Guest Post: "Pension Crisis Averted" by @pdxsag

[This is a guest review by our CBS correspondent @PdxSag.]

Hypothesis: Spike protein gene therapy shots (the mRNA vaccines) might age the cardiovascular system and increase cancer risk by 10 years, or around one Gompertz interval.

Some puzzles that I sought to answer in formulating the hypothesis:

•  Mortality worsened in 2021 vs. 2020 despite widespread vaccinations.
• A "spike" (pun!) in mortality among younger, working-age individuals coincided with vaccine mandates.
• The spike in younger deaths peaked in Q3 2021 when Covid deaths were extremely low (but rising into the end of September).
  

The conundrum is showing up most clearly in life insurers' results. Here, for example, is the NWLI income statement for Q3 2021:

Death benefit pay-outs up by over 2.5X?  It’s like these guys were underwriting life insurance in SF in 1985. And now we are seeing that Q4 2021 loss ratios have increased huge percentages over the Q4 2019 figures. Edward Dowd has started documenting life insurance company financial results for the 4th quarter 2021, and they are not good. Working-age claims (presumably the 55-65 demographic) are running 30-60% above pre-vaccine year-ago quarters of 2019 and 2020. Many life insurance companies swung from quarterly profits to losses. [ZH]

My hypothesis, that the spike protein is essentially doubling the mortality rate, may seem extreme. But that is what it would mean if it simply aged everyone by about eight years - again, one Gompertz interval.

Odds of dying in 10yrs [1]:
60 yo's -- 15% -> 30%
70 yo's -- 30% -> 65%
80 yo's -- 65% -> 95%
90 yo's -- 95% -> 99%

Present day, number of Americans [2]:
55-65 yo's    24M
65-75 yo's    18M
75-85 yo's    12M
85+ yo's    4M

Therefore, in 2030 revised demographic counts:
65-75 yo's 21M -> 18M
75-85 yo's 12M -> 6M
85-95 yo's   6M -> 0.6M
95+ yo's      de minimis

That is a 66% drop in the right-tail, and twice as many early deaths among the youngest cohort of pensioners. Pension obligations fall commensurately: pension crisis averted. Medicare and post-retirement health obligations are probably reduced as well.

This bears watching closely in the year ahead. Unlike the “trust-science” propaganda, death benefit payouts don't lie and can't be gamed. Finally, increased claims, and if we get them, rising interest rates are not going to be kind to most life insurers.

Life insurer results for Q2-2022 will tell the tale. Q1 confounded by boosters. If Q2 comes in ugly then we’ll know the damage is likely cumulative and long-term.

All Roads Lead to Physical Fitness

[From our guest correspondent, @pdxsag.] 

"All roads lead to physical fitness. It's the one litmus test for whether a mutual has seen through the Coof-prop." -@PdxSag

Over the last year I've been floored by various “mutuals” on the internet that have broke in favor of lockdowns, quarantines, and mandatory vaccinations, versus those that have called the Covid response a farce, a psy-op, a statist power-grab, etc.

First I must clarify what I mean by a “mutual.” On twitter, it means two people that follow each other. Twitter is a status game where having the most followers is winning. If you can't have the most followers, having followers that have the most followers is the next best thing. Hopefully you can influence the influencers. So, I don't mean mutual in that strict sense. I mean mutual as ideological fellow traveller. For myself and I suspect most of CBS readers, that is going to be people who are sympathetic to traditionally defined small 'c' conservatism and small 'l' libertarianism.

Otherwise intelligent people I trusted on things financial and political, two topics that don't suffer fools gladly, would voice opinions indistinguishable from WHO or CDC talking points. I had no idea how someone was going respond to the Covid propaganda. It seemed so random.

As I wrote in April, "2020 was the year everyone dropped their mask." So after 2020, we knew exactly where everyone stood, but we were left agape at who broke which way. Well, dear reader, it finally hit me and now I share it with you.

Whether someone thought to be clear-eyed and intelligent was going to be in favor of Big Government's and Big Pharma's Covid response is predictable based on their physical fitness (or lack thereof).

This is most obvious with Boomers, likely owing to their relatively more imminent mortality. And narcissism.

Physicians are another solidly predictable demographic, owing to their professional obligation to embrace the "standard of care" which explicitly demands a pill or surgery as the solution to every problem that ails us, with the rare exceptions who reject the standard of care in favor of a heterodox diet and some form of strength training as the true solution to today's chronic disease epidemic.

To be clear, fitness alone is not sufficient. Being fit doesn't make someone smart. There are fit bubble brains all over solidly progressive metros, though as one gets older it's harder and harder to stay fit if you're not smart. Hence, my qualifier about this rule being applicable to mutuals.

Conversely, being smart doesn't make someone fit. You have to step away from the computer and actually put in the hard work that's required to build your corporeal self. (OTOH, though it's hard in quality, it's far less in quantity than people are led to believe.)

This leads to the final irony. We are better served following the trolling aesthetes of frog-twitter than some high-IQ autists. Body first, and the mind will follow.

Truth. Once you see it, you can never unsee it.

WSJ: "We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April"

Bullish for reopening:

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

Antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity. Antibody testing doesn’t capture antigen-specific T-cells, which develop “memory” once they are activated by the virus.

This opinion by Marty Makary.

Previously in CBS regarding reopening: 1, 2.

Get Ready for Reopening

Would be kind of amusing if oil investments had a monster year while tech was one of the worst-performing sectors.

— Conor Sen (@conorsen) February 3, 2021