Monthly Archives: March 2022

ESG Scoring: Political Tool Disguised as Investment Guide

30 Wednesday Mar 2022

Posted by in Capital Markets, Corporatism, Environmental Fascism, Social Justice

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ESG scores are used to rate companies on “Environmental, Social, and Governance” criteria. The truth, however, is that ESGs are wholly subjective measures of company performance. There are many different ESG scores available, with no uniform standards for methodology, specific inputs, or weighting schemes. If you think quarterly earnings reports are manipulated, ESGs are an even more pliable tool for misleading investors. It is a market fad, and fund managers are using it as an excuse to charge higher fees to investors. But like any trending phenomenon, for a time, the focus on ESGs might feed-back positively to returns on favored companies. That won’t be sustainable, however, without legislative and regulatory cover, plus a little manipulative help from the ESG engineers and “Great Reset” propagandists.

It’s 100% Political, 0% Economic

ESGs are founded on prioritizing objectives that have little to do with shareholder value or any well-understood yardsticks of financial or operating performance. The demands on company resources for scoring highly on ESG are often nakedly political. This includes adoption of environmental goals such as fraudulent “zero carbon” impacts, the nebulous “sustainability” objective promoted by “green” activists, diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives, and support for activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Concepts like “stakeholder value” are critical to the rationale for ESGs. “Stakeholders” can include employees, suppliers, and customers, as well as potential employees. suppliers, and customers. In other words, they can be just about anyone in the broader community, or more likely activists for “social change” whose interests have but the thinnest connection to the business’s productive activities. In essence, so-called stakeholder capitalism amounts to a ceding of control over corporate resources, and ultimately confiscation of wealth from equity owners.

Corporations have long engaged in various kinds of defensive actions, amounting to a modern-day trade in indulgences. No one will be upset about your gas-powered fleet if you buy enough carbon offsets, which just might neutralize the impact of the fleet on your ESG! On a more sinister level, ESG’s provide opportunities for cover against information that might be damaging to firms, such as the use of slave labor overseas. Flatter the right people, give to their causes, “partner” with them on pet initiatives, and your sins will be ignored and your ESG will climb! And ESGs are used in attempts to pacify leftist investors who see the corporation as a vessel for their own social objectives, quite apart from any mission it might have had as a productive enterprise.

Your ESG will shine if you do business that’s politically-favored, like renewable energy, despite its inefficiencies and significant environmental blemishes. But ESGs are not merely used to reward those anointed as virtuous by the Left. They are more forcefully used to punish firms in industries that are out of favor, or firms refusing to participate in buying off authoritarian crusaders. For example, you might be so berserk as to think fossil fuels and climate change represent imminent threats of catastrophe. Naturally, you’ll want to punish oil and gas producers. In fact, if you are in charge of ESG modeling, you might want to penalize almost any extraction industry, with certain exceptions: the massive extraction and disposal costs of renewables will pass without notice.

All these machinations occur despite the huge uncertainty surrounding flimsy, model-based predictions of warming and global catastrophe. Never mind that fossil fuels are still relied upon to provide for most of our energy needs and will be for some time to come, including base-load power generation when intermittency prevents renewables from meeting demand. The stability of the power grid depends upon the availability of carbon-based energy, which in fact is marvelously efficient. Yet the ESG crowd (not to mention the Biden Administration) seeks to drive up its cost, including the cost of capital, and these added costs fall most heavily on the poor.

ESG-guided efforts by activists to deny capital to certain segments of the energy sector may constitute antitrust violations. Some big players in the financial industry, who together manage trillions of dollars in investment funds, belong to an advocacy organization called Climate Action 100+. They coordinate on a mission to completely transform the energy industry via “green” investments and divestments of presumptively “dirty” concerns. These players and their clients have huge investments in green energy, and it is in their interest to provide cheap capital to those firms while denying capital to fossil fuel industries. As Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich writes at the link above, this is restraint of trade “hiding in plain sight”.

