"Suddenly" ... a glitch in the matrix

Mar 10, 2024

In a previous post I explored how often the word “unexpectedly” was used over time in the Legacy.com database. The results of that search were consistent with the trends in increased deaths that I found at the Legacy site when I compared pre and post pandemic years of obituaries. The marked increase in mortality from 2020 to 2021 was indeed reflected in the increased use of “unexpectedly” within the text of the obituaries during the same period.

It was pure happenstance that I chose to start my digging for that post with the term “unexpectedly.” In the lead up to my very first post about Legacy.com, I had been searching several different terms in the advanced search, and the results all seemed to be showing a consistent pattern:

the years before the pandemic tended to taper downwards in numbers
2020 was not exhibiting the type of increase that I would expect for a raging contagion
the jump in numbers starting in 2021 was significant

Here is a graph of the results for “sudden”:

Here is the result for “brief illness”:

This next graph shows the combination of “sudden” and “cardiac” in separate fields of the advanced search:

So it was a double-take moment when, to my surprise, this chart materialized when I did the search for “suddenly”:

I took the pains in the above “suddenly” chart to go month by month from 2015 to the present, as I had in the aforementioned “unexpectedly” graph (let’s just look at that one again):

The first impression that I have looking at the two graphs, is that they are almost identical, except that the pre-pandemic years seems to be jacked up in the first part of the “suddenly” graph. I was puzzled why everything else I searched for seemed to give the same sequence … except this one thing.

*Here is a reminder of how the graphs typically look when searching for an age of the deceased:

Why then?

The “suddenly” graph was such an outlier to all the other data.

Then it struck me that the term had become very political. This was largely thanks to the film Died Suddenly. But perhaps also to a lesser extent, by the book Cause Unknown : The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths by Ed Dowd.

Especially with the Stew Peters produced Died Suddenly, there erupted a concerted media outcry against it.

Even the Anti-Defamation League felt compelled to weigh in:

Died Suddenly is a 2022 anti-Covid-19 vaccine film produced by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters. It promotes the baseless theory that Covid-19 vaccines are causing healthy individuals to develop deadly blood clots, suggesting this is proof that “global elites” are using Covid-19 vaccines to depopulate the planet as part of a broader conspiracy to establish a global, totalitarian regime.

So how could the film Died Suddenly, realeased in 2022, and the bruhaha that ensued be in any way responsible for the graph that I had produced for the term “suddenly”? I mean, the graph starts way back in 2015, right? Am I saying that the data was in some way “jacked”? I do not know that it was or that it wasn’t.

But here is a curious thing.

We have all seen The Matrix. We are talking the first one. Keanu sees a cat, twice.

Deja vu = a glitch in the matrix. Something got changed. Danger.

Please take a very close look at the details in both screenshots. These are two consecutive months in 2020, February and March. The total occurrences of the word “suddenly” are exactly the same in each month.

That is the only time that I saw this happen in all of my searches.

I would love for a statistician (someone like a Norman Fenton or a Steve Kirsch) to tell me what are the odds of that happening by chance?

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