Several of the articles I’ve written for the Daily Sceptic have come about from conversations I’ve either had or overheard. Today’s is no different. This time it was my mother-in-law saying, with some foreboding, that: “Things are getting very bad in China. They say 1 million people are going to die!” And, indeed she’s right, this is what much of the mainstream media are saying.
I don’t expect my mother-in-law has much idea what the population of China is. About 1.4bn, is the answer. Neither would she know how many people die annually in China in a normal year — why would she? It’s about 11m. Whilst my mother-in-law can be excused for not easily being able to put these figures in context, the same cannot be said for the BBC, CNN, Fox, the Telegraph, MSN, Bloomberg, Reuters, the Washington Post or the New York Times.
Cindy Yu, a journalist I have a lot of time for, wrote a piece in the Spectator that attributed the 1 million deaths figure to an un-named Hong Kong university. But her article, like so many others, made no attempt to contextualise this number. I think my mother-in-law can be forgiven for having failed to do so also.
Since Cindy Yu’s Spectator article we’ve had Gordon Chang in the Telegraph telling us that 2.1m may die. Gordon’s got a book to flog titled The Coming Collapse of China, so you can understand he’s not a man to play down China’s local difficulty. Then, as this game of ‘top trumps’ really heats up, we’ve had Amol Rajan on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on January 5th 2023, during a discussion with Professor Rana Mitter of Oxford University, no less, a China expert, speculating that deaths would be in the tens of millions!
Let’s see if we can shed a little light on the figures.
Data from the UN suggest that 7.8 people per 1,000 Chinese die every year. It seems low to me but let’s go with it. If a million people were to die of Covid this year, then that figure would go up to 8.5 per 1,000. Of course, just like everywhere else, the profile of those 7.8 per 1,000 dying in a normal year tend to be very elderly, frail, with multiple comorbidities. Well, that extra 0.7 person per 1,000 dying will also tend to be very elderly, frail and with multiple comorbidities. Think of your village, town, city, suburb, whatever: if 8.5 people per 1,000 died one year rather than the usual 7.8, would you notice? Maybe, if you were an undertaker, you’d see a very busy spell, likewise for the hospitals. But for the man on the Guangdong omnibus, would he notice anything?
But how credible are these figures, 1m, 2.1m, 10m? You instinctively know that if it’s made the papers and it’s come from some Fergusonesque modeler with a pre-disposition to over-dramatise, it’s bound to represent an unlikely worst-case scenario, or in the case of the BBC’s Amol Rajan, simply plucked out of the air. Let’s apply the ‘sniff’ test to these numbers. Do any of them smell right?
If there were 1 million Covid deaths in China during this wave, that would mean about 714 deaths per million of population. 2.1m deaths would mean 1,500 deaths per million, and 10 million would mean over 7,000 deaths per million. Nowhere in the world has hit this level of deaths after three years and multiple waves.
Figure 1 shows the fatality rate in China’s neighbours, the U.S. and the U.K., according to Our World in Data.
The average cumulative fatality rate after three years of Covid in the Asian states is about 500 per million. The implied China fatality rate from 1 million deaths would put China ahead of its neighbours. The figure looks to be on the high side, but credible. The 2.1 million deaths would put it three times higher. The fact that China is now battling the relative pussycat that is the Omicron variant, rather than the more full-throated varieties that India dealt with back in 2021, reinforces my view that China is more likely to be at the lower end of the Asian range than the top. My guess would be in the range of 500,000 to 700,000 deaths.
The 2.1 million forecast of Gordon Chang looks like scaremongering. Figure 2 gives you an idea of how far off the scale the 2.1 million figure would be. Why should China buck the regional trend? Is Chinese society so very different from Vietnam’s? If the cumulative rate in Vietnam is 439 per million, and India’s 374 per million, why should China’s be significantly higher? Vaccines?
Defenders of the vaccines may claim that China’s failure to vaccinate its 1.4 billion people with mRNA vaccines makes it more vulnerable than the neighbouring countries. However, looking at figure 3 we can see that after these countries had injected more than one dose of vaccine per person, rather than the fatality rate reducing, it accelerated.
It doesn’t seem that the Chinese need to worry over-much about not having deployed the mRNA vaccines.