Manipulation

ESGs could be the mother of all principal-agent problems. Corporate CEOs, hired by ownership as stewards and managers of productive assets, are promoting these metrics and activities, which may not align with the interests of ownership. ESG’s are not standardized, and most users will have little insight into exactly how these “stakeholder” sausages are stuffed. In fact, much of the information used for ESGs is extremely ad hoc, not universally disclosed, and is often qualitative. The applicability of these scores to the universe of stocks, and their reliability in guiding investment decisions, is extremely questionable no matter what the investor’s objectives. And of course the models can be manipulated to produce scores that suit the preferences of money managers who have a stake in certain firms or industry segments, and who inflate their fees in exchange for ESG investment advice. And firms can certainly engage in deceptions that boost ESGs, as already discussed.

Like many cultural or consumer trends, investment trends can feed off themselves for a time. If there are enough “woke” investors, ESGs might well feed an unvirtuous cycle of stock purchases in which returns become positively correlated with wokeness. Such a divorce from business fundamentals will eventually take its toll on returns, especially when economic or other conditions present challenges, but that’s not the answer you’ll get from many stock pickers and investment pundits.

At the same time, there are ways in which the preoccupation with ESGs dovetails with the rents often sought in the political arena. Subsidies, for example, will be awarded to firms producing renewables. Politically favored firms are also likely to receive better regulatory treatment.

There are other ways in which firms engaging in wasteful activities can survive profitably, at least for a time. Monopoly power is one, and companies often develop a symbiosis with regulators that hampers smaller competitors. This is traditional rent-seeking corporatism in action, along with the “too-big-to-fail” regime. Sometimes sheer growth in demand for new technologies or networking potential helps to conceal waste. Hot opportunities can leave growing companies awash in cash, some of which will be burned in wasteful endeavors. ESG scoring offers them additional cover.

Cracks In the Edifice

John Cochrane notes a fundamental, long-term contradiction for those who invest based on ESGs: an influx of capital will tend to drive down returns in those firms and industries, while the returns on firms having low ESGs will be driven upward. Yet advocates claim you can invest for virtue and superior returns. That can’t outlast real market forces, especially as ESG efforts dilute any mission a firm might have as a productive enterprise.

Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has revealed other cracks in the ESG edifice. We now have parties arguing that defense stocks should be awarded ESG points! Also, that oil production by specific nations should be scored highly. There is also an awakening to the viability of nuclear power as an energy source. Then we have the problem of delivering on Biden’s promise to Europe of more liquified natural gas exports. That will be difficult given the way Biden has bludgeoned the industry, as well as the ESG conspiracy to deny it access to capital. Just watch the ESG hacks backpedal. Now, even the evangelists at Blackrock are wavering. To see the thread of supposed ESG consistency unravel would be enough to make you laugh if the entire conspiracy weren’t so grotesque.

Closing

The pretensions underlying “green” initiatives undertaken by large corporations are good mainly for virtue signaling, to collect public subsidies, and to earn better ESG scores. They are usually wasteful in a pure economic sense. The same is true of social justice and diversity initiatives, which can be perversely racist in their effects and undermine the rule of law.

Ultimately, we must recognize that the best contribution any producer can make to society is to create value for shareholders and customers by doing what it does well. The business world, however, has gone far astray in the direction of rank corporatism, and keep this in mind: any company supporting a sprawling HR department, pervasive diversity efforts, “sustainability” initiatives, and preoccupations with “stakeholder” outreach is distracted from its raison d’etre, its purpose as a business enterprise to produce something of value. It is probably captive to outside interests who have essentially commandeered management’s attention and shareholders’ resources.

When it comes to investing, I prefer absolute neutrality with respect to out-of-mission social goals. Sure, do no harm, but the focus should remain squarely on goals inherent in the creation of value for customers and shareholders.

