It’s been a while since I’ve paid much attention to Steve Kirsch, the tech bro turned rabid COVID-19 crank and all-around antivaxxer whose flailing efforts to “prove” that vaccines are deadly and COVID-19 is not, coupled with his love of bad Internet surveys as “proof” of how “deadly” vaccines supposedly are and his “Debate me, bro!” crank tactics, sometimes amuse me with his sheer ignorance and stupidity. For example, who can forget when he used a poorly designed Internet survey to “prove” that vaccines cause The Gay and The Trans? Or when he used another poorly designed Internet survey to “prove” that COVID-19 vaccines killed more than 3.5 times the number of people as COVID-19 itself? Or when he incompetently analyzed epidemiological data on an Excel spreadsheet to “prove” that COVID-19 vaccines kill? Sure, he tries to portray himself as “reasonable” and “scientific” by occasionally refuting even more bonkers conspiracy theorists, such as virus deniers, but that proves nothing other than that there actually do exist people more bonkers than he is with respect to antiscience conspiracy theories.
This time around, Steve Kirsch, being Steve Kirsch, has gotten his hands on some data from the Czech Republic and used it to “prove” that the mRNA-based vaccine manufactured by Moderna increased all-cause mortality by 50% more than the Pfizer vaccine. Of course, regular readers can see the immediate unproven assumption there, namely that either vaccine increased all-cause mortality. (They did not.) However, his “analysis” is amusing in its cluelessness and thus worth discussing. Thankfully, science-supporting stalwarts The Real Truther and Professor Jeff Morris have provided figures to help with the rebuttal, but I suspect that many of my regular readers will immediately see the problems with Kirsch’s “analysis” (if you can call it that) if they read his first post before reading my discussion. In fact, I encourage you to do that, and here’s the post: BREAKING: Record-level data from Czech Republic FOIA proves that the Moderna vaccines increased all-cause mortality by over 50% (and the Pfizer vaccines weren’t safe either),
OK, could you stand it? No? Yes? Either way, let’s take a look at the “analysis” that Kirsch did:
Record-level vaccination-death data obtained legally under FOIA from the Czech Republic can be easily analyzed to compare the one-year mortality rates for each individual age group by brand. If the vaccines are all safe, the mortality should be very similar, differing only by marginal effectiveness. If we exclude months of COVID mortality, the mortality rates between brands should be nearly identical, only differing due to very small composition differences between participants in each age group of the same sex and age.
Unfortunately, the brands differ substantially whether or not you exclude the COVID months of death.
The importance of this article is that it proves, for the first time, using gold-standard unimpeachable data and a new brain-dead simple analysis method that is not subject to confounding, that the COVID vaccines increased all-cause mortality.
This article will be ignored by the mainstream media and medical community for as long as possible. This is why it is important to spread the word.
No, this article will be ignored by the mainstream media and medical community because it is bad science. Isn’t it convenient how, whenever a crank like Steve Kirsch is “ignored” by scientists, they never, ever stop to wonder if it’s because what they did was so trivially wrong that scientists quite correctly don’t take it seriously. Oh, no! Perish the thought that Kirsch might be wrong! It must be because “They” are suppressing his message! Finally, whenever you see anyone say that they used a “new brain-dead simple analysis method,” much less that this “new brain-dead simple analysis method” is “not subject to confounding,” you know you’re about to enter the territory of bad statistical analysis in which confounding is very likely the cause of your “findings.” Remember, for example, Brian Hooker, who once bragged about his “simple” reanalysis of data from a complex epidemiological study, saying:
So I reanalyzed the dataset using what is a very, very simple statistical technique. I think that in statistics simplicity is elegance. And I’m not really that smart; so I like to do simple, easy things rather than much more intellectually challenging things. So I did the simplest, most straightforward analysis, which is a Chi Squared analysis…
Let’s just say that Steve Kirsch is even less smart than Brian Hooker, as he confidently proclaims with the massive arrogance of his even more massive ignorance:
For example, for ages 46-69 who got two shots of Moderna vs. two shots of Pfizer in 2021 in the Czech Republic, there is over a 50% higher risk of death measured over a 1 year time window since the time of the shot as shown in the chart above.
