Recent headlines would have us believe that 2022 was an unusually deadly year. “1,000 excess deaths each week as the NHS buckles,” boomed the Times. “Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years,” thundered the BBC. “Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high,” bellowed the Guardian.
The Times article is particularly illustrative. “Excluding the pandemic years, 2022 brought the highest excess deaths total since 1951,” it claims. What’s more, “Covid accounts only for a minority of recent extra deaths” which means “the crisis in the NHS is killing hundreds of people a week”.
None of this is true. Or if it is, it’s highly misleading.
The error stems, as I’ve mentioned numerous times both here and elsewhere, from ignoring age-structure – from using the absolute number of deaths, rather than the age-standardised mortality rate. It’s the same error the media has been making all the way through the pandemic.
Like most developed countries, Britain has an ageing population. The percentage of people in older age-groups is increasing. This means the percentage of people at high-risk of dying is increasing. And when the percentage of people at high-risk of dying goes up, the absolute number of deaths rises too.
If we don’t adjust for population ageing when estimating the level of mortality, we’ll erroneously conclude that the current year was more deadly than previous years. To quote an article I wrote back in January of 2021:
Demographers typically use age-adjusted measures when comparing mortality rates over time or across countries. Simply adjusting for total population is insufficient. For example, Mexico and Japan have approximately the same total population. Although the risk of dying at any age is lower in Japan — as reflected by its higher life expectancy — there are actually fewer deaths each year in Mexico (at least ordinarily) because of its younger population.
So what happens if we look at the age-standardised mortality rate? The latest numbers for England and Wales were just published by the ONS:
The population-weighted age-standardised mortality rate in England and Wales was 953 per 100,000. While this was higher than in 2019, it was lower than in 2021, 2020, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013 and every year before that. In other words, 2022 was the third least-deadly year ever.
2022 doesn’t do quite as well on excess mortality – age-adjusted excess mortality to be specific. But the level recoded was far from unprecedented. Going back to 2006 (which isn’t particularly far), it had the fourth-highest excess mortality after 2020, 2021 and 2015.
Remember what the Times claimed? “Excluding the pandemic years, 2022 brought the highest excess deaths total since 1951.” We can now write our own version: excluding the pandemic years, 2020 brought the highest age-adjusted excess mortality level since… 2015.
It’s also worth noting that even though 2022 had the fourth-highest excess mortality since 2006, it was still negative: last year’s age-standardised mortality rate was lower than the five-year average from 2015–2019. Hardly cause for panic.
I don’t doubt there are problems in the NHS, but claiming it’s in “crisis” because of elevated excess deaths, when 2022 was the third least-deadly year ever, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Stop Press: The Kraken isn’t all its cracked up to be. According to the ONS, the number of people infected in England and Wales declined by a third if you compare the week ending January 10th with the previous week. MailOnline has more.
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“said the inquiry should be “automatic” and should focus on whether there was a “delay” to announcing the first lockdown last March”
nothing like presuming the result of an enquiry!
Yes let’s put the government on trial but we already know the outcome. Excuse me Mr speaker when was any health advise correct? All the models have been over stated 11 times what they actually were. All the evidence of a pandemic, ie cases have been incorrectly collected, the pcr test is not fit for purpose. Every lockdown had ZERO effect on death or infections. Lockdown caused massive harms to the economy and people’s mental health. Children have been stigmatised and traumatised over something that has zero effect on them. Yes let’s not look at any of this evidence let’s just talk about if we could have done it earlier. What a fucking shitshow!! Hang them!!!
Enquiry should be launched as soon as possible. So not in my lifetime then.
It works both ways. If the enquiry starts quickly, it will effectively give all the politicians and SAGE a very convenient “get out of jail card”, as their response to every challenge will be to insist that “we will have to wait for the outcome of the enquiry”. Then, in true Civil Service style, the government will ensure that the terms of reference of the enquiry will be so broad that it won’t be in a position to complete its deliberations during the political and academic careers of all the main players. It’s all so predictable.
