On May 5th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a new report estimating global excess deaths at 14.9m for two years of the pandemic 2020-21 as the true COVID-19 mortality toll, nearly triple the official toll of 5.44m. “Excess mortality” is the difference between the number of deaths that would be expected in any time period based on data from earlier years and the number of deaths that have occurred. For countries with robust data surveillance, reporting and recording systems, this poses no real difficulty. Unfortunately, these conditions are not met in many countries. Therefore their excess mortality can only be estimated and the accuracy is a function of the reliability of the methodology and modelling used in the exercise. Given the overwhelming evidence about the flaws and deficiencies of Covid-related modelling over the last two years, and the damage caused by governments trusting modelling projections over real-world data, this should immediately throw up a forest of red flags about the WHO report.
A second reason to be sceptical is the less than stellar role of the WHO in its well-known Covid-related deference to China, the abandonment of its own summary of the state of the art science on managing pandemics from October 2019, its willingness to manipulate definitions of ‘herd immunity’ in relation to vaccines and natural immunity in order to fit with the experimental pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that came to dominate Covid policy around the world, and its self-interest in expanding its budget, authority and role in steering global health policies and management by means of a new international treaty.
A third ground for scepticism is they ascribe the total death count to the direct effects of Covid “due to the disease” and indirect effects “due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society”. The first part is questionable because it fails to distinguish between deaths with and from Covid. The second is disingenuous because the indirect toll of the NPIs (lockdowns, masks, induced fear, lost schooling, lost jobs, cancelled screenings and operations, aborted immunisation programs, disruptions to global food production and distribution, etc.) and vaccine-related adverse events will prove to be significantly higher than the indirect effects of the disease per se. Any study that fails to disaggregate deaths caused by the disease and by policy interventions to mitigate it lacks credibility.
Like many others including Will Jones on this site, I was especially struck by the new figures for India. The report pushes India up to the very top of the Covid mortality toll with 4.74m deaths, nearly 10 times more than the count of 481,486 (as of December 31st 2021), almost one-third of the world total. Sorry, but that is simply not credible.
India’s geographic diversity, population size and economic conditions make data collection especially challenging. In public lectures in Australia and Canada, to drive home the point about the scale, I usually comment that the entire Australian population is a rounding error in 1.3bn-strong India. It suffers from persistent and widespread mass poverty – India is a country of a few mega-billionaires amidst the world’s biggest pool of poor, illiterate and sick people bar none. It might be nuclear-armed, but state capacity when it comes to administration and public and social services is easily the worst of all major economies. The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible and high quality healthcare is neither accessible nor affordable for ordinary Indians. The best doctors work in the public sector, in medium to large clinics and hospitals in metropolitan centres and as individual practitioners in most towns and villages. Consequently, health statistics are not all that reliable. But this is a general pathology, not one unique to COVID-19.
From everything I know about India, the WHO estimate does not align with overall death data, historical trends and Covid death compensation claims on the Indian Government from states. Indian experts believe that official statistics capture over 90% of all deaths. But this also means that about 10% of deaths would have been missed in previous years, yet the WHO’s ‘excess deaths’ count uses the official numbers as the baseline against which to estimate the impact of Covid. In a related vein, why would under-reporting be limited to Covid-related deaths and not, say, to suicides with its heavy social stigma and traffic accidents where the operators of overloaded buses and vans would try to drastically reduce actual numbers in order to hide the illegal loads (Figure 2)? The WHO estimates are flawed also in relying on 2019 deaths instead of using a five year average 2015-19 to wrinkle out anomalies in any given year.
Estimates of India’s total annual death rate range from 738 per 100,000 people by the World Bank to 1,030 per 100,000 people by World Life Expectancy. The total annual death toll therefore would be somewhere in the 10-13 million range: a very wide range. The WHO estimate of the death rate for 2021 is within the higher range from World Life Expectancy. Simply put, the WHO estimate of all-cause deaths is within any realistic estimate of the margin of error in India’s unique circumstances of scale and state capacity.
The caveats to official data notwithstanding, the WHO estimate would mean almost one-quarter additional deaths than normal. In fact it’s worse. Looking at the detailed tables, the 4.74m excess deaths is calculated from a combined excess death rate for 2020–21 of 171 per 100,00 people. This is disaggregated into 60 and 280 per 100,000 people for 2020 and 2021, respectively. That would imply a 38% jump in all cause deaths in 2021. Despite all the horror scenes we saw on TV of corpses lying in the streets and washed ashore on riverbanks, that’s just not possible. Perhaps the clue to the error lies in the title of the actual document: “Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 (modelled estimates)” (emphasis added).
Some Daily Sceptic readers had fun with this aspect of the WHO announcement. My favourite exchange was this:
India’s own estimates of excess deaths for 2020 compared to 2019 is 480,000, of which Covid-related deaths were just under 150,000. So over 300,000 excess deaths were due to non-Covid causes, which in itself is far more believable because of the impact of the lockdown measures on exacerbating most of the conditions underlying India’s leading causes of deaths. By contrast, in 2021 the Covid-related death toll was much higher at 332,492.
