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Steve Connolly, an Iraq War combat veteran, was horrified by all the death and dying around him — not in the Iraq killing fields, but in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings starting in 2021, after the COVID-19 vaccines rolled out.

Connolly, a 61-year-old disabled vet and retired social worker who cared for the most severe and violent mentally ill patients in Massachusetts, said the formerly routine AA meetings became scenes of more suffering and carnage than he’d ever witnessed in war or among “the worst of the worst” in mental hospitals.

“In all of my time, I’ve never seen this many people that I know dropping dead in this span of time,” Connolly said.

Verne was in his 70s, relatively healthy and stable, Connolly said, “coughing on a Sunday, dead on Monday.” Big Rob was in his 30s, a little obese, and “died from myocarditis.”

Allie was in her 30s, a heavy girl, but healthy. “She got the jab, then had serious gallbladder issues and had it removed. She was found dead when she didn’t show up for work.”

A physician in AA, known as Dr. Michael, debated Connolly about the jab. “I tried to explain it to him. He didn’t believe me. Two weeks later, he got the booster. He died from a heart attack a few days later. Then they killed my friend, and I started to investigate.”

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Connolly relayed how, driven by anger and pain over the unexplained scourge of deaths, he pored over “thousands and thousands and thousands” of obituaries and discovered that deaths reported as “suddenly” or “unexpectedly” on legacy.com obits soared more than 62% across the U.S. after the rollout of the mRNA vaccines.

Connolly’s data trove, assembled with the help of Massachusetts systems engineer and vaccine-death investigator John Beaudoin Sr., matches to a remarkable degree the unprecedented rise in U.S. excess deaths and disabilities in government data reported by former BlackRock hedge-fund manager Edward Dowd, Dr. Pierre Kory and others, Kory said.

Kory, president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance who treats COVID-19-vaccine-injured patients in his practice, has written extensively calling for the government, insurance companies, public health officials and major media to acknowledge and investigate the catastrophic health crisis of excess deaths and disabilities striking not just the U.S. but all countries where the vaccines were rolled out on a massive scale.

Kory last week discovered Connolly’s data, published in August 2023 on Beaudoin’s Substack, Coquin de Chien’s Newsletter (French for “Naughty Dog”), and wrote about it on his Substack.

“For those of us already fully aware of the massive excess deaths caused by the mRNA vaccines, it is difficult to be impressed with new data sources proving same,” Kory wrote.

“I thought the EMS data I posted yesterday was shocking,” Kory wrote. But Connolly’s “charts of his findings are beyond compelling and deserve wider sharing.”

Asked by The Defender to quantify the significance of Connolly’s data, Kory — who was a highly published University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pulmonary critical care medicine and ran the intensive care units at two of the world’s top academic medical centers — said, “I would just say that, like all the other sources revealing such a tight temporal association, this also leads to no other explanation but the vaccines as the principal driver of the excess mortality.”

“It’s uncanny,” Connolly said. “I go to an AA meeting every day and people are dying around me, people I know and don’t know. Almost every meeting has new people talking about their relatives dying or having a stroke or another ailment like Guillain-Barré [syndrome] or heart attack. It’s unusual now that a medical event hasn’t befallen someone.”

When he hears the tragic stories, Connolly said, “I just point to my arm with my finger.”

Connolly, who lives in Hubbardston (pop. 4,300) in central Massachusetts, served two tours with the U.S. Army in Iraq and 13 years with the National Guard. Sober for 26 years, he relapsed after his second tour in Iraq and battled alcoholism for eight years but has been sober since Aug. 21, 2020.

During the 2020 lockdowns, he waited eight months for medical treatment for blood in his urine before bladder cancer surgery in November 2020.

“I’m pretty beat up,” he said. But the pandemic put him on high alert. “I was paying attention to the news quite intently. I’m former military and I wanted to make sure that I was prepared for whatever was coming.”

As a former case manager for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, Connolly was responsible for advocating for the mentally ill including severe schizophrenics, bipolar and dual-diagnosis patients with substance abuse, and a client so violent he spent most of his life in Worcester State Hospital with a double lobotomy.

Connolly, who knew his way around hospitals and the medical system, was immediately suspicious of calls to lock down to “flatten the curve.”

“Something didn’t sit right with me,” he said. “I’m all about I get to do what I want to do because I’m a free man. I started driving to local hospitals to see them overrun and they were ghost towns.”

Connolly told The Defender:

“I spent a lot of time in hospitals with my clients. I wore masks and gowns and gloves depending on the contagion. But you don’t shut a hospital down. You don’t sequester healthy people if there’s something contagious going around. You isolate the sick.

“Things weren’t adding up for me — and then my friend got sick.”

Connolly had known his friend Keith, 59, in AA for 13 years. “He was a relatively healthy guy and had been sober for 13 years, and suddenly his abdomen began to distend, he was very, very sick.”

While battling his bladder cancer, Connolly served as Keith’s health proxy. He accompanied his friend to the doctor as he would with his clients as case manager, “responsible for every aspect of someone’s care — housing, food, medical, legal, everything.”

More things didn’t add up at the doctor’s office.

“The doctors told Keith he had liver cancer,” Connolly said. “But his death certificate said he died of end-stage liver disease, cirrhosis. But he was sober for 13 years. How the hell did cirrhosis kill him? Cirrhosis is a long, slow death.”

“I wasn’t there to argue with the doctors, but I was very suspicious. Keith died 60 days after getting the vaccine.”

After his friend’s death, Connolly devoured every scrap of information he could find about the post-vax excess death crisis from Dowd, Kory, Dr. Paul Marik, Dr. Ryan Cole and others. “I became an activist.”