Full Blame for Monstrous Aggression On Putin

14 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by in Foreign Policy, Propaganda

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One would think condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would be easy for anyone who cares about human rights. This action and the threats he’s made against the West are the work of a psychotic. Yet there are some who place the ultimate blame for his behavior on the West and on NATO in particular. These reactions range from “This is all our fault” to “He’s evil, but we should not have provoked him”. Other reactions are much wilder, such as “We’re hiding something in Ukraine” to “We orchestrated this whole thing.” I am a small-government classical liberal, and no one trusts government power less than I do. However, I certainly place more trust in Western governments than in Russia’s authoritarian regime. If the West deserves any blame here, it’s because we made it easy for Putin.

Authoritarian Longings

For certain Western conservatives who’ve developed a man-crush on the “strong leader” Putin, the first thing you should understand is that he is an inveterate gangster and thug. Brute force fascism has always defined his approach to governance and foreign policy. That’s how this so-called “genius” came to power: three Russian apartment buildings were bombed in 1999, an act believed to have been instigated by the Russian Federal Security Service, of which he was head. Putin blamed Chechen rebels, prompting an attack on Chechnya that led to his ascendency.

Even among more moderate voices we hear statements like this:

“Russia has an existential interest in keeping NATO away from his border.”

Existential? “His” border? NATO may have expanded to include members from Eastern Europe, but that didn’t change its basic defensive posture nor the Putin regime’s expansionist goals. Objectively, it might have been more in Russia’s existential interest to be less belligerent and avoid the kind of rogue-state trap it’s now sprung on itself.

There are a few so-called leading intellectuals in the West who have condemned NATO eastward expansion as the root cause of Russia’s vengeful mind set, such as George Kennan and John Mearsheimer. However, Russian scholar Stephan Kotkin says they have it all backwards:

“The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before nato existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

I would even go further. I would say that nato expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today.”

Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen agrees with that assessment, noting several early attempts at outreach to Russia:

“Russia is not a victim. We have reached out to Russia several times during history…. First, we approved the NATO Russia Founding Act in 1997…. Next time, it was in 2002, we reached out once again, established something very special, namely the NATO-Russia Council. And in 2010, we decided at a NATO-Russia summit that we would develop a strategic partnership between Russia and NATO.”

Nazis At the Kremlin

Putin contends that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified”, which is bizarre given the large Jewish population of Ukraine and its representation in leadership. Putin’s claim is also complete projection, as Melanie Willis has written:

“It is in fact Putin himself who has unleashed neo-Nazism on Ukraine using the Wagner Group. This is a private army of mercenaries financed by pro-Kremlin oligarchs. It’s led by Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence officer sporting Waffen-SS tattoos who allegedly named his outfit after Hitler’s favourite composer.

Far-right extremists comprise the core of this group, which has committed horrific atrocities across Africa, the Middle East and Ukraine as a front for Russian imperial policy. …

The Russian Imperial Movement, which has fought in Ukraine, was designated a terrorist organisation by the US in 2020 for training and funding neo-Nazi terrorists across the world in its military camps, which operate under the Russian security services’ eye.”

Love Letters To Soviet Monsters

As if to emphasize his bona fides as a vicious authoritarian, Putin lionizes the failed Soviet empire, as if to forgive the horrors perpetrated by the communists: millions of lives lost to the engineered Ukrainian famine of the Holodomer genocide in the 1930s, the widespread raping of Russian, Polish, German women by members of the Red Army at the end of World War II, the millions confined to concentration camps over the entire Soviet era, and the repression, murder, or exile of many others. And this is to say nothing of the long economic nightmare inflicted by communist central planners, including the denial of property rights to ordinary people in the USSR and its satellite states.

