Has COVID-19 caused excess deaths? This might seem an odd question, as most people do not doubt that the answer is yes. However, a growing number on the sceptical side of the aisle have been questioning this recently. This is not necessarily because they don’t believe in viruses – most of them do – but sometimes because they think there is nothing special about SARS-CoV-2 and invariably because they think interventions such as lockdowns, faulty treatment protocols and vaccines are responsible for any deaths out of the ordinary.
The first thing to be said in response to this is that there definitely is something special about SARS-CoV-2. Namely, that it is the only known SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site – likely a feature it was given in a lab – which makes it unusually infectious. This essentially makes it like SARS-1 but far more transmissible.
A second thing to underline is that no one has yet shown any convincing relationship between policy interventions and deaths. Studies based on real-world data rather than modelling show that restrictions made little or no difference to outcomes. Here are five examples:
- “Full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.” “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine (Lancet) 25 (2020) 100464, July 21st, 2020.
- “We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behaviour, and small but adverse effects on the economy.” “Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Christopher R. Berry, Anthony Fowler, Tamara Glazer, Samantha Handel-Meyer, and Alec MacMillen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, April 13th, 2021.
- “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.” “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, November 19th, 2020.
- “Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.” “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. CESifo Economic Studies March 29th, 2021.
- “While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs.” “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, January 5th, 2021.
This means of course that lockdowns failed utterly as disease control. But it also means that no relationship was observed with increased deaths either. It is not the case that the places which imposed the harshest restrictions had the most deaths, nor that the places which eschewed restrictions had fewer deaths.
Consider Sweden: light restrictions in spring 2020, but a sizeable wave of excess deaths. And Germany: strict measures in spring 2020, but few excess deaths – though considerable excess in later waves. South Dakota imposed no restrictions in spring 2020 and had no excess deaths, yet then experienced a huge wave of mortality during the autumn (see below). Florida lifted all statewide restrictions in autumn 2020 and had a relatively mild winter, yet then saw a large wave of deaths the following summer. As per the above studies, nothing about these outcomes is explained by whether they did or did not have restrictions.
If all or most excess deaths during the pandemic were caused by interventions – and let’s bring treatment protocols into this as well now – then why did Germany and South Dakota have little or no excess deaths during spring 2020, but then considerable excess deaths later in the year? Why would interventions not kill in the spring but then do so in the autumn?
Some commentators blame overuse of ventilators for killing large numbers of people, and undoubtedly these killed some who would have survived otherwise. But the ventilator panic was entirely a first-wave phenomenon, spawned by ill-conceived treatment protocols out of China; it was over by June 2020. Germany had the same faulty Chinese treatment protocols as anywhere else, but it didn’t see a large spring wave like Lombardy, New York or London. But then later in the year, once people had stopped overusing ventilators, that’s when Germany and South Dakota saw their deaths. How can treatment protocols explain this any more than social interventions?
Other counterexamples include Australia and New Zealand, which imposed long and extreme restrictions and had the same faulty treatment protocols as anywhere else, but saw no spike in excess deaths in 2020 and 2021.
Dr. Jonathan Engler has stated that there is “no excess death observable until the emergency is declared” and he and others take this as further evidence that it is the emergency response that caused the excess deaths. But as a point of fact it is untrue that there is “no excess death observable until the emergency is declared”. Italy’s lockdowns started on March 8th but there were already excess deaths in the week prior to that (see below) and the ICUs were already full. It was the high number of deaths and hospitalised patients that prompted the Government to impose the lockdown.
Likewise, in New York City there were excess deaths in the week ending March 22nd (and again, ICUs were full), but the city didn’t lock down until the end of that week. The restrictions in these places were imposed in response to the rise in deaths and hospitalisations.
Dr. Engler asks why there was a lack of excess deaths before March 2020 when the virus had been circulating for months. The short answer is that this is likely a result of the virus mutating and not having yet reached the most transmissible, immune-evasive form in each context. Spread before February 2020 was at a low level and there were no explosive outbreaks.
Taking a step back, we need to recognise why it is so widely believed that a virus is responsible for most of the excess deaths. It’s not based on any single, fallible measure such as PCR testing, but on a host of factors that together build a clear picture. These factors are symptoms, PCR test positivity, LFT positivity, sequencing of viral genomes, hospitalisations, ICU admissions, Covid deaths, excess deaths and antibodies, which all rise and fall together during a Covid wave. This happens in each wave and in every country and region of the world, and the pattern always repeats. There is no other explanation for why this would happen. Let me illustrate with England, but the same could be shown for any country or region.
Here are data on Covid-like symptoms from the ZOE app.
Here is PCR positivity (percentage of PCR tests that are positive).
Here is the number of positive Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs), which were introduced towards the end of 2020.
Here are hospitalisations.
