Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? A Statistician's Perspective

Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.

And have been for six months. The chart may seem unbelievable or impossible but it is correct, based on weekly data from the British government.

The brown line represents weekly deaths from call causes of people aged 10-59 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie but not the 2021 Ghostbusters movie, per 100,000 people.

The blue line represents weekly deaths from all causes of unvaccinated people per 100,000 in the same age range.

I have checked the underlying dataset myself and the graph plotted above is correct. People under 60 who watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are twice as likely to die as people who watched the 2021 Ghostbusters movie. The overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal.

I don't know how to explain this other than movie-caused mortality. I was told by everyone that the 1984 Ghostbusters movie was safe and amusing, and never anticipated it could be so dangerous to young people! It appears the 2021 film is MUCH safer, and strongly preferred, but this fact has been hidden by conspiracy

Digging further, I noticed the probability of seeing 1984 film is higher for those older in the spectrum, while demographic of those watching the 2021 film is much younger.

I guess that makes sense, since for GenX'ers the 1984 movie came out in their childhood and teen years, while the 2021 movie just came out for the post-millennial subset of the 10-59yr age group to see.

Digging some more, I found UK data showing age-specific mortality rates from 2019, shown in the black numbers above the bar plot.

Even though the overall 10-59yr mortality rate is 149.5 per 100k

The mortality rate in this range varies from 8.8 per 100k (10-14yr group) to 478.2 per 100k (55-59yr group). Thus, the older part of the 10-59yr age group has death rate >50x more than the younger part. This got me thinking, "I wonder if the different age distributions have something to do with this."

So I computed the expected mortality rate for the cohorts watching the 1984 and 2021 movies based on a weighted average using their age distribution.

Looking at those numbers, I see that a group of 10-59yr old people with the age distribution of those watching the 1984 movie would have an expected mortality rate of 192.3 per 100k

While a group of 10-59yr old people with the age distribution of those watching the 2021 would have an expected mortality rate of 79.7 per 100k.

Thus, based on the disparate age distributions, we would expect people watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie to have a death rate of 192.3/79.7=2.4x higher than the death rate of people watching the 2021 Ghostbusters:Afterlife Movie. Thus, maybe the 2x higher rate of death among 1984 Ghostbuster movie watchers has another explanation other than movie-caused mortality.

Maybe it is the dramatic difference in age distribution in watchers of a GenX film vs. a Post-Millenial film that explains the death disparity we are seeing.

Maybe someone should explain this to Alex Berenson before he writes another SubStack post, or the thousands of people forwarding this around social media and alternative social media platforms.

Here is a detailed blog post picking apart a somewhat analogous situation involving these SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.