Also recall that Putin’s army has made a practice of bombing civilian targets in separate conflicts starting with Chechnya in 1999, Georgia in 2008, and Syria in 2015. Cluster bombs and thermobaric weapons were used against residential areas in all three of these actions, the first two of which were Russian invasions of sovereign nations, and the third was on behalf of the Bashar Assad regime. It’s no surprise that we’re now seeing atrocities committed at Putin’s behest in Ukraine, and it could get far worse.

NATO: Not All About Russia

Another thing to understand: NATO’s original and ongoing purpose goes far beyond simply defending against Soviet and now Russian aggression. Claire Berlinski has a good post on this subject. She quotes “A Short History of NATO”:

“In fact, the Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.”

Much of Europe was reduced to rubble after World War II, with many millions of soldiers and civilians dead. Homelessness and hunger were everywhere. Berlinski points to outbreaks of “militant nationalism” that plagued Europe in the wake of earlier crises.

“The enormity of the destruction transferred the responsibility for preserving Western civilization to the United States. …

Americans who resent Europeans for being reluctant to militarize and for placing so much importance on political integration should remember that this is the world we created. We insisted upon this. Europe had no choice. It’s very strange for Americans suddenly to view the United States’ greatest military and foreign policy achievement as a failure. It was the United States’ plan for Europe to focus on economic growth rather than maintaining large conventional armies …”

Indeed, this point was lost on Donald Trump. There is no question that European states should pay up to their commitments to NATO, and today more balance in those commitments is probably well-advised. However, as Berlinski notes, even when the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR dissolved, NATO’s role in ensuring European stability was still paramount. One might even say it ultimately required NATO expansion to the Eastern European states. And no, Russia was never promised that NATO would not expand to the east. That is a complete myth promoted by Putin and the Russian misinformation apparatus.

The rise of Russian belligerence over the past two decades meant that all three components of NATO’s original mission remained relevant. And through all that, NATO’s posture has remained defensive, not offensive. Yet many in the West have fallen for a continuing barrage of Russian propaganda and misinformation that the U.S. should withdraw from the alliance. On that, Berlinski says,

“It’s an idea very much like unilateral nuclear disarmament.”

The West Did Not Impede Putin

As a staunch Russian nationalist, Putin has always been butt-hurt about the fall of the USSR. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking he hasn’t been coddled to a significant degree by the West, even as he grew bolder in his provocations and bullying. I already discussed NATO’s attempts to reach out to Putin before 2010. This article recounts, from a series of tweets by Kyle Becker, the subsequent course of affairs. Becker notes the following:

  • As Secretary of State under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton approved the Uranium One deal giving Russia 20% of U.S. reserves.
  • In early 2010, the new START treaty left Russia with huge tactical nuclear advantages, and the agreement had very weak enforcement mechanisms.
  • Obama’s incredible hot-mic moment in 2012 caught him promising “more flexibility” to the Russians on ballistic missile defense after the November election.
  • The 2014 takeover of the Crimean Parliament and the subsequent rigged referendum to leave Ukraine was met with ineffective sanctions.
  • Missiles fired by pro-Russian forces took down a Malaysian Airlines flight over the Dunbas region in 2014. Earlier, Obama had denied Ukraine access to equipment that would have defended against anti-aircraft fire, and might have prevented the tragedy.

Even more recently, Joe Biden in January practically issued a pass to Russia on action against Ukraine: “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…” Well then! Townhall’s Matt Vespa says:

“Russia is invading because they’ve been getting away with using brute force for years, coupled with an eight-year administration in the United States that did all it could to weaken everyone around them. Obama did nothing when Crimea was seized. He did nothing when Russians established themselves in the Middle East… For a solid decade, the use of force has worked, and Biden being Obama’s former VP, he sees a continuation of that weakness. Putin was right in that regard, gaming out the West’s response to a senile U.S. president. What he did not expect was the tenacity of the Ukrainian resistance.”