Did these cretins all get secretly lobotomized when they are sworn into office, or is it a prerequisite?
There are no more words left to describe the level of stupidity involved in claiming that we should have locked down earlier. All the evidence shows that the only potential way that locking down earlier could have had anything but a devastating impact would be if all borders had been 100% closed before the bat-cold arrived. Since it probably arrived undetected in 2019 (since it was mild enough to be identified as cold/flu), even this was never an option.
There were legions of people who were sick as hell in December 2019 (and probably November 2019). So this does raise the question of how ALL the “public health” agencies in the world “missed” this new virus. Or maybe not, as it did resemble a flu-type virus with most symptoms (but not all).
In America, the CDC estimates that as many as 55 million Americans had an ILI (“influenza like illness”) in the “flu season” of 2019-2020. Say the real number of “sick” people was 35 million. If just 10 percent of these people who were sick with something (that wasn’t the flu) that would still give us 3.5 million people who likely/possibly had COVID in the heart of this flu season (roughly mid-November through January).
Many of these people later did get an antibody test in an effort to ascertain if what they thought might have been COVID really was COVID. But these people didn’t start getting these antibody tests in large numbers until May – which would have been four, five or six months AFTER these people experienced their COVID-like symptoms. And studies show that in 84 percent of people, COVID antibodies have faded to undetectable levels in two months.
So all these “negative” antibody tests do NOT rule out that at least a fair percentage of these people may have really had COVID. Plus, there were people who were sick in November and December who DID test “positive’ for antibodies in May.
Were ALL these positive antibody tests wrong? If they weren’t, how did these people get COVID … in November? Who gave it to them? Did they not give it to anyone else?
I’m sure i had the same thing along with my wife in Nov / Dec, both so ill, and it was as close to a bad influenza as we could get..
2008 i had an influenza that actually woke me up at night,i had to call my parents on the phone (from the room next door) to come help me, 4 weeks it took me to get back to feeling normal.
Anyways, if it was here before March, which is highly likely, its not reflected in the ONS stats. Apart from the 2nd week of January, the following 8 to 10 weeks all cause mortality, is below its 5 year average.
Lockdown comes and.. Well.. You know the rest
My wife had all the symptoms mid December 2019. No proof it was covid of course because we would have been laughed at had we turned up to the GP/hospital and asked to be tested for a seasonal illness.
Exactly.
We had it here in not inconsiderable numbers. The kicker is that it was followed by relatively low levels of Official Covid suggesting a lot of people became immune. Same pattern elsewhere, how about the rest of the world?
The inquiry’s foregone conclusions will serve to justify the next, this time, early, Lockdown.
Surely: a pre-requisite to be a politician and then be ‘elevated’ to the House of Lords for being nothing more than a parasite on the nation’s taxpayers requires no brain, no self awareness and a total lack of any knowledge outside the goings on in the Westminster Bubble? But maybe Fowler, who was the Secretary of State for Health during the HIV/AIDS hysteria does know what he’s talking about NOT
Enquiry won’t be worth reading in full then! It’s already had its agenda set
As “Sir Humphrey” explained to “Jim Hacker”… “Never announce an enquiry before you know exactly what its conclusions will be”.
Will be an embarrassing whitewash –
And the report already written, ready for speedy publication. In summary “It wasn’t us Guv’nor, no one is to blame it’s institutional, asymptomatic lack of common sense”
Exactly it’s going to be a WHITEWASH whatever happens.
I would not trust any enquiry set up by establishment interests. (see Iraq). Whilst there are different establishment factions, ultimately they’re all in the same gang and follow the same script.
What a dummkopf. “Best medical advice”. Medical advice wasn’t very good, was it? And it wasn’t actually very medical either. Anyway, the decisions are POLITICAL and that involves tradeoffs and weighing balance of harms.
The best medical advice at the time, and still is, the opposite of what was done.
