Fact-checking Alex Berenson

Post #1275

Alex Berenson just came out with a substack reporting on the pull-forward effect, sometimes called the dry tinder effect, wherein whenever you get high death in one month or year, you end up with less death later — because people who might have died in that later month or year had already died earlier.

It mentioned Bulgaria’s death rate.

Compared to the USA, it really is the case that Bulgaria has been having a lot less death than the USA lately, when each nation gets compared to itself over time:

Another nation with tons of “negative excess death” like Bulgaria has been having is Latvia. I added some other nations up top, nations which cannot seem to kick the habit of having their people kick the bucket (nations with “out-of-control” excess death). Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the USA have persisting excess death.

But excess deaths should not be persisting into 2025, so it must mean that Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the USA have been doing something differently than Bulgaria and Latvia. One of the biggest differences between the two groups is the uptake of COVID shots. Bulgaria and Latvia took less shots:

As you can tell by the table-top flatness for Latvia and Bulgaria, by Feb 2022, those two nations were “done with COVID shots” — while the other 4 nations (Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, USA) kept on dosing their populations after Feb 2022. Here are how they compare with just the booster doses:

By keeping booster shot uptake down so that it remained less than 30 booster shot doses per 100 population, Latvia and Bulgaria were able to avoid a persisting excess death which had plagued the other 4 nations (nations which had been giving out booster shots more). It looks like Alex Berenson was on track with his report.

Alex Berenson gets zero Pinocchios for his report on the low jab rate and current low death rate in Bulgaria, versus high jabs and high death in the USA.