Patients in mechanical ventilation ICU beds.
Covid deaths (where Covid is mentioned on the death certificate as a cause of death).
Excess mortality.
Note that the sharper peak in excess deaths in the first wave compared to the second is mainly a result of the baseline in winter being higher, as shown below.
Here are antibodies (for 2021).
Here are the data from sequencing of viral genomes, with variants corresponding to each wave.
The close correspondence between these graphs is I’m sure obvious to anyone. The significance of that correspondence is that these are all showing different aspects of the same phenomenon, namely a viral outbreak that is causing a closely correlated rise in symptoms, PCR positives, LFT positives, variant genome detection, hospitalisations, ICU admissions, antibodies and deaths. No other cause for this multifactorial phenomenon is plausible. Thus we must conclude that excess deaths during the pandemic are to a large extent explained by the effects of the virus that is causing all these things. Some excess deaths will no doubt be due to interventions and faulty treatment protocols, and the impact of these should be investigated. But most will be due to the virus.
We must, of course, as sceptical inquirers, follow the evidence where it leads and challenge received wisdom. Nonetheless, I have been watching the recent rise of the Covid-doesn’t-cause-excess-deaths theory among sceptics with a growing sense of alarm. The views can be extreme. For instance, Denis Rancourt, whose analysis is often cited in defence of the view, states:
We conclude that a pandemic did not occur. We infer that persistent chronic psychological stress induced by the long-lasting Government-imposed societal and economic transformations during the Covid-era converted the existing societal (poverty), public-health (obesity) and hot-climate risk factors into deadly agents, largely acting together, with devastating population-level consequences against large pools of vulnerable and disadvantaged residents of the USA, far above pre-existing pre-Covid-era mortality in those pools.
In more recent articles, Dr. Rancourt has begun arguing that all excess deaths since 2021 are caused by the vaccines. For instance, Dr. Rancourt claims that all the excess deaths in India’s large Delta wave were due to the vaccines, giving a vaccine fatality rate of 1%. But in fact the correlation between vaccine doses and excess deaths in 2021 in India is very weak, and the graphs in his own report make this plain.
Here are excess deaths in India:
And here are vaccine doses.
Note the peak month for deaths is June, which is a month of little note for vaccines (see green horizontal line). There is no obvious relationship here at all, and certainly no warrant for supposing all the Delta wave deaths were vaccine deaths. While we know from other data the Covid vaccines are injuring and killing people, this is not something that can be easily seen in correlations with excess deaths.
Dr. Engler has argued that “it was the manner in which healthcare was delivered which was relevant to the death rate, not the spread of a virus” and his analysis has been picked up by others. Dr. Jessica Rose has stated that “what has taken place over the past few years is government-assisted termination of our elderly using such tools as the injections themselves, lethal cocktails of respiration depressing drugs upon declaration of ‘Covid positive status’, improper do not resuscitate (DNR) declarations and use and neglect (starvation and dehydration)”. It’s unclear how much of the excess deaths these analysts regard the non-viral causes to be responsible for, though the way they write seems to suggest much or all of it.
I agree that we need to look into the extent to which interventions may have made things worse. But it’s essential, for our own credibility and fidelity to the evidence, that we keep this in perspective. The main thing driving excess deaths over the last three years (well, 2020 and 2021 at any rate, 2022 is less clear) is the new SARS-like virus that was made highly infectious in a lab somewhere. It’s important to acknowledge this because the evidence for it – symptoms, test positivity (of two types), genomic analysis, hospitalisations, ICU admissions, deaths and antibodies – is so clear that denying it is a fast-track way to becoming instantly discredited in the eyes of anyone outside the small bubble of sceptics who have spent too long staring at graphs and playing with spreadsheets. If we want to be taken seriously in our reasoned, evidence-based opposition to lockdowns, masks, experimental vaccines and so on, then we don’t need to go making it easy for our enemies to smear and cancel us because we’ve started arguing that the waves of deaths that invariably accompany waves of infections are not in large part caused by a virus.
Update: This article has been corrected. An earlier version incorrectly implied that SARS-1 did not spread via aerosols.
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Written by the Guardian, Fauci, the MHRA, the WHO? Beyond illiterate.
The main thing driving excess deaths over the last three years (well, 2020 and 2021 at any rate, 2022 is less clear) is the new SARS-like virus
A more intelligent, sophisticated approach https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/covid-litigation-conference-next
The 60 K excess dead this past January just in Germany are pace the ‘science’ from scariants or probably the unstabbinated.
LDs worked.
The stabs worked so that is why 60 K died.
If only there were more LDs, Stabs and diapers…we cannot rule out….as we pretend to be ‘nuanced’ pedants and quacks, to take into consideration the mutations which destroy functionality which of course lead to scarier fakeiants…blah blah fake science.
