Tag: causes of death

‘Gun Death’ Rate Leaves The Trace at a Loss for Reasons Why

So-called gun violence is always going to be a major talking point, even though it’s down across the board. This is obviously good news, and I think we all have a good idea why that is.

While I can’t prove that it was because of the Bruen decision, the drop disproves a lot of anti-gun talking points, and while I’d put money on the decision being the reason for that drop, intellectual honesty precludes me from declaring it outright.

That’s because, as we all know, correlation doesn’t equal causation.

Again, though, we’ve got a pretty good idea. For folks at The Trace, this is apparently some kind of mystery.

On its own, the third quarter recorded 3,301 shooting deaths, the lowest figure in over a decade of GVA data for the three-month stretch.

Why are we seeing this decline? A recent report from the Council on Criminal Justice surveyed four dozen scholars on the crime decline in recent years. It found no single cause, but broad agreement that a range of factors — including the end of the pandemic, community violence intervention work, and focused deterrence from law enforcement and social services — each played a role.

There are important caveats with the shooting data. GVA does not capture every shooting. It can enter or update data on shootings weeks or months after they happen. (These numbers were pulled from GVA on October 13.) It also does not track gun suicides, which represent two-thirds of all shooting deaths. Still, GVA maintains the most complete, timely information available.

The limitations they mention are very real, because GVA just uses news reports. However, that fact is part of why it’s not a complete, timely source of information.

Keep reading

FDA, NYT Downplayed Evidence Showing Covid Shots May Have Killed Kids

Last fall, FDA safety officers began compiling a list of children possibly killed by Covid vaccines. Digging through thousands of reports of adverse effects and autopsy records of those who had died after receiving the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer, the team eventually determined that several adolescents had apparently died from the Covid vaccines.

On Dec. 5, the team’s leader, Dr. Meghna Alimchandani, sent an email recommending changing the labels on all mRNA Covid-19 vaccines to notify patients of the risk for cardiac death (fatal myocarditis), adding that her safety team planned to present those results at an upcoming FDA meeting. Such warnings, even regarding rare outcomes, are standard procedure — as is well-known by everyone who has watched drug TV ads that run through long lists of known harms.

Ten months later, the FDA has still taken no action to warn parents.

A RealClearInvestigations inquiry found that a strange-bedfellows convergence of political interests appears to have blocked the dissemination of this scientific information. President Trump, whose Operation Warp Speed helped fast-track development of the vaccines in 2020, believes his efforts saved millions of lives, and several current and former health officials told RCI they are loath to complicate that narrative for him. RCI also found evidence that the Biden administration, a strong supporter of vaccine mandates, showed little interest in examining or publicizing mortality data that might undermine its policies. For its part, the pharmaceutical industry was intent on protecting its profits, and influential media outlets, especially the New York Times, have downplayed evidence of Covid vaccine deaths and attack those who’ve tried to bring them to light.

“In the end that’s the big story,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, who has sustained a years-long investigation into Covid vaccine safety, releasing hundreds of pages of internal FDA records that call into question the agency’s forthrightness and that the legacy media have largely ignored or dismissed. “Advertising allowed Big Pharma to not only capture our medical colleges, medical journals, and Congress, but now the media,” Johnson added. “They’ve run the table,” he said. “That’s why this isn’t covered.”

Keep reading

Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty for Mom Accused of Murdering Twins Who Died 8 Days After Vaccines

Idaho prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Andrea Shaw, a young mother charged with murdering her twin toddlers, dramatically raising the stakes in a criminal case that has drawn national attention.

In a notice filed late last week in Idaho’s Third Judicial District Court, Payette County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ryon Sirucek identified four statutory aggravating factors that prosecutors intend to use to justify capital punishment if Shaw is convicted of first-degree murder.

Under a law that took effect in July 2026, firing squads are Idaho’s primary method of execution. The legislation followed a botched 2024 attempt to execute a 73-year-old man by lethal injection.

Prosecutors must prove at least one statutory aggravating circumstance before Shaw can be considered eligible for the death penalty. If Shaw is convicted, a jury would determine whether those circumstances exist.

According to the filing, prosecutors identified four aggravating circumstances: that Shaw allegedly committed two murders at the same time; that the murders were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity”; that she exhibited “utter disregard for human life”; and that her conduct demonstrates a propensity to commit murder that would make her a continuing threat to society.

