Annually about 1,500 people are killed on Britain’s roads. Just imagine if that figure increased by 5,000, there’d be the most awful fuss! Yet, it’s likely that across England heart failure deaths could be 5,000 higher in 2024 than in 2020 and still no ‘excess’ deaths would be recorded. How could this be? It’s all to do with inflation. Only this time it’s the level of ‘expected’ deaths that’s being inflated away rather than the pound in your pocket.
Already, in 2023, the expected level of heart failure deaths is 7% higher than it was in 2020. This means that we could see 3,000 more people die from heart failure in 2023 than in 2020 without registering any ‘excess’ heart failure deaths. In 2024 an increase of 5,000 heart attack deaths over the 2020 figure would also be reported as no ‘excess’ deaths.
‘Expected’ deaths are calculated by averaging deaths in prior years. The average will increase as data from prior years are replaced with data from recent years. As heart failure deaths in 2021 and 2022 have been so high the ‘expected’ rate of death goes up accordingly. Heart failure deaths in 2023 look set to continue this trend.
The latest data release from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities incorporates six new weeks of data in 2023, from week ending March 24th 2023 to week ending April 28th 2023. This can be directly compared to the six weeks in 2020 at the start of the pandemic, from week ending the March 27th 2020 to week ending May 1st 2020.
During this six-week period in 2020 it was expected that 7,142 people would die from heart failure. This ‘expected’ death rate from heart failure was calculated using heart failure deaths from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. By contrast, in 2023 it was expected that there would be 7,619 deaths from heart failure in the corresponding six-week period. That’s a 7% increase. So, when we look at excess heart failure deaths in 2023 they appear to be far lower than they would be if we had compared them to the 2020 base level.
In 2024, we’ll have lost 2015, 2016 and 2017 from the average and gained 2021, 2022 and 2023. The average will have increased to something like 7,856, a 10% increase on the 2020 figure.
At this juncture it’s worth just checking whether all-cause deaths and other causes of death, such as cancer, have increased at the same rate as heart failure. You may not surprised to learn that they haven’t. Whilst the level of expected all-cause deaths and cancer have increased by about 3%, the expected rate of heart failure has increased more than twice as fast to almost 7%. What’s so special about heart failure?
Having looked at the ‘expected’ numbers, what about the actual number of deaths?
In the six-week period of weeks 12-17 in 2023 there were 8,804 heart failure deaths. If we compare this to the expected level in weeks 12-17 in 2020 of 7,142 we can see that this amounts to a 23% increase. Of course, the reported ‘excess’ heart failure death rate isn’t reported as being 23% but rather 16% (still a big increase) because the ‘expected’ rate of heart failure deaths has been inflated over the past three years.
The next question to ask is, is an increase of 23% significant? Well, the increase in all-cause deaths in 2020 over the ‘expected’ level of deaths, bearing in mind that this was the year of a ‘once in a century’ pandemic, was about 14%. So, yes, I think a 23% increase is really something that should be looked at. A lot more people are dying from heart failure than was previously the case.
Following previous articles in the Daily Sceptic I’ve been criticised below-the-line for suggesting that the vaccine delivered some societal benefits. Specifically, I contend that they provided a narrative that allowed society to reopen. I stand by that view. In the absence of the vaccines I don’t believe that society would have reopened up as quickly as it did. That said, the only reason it was shut down in the first place was due to the panicked decisions of Government. I’m not a natural anti-vaxxer, I’m just anti-vaccines that don’t work and that people are coerced or tricked into taking.
To date, my objection to the vaccine rollout has been a libertarian one. I think the authorities overplayed their hand scaring people and coercing people who were never at any risk from Covid into getting jabbed with an under-tested treatment. Freedoms were trashed, informed consent was ignored and the door was opened for future Governments to steamroller individual rights. However, this increase in heart failure deaths makes me think that the vaccines were more dangerous than I had thought.
While I’m increasingly persuaded of a very significant link between mRNA vaccines and heart failure, I still don’t see the evidence of increased levels of cancer deaths post-vaccine. Cancer can be a slow burn disease and maybe the jury’s still out, but to date, the data don’t seem to show increased cancer deaths.