What was the Rona death rate again Will? A rounding error?
Wrong and unfair, and the article you’ve linked to, whilst important, in no way supports nor contradicts the points made. The point is, the grievances and injustices suffered by most of the world’s population under the Covid tyranny are scandalous and egregious enough even if it was what could be called a pandemic. And the article was as much about public relations as it was about the specific circumstances (which let’s be honest, none of us are certain about – that’s why criminal investigations are needed). We’ve all had to repress our pet theories when talking to non-red-pilled friends and family. I think this is what Will is calling for; some restraint.
I get Will’s point and it’s a bit much to dismiss his piece as as good as written by Fauci.
But it does seem as if it is those on the reality based side of these arguments- anti covid tyranny, anti censorship – go to extreme lengths to measure their words and call out any of its own faux pas.
Meanwhile the pro tyranny side of the argument can exaggerate, obfuscate, attack, misrepresent with abandon with seemingly no consequences.
In the end the question which I haven’t fully resolved in my mind is whether this should be approached like a debate or a melee. If we are in a debate, then yes I guess it makes sense to measure ones words and let reasoned arguments prevail.
But this has so far been a melee. We have been overwhelmed by a tyrannical mob that has had no qualms about using the dirtiest, most dishonest tactics. Reasonable people appealing to decency and proper rules of engagement have been trampled and destroyed.
Maybe reasonableness will eventually prevail, but it might take a bloody long time.
Oh still, small voice of calm….
I am by no means an organised religion kinda guy, but some words of a famous hymn seem relevant here.
This is not particularly clear to me. I would like to see comment by someone like Professor Norman Fenton. So much depends on how statistics are put together and whether this is done in an attempt to make a particular case or in a genuine attempt to see what is happening. The stats themselves are misleading – showing percentage positive PCR tests for example misleadingly compares times when these were taken because an individual had symptoms and times when they were administered almost willy-nilly.
Here is my response to he the article:
https://www.normanfenton.com/post/what-really-caused-the-surge-in-covid-deaths-in-early-2022
An unashamedly dodgy segue but I think this is significant. Due to there being no public sequence data available for the bivalent death jabs that are being administered to kids, this guy ( and his team presumably ) decided to do the deed himself and discovered some very interesting results.
Note; this article gets *very* technical halfway through so I’ll just share the conclusion here;
”In summary, there is a paucity of public information on the sequence fidelity and nucleic acid purity used in these vaccines. To our knowledge, this is the first deep sequencing of these products and the first time expression plasmids have been discovered in the vaccines. These are potent contaminants in the vaccines being administered to children. Billions of these contaminants per injection is likely an under estimate of their the entire burden as these plasmids can self replicate in bacterial hosts. Multiple studies have demonstrated prolonged vaccine mRNA clearance. This could be the result of the m1Ψ in the mRNA or the transfection or transformation of DNA based expression vectors. The introduction of billions of antibiotic resistance genes in high copy replication competent plasmids should evoke concerns over accelerating global antibiotic resistance.”
https://anandamide.substack.com/p/curious-kittens
Think I’m doing him a disservice by referring to him as ”this guy”. Kevin McKernan has impressive credentials and his Twitter looks to be worth following.
https://twitter.com/Kevin_McKernan
Been following him for a couple of years, he’s very good. Also is host to a lovely cat.
Yes it was the beautiful Maine Coon that drew me in, like bait.
He is very good, I just don’t pretend to know what he’s on about half the time. 
Indeed, very cute fuzzy kitty.
Reposted & reviewed by Dr Jessica Rose too, her comments are worth reading:
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/contamination-with-antibioticspike
Thanks, that’s also a good read and she translates it into more layman’s terms. Yes, a recipient becomes an ”antibiotic resistant bacteria manufacturing plant” indeed. And I am firmly of the opinion that the manufacturers knew about this, despite their proven poor manufacturing standards. Immunosuppression of the masses ( already happened of course ) would suit them as an objective. And the thing is, even if Big Pharma didn’t know about this contamination, they do now, and it’s taken an independent researcher to bring this to the public’s attention, so let’s see how long it takes for them to defend/explain this publicly shall we, and then recall all of the bivalent crud. I’m thinking pigs will be preparing for launch first.
Wow. Thanks for sharing!
Trouble is, nothing makes any obvious sense. We’re still stumbling around in the dark as to what happened.
If it’s the virus then why the delay in the first wave in Germany until the autumn, unlike in comparable counties and regions? What possible mechanism can explain this? Or is the problem here just in how the prevalence of the virus was measured?