No one trusts the Chinese data, so it seems likely we’ll never know how the relaxation of measures will work out. There’s clearly a fine line the Chinese Community Party (CCP) needs to walk. Overdramatise the deaths and people will feel betrayed by the relaxing of rules. Allow a bit of openness and by the end of the Chinese New Year holidays the people will realise that they can’t identify any significant difference to normal, and they’ll see what a paper tiger Covid truly was and wonder what they’ve just spent three years locked up for. Either way, it looks like a tricky task for the CCP to spin this to its advantage.
Think back to May 2021, the media went into a frenzy over deaths in India, while at the same time the official fatality rate in Poland was about seven times greater. The media is a lot more interested in shedding more heat than light.
Cindy Yu’s piece in the Spectator tells us that many of the big cities already seem to be coming out of the latest Covid wave. Traffic is up, cinemas are reopening. It sounds like the people are beginning to make their own risk assessment. Maybe the Swedish approach has won out after all.
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Being a globalist has nothing whatever to do with faith. I did noit know Schapps was jewish and I don’t care, he was incompetent as Transpiort Secretary and he has been disruptive fopr a long time. He has always valued a press release or interview higher than doing his job. Maybe that is why DVLA performed so badly under his watch.
I can see no reason whatsoever why jewish people would not value the independence of the country as much as anyone else in the UK. Globalisation is not free trade (which I support with few restrictions or qualifications) but globalisation has come to mean:
1 surrendering our self government to unelected, unknown, international socialists who develop theor policy at our expense in secret.
2 unlimited mass migration of poor ill educated masses to places which have evolved greater social infrastructure and a capacity for greater output per head, which the poor in the recipient countries are expected to suffer for.
Neither did I. He’s such an unimpressive individual that none of us know the first thing about him!
So true!
Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are the two names most people would cite when asked to describe a Globalist.
I don’t believe that either man is Jewish.
Both could do with a little chop , if they haven’t already
I wasn’t aware that being a lackey of the WEF and following an agenda that uses climate change as the rationale for eradicating cash payments, eroding basic freedoms and giving governments and corporations almost unlimited power over citizens, had anything to do with Judaism or any other religion.
There’s a Jonathan Miller joke from the Sixties that comes to mind…
Now go away and get our shrubbery or we shall say “anti-Semitic” at you again.
Ah, “the age old anti-Semitic trope that sees the Rothschilds running the world’s media and the global banking system.”
Why is that anti-Semitic? It’s clearly assumed as a given in the article. The Rothschilds had inordinate influence in the banking systems of their day and were instrumental in the relationships between governments and private banks through their so-called independent central banks. They brought the model to the US through their non-Jewish counterparts Morgan and Rockefeller and eventually established the Federal Reserve on Jekyll Island. This same cabal of bankers control the world’s money supply through the IMF, World Bank, central banks in each country and the fractional reserve system which allows them to create debt money out of nothing and give it to their cronies through quantitative easing. These are age old dynastic banking empires that bear the names of their patriarchs in the firms they operate under. One of the big names happens to be Jewish.
What does this have to do with being anti-Jewish or having anything against the Jewish race? Few of the top banking families today are actually Jewish, especially at the top. Why does the name Rothschild allow our whole system of financial corruption to be shrouded by the fig leaf of the Holocaust?
Or are we really that easily discouraged from asking?
Sadly ‘anti-semitic’ has become a catch-all defence against any threats to the status quo, easily invoked because some Jews inevitably occupy positions of power. Regrettably this is also a strategy used by Israel whenever anyone criticises its policies. It’s a dangerous game; both cheapening and normalising anti-semitism, crying wolf, and running the risk of creating greater hostility and mistrust for the very group it pretends to defend.
yes before the first world war the Rothschilds were influential. when I started working in the City they were one of a number of merchant banks, all of whom were even then lightly capitalised by international standards, and of no particular reputation except for their name.so when Rothschilds are so often still mentioned when discussing international finance one must wonder whether the writer does not know the names of any others or it is intended to be anti semitic although it is debateable how many of the present lot of that family regards themselves as Jewish having married out so much
I think there is a perception that Jews are over-represented in international finance and have a tendency to be clannish. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know but there are plenty of instances of particular races being over -represented in particular sectors and probably behaving clannishly which is a natural human trait. If we can’t discuss whether these things are true or not and whether they matter then it’s hard to talk about the world in any sensible manner, while at the same time being conscious of where such reasoning might lead – but that can’t be an excuse to shut down debate and silence people you don’t like.