In recent months I’ve read a number of articles about an upsurge in cancers (examples include a piece by Karol Sikora from November 2022 in UnHerd and two pieces by Angus Dalgleish that appeared in the Daily Sceptic in November 2022 and January 2023) though not always specifically linked to the vaccine. However, if we look at the excess mortality figures produced by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities we don’t see these concerns being translated into excess deaths. So far, in 2023 cancer deaths are lower than the expected figure.
Cancer deaths appear to be a very different case to deaths from heart failure. Heart failure deaths have consistently been above the expected level since March 2020, as can be seen in Fig 2.
What’s perhaps more illuminating is if we compare the rate of excess cancer deaths to excess heart failure deaths since March 2020. At the end of April 2023 the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities reports 26,580 excess deaths (14% above the inflated ‘expected’ rate of deaths) from heart failure compared to 8,304 (1.7%) excess cancer deaths. Interestingly, the acceleration of heart failure deaths really took off after the vaccine rollout started.
In Fig 3 I have drawn a red line at week ending March 5th 2021, by which time over 90% of the over-70s had been vaccinated. Since then, while there have been 929 excess cancer deaths there have been 17,693 excess deaths from heart failure. That means, since March 2021 excess deaths from heart failure are 19 times higher than excess deaths from cancer.
One might almost think that when Andrew Bridgen, Dr. Peter McCullough or Dr. Aseem Malhotra say that perhaps someone should look into excess heart failure deaths, they have a point.
It’s hard to know what to make of all this. The key takeaways seem to be:
- Deaths from heart failure in a six-week period in 2023 were 23% higher than the expected level for the comparable six-week period in 2020.
- The ‘expected’ number of excess deaths from heart failure is almost 7% higher in 2023 than in 2020. The level in 2024 is likely to be 10% higher than in 2020. Why, when cancer deaths have not similarly increased?
- Excess deaths from heart failure have increased significantly in comparison to the expected level of deaths; this is particularly true since the vaccine rollout.
- If cancer diagnoses are increasing this increase hasn’t shown up in the mortality figures yet.
- Over the last couple of weeks excess deaths in England have been over 18% higher than the expected level (see ONS data) in spite of the expected level of deaths being inflated by inclusion of deaths in 2021 and 2022 into the ‘expected’ death figure.
Surely, the time is long past when someone should be explaining what’s going on.
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‘climate deniers’. I reject the premise of the pejorative.
Apart from the disgusting attempt to compare anyone who questions any aspect of this issue to holocaust deniers it seems to imply that as well as “climate deniers” there are also “climate confirmers”. —–But there are no experts or scientists or modellers or bureaucrats or activists or Attenborough’s or Thunberg’s who know what the climate is going to do 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. —–So there are no “confirmers”, and if there are no “confirmers”, then there is nothing for “deniers” to deny.
The evidence that the left is reverting to totalitarian type just keeps flowing in. “It’ll be different, this time,” they lisp, before trying to ban political parties (the AfD), blacking out “problematic” news stories and criminalising thought. Now they want to clap a chap in jug for holding an opinion. So where’s the difference, exactly? Well, they haven’t set up the gulag yet, but with prisoners of conscience they would take the first, fatal steps.
Farage is now talking openly of the need for a political revolution and he is right to do so – something along the lines of Prague, 1989. The political class, whether from cowardice, opportunism, true belief or sheer complacency (how typical of our establishment!) is overseeing the reintroduction of tyranny. The one gleam of hope amid this darkening mess is that the public is waking up and finding its voice, correctly identifying the enemy as hard left and willing to find ways and means of defeating them.
And Mr Young, here, can congratulate himself on making an indispensable contribution to that process.
“The one gleam of hope amid this darkening mess is that the public is waking up and finding its voice, correctly identifying the enemy as hard left and willing to find ways and means of defeating them”.
Not if the results of the last three by-elections are anything to go by!
Nobody, their facts are delvered, fully created, by organisations like the UN
Courtesy of Reuters and the Asscociated Press.. now.. I wonder who owns those two agencies ????