Will writes:
we need to recognise why it is so widely believed that a virus is responsible for the excess deaths. It’s not based on any single, fallible measure such as PCR testing, but on a host of factors that together build a clear picture, namely the fact that symptoms, PCR test positivity, LFT positivity, sequencing of viral genomes, hospitalisations, ICU admissions, Covid deaths, excess deaths and antibodies all rise and fall together during a Covid wave.
Thing is, excess deaths aside, all those parameters can be, and we know were, fiddled. And they were inconsistently measured in across different countries, making comparisons almost impossible. Was a patient in hospital or ICU because of or merely with covid? Died with or of? We don’t know, but we do know the data was fiddled.
All we are left with is excess deaths.
I think we need a more focussed analysis. The reports Will cites attempt to correlate excess mortality with non-pharmaceutical interventions (e.g. lockdowns).
I think this is something of a false trail. we need to concentrate on iatrogenic measures implemented in each country and any association with excess deaths.
As a caveat to my post, I guess another parameter which isn’t so easily fiddled is the antibody seroprevalence rate in blood donors.
Couple of points concerning the graph of seroprevalence (‘Figure 8’)_ which Will gives above.
First, I’m not sure of the year on the x axis? Don’t know if I’ve missed this.
Second, what can be inferred from this graph except that there was a respiratory virus passing steadily through the population over that year. In fact, this data appears to contradict the picture presented in the testing/hospitalisation/deaths graphs presented about, which of course show strong ‘evidence’ (if that’s the right word) for distinct viral waves.
In short, is the seroprevalence data actually evidence that the waves of deaths were not necessarily associated largely with covid?
I’d welcome any comments/corrections on this.
As an aside, I’m not sure what the sequencing of viral genomes graph contributes to the argument? Again, any enlightenment would be welcome.
May I be so bold as to suggest that if we can only really detect that deaths within a population are unusually high by meticulously plotting graphs and trying to identify anomalies in trend lines, then maybe deaths are not that high and we should just stop obsessing over it and get on with life?
I put it to DS readers that the main purpose of these official statistics is to create the illusion that those in power (a) know what is going on and (b) can control the system.
A couple of simple question: the next GDP report, is the figure going to be revised up or down or stay the same? Is excess death in the UK for the month of Feb going to be up or down?
None of us can answer these questions despite the fact that the events are playing out in front of our eyes right now. For all intents and purposes, it’s undetectable from our day to day experience. So then, does it matter?
I think your points are well made, but I think it matters if billions of public money are being spent on vaxxes that kill people, and that these vaxxes were forced on people and are still being publicised. As a minimum there should be a proper investigation into this.
Couldn’t agree more.
The real life consequences of government profligacy are very apparent to me daily in the various taxes I am forced to pay and which seem only to increase in size and number.
There seem to be millions of people for whom the nanny state is like an addictive drug. I wish I could go and live somewhere with people who think the state should do as little as possible.
Thanks for thoughtful post.
But doesn’t every piece of evidence say that excess deaths are running well high right now?
And doesn’t the evidence tell us that something was going wrong with deaths in spring 2020, be it a virus or some other cause?
And thus aren’t we duty-bound to try to work out what has happened, out of respect for all the people who have lost their lives, and to prevent mistakes (or worse) being made in future?
Fair point about government stats and illusion of control. And about GDP stats – but one of the features of numbers of deaths is that they are not so liable to fiddling, or ‘recalculation’, as other stats.
Not sure about other people on here, but I wouldn’t say that vaccine injuries and probable deaths among my own circles are undetectable from general day-to-day experience. But everyone’s personal experience will be different.
I absolutely agree that vaccine injuries are very detectable from day to day experience. I know of a few.personally. Not friend of a friend. Direct acquaintances. And in addition many indirect acquaintances, so friends/family of friends.
Covid deaths? None. Vaccine deaths? None.
But stands to reason. When you take the excess death stat and convert it to actual numbers of people its a tiny proportion of the population. Absolutely undetectable with the “naked eye”.
To me the crimes have been putting the population under house arrest, forced masking and quasi-forced medical treatment. Even if none of those things cause a single death, they are intolerable crimes against the population.
I agree with the thrust of your argument but I would also propose that the figures and statistics being drawn from all over the world are all over the place in terms of accuracy of collection and what is purportedly being measured. Therefore, while we can ackowledge that there are much higher rates of excess deaths, an investigation to the methods used and ‘corners cut’ by Big Pharma in producing the vaccines in too short a time and the insistence on further vaccination ad infinitium, should be undertaken pdq.
The problem, as I see it, is that we will get little real research or investigation from government circles anywhere in the world because of the awful knee-jerk decisions to use NMIs which have wrecked the economy and as the politicians are mostly male, they are unable to say’we got it wrong’.
For what it is worth, I think that the virus has caused excess deaths for the most vulnerable which are the elderly – over 80 – and the patients with severe comorbidities, in otherwise, ‘tinder deaths. However, there is clearly something wrong in how many young men have been affected post vaccination and is worth investigating.
