"I do not see the effects that Unz is talking about. Not at all. A single-cause change in the death rate of the magnitude that he's proposing should most certainly show up in these figures (particularly the latter chart), but it isn't there. I see no reason to take this claim seriously."
The problem with that line of reasoning is that if I put a blog post together that looks believable and claims there were 5 million deaths, many reasonable people will assume the truth is somewhere in between.
You're not an authority nor do you have any data to back it up.
It's appealing to the two authorities of research on the topic, not the FDA versus JoeRogan592's blogspot. So it's not quite equivalent, but your point about fake news is taken.
> I mean, 55k excess deaths is still a pretty massive number.
So is 25 million. :)
I don't mean to be callous by saying this, but it's often stated that even one death is unacceptable, but we also expect products to infinitely scale. At some point you will have a death from anything including breathing or drinking water.
What would be even worse is if we found that threshold of "one death" and limited the number of prescriptions below that. I think most people who need certain medications would prefer to roll the dice than be rejected the treatment.
I've always thought it would be a good compromise if the risk of death for the recommended dosage is required to be printed on the label along with doctors and pharmacists warning the patient ahead of time even for trivial stuff like ibuprofen.
Even more generally, a culture shift towards realistic expectations is sorely needed these days.
The issue is that 55k deaths is the known known. The known unknown is the multiplier due to the lackadaisical handling of geriatric deaths by overworked/under-skilled coroners (large number aren't MEs or MDs). I imagine it could be 1.5-2x (say 80% confidence) but not 550k (10x) without a mountain of evidence.
FDA claims: 1/5th of a percent died (55k)
TFA claims: 2 percent died (500k)
That's a huge difference of opinion.