OK, so it may focus on whether there was a delay. Although the parameters appear to have been set, it could be a forum in which there may be a possibility that issues around, for example, the PCR test can be raised – if the right people are involved.
So there is a slim possibility here of a brilliant counter-con on those who have conned us. It is, of course, an outside chance, but we don’t get many chances to crack these nuts.
There is no major political or judicial force that understands (or admits to understanding) what madness has been perpetrated – not in the UK and hardly any globally. Just the governors of a few red US states. The chances of an enquiry that genuinely wants to get to the truth are zero, because almost everyone involved will want their role in it to be vindicated. The only arguments will be about execution of the strategy, not about whether it was the right one.
Whitewash
Waste of time
Waste of paper
Waste of taxpayer money
Would achieve nothing
Would be made of yes men and women
Exactly, why bother the agenda has already been set. More money pissed up the wall. As if the government haven’t done enough of that already.
An inquiry could be politically useful, as it would allow the government to pretend that it was prepared to learn from past mistakes. There must be a way in which people who believe they have lost loved ones because of lockdown can be represented at an inquiry. This would probably be the best way of calling expert witnesses who are prepared to present the scientific evidence against lockdown.
That will be outside the terms of reference.
It will be used to further solidify their lies. We’ll see government ministers getting a slap on their wrists for not being authoritarian enough. I reckon we’ll see a sacrificial lamb in the shape of Madcock to stir up drama.
Yes we should have locked down earlier like the Czech Republic, how did that pan out in the autumn??
Or Peru whose lockdown was very early and harsh, and which was subsequently, like the Czech Republic, top of the global per capita COVID death rate chart for a while. Also, New Zealand didn’t lock down particularly early, and they are considered saintly
Day 403 of 21 days to flatten the curve.
Should we have locked down sooner? Pretty sure the answer is No.
The government should have stopped all inbound flights from China, then Italy, rather than locking everyone in their homes. But that would have been “raaacist.”
No. It would just have been pointless.
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/04/30/public-inquiry-into-governments-handling-of-covid-should-be-launched-as-soon-as-possible-says-lord-fowler/#comment-489422
In the UK the masses have willfully submitted to the experimental Covid19 ’emergency use only’ injections, even though it is clear and a matter of scientific fact thanks to John Ioannidis that there is and never was a genuine emergency or anything like as serious as they are describing. We have since learned that the WHO, a criminal/captured entity, changed the definition of what constitutes a “pandemic” around the time of the 2009 Swine Flu Hoax.. Until then, a pandemic could only be declared if an illness involved a remarkable level of death and serious illness and spread. They changed that so they could effectively declare a pandemic as and when they felt like it, no need for it to be a serious threat to our health.
Why the WHO Faked a Pandemic
https://web.archive.org/web/20100208182828/https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/05/world-health-organization-swine-flu-pandemic-opinions-contributors-michael-fumento.html
Everything they have done has been completely unreasonable and has been based on fabricated lies, not mistakes. The public have been so taken in by the lies that they have taken experimental injections to save them from an illness they have as good as zero risk of dying from or getting seriously ill from with no questions asked. It’s possible they might apply a bit more caution when faced with injecting their kids. This could lead to them seeing how crazy it all is and to consider that they may have made a mistake, which they should not repeat on their kids. Do they really want their kids to be experimented on when they have absolutely zero risk from Covid?
This presents an opportunity to let them know what the truth is about the staus of the vaccines (not licenced, still under trial) and how it is highly unethical, dangerous and wrong on just about every level to inject people en masse when these injections are still under trial and not even fully tested on animals. We can let them know that in Nazi Germany, they did medical experiments and afterwards it was agreed that this is completely unacceptable and the Nuremberg Laws were drawn up to prevent this kind of thing happening again. While research can be conducted, it must be done with the full consent of the subject who must be made aware of all potenital dangers. People have been lied to, plain and simple, in the UK, about being experimented on with the Covid jabs. They have been told repeatedly, by Doctors and Ministers and people in authority, that everything has been fully tested and that it’s all safe. Well the trials don’t finish until 2023, for what they are injecting, so this is a total lie which miust be exposed. It is totally fraudulent to claim these injections are safe. It is also very dangerous to claim they are safe, to trick people into taking the injections by saying they are safe when it is 100% established fact that they are still under trial and the animal phases were skipped leading straight to human testing.