I don’t doubt that Covid, like flu, contributes to the death tally. As a novel virus that tally will show as excess deaths. I don’t, however, need to read multiple studies to understand whether locking people up, depriving them of sunlight, air, exercise and human interaction, increasing alcoholism, obesity and mental health issues, breathing in plastic microparticles from masks for a couple of years etc etc might also be a contributor. Sorry Will, but sometimes we can sidestep ‘science’ and just use a little common sense.
Yes, I quite agree. The iatrogenic measures plus the things you mentioned plus the fear factor (the nocebo effect) I am sure acted as multipliers for the virus or viruses. SARS-Cov-2 is just another virus contributing to the disease burden of ‘Influenza-Like Illnesses’ and for three years virtually all ILIs were counted as Covid deaths. If you took out all the man-made responses to the viruses, I doubt you would see any particular signal.
French statistcian Pierre Chaillot confirms this for France in a new book, recently published
https://www.epochtimes.fr/entretien-avec-pierre-chaillot-il-existe-des-hausses-de-mortalite-concordantes-aux-campagnes-vaccinales-pour-quasiment-tous-les-pays-deurope-2212580.html
excerpt from above page (deepL translate)
According to the databases you decrypt, influenza and other respiratory diseases would have completely disappeared during the winter of 2020-2021. How is this possible? Did Covid-19 have the “superpower” to make them disappear?
The disappearance of influenza has been the subject of much epidemiological speculation. For my part, I apply Ockham’s razor principle: the simplest explanation is often the best. The flu (or rather, the set of symptoms that we usually call flu) has not disappeared. It is the counting that has disappeared. The patients that we see every year in winter during cold spells have simply been coded “Covid-19” instead of “flu”. Similarly, all respiratory pathologies have been reduced in hospital statistics to make room for “Covid-19”. This is only a transfer. These missing patients in the statistics are one of the proofs that the “Covid-19” statistics are complete nonsense. It was bureaucracy at work, not medicine or science.
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Indeed, backed up by very little out of the ordinary in terms of annual age adjusted all cause mortality figures.
Free Lemming, you left out one thing which can contribute to the death tally, which cannot be accurately measured, but may easily be underestimated: Fear can kill.
Fear can kill, both directly and indirectly.
100% agree. The sheer panic and fear I’ve witnessed over the last few years has been an incredible insight into mass group think and the fragility of the human mind. Quite extraordinary. There’s plenty of other things to consider as well, but the list wasn’t intended to be exhaustive
I don’t think there are many of us that believe it not exist, but the main issue is the crass over reaction to it, and whether that, in itself, could have increased the death rates, either by direct physical causes, or psychology. Related problems are the opportunism and the waste of resources associated with it, and sweeping aside of normal development protocols for novel drugs, on the pretext of Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
If you play with fire, expect to get burned!
We, the human (sorry, huthem) race, created this monster and now we try to define it, explain it, excuse it?
Sometimes making the decision not to do something is the hardest decision to make.
Wether it be the virus or the vaccine it’s still our fault and all totally avoidable
We’re more like children than an advanced species!
“We mess about with things to much”
‘A second thing to underline is that no one has yet shown any convincing relationship between policy interventions and deaths.’
Is that really correct?
‘The UK government was clearly aware that the 400,000 residents of care homes in the UK, many of whom live with multiple health conditions, physical dependency, dementia and frailty, were at exceptional risk to coronavirus.9 Yet at the height of the pandemic, despite this knowledge, it failed to take measures to promptly and adequately protect care homes. Contrary to the claim by the secretary of state for Health and Social Care that a “protective ring” was put around care homes “right from the start,” a number of decisions and policies adopted by authorities at the national and local level in England increased care home residents’ risk of exposure to the virus—violating their rights to life, to health, and to non-discrimination.
These include, notably:
• Mass discharges from hospital into care homes of patients infected or possibly infected with COVID19 and advice that “[n]egative tests are not required prior to transfers / admissions into the care home”.
• Advice to care homes that “no personal protective equipment (PPE) is required if the worker and the resident are not symptomatic,” and a failure to ensure adequate provisions of PPE to care homes.
• A failure to assess care homes’ capability to cope with and isolate infected or possibly infected patients discharged from hospitals, and failure to put in place adequate emergency mechanisms to help care homes respond to additional needs and diminished resources.
• A failure to ensure regular testing of care home workers and residents.
• Imposition of blanket Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR) orders on residents of many care homes around the country and restrictions on residents’ access to hospital.
• Suspension of regular oversight procedures for care homes by the statutory regulating body, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), and the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman……….’