The Biolabs Pretext

What about those biolabs in the Ukraine? Putin’s propaganda machine went into high gear to characterize the labs as threats of biological warfare on Russia’s border. Many Western populists and conservatives thought this seemed like a rational pretext for Putin’s actions, but without a shred of proof. We really don’t know what’s happening there, but biolabs are not exactly uncommon, and the vast preponderance of biological and virological research is benign. The mere existence of those facilities is certainly not synonymous with “bio-weapons” research, as many have taken for granted. And, of course, a biolab in the West is likely to be engaged in bio-defense research as well. You can be sure, however, that Putin has contemplated the use of bio-weapons against Ukraine.

Conclusion

Vladimir Putin has made ominous threats against NATO countries, but if he didn’t have a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons he’d be merely a bad actor from a low-tier industrial society, and without the clout to frighten the entire world. His belligerence is long-standing and quite out-of-hand, and it is unlikely to stop with Ukraine should he succeed in crushing it. That seems to be his intent. NATO and the West did not do anything to justify Putin’s conspiratorial fantasies. In fact, the West coddled Putin for far too long, to our detriment and to the horror of the Ukrainian people.

I’m trying to maintain some optimism that Putin’s miscalculations in this invasion will eventually lead to Russian defeat. At the very least, it may be impossible for his occupying forces to maintain control without disastrous consequences to them. That might eventually lead to a withdrawal, much as it did in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Western leaders still hope to find an “off-ramp” for Putin allowing him to save face and perhaps settle for small gains in the separatist regions. If so, I won’t be surprised to see repeat offenses from Putin in the future, either in Ukraine or elsewhere.

Projecting a Wobbly Stick

11 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by in Foreign Policy, National Security, War

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Why reveal your intentions when you don’t have to? That’s exactly what the Biden Administration did with respect to the question of a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, and it might as well apply to all future incursions backed by wild threats from aggressor states possessing WMDs. This was another unforced error by Biden’s team and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. John Cochrane writes that “strategic ambiguity” has real value in deterring an aggressor, but apparently our current leadership hasn’t thought that through. From Cochrane:

“Once again, the U.S. declares, publicly, ahead of time — ahead of the possible collapse of the Ukrainian government — what we will not do, and elevates it to a matter of principle.

Who else is listening? Well, Xi Jinping. And the Iranians. And the South Koreans, Japanese, Saudi Arabians, and more. …

We have just wrapped Taiwan up and delivered it to China.

Message to Iran: test one nuclear weapon. Invade Syria, Iraq, or whatever. The US will not respond. Message to others. Get nukes. Now.

This war isn’t just about Ukraine. It is about the kind of world we live in for the next generation.”

As Cochrane’s says, the U.S. and NATO calculated that supplying anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine would not trigger Putin to make good on his larger threats. At the same time, the thinking is a no-fly zone is too chancy. It’s probably true, but there was no reason to say so. It could have and should have waited. It might have given Putin some pause, any instance of which could be of great value to the Ukrainians as they marshal their defense.

This kind of up-front pusillanimity more broadly undermines the credibility of other options we might wish to have against aggressors in the future, such as trade embargoes, naval blockades, or even conventional weapons. Nor do the particulars in this case limit the range of actions a future aggressor might make threats against. We’ve more or less revealed that whatever a future aggressor chooses to forbid, under the menace of some drastic reprisal, is off the table. Acquiescence is adopted as doctrine, and that is a huge blunder.

Excess Deaths and Avoidable Deaths

07 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by in Public Health

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Understanding the severity of the coronavirus pandemic is more straightforward when measured in terms of excess deaths, rather than total Covid deaths. We’ve had a large number of excess deaths in the U.S., but not all of them can be attributed to Covid. It’s also worth asking whether some of the deaths were avoidable, because that reflects even more profoundly on the success or failure of public policy and the health care system in dealing with the challenge. Unfortunately, while the precise number of avoidable deaths the nation has suffered is speculative, it is nevertheless significant.