They need to understand that Coronavirus vaccines have never been licenced as they caused worsening of disease in animal trials where vaccinated animals got more ill than they otherwise would have done when later challenged with the wild virus, with some actually dying, all because of the vaccine.
Informed consent disclosure to vaccine trial subjects of risk of COVID‐19 vaccines worsening clinical disease
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijcp.13795
Couple that with the fact that the mRNA technology they are using is just as controversial, has also never been licenced or advanced beyond animal trials and has many serious potential health implications, and it really is a recipe for disaster.
People need to understand that Covid19 is only a serious risk to people who are very elderly or who are already very ill. There can be exceptions but this is unusual, most people have natural immunity which serves them fine, like it does with all the other things we face in day to day life. The cost of what we are doing far outweighs any benefit because the threat from Covid19 is actually very low, just like a regular flu which comes around every year liike clockwork. Sometimes we have worse flus than others for various reasons, but this is all part of nature. There is no rational justification for all the harm we are doing in the doomed, pointless quest to destroy Covid19.
Powerfully put!
I believe every journalist, who has penned an article about the “vaccines” without giving prominent mention to their experimental status, is complicit in the crime against humanity. No exemption should be granted for the word “sceptic” occurring in the name of the publication.
Agreed, especially Sean O’Grady from the Independent who, as many LS readers will recall, said that he would make the ‘vaccination’ compulsory for schoolchildren. Julius Streicher was a journalist and look what happened to him.
The only way a “lockdown” of society MIGHT have stopped the “spread” of this virus is if it had been implemented world-wide on, say, November 1st, 2019.
The virus horse had escaped to at least the next county by the time the barn door was closed in March 2020.
There is evidence it was in Europe in the summer of 2019 – found in waste water treatment plants in Spain.
As Jim Hacker said in “Yes, Minister”: “We don’t want a public inquiry. We want to find out what went wrong”.
Yes, let’s get an inquiry under way sharpish.
A well conducted whitewash will clear the decks for the next phase of the Reset and with all the current genocidal criminals exonerated it will be full steam ahead.
Also well put.
This seems to be a close-minded attempt to pre-frame the scope of the inquiry, by assuming that early lockdown was the only correct action and persisting in the narrative that a single action at the right time would have fixed everything.
An honest inquiry would focus on a more open-ended question, such as “based on the available evidence what can we learn about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of the actions taken by the government and SAGE to manage the Covid situation?”
Of course, that’s far too much like a scientific inquiry and would never be permitted to happen
Why don’t we have another enquiry into the Iraq War while we’re at it, to find out whether we should have started it earlier?
or an enquiry into the enquiry
The only Public Enquiry I want is in a Court of Law for these criminals.
I totally agree
It’s been over a year since it start and over 6 months since vaccination started to put a sudden stop to it.
I nearly missed the irony, and down-voted that! Must be getting past my bed time.
Yawn. What’s the betting they (meet their puppet masters requirements to) come out with – ‘Should have locked down SOONER, HARDER, LONGER’. And when I say Yawn I actually me ftfo
Might not because that would be presented as vindication for Starmer and Labour.
The mainstream media loves the narrative of locking down too late because it creates an opportunity to stick it to politicians, whilst also giving themselves the all clear. As in, ‘Dont look at us! We did all we could under the circumstances’. The real truth will implicate them as enablers and that just won’t do! It could be generations before the media have the guts to let the truth rise to the surface
It’s the false binary trick. If we’re all arguing over whether the lockdown was early enough or not, we’re accepting the notion that a lockdown was the correct solution.