‘…..Via its Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the government in mid-March adopted a policy, executed by NHS England and NHS Improvement, that led to 25,000 patients, including those infected or possibly infected with COVID-19 who had not been tested, being discharged from hospital into care homes between 17 March and 15 April—exponentially increasing the risk of transmission to the very population most at risk of severe illness and death from the disease. With no access to testing, severe shortages of PPE, insufficient staff, and limited guidance, care homes were overwhelmed. Although care home deaths were not even being counted in daily official figures of COVID-19 deaths until 29 April, some 4,300 care home deaths were reported in a single fortnight during this period.’
ttps://www.amnesty.org.uk/care-homes-report
In addition:
Why no mention of the NICE guidelines published April 2020 which encouraged euthanasia of care home residents, recently reviewed by Dr John Campbell:
https://rumble.com/v29hjiy-uk-guidelines-and-unnecessary-deaths.html
Or John Dee’s exhaustive analysis of probable iatrogenic deaths across several morbidity classifications:
https://jdee.substack.com/p/the-iatrogenesis-hypothesis
Or the withdrawal of simple and previously standard drug treatments including antibiotics and steroids (anecdotal evidence elsewhere here on DS) let along IVM, HCL & Vit D, combined with enforced protocols for repurposed drugs known to have significant adverse side effects such as run-death-is-near and/or proven to be ineffective:
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/self-care-and-treatments-for-coronavirus/treatments-for-coronavirus/
Or the almost blanket refusal to investigate and treat those with vaccine injuries:
https://www.ukcvfamily.org/about
The whole thing is a planned and organised assault on humanity.
‘……we’ve started arguing that the waves of deaths that accompany waves of infections are not in fact caused by a virus.’
The medical profession has known for years that the common cold is lethal. To pretend otherwise would be very silly indeed.
‘Rhinovirus infection in the adults was associated with significantly higher mortality and longer hospitalization when compared with influenza virus infection. Institutionalized older adults were particularly at risk. More stringent infection control among health care workers in elderly homes could lower the infection rate….’
‘Unexpectedly Higher Morbidity and Mortality of Hospitalized Elderly Patients Associated with Rhinovirus Compared with Influenza Virus Respiratory Tract Infection’ International journal of molecular science. Published online 2017 Jan 26.
Nevertheless the actual numbers who definitely died from covid 19 is certainly a matter for debate.
How long do pandemics last? It is clear to me the excess deaths experienced during 2022 were to a large extent caused by the injections.
How long do pandemics last?
No-one really knows because, judging by all cause, age adjusted, annual mortality figures, there hasn’t been one for a very long time.
What is a pandemic?
The WHO definition changed from something that causes a lot of death to something that causes a lot of infection.
So by that definition we are perhaps in perpetual coronavirus and flu pandemics, because they never really go away.
What I find confusing about this article is the lack of a clear definition of excess deaths in the different contexts in which it is used.
If we talk about excess deaths in general within a single geographical region, the underlying status of this population is dynamic, with regard to infection, immunological status and other factors that effect the ‘terrain’ of infection, such as vitamin D status etc. Add to this the complex pattern of gene therapy with ‘vaccines’, which in themselves have an unpredictable outcome, and it gets awfully complex.
There were clear peaks in excess deaths in early 2020 in relatively immunologically ‘naive’ populations. However, many of these excess deaths, in Sweden for example, came from the excess deaths that did not happen in 2017-2018, perhaps due to the long, hot summer of 2017 that meant vitamin D status was high and the normal wave of respiratory virus deaths in the winter of 2018/19 didn’t happen. Actually, the same pattern in low excess deaths was seen in 2019 too – until SARS-CoV2 arrived. In this respect, what happened in 2020 was not excess deaths per se, but rather delayed deaths from the 2 previous winters.
At the other end of the spectrum – where are excess deaths happening now? In the unvaccinated, double, triple, quadruple, quintuple of sextuple vaccinated? I suspect a SARS-CoV2 infection in an unvaccinated person who will surely have been exposed to the virus multiples times by now (and probably had been exposed under 2020), is most likely mild or subclinical, where as the same infection in a multiply jabbed individual could be quite severe or life threatening because of a skewed immune response and teh toxic side effects of the mRNA therapy.
Can recommend the first hour of this lecture by Dr Steve Pelech, which gets in to a lot of the relevant issues about immunological status and when a novel virus began to circulate in Canada, at least.
https://livestream.com/whiterocksdachurch/events/9259494/videos/234894719
So to answer my point – yes the virus is associated with excess deaths, but in what particular context and how, is a complex question.
The misconceptions about ‘viruses’ appears to largely derive from the nature of the experiments that are used as evidence to argue that such pathological particles exist and are directly responsible for the observed symptoms.
Virology (and genomics) is suffering from an epistemological crisis. Until virology moves away from computational data analysis that’s prone to biases and errors, no one can say with any certainty that virus ‘X’ causes symptoms ‘Y’.
