The ONS announced last week that there were 49,428 deaths registered in England in December, which is 1,200 more than in November, and 17.5% more than the five-year average.
Age-standardised mortality rates for leading causes of death other than Covid were close to their five-year averages, suggesting that Covid was the main reason for elevated mortality last month (see below). Although, as noted before, cause-of-death comparisons should be interpreted with caution.
December’s overall age-standardised mortality rate was 9.3% higher than the five-year average. This is a greater disparity than last month and the month before. Though it’s still less than that seen in September. Here’s my updated chart of excess mortality in England since January of 2020:
What’s more, December’s age-standardised mortality rate was 8% lower than the same month a year before. Notice that the bump for the winter of 2021 is slightly lower than that for the winter of 2020.
While it’s certainly good news that mortality is lower, you might have expected a bigger reduction, given the many fewer people had natural immunity last December, and less than 1% of the population had been fully vaccinated.
Indeed, it’s noteworthy that going from under 1% fully vaccinated to more than 68% double vaccinated (including almost all elderly people) is only associated with 8% lower all-cause mortality.
This is consistent with evidence from other European countries, where post-vaccination waves have been as or more deadly than pre-vaccination waves. Such data are hard to reconcile with claims of 90% vaccine effectiveness against death.
With December’s figures out, we now have a full year’s worth of mortality data for 2021. So, how does the second year of the pandemic compare to previous years? It was more deadly than 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016. However, it was actually less deadly than 2015 – just six years earlier.
Here’s the ONS’s chart plotting the age-standardised mortality rate each year, going back to 2001:
The overall level of mortality in 2021 was higher than it would have been in the absence of the pandemic (it was above trend, in other words). Yet it was lower than in 2015, 2010 and every year in English history before that. All in all then, 2021 was not a remarkable year for mortality.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
In the great Physics Lab up in the sky, Professor Richard Feynman will be smiling wryly. As concluded in the report of the 1987 Presidential Commission into the Challenger space-shuttle disaster…
“…For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.“
True. Though – you will take this medicine whether you want to or not, and it will not cure you anyway is not really “public relations” `😏😏
Easily predictable.
Aren’t the same group of morons trying to ‘dim the sun’ through geo-engineering?
Truly clown world in overdrive.
Meanwhile hydrocarbons as abiotic energy can form in years. Entirely renewable.
Abiotic energy? Is that a thing?
Lots of people think it is. I don’t generally like quoting Wikipedia, but here is an article about it, although Wikipedia does what Wikipedia does and repeats the established doctrine, in this case that oil and gas come from dead creatures, something which even from an early age I thought sounded implausible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
When clouds cross the sky, output from solar panel falter and fluctuate, in the same way that changes in airflow cause output from wind turbines to fluctuate.
This cause frequency fluctuations which cause grid shutdown.
Weather-dependent electricity generators do that. Surprise!
Looking on the bright side, it’s keeping some branches of academia busy: https://www.ieee-jas.net/en/article/doi/10.1109/JAS.2024.125013 This one is on the topic of instability, rate of change of frequency etc.
And clouds move quicker than the wind changes and the peak risk to the grid will be when solar panels are at maximum output in the middle of the day. Just remind me again what time the grid collapsed.
Tony Blair wading in – clearly he’s on manoeuvres. What’s he after?
Perhaps they want to ditch the net zero nonsense without making it look like a u turn? Too much of a coincidence that he comes right after the blackout…
And just before the local elections where the public will give their verdict.
Local elections? What local elections? Denied to us here in Essex by the government, on the pretext that there will soon be a reorganisation of our local authority, making elections a pointless exercise. The more cynical locals see it more as a strategy to stop us expressing our disgust at what Labour’s doing in government by voting for anyone else.
Wants to be Klaus’s successor doesn’t he at the WEF?
Still pushing shit like carbon capture though.
Until the “CO2 is bad” meme is dead and buried there’ll be no salvation.
Money for his new carbon capture venture.
Could just be that he is a complete tosser? Simple answer is often the correct one.
That *almost* goes without saying… he doesn’t do or say anything unless there is a quid in it for him, he out Tory’d the Tories when he was in office
Dunno, but for a change he is right on this one
Whilst Blair’s conclusions are broadly ok, the logic he uses to get there is poor. I think he says it the way he thinks voters might listen, rather than by analysing the facts and stating them
A politician’s gambit there.
It’s sickening to see how people like Blair who spend all their time pontificating to the rest of society thinks he can turn on a dime and hope that everyone either doesn’t realise or forgets that 10 minutes ago he was aggressively advocating the opposite and that he helped create the hysteria he now denounces.
He and George Soros agreed all this in April 1996.
More sickening is the amount of money that Tony The Liar receives for what appears to be nothing of use whatsoever.
“Most political leaders are decent people who do want to do the right thing…”
Really, Tony? Well thanks for clearing that up for us… 😫
I just thew caution to the wind and ventured over to http://www.bbc for this subject. Not been there for nearly 10 years. I hoped for the best but found the worst. It’s like a bad stand up comic’s description of why life is shit. Utter drivel, made up nonsense, and stated facts that are conjured out of thin air with no evidence whatsoever. It will be another 10 years at least before I return.
The War Criminal is all in favour of carbon capture.
It would be a very good idea therefore to check whether Blair has financial “interests” in the carbon capture SCAM.
Given the deafening silence from the BBC and Miliband I think we can safely assume that the Spanish blackout is a direct result of Net Zero policies. Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s what….
Who would have known? ——–Everyone who isn’t brainwashed with phony planet saving propaganda and who know a little, bit about energy. ——Mainly that you cannot run Industrial Society on sun and wind. But the tragedy is that our UN and WEF lackey politicians do not care. All they are concerned about is following instructions from the phony planet saving technocrats and ignoring their own citizens who actually voted for them. —–PS Tony Blair already said 6 months ago that nothing we do here regarding ne Zero will make the slightest difference to global climate. But ofcourse anyone who knows anything about this issue does not need Tony to tell them. But when a left wing look up to person like Blair turns against net Zero then Miliband is in a spot of bother.
My apologies for posting this again, but I do think this article makes an important point:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dfleming/p/the-long-game-of-tony-blair-from?r=ylgqf&utm_medium=ios
We might have guessed – if that evil skank Blair has anything to say on the subject.
Thanks for the link.
NetZero cannot and will not ever work
https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero
Being “asked” to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle? If only.
Anyone know what Blair thinks about the recent sun dimming nonsense?
In the midst of all this, there’s good news for China, Russia, and anyone else who wants to weaken western nations: they don’t need to worry anymore about sabotaging our power grids, because we’re doing that ourselves by building in vulnerability in the form of intermittent renewables. They just have to sit back and wait for the chaos to arise.
So Spain is ending nuclear power. It’s not about low carbon energy, it’s about less energy. Blair is the consummate politician, he has not changed any of his opinions, he just knows when to row back a little bit.