Interestingly, Bulgaria and Romania actually started the pandemic with lower excess mortality than German and Portugal did, and they also finished with lower excess mortality. In the meantime in-between-time, the former two countries also had three big mountains of excess mortality that the latter two did not have.
This would seem to lend some prima facia support to HA’s contention that the countries with high vaccine uptake managed to preserve their old geezers through the Covid waves so that they were available a year or two later to die of something else, whereas the low vaccine uptake countries successfully killed off their old and sick during Covid, leaving behind a healthier population who didn’t die excessively.
However, there is a problem with that thesis. The old and the sick are always dying off, so in “normal” (i.e. non-pandemic) times, they don’t contribute anything to excess mortality. In pandemic times, it is precisely the old and sick who contribute to excess mortality. We can verify this from the now well-attested fact that the young and healthy (i.e. anyone under 49 years old without comorbidities) have a vanishingly small chance of dying from Covid. It was not the young who were making those big mountains of excess mortality in Bulgaria and Romania during the pandemic, therefore it was the old and sick. About that much, HA is correct.
But it cannot be the old and the sick contributing to the excess mortality in high vaccine uptake countries in post-pandemic times, because they would not be dying excess deaths only now, unless you wanted to make the bizarre claim that the vaccines had some kind of supererogatory health effect on uptakers such that, for a year or two after injection, they would not die of Covid or of anything else, either. If it is not the old and the sick contributing to excess deaths in Germany and Portugal now, then it must be the young. About this much, HA is obfuscating as he usually does.
The fact remains that today in Bulgaria and Romania excess deaths are actually negative, while in Portugal and Germany they are at 8.6% and 23%, respectively.
Additionally, HA is also obfuscating the matter at hand by diverting attention towards the high excess death rates in Romania and Hungary during the pandemic (among the old and sick), thus prescinding from the question of whether or not the vaccines are harming young people today. We already know who died of Covid and why they died. The question now is who is dying from the vaccines. HA’s attempts to obscure this crucial point are barbaric and sinister.