Shaw was indicted by a grand jury and arrested on June 30 for allegedly deliberately suffocating her twins, who died on May 1, 2025. Prosecutors allege Shaw killed the children while they were sharing a bed. Her trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 11, 2027.

Shaw, who pleaded not guilty, has consistently denied the allegations. She suggested that her twins’ deaths may have been caused by the vaccines they received at a routine doctor’s appointment just over a week before they died.

According to court documents filed by her defense, Shaw took the twins to the emergency room on April 24, 2025, the day after they received routine vaccinations, because they were lethargic and their lips had turned blue.

The treating emergency room physician diagnosed both children with a “post-immunization reaction,” the filing states.

The children remained ill in the days leading up to their deaths, and Shaw repeatedly sought medical advice.

Neither the police nor the prosecution have publicly outlined the evidence they believe supports their claim that Shaw deliberately killed her toddlers. The grand jury indictment is sealed and not publicly available, and the coroner reports have not been released.

Shaw’s bail was initially set at $2 million. A district judge in Payette County, Idaho, later revoked the bail, which is discretionary in capital cases.

Keep reading

Retraction of SIDS Paper Based on VAERS Analysis Five Years after Publication

Few individuals can relate as personally as I do to the experience of having peer-reviewed research retracted after it revealed potential safety signals in the VAERS database.

Neil Miller recently had his peer-reviewed published work “removed” from the journal Toxicology Reports. It has been published for 5 years: since June 2021.

Five years! What’s that now? The smell of a Pubpeer rat? Could be.

The title of the paper is Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature, and you can find the abstract on PubMed.

The reason for the “removal” was that there were claimed “serious methodological flaws” according to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. What were these methodological flaws, you ask? Well according to the excuse written on the journal’s site where the paper was once readable, these “flaws” revolved around the inability to “infer correlation” – NOT CAUSATION – between vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Keep reading

Massive Explosion at Alberta Military Base Kills and Injures Troops, Hospitals Reportedly Full, ‘Significant Casualties,’ Defense Minister Says ‘Situation Active and Delicate’

An incident at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta on Saturday sparked a major fire that spread beyond the base in high winds, and Defense Minister David McGuinty confirmed fatalities and injuries among military personnel.

Global News reports “at least seven people are dead and dozens more left injured.”

The report added:

A live-fire training exercise hit a gas line or gas well on the base causing an explosion around 4 p.m. MT, multiple Canadian Armed Forces sources told Global News.

A fire then broke out and spread, fuelled by wind gusts of up to 100 km/h that prompted much of Alberta to be under wind warnings on Saturday.

Officials were tight-lipped about details, but McGuinty said he was “saddened to share that there have been both fatalities and injuries as a result of an incident on the base.”

Keep reading

Nurse: Stillbirths Exploded After COVID Shots Hit Maternity Wards

A California labor-and-delivery nurse says her Fresno hospital went from a handful of stillbirths a year to more than 20 in a single month once COVID shots were pushed on pregnant women, then answered the pile-up with an email on how to handle the dead.

The same product is now sitting in a federal file parents were told not to worry about. An analysis of the National Health Interview Survey, published yesterday, finds COVID-vaccinated children had higher odds of autism, ADHD, anxiety and special-education use than children who never received the shot, and the authors say the shots in children should stop.

Michelle Spencer has worked the antepartum, postpartum and labor-and-delivery floor at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno since 2017. In interviews that Children’s Health Defense aired, she described the unit before the pregnancy rollout as a place that saw about four stillbirths a year. After the shots started going into pregnant women, she said, it became four a week, and it did not stop.

A total of 22 stillborn babies in 30 days against a baseline of four a year is more than the previous five years combined, on the order of a 6,500 percent jump in a single month. Spencer’s July 30, 2025 complaint in Fresno County Superior Court used a baseline of one fetal death a month before spring 2021 and about 20 a month after, and calls the rise a statistically significant surge of more than 400 percent.

She has said she cannot pull the hospital’s full record, so the monthly figure is her estimate from the floor. The document that is not an estimate is the email.

In September 2022, nurse manager Julie Christopherson wrote to nursing and technical staff about what the hospital called “demise patients.”

Keep reading

Possible Plague Crisis in Siberia: Five Hospitals Placed Under Quarantine After Lab Tech Dies Following Test Tube Accident Containing Plague Bacteria

A 28-year-old technician at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute is dead, nearly 200 people are under medical observation, and five hospitals in the region have been reportedly slammed shut for quarantine, while the Kremlin’s health agency insists this is nothing but “pneumonia of unknown origin.”