Bad Metrics

A huge problem with using total Covid deaths as a measure of pandemic severity is that no one is confident in the accuracy of official statistics. There are reasons to suspect over-counting in the U.S. due to financial incentives created for hospital systems by the CARES Act. These were exacerbated by the CDC’s absurd 2020 recommendations for the completion of death certificates. Essentially, any non-primary Covid entry on a death certificate was sufficient to count the death as from Covid. No other disease is or has ever been tallied like that.

There is an important distinction between deaths “with Covid” and deaths “from Covid” that has been acknowledged only recently by health authorities. A death “with Covid” can occur when a patient tests positive for Covid after being admitted to a hospital for another primary ailment. Thus, deaths from other causes like heart failure have been improperly coded as Covid deaths under the CDC’s guidelines. Even tragedies like auto fatalities have been coded as Covid deaths.

At the same time, some public health “elites” insist that many Covid deaths in the community have gone unreported. That might have been true in the early weeks of the pandemic. However, post-mortem testing by medical examiners began to spread by April 2020, though there was a shortage of tests, and the CDC issued guidelines to encourage it late in the year.

Counting excess deaths from all causes avoids these controversies, including differences across countries in the way they record Covid deaths. It’s also possible to break down excess death into broad categories of causes, though the task is complex.

How Many?

First some simple accounting. Let’s define all-cause mortality during a period (Mort) as Covid deaths (C) plus plus all other mortality (M), or Mort = C + M. Expected mortality in the absence of a pandemic would be Exp(Mort) = Exp(M). Usually this expected value is taken as an average of deaths over several previous years. Therefore, excess mortality during the pandemic is:

EM = C + M – Exp(M)

How many excess deaths have we actually seen during the pandemic? According to Our World In Data, the figure was 950,000 as of Jan 9th. USMortality.com puts the excess at about 965,000 through the end of 2021. So these two sources are in close agreement, which says a lot given the usual difficulty of getting pandemic numbers to tie-out across sources

Through 2021, cumulative Covid deaths (by date of death) were almost 850,000. That’s less than excess deaths, so it’s obvious that other factors have contributed to the excess. Interestingly, 2021 was worse for excess deaths than 2020 for all age groups except 85+. Some have suggested the most vulnerable in this highly vulnerable age group had already succumbed to Covid in 2020, but there may have been other reasons for the difference.

Non-Covid Excesses

As noted above, some of the Covid deaths were misattributions. If we understand C to include only deaths “from Covid”, then we must acknowledge that M includes deaths from other causes but “with Covid”, as well as all deaths without Covid diagnoses. For example, because of the confounded way in which Covid deaths have been counted, a death from heart disease could end up in the official count of C, but it should be included in M instead.

The figures above imply 100,000+ excess deaths during the pandemic not associated with Covid diagnoses. If we add to those the “with Covid”, incidental total, then perhaps 300,000 – 400,000 excess deaths during the pandemic were from non-Covid primary causes!

Lockdown effects are a prime suspect in these non-Covid deaths. For example, if health care was deferred because hospitals cancelled or delayed elective procedures, or because patients feared the hospital environment, that would certainly manifest in premature deaths. Deaths of despair or neglect were also in excess, as one should expect when populations are subjected to prolonged periods of isolation.

These kinds of deaths are so-called “lockdown” deaths because they could have been avoided without such stringent policy measures and the propagation of fear by public health authorities. Those who might protest this nomenclature should note that lockdowns have been unsuccessful in mitigating the pandemic (and see here). After all, in terms of excess deaths, the Swiss approach was quite successful!

Avoidable Deaths

Many of the excess pandemic deaths were avoidable. Prolonged lockdown policies were driven by politics rather than sound public health reasoning. However, within the Covid death totals there is another category of avoidable deaths, and it is every bit as controversial. This post from The Ethical Skeptic (TES) goes into great detail on the matter. He takes a strong position, and some of his assertions and his accounting are subject to challenge. I sometimes find that TES’s posts contain ambiguities, and the graphical evidence he presents is often poorly labeled. Still, he has proven correct on other controversial issues, such as the ancestry and surprisingly early “vintage” of the Omicron variant.