The evidence proffered by virologists as ‘evidence’ of viruses through ‘genomes’ and animal experiments derives from methodologies with insufficient controls.
So, what we have here is a bunch of correlated looking graphs distilled out of unknown raw numbers and a fancy theory what really should have been causing these correlations. This fancy theory is essentially That’s how I believe things should look like during a deadly, viral pandemic. But as there aren’t really any prior instances of deadly viral pandemic which have been analysed to death in this way, simply because the technology to do so wasn’t generally available in earlier times, eg, during the so-called Hong Kong flu, that that’s how things should look like during a deadly viral pandemic is just an assertion based on the preconceived opinion that a deadly viral pandemic had occurred.
Dr Jones theory may be correct. But we don’t know this and cannot determine it. This article is really nothing but pretty elaborate handwaiving.
When you subtract the number of deaths caused by lockdowns, fear, and iatrogenesis (e.g. ventilators and vaccines) from the number of excess deaths, there may be a remainder of some excess deaths caused by the virus, but not nearly as many as we have been led to believe. We have all been scare-mongered by exaggerated interpretation of greatly inflated and misleading official statistics.
To put the true risk of the virus into perspective: The second graph in this BBC News article (in January 2021) shows that the death rate in England in 2020 was lower than every previous year in Wales apart from just two – 2019 and 2014, when it was only slightly higher.
So I don’t remember people in Wales being particularly scared of dying in 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, when, in all of those years, the death rate was higher than the death rate in England in 2020, the year most of the population of the UK were relentlessly scare-mongered into believing that the risk of death was so high that they must risk an experimental vaccine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55631693
The iatrogenesis hypothesis – Norman Fenton and Martin Neil:
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-deadly-initial-spring-2020-covid
First: “it is the only known SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site – likely a feature it was given in a lab – which makes it unusually infectious. This essentially makes it like SARS-1 but with aerosol transmission, and so far more transmissible.”
Then: “Dr. Engler asks why there was a lack of excess deaths before March 2020 when the virus had been circulating for months. The short answer is that this is likely a result of the virus mutating and not having yet reached the most transmissible, immune-evasive form in each context.”
Doesn’t add up. Does the furin cleavage site make a difference to transmissibility, or not? If so, why did it only start to matter in spring 2020?
An interesting new Swiss study cited by Dr McCullough here, demonstrating that both the Covid death jabs and the useless flu jabs have no significant impact in preventing hospital admissions and death in the elderly population. You can see the vax status within the paper if you go to Table 1;
”Portmann and colleagues published a sobering report on hospitalized cases of Omicron and Influenza A/B infections in Switzerland. The in-hospital mortality rates were 7.0 and 4.4% with 8.5 and 15.3% incurring cardiovascular events in the SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza A/B groups, respectively. This translated into nearly identical outcomes (ICU admission and death) at 30 days in both groups. There appeared to be no impact of antecedent vaccination for either disease but for different reasons. The COVID-19 vaccinations failed to stop hospitalization with the majority having been immunized. There was no statistical difference in death among those vaccinated verses not, 7.2 vs 9.3%, p=0.05, respectively. Influenza vaccination appeared to have no impact because of very poor utilization (10%) with considerable missing data.”
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/similar-in-hospital-and-30-day-outcomes
And what about the administration of excessive doses of Midazolam and Remdesivir and the suppression of known effective treatments, such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine and even Vitamin D? People in the Medical ‘Profession’ and Media need to stand trial for murder, rather than simply blaming the virus. If they are innocent, why were long established protocols for certifying cause of death ignored during lockdowns?
Yes ….. I agree, not enough people even look at it…it’s shocking…!
https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1623614417580568576
FACT: The first “Covid” mortality wave in the UK was Midazolam, not respiratory disease. We still need to talk about Midazolam…
@james_freeman__
A six letter word beginning with ‘m’ and ending in ‘r’
The spike in midazolam and morphine use happened at exactly the same time as the first wave of deaths spike in 2020
Midazolam and morphine given together, depress breathing…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BqbVo2sQi0
Euthanasia in the pandemic?
Dr. John Campbel
What about the theory that the virus was not all that special UNTIL the lockdowns (starting with Wuhan) selected for the most transmissible AND virulent strains? Kinda like how the vaguely lockdown-like conditions in the the trenches of WWI ultimately selected for nastier strains of the 1918 flu? If so, that is VERY iatrogenic!
Were these “tests” not shown to be worthless and not fit for purpose? I thought Mr Mullis said they shouldn’t be used as a diagnostic tool? Or am I going bonkers (again?). Help!!!!
Honestly, I do think the virus is likely to have killed quite a large number of people.