The younger you were, the greater the percentage increase in risk. For 20 to 29 year old’s for example, the MRR (mortality rate ratio between Moderna to Pfizer) approached 2:1 which means you more than doubled your all-cause mortality if you took a Moderna shot.
So even if the Pfizer vaccine was 100% safe, the Moderna vaccine should be immediately stopped as being far too deadly to use for any age group.
The 50% number is an absolute ACM increase compared to the Pfizer ACM value, not a comparison of excess mortality risk.
That’s a train wreck. Vaccines are always supposed to reduce absolute ACM. Vaccines are never supposed to increase ACM, even by a little bit.
The problem is, of course, that Kirsch never showed that the Pfizer vaccine increased all-cause mortality compared to an appropriate control group of unvaccinated Czech residents. In addition, the very assumptions that Kirsch makes are, as has been the case with many of his “analyses,” highly suspect. For example, you’ll immediately notice that in his “analysis,” there is no unvaccinated control group to compare either the Pfizer or the Moderna groups for. Before I even read other debunking of Kirsch, my immediate thoughts were:
- Maybe there are confounders, given the “new brain-dead simple analysis method” that Kirsch claims to use. (Hint: There likely are.)
- Maybe this result could be explained by Moderna being less effective at preventing death from COVID-19 in this population. (Hint: Kirsch’s analysis does not eliminate this possibility.
As Prof. Morris points out:
Since this is longer than the “free” X post, I’ll just quote the whole thing:
His data set contains population level data that he claims “includes everyone who was alive between 1/1/2020 and 12/31/2022” in Czech republic, which if true, means the data set contains an accurate accounting of unvaccinated individuals and their deaths so he could compare vaccinated to unvaccinated death rates.
But rather than doing this, he makes all kinds of indirect convoluted arguments comparing different vaccine groups and then gish gallops through some of his other favorite talking points, while completely ignoring/hiding the unvaccinated data.
I can see why — since the unvaccinated death rates are consistently higher than the ever vaccinated death rates across the age group (and both are close to average death rates in the age group from 2015-2019 so there is no evidence they are inaccurate), as you can see in the plot below.
See what I mean? Without the data from unvaccinated people to compare to both the Pfizer and Moderna data, what Kirsch is doing is very deceptive. Whether it’s him deceiving himself or him intentionally trying to deceive you, I’m not sure. Given my previous interactions with him, I strongly suspect the former. Kirsch really does think he’s some sort of genius who has “discovered” new analysis methods that actual epidemiologists somehow have not. In addition, Kirsch claims that there was “no systemic bias” in how the vaccines were allocated, Pfizer or Moderna, but I have a hard time believing that in light of this statement by the Czech Republic itself in a post referenced by Kirsch:
You cannot currently choose which vaccine to get. Odds are you will get the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, as that one so far has been the most widely available, accounting for about three-fourths of the deliveries.
Just because Czechs couldn’t choose which vaccine they got at the time of that statement does not mean, as Kirsch seems to be claiming, that the allocation was random and without bias. That the government didn’t allow choice of vaccine when this statement was issued does not mean that there was no bias in allocation! Kirsch does this sort of thing all the time, claiming “no bias” or that the data are the “best yet,” when in fact the sources that he cites show nothing of the sort. Also, remember, these are data for one relatively small country.
None of this stops Kirsch from crowing:
If both vaccines are safe and reduced all-cause mortality by similar amounts, the MRR will be approximately 1 for all age groups.
But what we found is stunning. The numbers are not similar at all.
Moderna has over a 50% higher all-cause mortality for ages 46-69 than Pfizer.
Even if Pfizer reduced all-cause mortality by 10% for all age groups (which is completely improbable as I’ll show in a subsequent article), Moderna would still have increased all-cause mortality and should be immediately pulled from the market worldwide unless Moderna can explain how the Czech the data is consistent with a safe vaccine.
I don’t see how they can possibly do that.
Seriously. There are a number of reasons that this could be the case. One could be confounding, and Kirsch doesn’t adjust for any subject-level confounders other than age, as Prof. Morris points out:
In fact, looking at the data, one sees that the Moderna group had twice the percentage of chronic illness in the time period covered by the data:
And:
Let’s just put it this way. Kirsch’s “analysis” makes Hooker’s “simple” reanalysis of the Atlanta study using the chi-squared test look sophisticated by comparison.
