There have been 12,517 excess non-Covid deaths registered in England and Wales in the 14 weeks since April 23rd, according to the latest official data from the Office for National Statistics, released on Tuesday.
In the week ending July 29th, the most recent week for which data are available, 11,013 deaths were registered in England and Wales, which is 1,678 (18%) above the five-year average for the week. Of these, 810 mentioned COVID-19 on the death certificate as a contributory cause and 531 mentioned COVID-19 as underlying cause, leaving 1,147 deaths from a different underlying cause. Note that this was the week following the brief but intense heatwave (with recorded temperatures topping 40°C for the first time in some areas), so some of these will be heatwave deaths, as will many of the additional Covid deaths (being people who happened to have Covid at the time).
At the Daily Sceptic we have been following what appears to be a correlation between the spring fourth dose booster rollout among over-75s in England and a wave of now over 12,500 non-Covid excess deaths that are currently unexplained (see chart below).
If all of these deaths were a result of the spring boosters (of which 4,201,990 have been delivered up to July 29th) it would be a rate of one every 336 doses. That figure is likely an upper bound, as not all the additional deaths may be due to the boosters (some may be due to the pressures on hospitals and emergency services, for example). We saw last week that these U.K. data are broadly in line with data from the Netherlands analysed by vaccine scientist Dr. Theo Schetters.
Deaths by date of occurrence spiked even further in the week ending July 22nd, which is likely to be connected with the heatwave of July 18-19th. One oddity is that the spike began in the previous week, before the heatwave occurred, the reason for which is not immediately obvious. More generally, excess non-Covid deaths have remained at a high level as the spring vaccination campaign has wound down, meaning the close correlation has not continued. This may be an indication of ongoing vaccine injury, perhaps in conjunction with lasting effects from previous Covid infection, or of the operation of another cause which has not yet been identified.
As noted in previous weeks, the cause of the deaths appears to be largely related to diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Cancer deaths are, perhaps surprisingly given the withdrawal of healthcare access during the pandemic, broadly at normal levels, suggesting there is something other than lack of access to healthcare going on. The continued high level of excess deaths is unexpected as, following the 144,000 excess deaths of the last two and a half years, we would have anticipated a period of lower than average deaths. Oddly, the Government has shown no interest in investigating this. When Esther McVey MP, Chair of the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), submitted a written question asking the Cabinet Office what steps it was taking “to investigate the higher than expected rate of deaths of 12.2% above the five-year average”, it simply referred the matter to the U.K. Statistics Authority, which merely said it will continue to publish the relevant statistics.
Oxford Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine Dr. Carl Heneghan and his colleague Dr. Tom Jefferson have now joined the call for the Government to investigate these thousands of unexplained excess deaths, noting “we are not aware that the causes for the variations identified have been investigated, nor that there is a recognised threshold to trigger such an investigation”.
“This suggests a lack of interest,” they add, “and begs the question of why such data are collected in the first place. Nevertheless, the signals in the data suggest something is not quite right.”
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