But the evidence that Will cites is not as clear as all that. Many of these graphs that move in lockstep are dependent on each other: for example, if a patient has a positive PCR test then subsequently dies, then the doctor is almost certain to put Covid on the death certificate, regardless what actually caused the death.
More importantly: it doesn’t matter. We know that flu deaths almost disappeared during the pandemic. So people died of covid instead of flu. So what? If we didn’t have PCR tests, no doubt all those deaths would have been ascribed simply to pneumonia.
Further, the administering of PCR and LFT tests was strongly dependent on having symptoms. (I.e. those without symptoms were rarely tested.) Even the government admitted that a third of those infected had no symptoms, and that figure would have risen if those without symptoms had been routinely tested.
It seems to me that what we have here is a bad but not very unusual epidemic of a flu-like illness, made very much worse by panic driven unscientific treatment protocols and then by doom reporting from the gutter journalists who write and broadcast for the mainstream media.
I also note that governments across the world behaved as if they were under biological warfare attack, so presumably were quite aware that the virus originated from a lab. This was a national security response, not a public health response.
It surely cannot be coincidence that the one Western country that did not lock down, Sweden, happens to be one of the few that is not (currently) a member of NATO.
This is an argument of medical assessments and statistics which has been designed to never be resolved and is a complete diversion.
The real question of fault lies with who and why the rules of the game were set to (a) a man-made virus strain containing patented gene sequences owned by DARPA and Moderna, and containing a 500+ gene sequence of HIV (b) a spurious PCR gene test (c) a PCR test set at >23 cycles (d) banning of legitimate alternative treatments (e) no post mortems (f) shaming of legitimate questioners of the narrative (g) AND LAST BUT BY NO MEANS LEAST FOR ANYONE INVOLVED IN SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTATION, PARTICULARLY MEDICAL, NO CONTROL GROUP FOR THE JAB.
You’ve been played.
‘…likely a feature it was given in a lab – which makes it unusually infectious.’
No it doesn’t.
That makes it unusually better able to invade cells quickly and increase reproduction rate – but that in itself does not make it infectious.
What makes any micro-organism infectious is the ease with which it can be transmitted from one host to the next. They are incapable of agency, which is why they have evolved to take advantage of the immune response to transmit them.
In the case of respiratory viruses, the immune response is to surcharge the nasal mucosa to cause increased nasal discharge of mucous and sneezing, and if the virus moves further down the RT, coughing.
However this is only beneficial if the host is left mobile, that is, not made so ill as to be incapacitated or dead.
This is why each Winter Colds and ‘flu are with us, because they leave most people able to be heroes and go into work and normal activity anyway and spread the joy to colleagues and about town.
The ‘novelty’ of CoV 2 was it caused only a mild immune response in 99.8%, so mild it often went unnoticed, and was only severe or fatal in people who already had low mobility… elderly with comorbidity… so it made no difference to the transmission rate.
Because of that it spread faster than Cold and ‘flu as it rendered considerable fewer people so unwell they preferred to stay home.
There is indeed enough consilience to conclude that the virus is real and a significant source of excess deaths. However, there is also enough consilience to conclude that the virus was not the ONLY cause of excess deaths, as it only explains a fraction. The combination of lockdowns, masks, NPIs, faulty treatment protocols (not just ventilators, but also “run death is near” and other things too), denial of actually effective treatment protocols like HCQ and IVM, and of course the jabs, jabs, and more jabs, also greatly contributed to excess deaths, both on their own as well as making actual Covid deaths more likely than otherwise.
As for how “special” the virus is, it’s really not very by historical standards. It is basically a “super flu” on the order of the 1936, 1957, 1968, 1977, and 1993 flu pandemics, albeit a coronavirus rather than influenza. Or at least it would have been if left to it’s own devices.
A Bangladesh study found that just three nutrients (Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc) in sufficient amounts would have been enough to essentially push case and death rates to below-pandemic levels, for example. Also, it is worth noting that an unknown number of “Covid” pneumonia deaths were in fact secondary bacterial pneumonia deaths that could have been prevented with just #3tablets of azithromycin or doxycycline, per the pre-2020 standard of care that was abandoned for anyone who tested positive for Covid in most countries. Let that sink in for a moment.
Sweden is a bad example, because they had less than normal deaths in advance of Covid so were building up a number of elderly with other diseases that were not immediately fatal. After the height of the pandemic, their death rate was generally lower than other countries with similar situations, but which had imposed far more stringent Covid restrictions.
I have written a response to this article here:
https://www.normanfenton.com/post/what-really-caused-the-surge-in-covid-deaths-in-early-2022
Germany continued to put people on a ventilator.
These lung doctors just published a letter and estimate about 10k people having been killed by that throughout all waves.
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/bericht_zur_corona_lage_10000_tote_durch_fruehbeatmung