Unsurprisingly, Kirsch, being Kirsch, has posted a long “rebuttal” to the various criticisms of his “study,” claiming Attempts to debunk my “Moderna and Pfizer are kill shots” post fail badly. However, he’s also added basically the same material to his original post, because apparently he can’t leave it at just saying, “I’ve posted my rebuttal here,” but has to repeat himself. This makes it difficult to decide what parts of his Gish galloping logorrhea to address, given that his posts are getting long even by Orac standards. I’ll give it a try, but first will note that The Real Truther called it perfectly, because Kirsch is nothing if not predictable:
Given the length of Kirsch’s rebuttal, I think I might well leave it for another day, as, no doubt, by the time I get to it he’ll have added more nonsensical “analyses” and epidemiological ignorance. Instead, I’ll conclude by simply challenging Mr. Kirsch: If you think your analysis is so airtight, why don’t you submit a paper describing it and your results to a reputable journal of epidemiology, vaccinology, infectious disease, or public health, as opposed to something like James Lyons-Weiler’s quack journal or the new FLCCC journal that they’re trying to launch. Pick a journal of epidemiology with a decent impact factor and submit your manuscript. Then, if you’re really confident, publish the peer review reports that you get back; that is, if the editor doesn’t laugh at your manuscript so hard that they just triage it without sending it out for peer review. Then, if you manage to get your paper published, deal with the criticisms that will come your way from the scientific community. That’s the way science works, not by publishing on Substack. Heck, if journals are too intimidating for you, you could submit your work to an infectious disease meeting or an epidemiology meeting as an abstract and see if it gets accepted for anything more than a poster. (Hint: Some meetings accept virtually every abstract submitted as a poster; what matters is what is accepted for podium presentations, especially plenary session presentations.)
My prediction is simple, though. Kirsch won’t do that, and he’ll claim it’s because he knows that “they” are out to get him. Of course, how can he know that if he never tries?
12 replies on “Steve Kirsch goes off the deep end over the Moderna vaccine”
If any of our vaccines were even half as deadly as this con-artist claims, we’d be seeing a worldwide mass die-off that NO ONE could ever hope to hide, cover up, or explain away. One party would make it their main and central campaign issue (guess which!), and the other would be unable to avoid responding to the charges.
Exactly.
We were all supposed to be dead by last March. So far I’m very disappointed by this apocalypse. Not enough aliens, zombies, mutants, or roving bands of wasteland marauders in inexplicably well maintained and fueled cars.
Ah well, perhaps this December…
Alties ( PRN, NN, Wolf etc) report that roving immigrant gangs are attacking metro areas, robbing, raping and killing as they take over homes and car jack suburban mothers whilst the vaccinated succumb to spike fever…
My SO’s FOX watching relative warned him about riding the deathtrap subway.
“Western” currencies collapsing, markets crashing, banks failing, crime waves, starvation looming as concentration camps are being built and freedoms eroding…
which is what they’ve been saying since 2008 or before.
What? I thought I had five years, i.e. I will die in April 2026. It seems I am already dead and enjoying the afterlife.
“It’s not so much an afterlife’ Said Arthur, ‘more a sort of apres vie.” —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Minor point in the text: Czechoslovakia, as a country, ceased to exist in 1992.
Also, Kirsch either doesn’t understand percentages, or assumes his readers don’t. He says that “even” if the Pfizer vaccine is 100% safe, the Moderna vaccine is 50% more dangerous. But if it’s 100% safe, it is 0% dangerous, and one and a half times zero, or two times zero, is still zero.
If anti-vaxxers took notice of statistics and math, they would not be anti-vaxxers.
Also, ” ..it’s watchmen..”?
SRSLY if you make typos on shirts you create yourself? …
I doubt it’s being ironic.
I flunked statistics twice, but even I can tell this is bovine excrement.
Anyway, this is my thought on the man.
https://imgur.com/gallery/oh-christ-its-this-asshole-again-bVlUJZc
[…] while he was working on badly “analyzing” the Czech Republic data. (I discussed just how incompetent his analysis was earlier this week.) I can’t help but notice Kirsch’s usual boast, even after suddenly […]