The Moscow Times identified the dead woman as Darya Shipilova, a laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East.

She was hospitalized in Shelekhov on September 29 with severe pneumonia, placed on a ventilator, and died on October 1, overnight into October 2, by some accounts.

The account that set off the alarm: Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube of live Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, while handling samples on September 25. That is four days before she was admitted, DW reported.

Meduza, citing regional media, reported both that version and a competing claim that she fell ill after a trip. Neither has been officially confirmed.

Alexei Tsydenov, head of neighboring Buryatia, went further than Irkutsk officials were willing to go. He publicly said the woman had died of plague, then edited the post to say she “may have” died of it.

Irkutsk’s own governor, Igor Kobzev, would only call it a “particularly dangerous infection” and convene an emergency anti-epidemic commission.

Keep reading

The Treatment Was Worse Than the Disease

On December 12, 1799, George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after several hours on horseback in snow, hail, and freezing rain. The next day he developed a sore throat and hoarseness, and in the early morning of December 14 he awoke struggling to breathe and swallow. Doctors were called, and what happened next is now one of the most talked-about medical cases in American history.

Washington did not lack medical care. In fact, he received a lot of attention from three skilled physicians, who used the treatments they thought best for someone as sick as he was, such as repeated bloodletting and other methods meant to reduce inflammation and restore balance. Late that night, Washington died.

Even now, more than 200 years later, we are not sure exactly what disease killed Washington. Some experts have suggested acute bacterial epiglottitis, severe pharyngitis, peritonsillar infection, or other causes of upper-airway blockage [1]. What is clear is that Washington lost a large amount of blood, by most estimates about 80 ounces, through repeated bloodletting while he was already very sick. His doctors did not mean to harm him. They thought removing blood would control the inflammation, but it made him worse. Their actions followed a long-standing medical tradition, supported by accepted theories, experience, and the authority of many generations of doctors.

It is easy to look back at this story and feel superior because of our modern knowledge. Today, we understand things like oxygen delivery, blood volume, shock, infections, airway care, IV fluids, antibiotics, and advanced life support. Washington’s doctors did not have this knowledge. But calling them primitive misses the real point. They were trained doctors using the best knowledge they had to try to save their patient. The real question is not why doctors in 1799 believed bloodletting would help. Instead, we should ask which treatments we use today with the same confidence that future doctors might find hard to believe.

Keep reading

Bill Gates Predicts A Billion Deaths Via Evolutionary Event

Bill Gates is back on the Sunday-show circuit spreading doom and predicting a massive reduction in the human population.

In an exclusive Meet the Press interview set to air this weekend, the Microsoft co-founder told Kristen Welker that artificial intelligence is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that… cause a billion deaths” – then used the line to demand federal legislation, law-enforcement monitoring, and an end to industry self-regulation.

Gates is touting AI as a species-level emergency, and calling for handing over total control to politicians and a new class of global inspectors.

Welker put the extinction question to him directly: “Do you believe AI is powerful enough to end all of humanity?”

Gates answered: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths, you know, so even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.“

Keep reading

Army flight surgeon drops bombshell: 29 troop deaths after COVID shot, 55,000 adverse-events, and 2,500 death files now under review

A bombshell sworn declaration filed in federal court is raising new questions about the Biden-era COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed on America’s military.

According to TrialSite News, Army Lt. Col. Theresa Long, a retired Army flight surgeon now serving as senior medical military adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and reporting to War Secretary Pete Hegseth, filed a sworn declaration in Adirim v. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency et al., in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Long told the court she has firsthand knowledge of more than 29 service-member deaths after COVID-19 vaccination and that she has been tasked with examining roughly 55,000 military-linked adverse-event reports, including 2,544 death reports in the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

“I have first hand knowledge of over 29 deaths of servicemembers after vaccination with the COVID-19 vaccines. I am currently tasked with investigating the 55,000 vaccine adverse event reports filed on individuals identified as members of the U.S. Armed Forces, this includes 2544 deaths.

“As the first aviation brigade surgeon I had one servicemember die of rapid onset and progression of esophageal cancer after COVID vaccination and one in which a student pilot who had never been COVID positive, who experienced sudden cardiac death at the controls of a helicopter during a training flight.

“An independent cardiologist evaluated all imaging, labs and history on the student pilot and determined that myocardial injury secondary to the COVID-19 vaccines was the most likely cause.

Keep reading