Welcome to episode 50 of the Weekly Sceptic.
This week:
- Toby reflects on the sad end of his other podcast, London Calling
- Oliver Anthony goes viral with a rebellious country song that resonates with U.S. conservatives
- Germany’s ruling coalition parties attempt to ban the AfD because it’s doing so well in the polls – and to hell with democracy
- George Monbiot calls for wolves to be reintroduce to the English countryside, prompting a fantasy about a Trans Werewolf wreaking havoc in the Guardian newsroom
- West Yorkshire police arrest an autistic teenager for ‘hate speech’, but become hated themselves
- Barrister Charlotte Proudman chastises a lowly ‘white male’ for trying to help her
- The ‘crazy plane lady’ finally speaks out on her crazy plane antics
- and of course Peak Woke!
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Produced by Jason Clift
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We’ve predicted on here by that the inquiry will be set up to conclude that we should have locked down harder and sooner, with added mask theatre. However, it would appear that the counter to that is quite a strong argument.
SWEDEN
My Laour MP has been unusually quiet throughout covid/lockdown/vax programme except to occasionally pipe up in support of
“sooner, harder, longer”
I hope local voters remember that.
“Labour MP” ? What’s that?
A dying breed.
Dead and embalmed more like!
What good will it do remembering? Oh, I get it… they’ll be voted out at the next elections and ‘be sorry’.
Unless they’ve had Bill Gates’ poison jabs and will be dead before the next elections anyway.
“sooner, harder, longer”
Just towing the lazy Labour Party line.
Or even toeing the party line
Yes – although many will, sadly, be on the MP’s side!
Sorry, I hadn’t seen this and I’ve repeated your point.
Sadly, most local voters probably agree with your MP.
“sooner, harder, longer”
I get that all the time from my mrs.
Was he referring to his evening entertainment?
If I were running the enquiry, I would make a strong point that we DID NOT KNOW the best action(s) to take, and STILL DON’T. We don’t even know how many people have died, and from what.
We do not know enough about the disease, the methods of curing it, and its impacts. Furthermore, ALL expertise in this area is deeply affected by politics, back-covering and competing interests. Expertise on vaccines, for instance, comes from Big Pharma, who are not going to say that they are worthless.
Until we can obtain dispassionate data from people who have no axe to grind, I cannot see how ANY enquiry can do more than publish a list of excuses from all concerned. There will certainly be no lessons learned…
We DID KNOW best action, it was the Government’s Pandemic Plan drawn up after many decades of experience and knowledge of respiratory viruses, revised in 2011 after the pig ‘flu virus. The plan was similar to the WHO plan and the plan that Sweden followed.
And we DO KNOW if we had followed the plan, like Sweden, it would have been best.
We do know how many died, just over 17 300 from January 2020 to end September 2021 according to the ONS following a freedom of information request asking how actually died from CoVid.
What’s your next question?
Sweden doesn’t count because reasons. And look at Norway… something.
Looking forward to someone here debunking this : “The much higher Covid death rates in Central and Eastern Europe are mainly due to lower levels of vaccination.”
And then we’re done.
Or more thorough faking of death certificates perhaps?
Autopsies were forbidden all across central Europe. It is now clear that many of the Italians who died early on were victims of other conditions, flu or the ventilators they were subjected to on the advice of the Chinese (an inappropriate treatment which Italian doctors observed caused many deaths – while Ivermectin was of course withheld)
Or, in one small town in Italy, a bureaucratic oversight led to all the nursing staff from three nursing homes being ordered to go home – and then they weren’t replaced for over two weeks.
Don’t ask for links – there was a ton of anecdotal info all over Twitter from concerned family and friends but it’s long since disappeared.
“but it’s long since disappeared.”
A bit like your promise of your ‘Postcard from Portugal’!
Was hoping you’d have provided details, eg. such as from which companies you pre-purchased your PCR tests.
Can you explain why you haven’t done this?
“Pics or it didn’t happen” is an expression that comes to mind.
EF, I said from the very beginning (both BTL and via private message) that I would not be providing details of test companies etc for the simple reason that we don’t buy them – yet travel anyway.
Stop believing that the authorities have their ducks in a row. Read ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
How do you propose I prove to you that we have travelled all over Europe for the last two years without being jabbed or paying for any tests (pre-departure, day 2, day 8 or whatever)?
PS the Postcard From Portugal is taking a bit longer than I anticipated. We experienced 100% mask compliance and some really nasty little Hitlers, so I wanted to research the country’s history in some detail, to try to understand.
“Long since disappeared”
Yes, the fragile truth has developed a butterfly quality – teased with much effort from its, ugly, all-embracing casing of lies, it flourishes for a delicate – 24 hours and then it has gone!
Most never even noticed it was there!
The paper calculates pandemic death rates as the difference between actual deaths and some crazily complex model they concocted. There’s a huge number of inputs and a major risk of overfitting: in short, it’s fantasy.
Conveniently the approach spits out some higher death rates in less vaccinated countries. They badge that in the tweet as related to vaccines, but that’s pure speculation: the paper doesn’t look at the numerical correlation between these variables let alone prove causality.
Note it is also Gates-funded. It has all the hallmarks of a piece of propaganda.
I’ll have a go. It’s an unfalsifiable statement. Anything unfalsifiable cannot be proven, therefore the default remains: higher deaths were not caused by lower levels of vaccination. QED.
More Covid lies exposed – but they served their purpose .
The UK including he children is one of the most highly ‘vaxxed ‘countries in te world – now we wait to see the results of the fear coerced injection of an experimental Gene Therapy on the, short, medium and long term health prospect of the population.
Have you read the study? Its a Gates-funded hit piece saying the authorities covered up covid deaths because they didnt lock down harder and sooner with more injections.
