Excess deaths were back this week, according to the ONS, with 855 (7.6%) registered above the five-year average in the week ending March 3rd. Of these, 349 were due to COVID-19 as underlying cause, leaving 506 from other underlying causes.
Excess deaths have been close to zero for the past five weeks, according to the ONS, suggesting to some that the trend of many more people than usual dying had come to an end. However, a closer look reveals this to be a mirage created by the ONS changing its baseline to include the large Alpha wave that occurred in early 2021. (To be fair to the ONS, it does note this change in the chart above.)
Below I have recreated the above graph but used the 2015-19 pre-pandemic baseline throughout. This could be criticised for not allowing for an ageing population. However, the last three years have been heavily affected by excess mortality due to the pandemic and the responses to it, which will have a much larger impact on the figures than a slight ageing effect, so the use of the consistent pre-pandemic baseline is warranted. Note that the Covid deaths (orange) include those with Covid as a secondary cause. In the Omicron era (i.e., since the start of 2022), 30-40% of these ‘Covid’ deaths are registered with a different underlying cause.
The difference in the last two winters when using this pre-pandemic baseline is stark. In the winter just gone, rather than near-zero excess for several weeks, there were high levels of excess throughout.
Here is what excess mortality (as a percentage) looks like using the 2015-19 baseline.
Comparing the totals, since week 16 of 2022 (i.e., April 18th), when the latest excess deaths surge began (the surge really started during 2021, but was masked during the winter due to the mildness of Omicron and the absence of flu), according to the ONS there have been 49,736 excess deaths, whereas using the pre-pandemic baseline there have been 62,543 excess deaths, 25.7% more. During 2023 to date the difference is 6,876 using ONS baseline versus 13,244 using pre-pandemic baseline, nearly twice as many (92.6% more).
What lies behind this very worrying trend has still not been properly investigated, and the Government recently confirmed that it has no plans to do so.
On a final note, Sweden has been in the news again recently as it had among the lowest excess mortality during the pandemic despite rejecting lockdowns in 2020.
Without wanting to take away from the important lessons here for lockdown, it is important to note that Sweden has been experiencing considerable excess deaths recently and is not exempt from whatever is causing this global phenomenon (whether vaccines, virus, missed treatment or whatever it is). In particular, over the current winter it hit 31.5% excess mortality in December (according to Our World in Data), higher than the U.K.
Whatever is causing the worldwide excess deaths since mid-2021, it is happening in Sweden no less than elsewhere.
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The WHO captured by China?
In Feb 2020 the 3 biggest funders of the WHO were:
1. The US
2. The Gates Foundation I.e. Bill Gates)
3. GAVI (I.e. Bill Gates.
When Trump threatened to cut off WHO funding, Gates offered to pick up the slack.
In March 2020 Gates did the rounds on the major news channels, calling for lockdowns.
Any attempt to establish how and why the world adopted lockdowns is incomplete without establishing exactly what Bill Gates was up to in those critical first months.
As far as I am concerned Gates is evil incarnate. Why anyone would allow a computer geek to dictate to us about our health is frankly ludicrous!
Correct. Nobody like Gates does what he has out of the goodness of his heart. If he had, he would not have imposed his own uninformed view, but sought the wide range of highly knowledgeable experts including those who disagree with all these pandemic responses, including lockdowns, vaccines, masks, distancing, etc., and did everything in the open.
But don’t you know that Gates is a world expert on viruses, his products are full of them and you can download patches to ‘solve’ the problem.
The true motivations behind the scientists who drove the utterly unscientific lockdowns and related interventions puzzled me from the start.
However, the penny did slowly drop. Think about the people behind the ‘NPI’s: Fauci, Farrar (Welcome Foundation), Vallance etc. All of these along with the hugely implicated Peter Daszak – as Will points out – were involved in the covert conspiracy to cover up the Wuhan lab leak that almost certainly occurred. The reason they were so keen to cover that up was because they were implicated in the history of the gain of function research. I think that history will eventually prove that they not only knew about it, but were involved. We know that’s true of Daszak, it is likely true of Fauci and therefore likely also involved all who participated in the Wuhan cover up emails.
