I watched it so you don't have to

I'm referring to the new documentary Died Suddenly, about the deaths attributed to the COVID vaccine, by right-wing crank Stew Peters. The film opens with a montage of images associated with conspiracy theories - Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination, the moon landing, Bigfoot, and others, with a guy on TV asking "aren't there any conspiracy theories you believe in?" We then get a short explanation of Malthusian Theory, which says that a population increases exponentially while its food supply increases linearly, leading to an inevitable shortage if nothing changes. This includes Tom Hanks, Bill Gates, and other luminaries agreeing that the earth's population is out of control. So of course, "the elites" are looking for some way to reduce it - except no one says this explicitly. It's just clever editing.

We're then treated to a barrage of headlines about people who "died suddenly," followed by stories from embalmers, doctors, and others testifying to "something we've never seen before," how the vaccine wasn't tested and how information about it isn't available, videos of people keeling over for no reason - the implication is clear: the vaccine killed them.

Except it's not. There are three things required to demonstrate causation:

1. A significant activity - the action in question, in this case, a person getting vaccinated.

2. An adverse event - death or disability following #1.

3. A nexus connecting the two. Here's where the documentary fails to deliver. Correlation doesn't equal causation. I was vaccinated, and later that day, my car's bluetooth stopped working. Clearly, these two events weren't related other than the fact that they happened around the same time. Now, if someone conducted a study and found that there had been a spike in Bluetooth failures associated with car owners getting vaccinated, that would suggest a third factor somehow affecting both. The same holds true for the deaths, diseases, and stillbirths - what's missing is a regression analysis to eliminate any other factors. Are these also happening elsewhere, in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia where the vaccine wasn't available? The most rudimentary analysis beyond "A happened, then B happened, therefore A caused B" isn't explored.

The film doesn't explore any of this. We're treated to anecdotes and impressions in place of genuine research. We don't even see raw data; we're just assured by a string of very serious people that they're observing something. A real assessment would at the very least include a regression analysis to eliminate any unknown third factors. Instead, we see evil "elites" like Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros with snippets suggesting (without coming out and saying) that the vaccine is a plot to reduce the world's population. What we don't get is any explanation of how the vaccine could be killing people, why some people supposedly die within days while others take months, or the mechanism whereby the vaccine causes the blood clots and other health effects that supposedly have skyrocketed.

The most glaring lacuna is why the vaccine exists at all. Anyone seeing this who wasn't aware of the COVID pandemic would conclude that people were getting vaccinated for no reason at all. COVID, and any possible effect it may have, isn't even mentioned. This isn't science; it's propaganda.

This presentation is going to be very effective with the film's target audience, most of whom have already been exposed to anti-vax propaganda and are primed to buy into the film's message without thinking about it critically. The production values are top-notch; clearly, for whoever made this, money was no object. It ends on the most emotionally manipulative note imaginable - babies! They're killing babies with this! And YOU will have to stand before God and explain why you did nothing. If the filmmakers wanted to encourage a few unstable individuals to carry out acts of stochastic terrorism, they may have succeeded by the time you read this.