A trick that only the very stupid could fall for. What a nonsense
MSM were Enablers – that is exactly right. A fiasco that has and will have is already having dire health and economic consequences.
The whole UK political system is utterly corrupted beyond repair.
Though it is only a local election coming up, this is our first chance to tell the bastards what we think of their criminal conspiracy. If you’ve not completed your paper vote yet, I urge you to vote ‘NONE‘.
It is only a partial election. The shire counties had theirs 2 years ago so we don’t get a vote next week.
Yea and we only get to vote for some poxy useless Police and Crime Commissioner – what a bloody joke that is!
Police and Crime Commissioners, Regional Mayors. My arse! Just another excuse to elect ineffectual and failed politicians to get their snouts in the trough for another four years. Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE! On may 6th.
Even more reason to vote: NONE.
Done that.
Slightly o/t but had bozo started lockdown 2. earlier, ie cancelled Xmas altogether, it might have lent credence to his ridiculous claim that ‘it was the lockdown wot done it’ in reference to the ‘second spike’ coming down.
I’ll save us some time and money here. Any inquiry will find that BoJo and his government acted like pusillanimous, panicky, populist cretins (albeit paraphrased) but that, given that the whole of the rest of the world did likewise, they can’t really be blamed for that.
It is a very great pity that this truly excellent video will never be shown on mainstream tv. It absolutely sums up what is happening to the psyche of the masses.
https://youtu.be/fdzW-S8MwbI
This is brilliant thank you a MUST WATCH!
…or maybe we should have an enquiry to see if Boris should have decorated his room 3 weeks earlier.
The enquiry MUST take place as soon as possible, before the full extent of the damage done by lockdown can be quantified.
The only thing worse than a fool is an old fool like Lord Fowler. He wants to start the enquiry with the belief that LD should have been done earlier.
We’ll never beat these entrenched views no matter how much we try.
Any enquirey should be totally independant but we all know it won’t be.
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.Well it appears that the government tore up and binned the accepted battle plan for dealing with an influenza type pandemic before it even had time to contact the enemy.
Why hold a public inquiry based on a pre-arranged conclusion? i.e that Covid spread in the UK was all the result of Boris not locking down soon enough. No attempt to get to the actual facts i.e China’s role in covering up the virus spread, NHS lack of preparedness, poor advice given by SAGE (from the start and ongoing), WHO flip flopping (masks?) or the absence any effort to discover whether lockdowns work or not. It was just assumed that they did.
Does anyone believe that a public inquiry of the type proposed will be anything other than a platform for members of the zero covid cult to spread more of their vile narrative and to put down a marker for imposing even more draconian measures e.g in case there is an outbreak of herpes caused by people failing to have stopped enjoying sex soon enough.
“China’s role in covering up the virus spread”
The west was pushing CIA-orchestrated regime change in Hong Kong right up to the increase in covid cases in mainland China. The West then switched to criticising China’s handling of the outbreak, putting them in a no-win position – either they treated it as they would normally then being accussed of doing nothing, or going over the top and being accused of a draconian response. The official Chinese position was that covid was bad but they had experienced worse eg multiple instances of pneumonic plague aroun d the same time. The Chinese also released their medical protocols for diagnosing the disease. They used two PCR tests taken at two weeks spacing plus a chest x-ray – on hospitalised, symptomatic individuals – as a means of confirming a preliminary symptom-based diagnosis. The single PCR test with count wound up to 50 for asymptomtic individuals seems to be a western construct – guaranteed to produce masses of false positives and make the situation seem worse than it actually was.
Covid ‘survivor’ Dec 2019-Jan 2020
Expect a total whitewash. Most will buy the inevitable “we needed to react quickly to a mystery viral outbreak, which looked like a Great Plague/ Ebola level threat”. We then “followed The Science” and continue to do so. ( In other words, “it wasn’t us, guv. It was the scientists wot dunnit”).