Connolly did what seemingly no one else had thought to do. He “spent an enormous amount of time” obsessively reading obituaries of those who died too soon or of unknown causes, looking for clues.

“Ed Dowd was doing the actuary data and I’m not a big brain,” Connolly said. “I got a high school diploma, I worked my way up to a master’s level based on experience, very little college, self-taught. But I started seeing these guys with big brains, Ryan Cole, Dowd. I wanted to participate somehow.”

In December 2022, Connolly heard Beaudoin interviewed on CHD.TV by Dr. Meryl Nass. He was stunned by the Massachusetts man’s story and data.

Beaudoin, 59, is an electrical engineer and systems engineer whose son died in a motorcycle accident in 2018. He was sitting around depressed, “not working, not doing anything,” when COVID-19 hit and his middle son said, “It’s all B.S.”

“I said, Charlie, you got to take it seriously, so I went to prove him wrong — and within a week, I proved him right. I found CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data and New York City data and the story wasn’t matching.”

Beaudoin enrolled in law school, but was thrown out for being unvaccinated. He sued Massachusetts and the federal government for vaccine data and the law school for tossing him out. In his new role as an activist, working with Steve Kirsch, Jessica Rose, Ph.D., and others, he struck gold with a Freedom of Information Act request that gave him the entire death certificate database of Massachusetts.

Beaudoin has been talking to groups and media ever since. His extensive analysis of 460,000 death certificates has made him “one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic.”

The death certificate data show a massive, illegal cover-up in Massachusetts of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine damage, Beaudoin said, that he will document in a forthcoming book.

“In Massachusetts alone in 2021 and 2022, there were 3,000 excess cardiac arrest deaths, 500 excess pulmonary embolism deaths, 400 excess cardiac arrhythmia deaths, hundreds of excess clotting and bleeding and blood vessel and stroke deaths.”

All were temporally associated with the mRNA vaccine rollout, Beaudoin said.

Beaudoin also produced data showing that COVID-19 killed Massachusetts residents in 2020, average age of 81, seasonally and with respiratory diseases. But far more Bay Staters have died since the 2021 vax rollout, now average age 65 with no seasonality, and a sudden shift “to circulatory and blood causes” of death.

For those who insist excess deaths are COVID-19-caused, Beaudoin said, “Diseases do not change how they kill, whom they kill and when they kill suddenly on a year boundary.”

Stunned by Beaudoin’s research, Connolly drove to rural Keene, New Hampshire, last Feb. 18 to hear Beaudoin give his death certificate presentation in the small Hope Chapel.

The event was sponsored by Health Freedom New Hampshire and the CHD New England Chapter.

After the presentation, Connolly, stricken and hurting, approached Beaudoin and introduced himself.

“I felt really badly for him,” Beaudoin said in an interview with The Defender. “He was telling me about friends and acquaintances at Alcoholics Anonymous, all disappearing, this guy died, that guy died. He was angry at the COVID-19 vaccine situation, but wanted to do something positive to prevent others from being harmed or killed.”

The two men exchanged information. Connolly barraged Beaudoin for days with screen-captured obits he’d found on his phone with the words “suddenly” or “unexpectedly.” Beaudoin looked up the death certificates and told Connolly the official causes of death.

Then, “Steve came up with a great idea,” Beaudoin said. “He found an online data tool embedded in a national obituary website, Legacy.com. Steve utilized the website’s advanced search tool to filter obituaries for the keywords “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He then filtered by date range and U.S. state.”

Connolly populated a multi-use spreadsheet Beaudoin created with the number of instances of “suddenly” or “unexpectedly” for every U.S. state and the years 2015 through Aug. 21, 2023.

The results stunned both men.

“Steve has the heart and zeal of a lion,” Beaudoin said, and “the results are staggering and incontrovertible.”

He called Connolly’s data “strong pragmatic evidence, corroborative of the insurance data highlighted by Ed Dowd, that there is a public health emergency manifesting in an astronomical increase in sudden fatalities since 2021.”

“Something is very wrong with public health beginning not in the COVID year of 2020, but rather upon deployment of the transfecting gene therapy drug the government calls a ‘vaccine’ in 2021,” Beaudoin said. “This is an alarming trend that cannot be unseen.”

Connolly said he was overwhelmed by the realization his work revealed massive numbers of tragic deaths, suffering on a catastrophic scale and evidence of a terrible crime. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, Oh, my God,’” he said. “People didn’t just decide to write ‘suddenly’ and ‘unexpectedly’ for no reason.”

“Even though I was already on board with this thing killing people, there was still a flicker of doubt that I hadn’t done any of the stuff myself,” Connolly said “I’m taking John [Beaudoin] at his word. I’m taking Ed Dowd, Ryan Cole, Paul Marik at their word, Pierre Kory at his word. I’m listening to attorney [Thomas] Renz.”

“But now I’ve seen it myself and found something that corroborated all of it in more of an organic way. This is not about me but I’ve actually contributed something. Maybe this will make a difference. I’m still trying to make a difference. We need the vaccine data from Massachusetts, and they won’t give it up unless we force them somehow.”

Beaudoin asked his recovering alcoholic friend, “Do you think this puts a stressor on you for your addiction?”

“No. It puts a fire in my belly,” Connolly said. “I see their faces. I see their eyes. I knew these people. … [They’re] hiding information. No reason for ignoring this. It may not be the vaccine. But wouldn’t they want to know? That’s the real question.”

“When does it end?” Beaudoin asked. “When do you stop looking at obituaries and get some peace?”

“When they stop trying to kill us. When I see people start being perp-walked. Nuremberg 2 should happen. These people have to be held accountable,” Connolly said.