Theoretically they had a lot to lose. Implicated in the creation of Covid-19 (a virus looking for an existing but unused vaccine technology) even the small chance of a truly devastating pandemic would end up being laid at their feet. So move to lockdowns. There was nothing for them to lose. They wouldn’t suffer, and even if there was only a minimal chance they would work, if they did, it reduced the chances of career-devastating blame heading in their direction.
Of course, the NPI’s had no meaningful effect, Wuhan hasn’t yet been really pinned on them, and instead of career opprobrium, knighthoods were the order of the day. It’s a funny old world. . .
I think the lab leak theory explains a lot.
Agree the rest doesn’t look like a single script, but I think there are overlapping scripts and directions of thinking – technocracy, safetyism, idiot populations convinced they can be “kept safe” by the government, general drift towards collectivism and away from individual freedom and responsibility, greed, the Medical Industrial Complex, elites liking the control.
How would this fit in with the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being around in the last quarter of 2019 in Italy and elsewhere including the USA?
It doesn’t fit in at all, so best not to mention it. Remember China is the fall guy here and we don’t want people spoiling the blame game.
Not just in Italy ….. I live in Dorset, England and I’m pretty sure I had it in November 2019, along with a number of friends here. In the locality is an International School where most of the students are Chinese who returned to the school after the 2-week half-term break at the end of October/early November 2019. At the time people were saying “there’s a nasty virus circulating.”
I have absolutely no doubt that it was present in the U.K. in October November 2019 simply from the patients I saw and my conversation usually included the phrase “there’s a nasty virus going round”. This would coincide with the military games being ground zero. If it was present in Italy in September 2019 and possibly in the summer of 2019 in the USA then that surely moves the focus away from Wuhan as the initial source to the USA?
Will, none of this changes the fact that national governments are in thrall to an unelected global power base.
…which is a problem.
…which is a problem
You seem a master of understatement, as it’s actually a genocidal nightmare. Already it is likely too late for those who naively believed in the innate goodness of genocidal oligarchs and their agents in governments.
“What drove each of these people to get behind the closing down of society as the ‘solution’ to a respiratory virus?”
I think Mike Yeadon’s explanation – “convergent opportunism” is probably the likeliest.
The virus most likely was engineered and escaped from a lab. And there was clearly a certain group of people who have for some time been aiming to engineer a pandemic and use it as a vehicle to push vaccines primarily for profit but with an element of population engineering involved.
The response started out mainly as an attempt by those responsible to cover things up.
A lot of other bad actors spotted the opportunity to move forward their agendas on the back of the “crisis”
It all gained a life of its own and got completely out of hand.
There was an element of “mass formation” going on whereby even those responsible at a senior level got carried away by the hysteria.
Governments everywhere are run by people who have little background in science, don’t understand basic statistics, and were therefore putty in the hands of the Big Pharma and Big Science lobbyists.
Very good point about the desire to get the toxic mrna gunk into people. There is an ESPN video from end Oct/early Nov. 2019, some conference or another, with a group of ‘scientists’ on stage, including Pfauci. He goes on at length about how wonderful mrna is and more or less describes his wet dream of hoping that a lovely bird flu virus or some such would emanate from Asia so he can “blow up” the use of this toxin. From Pfauci’s lips to Satan’s ears it would appear.
Yes there was some kind of “disaster planning” conference which simulated a pandemic remarkably similar to the one which actually happened, only a few months before it happened.
A remarkable coincidence.
So I suspect the whole thing was planned by the bad actors in the virus/vaccine community, but the virus escaped (or was let out) earlier than planned without the whole response having been properly planned and that’s when the chaos ensued.
That would also explain the change of emphasis from “stay calm” to “PANIC!”.
I reckon in the beginning not all governments knew it had escaped from a lab, and of course those responsible for the virus were denying it, so govts headed down the “stay calm” route – but then at some point the bad actors decided to let govts know behind the scenes that actually it had come from a lab and that it’s a very nasty virus and they really should panic.
A lot of the other bad things which happened beyond that point were probably primarily down to grifters just taking advantage of the situation to flog PPE, launder government money, advance their socialist / political / ecological / technological agendas.
Indeed, kinda like how the mon(k)eypox outbreak was simulated less than a year before it happened as well.