What hubris to think that we ever left the Medieval Ages with its suspicious, witch-obsessed, dogmatic mindset just because we have smartphones and the internet. Did the world get any smarter, any more self-aware after we invented all these things and more? NO, of course not. The same shysters get into power, the same hucksters want to stifle speech they don’t agree with, the same bitter, twisted souls who seek the light only to cast us into the darkness are all there, just dressed differently with smarter haircuts, reeking of peach-scented soap and wearing silk nooses around their necks. Religion is now called ‘The Science’ – I swear there’s a book of fiction somewhere about that. ‘Thou cannot and wilst not disagree with The Science, for to do so is blasphemy. Remember, there is no truth but OUR truth.’
This is very true. Flawed human nature with its contrary impulses and lurid fears does not change and needs profound tranquillity in order to reach the higher realms of logic and objectivity. This is what progressives forget: that the foundation of rationality is peace; and peace arises from a perfectly undisturbed status quo.
The whole idea of a “fact checker” is nonsense.
Exactly. It’s not fact-checking but pure censorship. In days of yore there used to be such a thing as scientific debate but it looks like that’s gone the way of the dodo.
The whole idea of a “fact checker” is….a bloody insult.
What worries me is that I think if you asked a lot of people about “fact checkers” they would think it was a good idea and put faith in them. Which is of course why we are where we are. I’m talking about “educated” and “intelligent” people, not just thickos.
What we on here have defined as the intelligent stupid. Ninety-nine per cent of those I live amongst qualify as intelligent stupid and it is extremely depressing as well as wearing.
Likewise
Fact Checking the Hockey Stick was good though right? So I think what you mean is that fact checking by people trying to protect dogma is a bloody insult. —-But unbiased fact checking isn’t. Everything needs to be fact checked. The whole idea of science is that the work of scientists be made available so others can check it. ——On the Hockey Stick Graph (as you will be well aware) data, code and methodology were not made available for others to check and only dogged determination by statistician Steve McIntyre exposed it as incorrect (and that is me being polite).
From the moment the US went for Assange with all its force and power, journalists for the most part have acquiesced to the establishment and know they are not to question authority. Not on any if the big stuff anyway.
So most of them probably welcome some fact checking authority to tell them where the red lines are.
Keeping themselves out of trouble is no doubt far more important to them than anything as mundane as the truth.
I think Paul Craig Roberts coined the term Presstitutes.. and how very apt that is..
“…there’s no infallible authority the courts could rely on to determine whether a particular claim about something climate-related is true or false.”
You are still living in the past.
Since Covid, the West’s judiciary has fully adopted the ‘only government&co data and conclusion is true and admissible in court’ approach.
I have to agree JayBee.
The demand for mere imprisonment of “deniers” is a walk-back for the alarmists. Back in 2012 Richard Parncutt (professor of systematic musicology at Karl Franzens University Graz in Austria) was calling for capital punishment for deniers (and some other targets).
Well, at least in the dock you could ask to boil a kettle to demonstrate the nature of boiling.
The judge and jury would swear they saw the water boiling at 30 centigrade
Undoubtedly.
As high as that ???
In previous times science was the big threat to authority. The likes of Copernicus and Galileo were thinking they were doing humanity a favour with their genuine search for truth but were seen as dangerous to the orthodoxy of the time. The authority of the church was being undermined. Galileo was given house arrest. —Wind forward to today and science is now king. There is a religious element to the science though, where those not subscribing to it or questioning it are seen as sinful heretics. The terminology is very religious—“climate apocalypse”, “Armageddon” etc and climate change supporters rely more on the will to believe and in faith and emotion rather than facts and reason. In many regards environmentalism, and in particular climate change has become a pseudo religious cult that tolerates no disbelievers. Or as Richard Lindzen puts it “Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues which makes claims for which there is no evidence and is characterised by profound immorality pretending to virtue”
Climate models can’t model regional climate behaviour beyond a couple of weeks let alone 100 years because the system they are modelling is mathematically chaotic. What reflects incoming solar energy? It’s clouds. They can’t model cloud behaviour so what makes them think they can model how solar insolation will evolve in 100 years time. Please find a fact checker who will contest that my statements are scientifically incorrect.
Additionally, I see on his Linkedin that Prof Cowern posits that reduction of SO2 is causing a faster rise in temperature and that 1.5 dec C may by reached by 2030. That would mean that CO2 has had a lesser impact than claimed as it’s usually all blamed on CO2.