Much as I have been critical in the past of official dismissals of international reports on India including weakening democratic practices, in this instance the Government is right to reject the WHO methodology of mathematical modelling based on data on 17 Indian states collected from websites and media reports: “This reflects a statistically unsound and scientifically questionable methodology of data collection for making excess mortality projections in the case of India.” As well as defective data collection methodology, the report is marred also by three critically flawed assumptions: that uncounted excess deaths occurred only in 2020-21 and not before; they occurred only for COVID-19 and not other diseases; and Covid-related deaths were due solely to the disease and not caused by policy interventions to control and eradicate it.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General.
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Everything about the WHO is suspect.
it always makes me shake my head when you hear people and the media say “india has had more deaths than the UK and scare people with supposed high figures” well yes, but india has different factors, i.e. the population of at least 1.4 billion, india’s hygiene and sanitary conditions are considered worse than a lot of Weston countries and also the general health conditions and diseases are also poorer. When the Who and the media spout big figures and ignore the many other factors it really is disingenuous.
Interestingly, you would think Covid would have had a bigger impact on California’s large homeless population.
Two articles on the WHO figures today. On one hand we are to take the data about Sweden seriously but not the data about India. Personally, I’m taking it all with a large pinch of salt.
Indeed, we seem to be picking cherries and sour grapes somewhat arbitrarily.
Except that the data for Sweden is far more likely to be accurate than the guesstimates for India
The Indian’s secret was vindaloo.
Vindaloo takes no prisoners.
More objectively likely, or more helpful to our preferred narrative?
The deaths in India need to be adjusted in order to fit in with The Science (the computer models).
They are having similar problems with the recorded global temperatures, turns out the weather is a climate change denier, they will cancel the weather’s Twitter account asap.
The WHO seems like a bigger version of the EU – out of touch, irrelevant, and a law unto itself.
The WHO is significantly worse. It’s an unelected gremium of so-called public health experts with the ambition to dicate government policy globally down to the level of who is when allowed to talk to whom and how people must dress in public. This is based on the notion that globally acting health bureaucrats get to decide which human acitivies are essential and which aren’t and can thus be harmlessly prohibited. Considering that people’s lives are usually tighty coupled to there jobs, this basically means grouping people into essential and inessential ones. The essential ones are allowed to work. The others are supposed to remain at home on often meagre government handouts financed by printing money or accumulating debts.
And it gets more evil than that: The WHO would also like to see universal, mandatory COVID vaccination. Even in the best case (which is far from the actual case), a vaccine will always kill some people. Hence, forcing people to get vaccinated is equivalent to decreeing that some of them are so inessential that it’s ok to put them to death by injection.
Lead by a terrorist…
What could possibly go wrong?
Still the most fundamental aspect of this is that no new pathogenic virus was properly isolated from any sick individuals in China, there was no proof of a new virus that caused a new disease.
When you look into the topic it turns out that virology is a complete joke of a science.
What they call isolation really is a fraud, they don’t isolate anything, they simply mix a sputum sample from a sick patient, mix it with monkey kidney cells as a cell culture host and then starve those cells and poison them with nephrotoxic antibiotics, when the kidney cells die they cliam that it but be virus wot done it.
From there they let a computer analyse all the gentic debris from the toxic soup and get the computer to piece together every possible combination that these bits could convievably make up, they then declare one of these made up sequences to be the new virus.
This is why they have an endless number of variants, the computers can generate endless different possible combinations and the virologists can keep claiming which ever ones they like as being significant.
The whole thing is a colossal fraud as are the vaccines that are claimed to combat these claimed viral infections.
Don’t fall for the “viruses don’t exist” scam either. There is pathogenic contagion that we call viruses, they just understand very little about them. The part they really don’t like to talk about is “terrain”, the health of the individual plays a much bigger part in how successful a virus is than any vaccine.
When humans play god disaster often follows.
Matthew Syed has written an absolutely appalling article in the Sunday Times using the WHO estimates to ‘prove’ how reasonable the UK government’s actions were/are. He also has a swipe at this website and all who ‘sail in her’ ( calling it by its old name).
I commented, needless to say my comment has been removed. The Times doesn’t like the truth. Goodness knows what the interweb will be like with the ‘on-line harms’ legislation.
the online harms bill ensures access to100% state viewpoints at all times, no exceptions.
VPN.
I didn’t realise we had been namechecked. I always assumed we were too small for anyone to notice. Evidently not. Excellent – a swipe shows we’ve hit a nerve and got people worried.
Yes, Syed accuses us of cherrypicking data!
Gave me a good chortle after what we have seen with government statistics.
Mark Woolhouse, a senior government scientist wrote a book about the Covid debacle; appropriately titled “The Year the World went Mad”. He concludes that the lockdowns were not necessary.
They’re just finishing the job.