Say there was a laboratory leak in the USA or at another facility in a NATO country rather than China. What if Wuhan became the epicentre because the virus was taken into China at the military games in October 2019? What could the political landscape have made of that in this scenario?
The US and China were clearly both heavily involved in the birth of this virus and therefore culpable for everything that happened since – but they are locked in a deadly embrace whereby they can’t blame the other because of all the inconvenient truths that might come out about their own involvement.
In other words, they both checkmated each other, and are now perpetually stuck lying in the bed they had made together.
Is that the reason almost every country followed China’s policy of lockdown? If Donald Trump had been re-elected would there or could there have been a different outcome? This is going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory!
Overall, I see no indication of a grand plan from the earliest days in which all are working from a common script to a common goal.
The WEF had rehearsed it, in Event 201; if evidence of a grand plan is sought, I might start there. Maybe, it’s just that not everyone in the bureaucracies was attached to the WEF, so initially there were indeed some independent initiatives and it took time for the message to percolate through? In the UK, the Gates-funded media seemed to take control of policy, howling for lockdowns. By May we had Tony Blair announcing his embedded teams in more than 20 countries.
The proposed WHO pandemic treaty is an attempt to ensure that next time, there will indeed be a grand plan from the start.
Oh yes. Whether all this was planned from the start is one thing, but political megalomaniacs have certainly got a taste for the totalitarian powers they can derive from ‘medical emergencies’ and they want more, more, more.
Vaccines are the problem, not the cure
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/vaccines-are-the-problem-not-the-cure/
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It is one thing to question why we embarked on this
radical newmedieval disease management system (the annals of history show many instances of the simplistic reasoning of locking away people and strapping bits of cloth in front of their mouths to ward off disease – it may well have been radical in its global and extreme implementation, new it was not).My question is why did countries like Germany and NL switch from their more softly-softly approach that was closer to Sweden’s than to Italy or Spain’s? It was clear by the autumn of 2020 that none of the approaches had worked to eliminate the virus (which the morons should have expected and spent the summer of 2020 preparing the health service for, instead of spending billions on setting up pointless (but every lucrative) testing and track and trace systems). Indeed, by autumn 2020 it was clear that the countries that locked down the hardest not only fared worst in terms of economic devastation, they also fared worst in terms of hospitalisation and deaths.
Why did countries that had initially followed, more or less, the best course of action, abandon it and set upon law-breaking initiatives that had not only failed throughout history, but had demonstrably failed more recently in the first wave in March 2020? I shall never forgive the Dutch government for its intentional trampling on the constitution by placing an entire nation under house arrest at night for approx. 8 weeks in the winter of 2021, when they knew 100% that it would achieve absolutely nothing – a point that was confirmed on 3 separate occasions by the current health minister (rather amazing he was honest about the fact that the incarceration made no difference). They first tried to introduce the house arrest in November 2020 and the lame reason given by the head of the OMT was “so that people would understand the sense of urgency” – so literally nothing to do with any type of health benefit, but purely a matter of manipulation and illegal population control. But why the change? My opinion has always been that NL took orders from Brussels (just as Rutte is doing now with regard to the nitrogen/destruction of farmers issue).
What was the reason Brussels tried to impose draconian measures across Europe? To gain back the facade of European leadership it lost within hours when all countries made their own pandemic choices? To strip away national rights even further? To make sure all countries would be on board with the “coerced vaccination is the only solution” approach? The approach where Von der Leyen purchased enough pfisser vaxxes to poke every European 2x, even though in April 2021 the EU had already secured enough of the poison to give everyone more than 2 pokes? How did she know in April 2021 that 2 pokes would not be enough, why is no one asking that question? Why is no one asking why she agreed to a 25% mark-up on vaxxes that were not needed in the first place?
This thing may have started out as a global panic with most countries adopting the monkey see, monkey do approach, but subsequent violations of constitutions and fundamental rights were, imo, coordinated and followed with much clearer minds.
Governments panicked and each tried to outdo the other in terms of restrictions to be seen to ‘do something’. So, in effect, if France locked up one million people, Germany would lock up three million and Scotland would lock up five million. It was like a match dropped on dry scrubland: the whole world went up in flames.