Most of the “avoidable” Covid deaths (again, as distinct from the non-Covid lockdown deaths) occurred well after the primary symptoms of the infection (fever, cough, and cytokine storm) had passed. In the end, the real killers were follow-on problems induced by Covid, primarily related to blood clotting and compromised vascular integrity from endothelial dysfunction. These deadly complications were known very early in the pandemic. The following schematic from TES shows a Covid “death timeline”. The figures listed under the schematic show the large share of clotting and vascular problems involved in these deaths.

Over the past two years, not all of these patients were placed on anticoagulants or blood thinners early in the course of their infections. Indeed, many of them were told to “go home and sleep it off”. This is what happened to TES as well as a number of commenters on his Twitter account. I know several individuals who received the same advice from medical professionals. Even among the hospitalized, many were not placed on these drugs in a timely fashion, or until it was too late. TES adds the wrinkle that his physician indicated he should have been vaccinated! Short of that, tough luck, said the healer.

TES blames this medical “malfeasance” on the CDC’s Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) for the Covid vaccines. In fact, he calls these deaths “EUA Shadow Deaths”, citing legal requirements associated with EUAs that would appear to prohibit alternatives such as therapies and even tests or studies of alternatives. That contention seems questionable given the CDC’s issuance of other EUAs for certain treatments, and there was no shortage of published experiments conducted during 2020-21.

The vaccine EUAs were not issued until late 2020, but TES claims that forces leading up to those EUAs were responsible for the failure to put patients on anticoagulants/blood thinners even earlier in 2020. The schematic says more than half of Covid deaths through the end of 2021 involved blood coagulation issues, and I have no reason to doubt those figures, which TES sources from the CDC. But He uses a value of 50% of Covid deaths to estimate that 421,000 Covid deaths were avoidable.

I’m not sure about that total, or rather, the use of the term “avoidable” in all those cases. I am sure, however, that we’ve seen a remarkable under-emphasis on therapeutics (and see here and here) relative to the emphasis on vaccines. The news media contributed to the dysfunction by condemning certain promising therapies for political reasons.

I’m also sure that there have been a meaningful number of patients who should have received anticoagulants/thinning agents but did not. Why did they not? Plausibly, the restrictions imposed by the vaccine EUAs made a difference, but clearly the medical community was not tuned into what should have been an obvious treatment regimen.

How many Covid deaths were truly avoidable? TES’s estimate of 421,000 seems too high if only because we can’t expect the dissemination of information through the medical community to be perfect. Moreover, some of these patients were undoubtedly on blood thinners already, or there might have been contraindications preventing the use of anticoagulants/thinners.

Nevertheless, a substantial number of deaths could have been avoided by more timely use of therapeutics and less stringent lockdown measures. Here is a chart from a tweet by TES showing another accounting for excess deaths:

Here, TES uses a slightly longer time frame, through about February 5, 2022, so the “EUA Shadow Death” total is somewhat larger, about 437,000, than shown in the earlier schematic. He attributes about 800,000 excess deaths, or 77%, to Covid, most of which he believes were avoidable deaths.

Lockdown deaths account for some of the additional 236,000 excess deaths reported in the chart, and probably a large share of the roughly 90,000 non-natural deaths labeled #3 (SAAAAD = “Suicide Addiction Abandonment Abuse Accident & Despair”; the two other categories in #3 relate to non-Covid illnesses acquired in-hospital or adverse reactions to medications). The Unknown/Abnormal category may include some lockdown deaths, but more on that category below.

If TES is correct about shadow deaths, the “avoidable” pandemic death total might account for well over half of all excess deaths. I suspect it might account for half, but even if less, it’s clear that avoidable deaths have been a huge part of the pandemic’s toll.

