotine or an mRNA booster clinic, their choice; but at the plotting and executive level, its actual principals—who generally are not the people you see speaking in public—are not stupid.
If you have a low tolerance for bullshit, or perhaps four-by-four grids of squares, you won’t like the image below, either. But at least it’s not confusing. Things that may put you at risk of a heart attack include skipping breakfast (or eating bacon and eggs instead); exercising, including shoveling snow (or not exercising); being a sad old maid (or a happy 22-year-old woman); climate change (if you’re a baby); energy drinks; noisy planes overhead; too warm a bed; bad potting soil; and falling asleep with the television on.
The (obvious) thing here is that people have been facing each of these hazards for decades. Heck, most people I know haven’t eaten breakfast since being weaned off the titty, if not earlier. What are the chances these sixteen-ish foes are acting together to newly injure or kill as many people as something that came along in 2021 and caused the CDC to visibly become a document-shredding propaganda outlet instead of a public-health agency?
I’m actually quite tired of all of this. I could write a post a day like this one about a different official lie or spin-job and not keep up with the output or the media’s catalysis of it. This country is a massive, throbbing shithole—a spasmodically winking anus three thousand miles in diameter, long unwiped and emitting a plume of greenish, searing death-gas reaching nearly to the moon (and carrying many spirits with it)—and it’s honestly impressive how quickly this was enacted across all its institutions by such colossally lazy bureaucrats and other fuckups. By dismal, shakedown-oriented DEI design, every institution has more mindless bureaucrats than ever, and this widely dispersed cavalcade of absolute idiots has ruined all of them, albeit not precisely of these idiots’ own tepid volition.
I really do expect a lot more people to eventually wake up to what’s happening, though I have no idea what that will take—if the economy tanks, people won’t think of much else—or what any of us will or can do in response besides morph into around-the-clock keyboard zealots, or simply wander around bellowing until given free long-term hospice with a warm bed (but not too warm) and precisely the right amounts of the right kinds of foods, mostly cricket-and-cicada smoothies with a shot of Paxlovid.
A few comments:
First, on the items in “four-by-four grid of squares” – those are examples of the some of the worst kinds of journalism. Those are essentially press releases slightly (if that) rewritten, with perhaps one sentence along the lines of “Dr. ABC from XYZ institution, who was not involved in the study, said …”. Researchers and their institutions like to put out press releases whenever they have something published. The types of examples in your graphic are usually from small studies of diet and/or exercise that are unlikely to be able to be replicated but are “newsworthy” because they came up with a different result from things that had been published previously. Observational studies of diet are notoriously hard to replicate, not necessarily because of any incompetence on the part of the researchers, but because usual diet is VERY hard to assess accurately. Short-term studies of diet, such as a 24- or 48-hour weighed food record may be more accurate, but how well they represent USUAL diet is highly questionable. (I’ll admit to having been involved in at least one study of an association between a dietary factor and an outcome -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29039795/.)
Much of my work over the past 20+ years has been on studies related to cardiovascular disease (CVD), but I have no insights into the association between COVID-19 vaccines and CVD in young people. The participants in the studies I work on are middle-aged or elderly. In the biggest one, they are now all over 80 (they were aged 45-64 when recruited in the late 1980s). It is likely to take a few years before good results are available for studies of COVID-19 (and COVID-19 vaccines) and CVD outcomes. Death certificates are notoriously unreliable in terms of identifying the real cause of death. For our studies of CVD we use a combination of hospital records, death certificates, and questionnaires sent to doctors and next-of-kin of the deceased. Then, typically, two physicians well trained on the study’s event classification rules independently review each case and assign a cause. Disagreements are adjudicated by a third physician. It takes time to compile the information and go through the adjudication process. So, for instance, for the study mentioned above in which the participants are now aged over 80, last month we released event information through 2020 to our collaborators – that is for events that occurred before the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines.
Two of the studies I work on are part of a large collaboration of cardiovascular disease studies that are combining information to look at various aspects of COVID-19. Some background is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35279711/. It will be a while before anything related to outcomes is published. (Today, on a conference call unrelated to COVID, the tenth author of that publication mentioned he had just come from a talk in which the speaker mentioned that marathon runners are at increased risk of atrial fibrillation. He (the person on the call) said very smugly that that is why he doesn’t run marathons.
I’ve given up expecting more people to wake up to what’s happening right in front of them. If they haven’t seen it, or don’t understand it even a little bit, they never will. But that’s just my nature. The economy has tanked already, it’s just floating on a sea of printed money and debt. When it finally sinks, most people will attribute it to whatever they’re told.