Another issue, I suspect, is that the likes of Fauci knew what sort of viruses were being cultivated in Wuhan and no one knew which one had been (deliberately) leaked. So Fauci, Daszack and others started to cover up the experiments that had been refused DARPA funding. If people begin to see these virology labs for what they really are: bioweapons facilities creating deadly diseases masquerading as medical facilities looking for cures to those diseases, there would be a purge throughout the global science community.
With the world locked up and economies tanking, the WEF, the investment banks and corporations, race-baiters, transgender activists and climate activists took the opportunity to push their agendas on traumatised populations. Behavioural programming experts got involved, hence masking people was pushed. Masks were there to intimidate: ‘I’m wearing one because I’m a good person! Why aren’t you wearing one?’
At the end of the day, follow the money. This stinks of dodgy lab financing, greased palms, paid activists, cover ups and people given backhanders to look the other way.
Hmmm. Two articles in two days (https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/21/the-wefs-illusion-of-mastery-is-as-much-a-fantasy-as-paranoid-conspiracy-theories-about-the-great-reset/) that appear to be persuading readers that there is no globally coordinated Great Reset. I do hope DS isn’t being somehow influenced – I don’t believe they are, but nothing’s off the table in current times.
There is nothing that I’ve read in either of these two articles that make any sense to me other than if there was a globally coordinated campaign. Occam’s Razor points the way, and any other theory is trying to make a smooth canvas out of a patchwork quilt. All global leaders following the same totalitarian actions at exactly the same time, every government issuing the same words (e.g. Build Back Better), each dictator issuing totalitarian measures in almost perfect lockstep with other dictators, each dictator knowing the stats., knowing the real risk; we must remember these people KNEW there was very little risk from the so-called virus (hence the xmas parties etc.). There is also the actual public manifesto of course – the book “The Great Reset”. Nope, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
DS – in the spirit of true journalism (of which you have been an ambassador over the last couple of years), how about a counter-narrative article? One which argues the case for a more malevolent explanation to the Orwellian times of the last 2+ years?
Toby’s always been sceptical of any conspiracy around the WEF and COVID-19. James Delingpole thinks the other way. Both views have merits. I think it’s a combination of the two extremes: incompetence and panicked cover-ups, alongside opportunistic organisations attempting to create a new fascist-run society out of the chaos.
Sure, but this one’s by Will, whose always seemed on the fence to me (maybe slightly more on the Great Reset side, but hard to tell). My belief is that an opportunity was identified very early on – probably before the UK went into lockdown – and events were set in motion for global social and economic change. The identical behaviour and phrases being used was/is just way too coincidental for it to be a coincidence. They had a plan that they had previously roleplayed many times over and they saw a small window to make their wet dream a reality. The rest is history. We will see, but I think the people that do not believe there is anything malevolent under foot will find themselves simply renaming The Great Reset to something like… ‘The Financial Revolution’ or something. That way they can refuse to listen to the inevitable told you so’s.
The Chinese people buy western products when they can. In practise they look up to the west, so for the CCP to be able to say “Look, the west is following our lead!” is a strong signal to the population that the CCP is doing it right.
Sounds highly plausible Will.
I’m prompted to comment already and I’ve only got as far as Will’s sentence about China being sincere in its use of total lockdown to fight Covid and that they really want to fight the disease. I love Will’s articles and he’s been amazing, but I really do think this is naive. I would suggest that the CCP are simply trying to cull their population. They haven’t been trying to prevent disease at all – viz shoving people who test positive into huge warehouse-type quarantine centres with no isolation or medical care (Unherd did a video with a Ukrainian girl in such a place a while back). It was as if they wanted Covid to spread among these people. I cannot attribute any good motives to what China (or most other countries) is doing. Bring on more like president Bolsonaro!
Your presumption wrt China omits the possibility of population control and the various “conspiracy” theories suggesting that this is all part of a scheme to reduce the world’s population. What is your view on this and do you see any persuasive evidence of this?
Super piece of writing, I’m more and more admiring of Will as a stylist, must memorize at least part of this one.