Vaccine Adverse Events

There’s been much speculation about the large number of Unknown/Abnormal deaths that have been coded during the pandemic: more than 65,000 in the chart above. One caveat is that an “unknown” cause of death usually means the cause is ambiguous: there might have been several factors contributing to the death such that the medical examiner was unable to assign a definitive cause. That status can be temporary as well. Still, the surge is noteworthy.

Unfortunately, there were an unusual number of excess deaths in younger age brackets in 2021, especially in the second half of the year after vaccinations had reached a fairly large share of the population. The pace of those deaths hasn’t yet abated in 2022. The next chart, from USMortality.com, shows excess mortality in the 25 – 44 age bracket in 2020 – early 2022.

Many of these prime age deaths could be a continuing hangover from deferred medical care and depression. There are claims, however, that the vaccines themselves killed a significant number of individuals. The upsurge in excess deaths suggests to some that the vaccines have had a much greater number of “adverse events” than we’ve seen reported by the CDC and the news media.

Here is how TES presents the data on excess deaths and vaccinations. The chart title is his somewhat confusing attempt to summarize the meaning of the lines plotted. The left axis measures the pace of vaccinations by week and the right access measures weekly excess non-Covid natural-cause deaths.

I have no doubt as to the efficacy of the vaccines against serious Covid outcomes in high-risk groups, though vaccine efficacy has been drastically overstated by the Biden Administration. The balance of risks for older individuals is clearly in favor of vaccination. Still, I’ve long felt that vaccination is less compelling for people in younger age brackets, and it’s possibly a bad idea. That’s both because Covid is a much smaller risk to them and because of possible vaccine risks, such as myocarditis.

To the extent that natural-cause, non-Covid excess deaths among younger age cohorts have been driven by unnecessary vaccinations, those deaths were avoidable. I’m not convinced of the significance, and it’s clear that among hospitalized Covid patients, outcomes have been better among the vaccinated. The following chart is from the link in the previous paragraph:

That sort of pattern might mean more deaths among the unvaccinated could have been avoided, on balance, had they opted for the jab. In almost all things, however, I believe we should eschew blanket mandates and instead offer protection to those seeking it in the high-risk population.

Conclusion

As many as 30% of Covid deaths to date are likely misattributions in which Covid was not really the primary cause of death. Nevertheless, excess Covid deaths “from Covid” as the primary cause are probably approaching 700,000 today.

The pandemic was certainly bad enough without a slew of bad calls by the public health and medical establishments. Of the 950,000+ excess deaths that occurred through the end of 2021, over 100,000 were not attributed to Covid. If we include deaths mis-attributed to Covid, the non-Covid total is likely in excess of 300,000 and could be as high as 400,000. It’s time to acknowledge that lockdowns and fear-mongering led to a large number of those deaths, and most of those deaths were avoidable. However, while I am skeptical, the number of deadly adverse effects from vaccines in the prime age population is an open question.

Another class of avoidable deaths was a product of the underemphasis on Covid therapies by the medical establishment. There were many cases of promising, repurposed drugs that were shouted down after so-called experts insisted that their use must be withheld until adequate randomized control trials (RCTs) had confirmed their efficacy. Not only did this ignore the long history of clinical evidence as a guide to medical practice. It also ignored the frequent real-world inadequacies that plague RCTs.

At the same time, obvious complications of the vascular system, primarily blood clotting, were not treated in a timely way or as a precautionary treatment’s, at least prior to hospitalization. Adding a conservative allowance for these deaths to the other avoidable deaths probably means that at least half of the excess deaths during the pandemic were avoidable. As of March 2022, that’s over half a million deaths! We can chalk it up to mismanagement and miscommunication by the public health establishment with a dash of ignorance, and perhaps some malfeasance, by health care practitioners. The death of expertise, indeed!