An antisemite is someone who proposes, implements or agrees with an antisemitic policy, ie one targetting Jews because they’re Jews. That’s the only sensible definition of the term. Any use other use of it is just another case of the tried and trusted American (of course) tactic of substituting (hysterical/ alarmist) name calling and guilty-by-association fallacies for political arguments. In the given context, it basically means Farrage is A Really Evil Guy[tm] and as All Good People Must Shun Really Evil Guys[tm] unless they want to become really evil guys themselves, what he actually said doesn’t matter anymore.
As a Jew, I would like an explanation of the opening sentence, ‘As a Jew that observed the Corbyn years with horror, I’ve developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to resurgent anti-Semitism.’
I would like to know what resurgent anti-semitism the author is referring to. What I observed was a relentless politically-motivated and very obvious smear campaign against a politician who, for all his manifest flaws, is categorically not anti-semitic. Reluctant to read the rest of the article with that ill-informed opener.
Yes I can’t stand Corbyn or his politics but that particular accusation against him never seemed all that credible to me.
His brother Piers on the other hand is carrying out sterling work on our behalf regarding upholding our rights and freedoms.
“RESIST DEFY DO NOT COMPLY!!!”
For god’s sake, let’s get this whole anti-semitism out in the open shall we? It is not anti-semitic to dislike someone of Jewish origin or to insult someone of Jewish origin. It IS anti-semitic to dislike someone because they are Jewish or insult someone because they are Jewish. There is a huge difference. The term anti-semitic is explained in the actual words used in the term as in ‘against semites’. So, it follows that it’s not anti-semitic to support the right for Palestinians to have their own country – something that is often cited as an extreme form of anti-semitism. It’s not, it’s just a way that Jewish nationalists prevent a large body of people (potential enemies now) having their own country on one’s own doorstep – having systematically taken away those people’s lands since 1948 in the first place. That’s not anti-semitic, by the way, that’s what actually happened. I personally didn’t like the way it happened but I have no problem with people being Jewish. It is what is done in their name that I don’t like and then the way that that is weaponised so no one has the right to criticise the state of Israel, which is absolute nonsense. Everyone has a right to a homeland as the Jewish people did when they carved out the state of Israel. For Jewish groups to pounce on Nigel Farage for being anti-semitic for calling out Grant Shapps as a ‘globalist’ is just ridiculous because Shapps IS a globalist who also happen tp be Jewish. Farage didn’t call him out for being ‘Jewish’ did he? Case closed.
I think it should be stronger than that: An antisemite is someone who wants to persecute Jews, who is persecuting Jews or who believes that Jews ought to be persecuted. That’s more than a mere dislike. Eg, I dislike football and football fans. But I’m perfectly ok with the the fact that both exist.
Fair enough, better description, RW.
No one ever thought about the slippery sh1thouse,s religious beliefs he’s just plain dodgy ! Didn’t he have an alias at some point intertwined with some nefarious business deals ! Actually he’d make a great MP , oh hang on …
It was from the infamous Alex Jones decades ago where I first heard the term globalist being used as a description and catch-all for the hidden hand running the gears behind the scenes. I guess I’m more interested in why these connections are becoming more frequented in the mainstream, usually the tactic was to simply ignore and leave it to the depths of the internet where any potential progress in the narrative never really gained traction or a critical mass of exposure to genuinely change perceptions, so why we’re now witnessing these powerful institutions running defence is the more pertinent question in my opinion.
Catherine Austin Fitts calls “them” Mr Global doesn’t she and I’m pretty sure she’s referencing the same elitist cartel pulling the strings. How any of this is anti-Semitic though I’ve no idea – it’s almost as if the propagandists are starting to believe the conspiracy narratives they told us were dangerous and ignore for our health themselves. What’s next – any criticism of the Israeli government to be considered anti-Semitic?
Along with many, I didn’t know anything about Shapp’s religion. He’s been one of many Transport Ministers, but one should note that Ministers in that department have to behave like steering a massive ship. Trying to get it to change course is hard work, with most of it’s policies built in under the direction of the Permanent Sec et al.
Schapps sounds vaccinated to me.
resurgent antisemitism from the Corby years, there’s a trope for a start
If people don’t want to be called Globalists, perhaps they shouldn’t behave like one.
Schwab’s book on the Great Reset singled out Brexit Britain and Trump US for criticism, while praising the EU, CCP, WHO and UN.
“Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.” – Ayn Rand