They exaggerated the risk people were facing from a new pathogen and they are now exaggerating the total deaths. They are writing history, in preparation for the future and leaving no lose ends:
– The virus was super dangerous
– Lockdowns, masks, tests and vaccines saved us.
– Millions still died because we were slow to act.
– In the future we must act very quickly.so that we don’t have 15 million deaths.
That’s the story they are going with and they have the force of international institutions, the corporate media, national governments and major corporations to make sure their version is firmly established.
Even with their bloated estimates of death the claimed virus was still a damp squib, but they have injected billions of people with their poisons so their work is done.
They have left an enormous number of loose ends, and they will unravel. We just have to keep pulling on them.
One of the best articles I’ve seen linked to by DS is this one which concerns itself with the Italians kick-starting the covid scam in the West.
If you read it, pay close attention to the section that talks about how the main mechanism of the fraud, the test kit, was developed in Italy in cooperation with the communist Chinese.
It wasn’t long ago MI5 admitted the communist Chinese has infiltrated Westminster.
“In the words of Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate Covid models that sent the world into a tailspin:
A single sentence said it all – I will never forget it.
The fact that Ferguson felt so secure in uttering it says it all really – that his position, and that of those he advised was unchallengeable, and that he can have had so little cop on to let the cat out of the bag like that in a televised interview – so what does that say about the quality of his modeling?
Great article BTW. You are right – one of the best DS has linked to
‘The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible’…
Are they talking about India or the UK?
And where was the header picture taken – West Bromwich or Bethnal Green?
Countries with reliable reporting systems, if not with reliable reporting, are showing mostly little above average, or even below.
Nobody in authority tells the truth.
What is also highly suspicious is that the evil cretinous scientists are claiming the spike in hepatitis in children may be linked to pet dogs.
Let’s ignore the fact the world has been forced to lockdown over the last two years while politicians (and undoubtedly the scientists themselves) partied and carried on with their lives as normal.
No they need a scapegoat and they want to destroy another joy we have in our lives.
I’ve meanwhile read a couple of arguments that keeping of pets should be prohibited because it would be to damaging the the climate.
Yes it’s quite clear the great reset includes stripping us of pets. Well they can fuck off with their fraud. I will be buying a pup within the next few months.
Can’t heklp but suspect they are taking the lead from China, where pets have been killed byt “the authorities” when forcing their owners into quarantine.Presumably they saw that it was yet another effective way to demoralise people.
I’m sure you might remember in the early days of the covid scam, the dodgy scientists were talking about pets being carriers of covid. Such warnings fizzled away from the scientists poisonous lips, but the memory remained.
Maybe they realised this was one step too far too soon and didn’t pursue it.
Maybe it was the first nudge, while the hepatitis theory is the second nudge, and perhaps the third nudge will be the final one where they’ve effectively granted themselves permission to confiscate our pets ‘for our own safety’.
They will have deemed the public suitably brainwashed by this point to be more willing to give up their beloved dog.
Do you think the famous dog owners among TPTB will be “giving up” their dogs? or having them forcibly taken from them?
The WHO has made healthcare in the 1st world countries worse, they should stick to countries who actually need them
What we had here may have made developed country healthcare worse than typical care in India or Africa.
Anyone involved in the flogging of the fake vaccines is lying. Don’t believe a word they say and do not get any more jabs. You put your health and life at risk with this poison.
Anything these monsters want is for certain not anything you want.
Indeed; all in accordance with the UN policy of population reduction.
Recent BBC Article on Excess Death – Explained from the DATA!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oq8-mOldEg
Remember, whatever nonsense they try to impose upon us in the future:
JUST SAY NO!
Highly suspect organisation produces highly suspect data. Well, that’s a surprise – NOT
The WHO is clearly one of our enemy within. Anything that they publish is to be treated with suspicion and extreme scepticism. A truly evil organisation; same as the UN and WEF.
Thank you for an excellent article.The WHO figures is based on a model which is absurd for countries with reliable real world data.Look at the Nordic countries with reliable data and Sweden with the world’s oldest and also the world’s most reliable death data.How many non discovered deaths of covid in a country with the most reliable death statistics did WHO find with their model? So many that they said Sweden was highest in the Nordic countries.
Nordic countries don’t need WHO estimates.They have real data.See below age stand. adjusted excess mortality.Sweden below Denmark,Finland(both LD the latter more so)and Norway lowest.
Do you believe Nordic raw data or WHO model?
‘He who pays the piper plays the tune’….Gates has his song sheet and the “terrible” pandemic narrative must be kept uppermost in minds.
India used Ivermectin to treat Covid patients so it’s very important to the WHO that India is identified as having one of the worst outcomes from the Scamdemic.
The WHO has to punish India for using Ivermectin and undermining the “WHO Official” view that Ivermectin doesn’t work.
I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but didn’t Japan also se ivermectin?
But they still believe China on 5,000 deaths???
Doesn’t make sense.
But having said that none of the ‘rona crap makes any sense.