There is an additional factor at work here, self delusion. China is a fanatical regime shaped by Mao’s cultural revolution and a narrative that the Party leadership can not be questioned. The West should have known better. Instead they acted like rabbits caught in headlights. How many of the world’s politicians and scientists, even those who now say we should never lockdown again, cling to the notion that it was the right thing to do at the time? Almost all of them. They can not admit to themselves that they made a mistake and why would they when so many are willing to keep the myth alive whilst continuing to depict those of us with more than a single braincell as lockdown deniers who refused to follow “the science”. Even though ” the science” amounted to little more than modelling (ie guesswork) and lobbying from health and social care systems that are not fit for purpose.
An excellent piece from Will.
But there are some awkward facts that need to be considered, when trying to fathom the CCP’s intentions.
First, the well recorded (by Western ‘correspondents’) Covid Theatre in the streets of Wuhan. ‘Business’ type men with briefcase dropping dead in the street. Never seen elsewhere. Apartment block entrances welded closed whilst shouting and screaming from inside. Allegedly screaming ‘it’s all fake’.
Then there’s the documented fact that internal travel was banned, whilst planes full of Chinese flew all around the world and especially to Lombardy, the key Belt and Road terminus in Europe. Followed by the mayor of Milan’s famous “go hug a Chinaman” campaign.
Only a straw in the wind, but, as it happened, my wife and I flew into Singapore for the nights 25-27 January 2020, to break the trip Auckland to Heathrow. And to enjoy the Chinese New Year. Coming from New Zealand, we hadn’t heard much about a ‘new’ virus and, what we had heard was that there was no human to human transmission. (Thanks WHO & CPP).
The authorities in Singapore had ditched that idea, but were encouraging people to keep one meter apart, wiping down handrails, measuring forehead temperature before allowing entry to museums, a bit more mask wearing on the metro, but only just noticeable. Loads and loads of people packed into the parks to enjoy the son et lumiere. (Meter apart be blowed.)
The taxi driver taking us to the airport on the 28th pointed out the Pandemic hospital, filling with patients for the first time since being built after Sars 1 a decade earlier.
I’m not sure that any of this supports Will’s thesis.
My conspiracy theory? Wuhan Institute of Virology developed this thing and released it deliberately to thin out the economically unproductive. With (at least initially) a preference for male victims.
OK, my conspiracy theory interests no-one. But just consider the old question.
Cui Bono?
And you think Bill Gates would push back against an idea that would reduce the numbers of old men (excluding the Billionaires, naturally)? Wrecking the West a bonus?
Someone earlier suggested our Bill listens to “experts”.
Actually, I remember reading a long piece that Bill Gates had set on an expert team to advise him how best a modern economy could run just on Ruinable Energy.
Experts reported back that this was absolutely impossible without fantastic advances in technology.
You think Billy Boy listened?
I watched as the media started the fear mongering long before any lockdowns. This included all of the staged pictures from China of welding people’s door closed and people dropping dead in the streets. This was all then picked up by bloggers and widely distributed on social media. You just cannot ignore the panic that was created by this barrage of fear mongering. People who were literally screaming at politicians to do something.
The biggest culprit in my mind is main stream media who created the panic in populations. It became a huge cash flow and More so after governments decided to lockdown and spend billions on propaganda to promote their policies. You just cannot ignore the influence of media and the panicked population in starting this.
Thank you for this excellent summary.
I agree with your thought process, which is in line with a discussion I had with a high ranking UK civil servant. The UK government panicked.
My follow up question is why they used these NPIs again and again after the first one? They had time to analyse, do a cost-benefit analysis, listen to other scientists, look at real world data. It appears they choose not to. Instead they inflicted massive damage to society as a whole.
Why? Hysterical groupthink by scientifically incompetent politicians led on by quasi scientists with axes to grind and no responsibility for their predictions.
Unravelling the politics of what’s happening seems an impossible task, especially when there is so much uncertainty around modern virology and epidemiology. So much is hidden behind smoke and mirrors with pseudo science, manipulated data and ever changing definitions to suit the narrative. It is not just a question of following the money but also the evil ideology of wealthy globalists that most normal humans struggle to accept has taken hold of our institutions. Read “The real Anthony Fauci” by Robert Kennedy Jr and ask yourself why Fauci doesn’t take him to court.