Yes – pure BS – for anyone but a four day old monkey.
– now we wait to see the results of the fear coerced injection of an experimental Gene Therapy on the, short, medium and long term health prospect of the population.
Adults will have brought the upcoming disaster upon themselves and I can waste no sympathy on these unthinking people. The real tragedy though, revolves around the children, who have been forced or coerced into being jabbed with the “poison death shots.”
I agree – a massive Crime Against Humanity is being committed under the noses of gullible parents.
It is almost too much to bear. The images of trusting children being ‘jabbed’ make me feel sick.
The late virologist and Senior French Scientist, Luc Montagnier said it a year ago: “These are not vaccines , they are poisons”
I suppose that there’s some tiny glimmer of sense and reality, in that this information has been published in the Mail and Lancet, and apparently the demented, politicised apparatchi(c)ks at Twitter haven’t “fact-checked” it off that stupid medium.
As we are now finding out, there’s an awful lot of people and institutions who, late to the party, seem to want to partake of the sceptic cocktails and rum punch. Now we require some objectivity on the gene therapies inflicted on the populations, and their ill-effects, both past and future.
The study wrongly conflates
“excess deaths per 100,000”
with
“covid death toll”
As if the only reason more people were dying was “bEcaUSe cOVid”.
I propose 80% of excess deaths are down to:
1. Throwing vulnerable people from hospitals into nursing homes full of other vulnerable people.
2. A huge increase in administration of Midazolam to “calm people close to death who tested positive for sars-cov-2” (despite having zero COVID symptoms)
3. Add all the rest related to consequences of lockdowns and all the other restrictions.
I read their definition of “covid death toll” and concluded that it’s a ridiculous study.
What has happened to the Lancet?
In the past, excess death was the best guide to deaths from an epidemic. However the most one can say about this one is that, since nearly every country performed similar atrocities, comparative excess death gives a reasonably reliable league table for “countries’ mortality during Covid.”
Our mid-range mortality, at 0.12%, is around the lower bound of John Ioannidis’s IFR estimation, and since there have certainly been many excess deaths due to the response to Covid, the true IFR seems likely to be much lower.
Confounding factors would be:
All in all, were it possible to unpick in how many the bug was the main cause of death, I suspect it would be well under 50%.
I posted before I read your excellent summary, Jon. The care home data is of particular concern. At one stage, two-thirds of all “Covid deaths” in Australia had occurred in the care homes of one state – Victoria.
Midazolam or remdesivir?
We don’t know. Information black hole. If anyone does have info, please post!
According to “The Age” (10 October 2020):
At the height of Victoria’s second wave, Western Health was assisting in outbreaks at 28 facilities, and Dr White said it was common to find that residents hadn’t been given food or water, as most of the staff and management were in quarantine.
“Dehydration policy” ?
Victorian government orders quarantine; forgets that those in quarantine can’t carry out normal work – like keeping people alive.
Premier Dan Andrews remains in office. In 2017, his government passed a Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill – to relieve suffering.
Both
In the past, excess death was the best guide to deaths from an epidemic.
In the past, most people died without the benefit of medical support. Nowadays, we keep many people alive for a few years longer with sophisticated medical techniques. And when you withdraw these, as we did during this epidemic, you naturally expect a lot of deaths amongst the elderly and fragile.
Consequently, even the simple ‘excess deaths’ figure needs looking at closely…
In the past there was no magic test that would allow people to diagnose themselves, they used common sense instead.
This is the sort of thing they’re trying to use as a get-out-of-gaol card.
We have to insist on data that clearly differentiate between “with covid” and “of covid” (though the unreliability of testing has made that a minefield); we have to insist on precise explanation of the terms “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated”; and we have to insist on the examination of deaths caused by lockdowns and related policies.
For starters.
Here it is.. courtesy of the ONS
An FOI (freedom of information request) to the ONS produced a figure of 6,182 DEATHS solely due to Covid.
COVID-19 deaths and autopsies Feb 2020 to Dec 2021
Release date: 17 January 2022
TOTAL : 6,182
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
Next (rhetorical) question: why did it take an FOI request to provide such essential figures?
and also how they were treated ,if treated .[many in the u ,s in ny especially , were sent home wiht no treatment then on to ventilators to die .
if treated when and how , and compare all this to who was given ivermectin and when and survived just fine . we must have that information publicized [ have learned so much from comments here and rfk jr book and so many other places
and of the ones who died many were obese not mentioned of course in the news
I propose that all, ALL excess deaths can be reduced to the effects of panic, despair and jabs.
Seconded……..that is apart from the ventilator issues, Remdesivir use and Midazolam use in Care Homes .
Then there is the flat refusal, with non- credible excuses, to use safe, cheap and effective Ivermectin, which could have saved many people.
The real scandal of the ivermectin ‘take down’, those involved and why is yet to break.( Oracle Films video by Dr Tess Lawrie tells the dark tale.)
Baroness Hallett’s enquiry will, sadly, be turned into a tedious whitewash.
But of course!
Isn’t that’s the “British Way” with enquiries…’Chilcot’ anyone?
And what would be your short version of Chilcot? As I understand it, it said much of the British role in the war was a disaster, but stopped short of dropping any individuals in it.
That’s not ideal, but it’s not a whitewash either.
“Sir” Blair is the outcome – ‘With an equivocating turn of phrase and one bound he was free from all blame !”
Then there was “45 Minutes to Armageddon”……and of course Dr Kelly and his deadly pen-knife.
How is it possible to have a War which politicians deliberately took us into, with false claims that turned into a disaster and yet no-one was to blame – not even the man who made the decision?
On that basis, Hiter was not responsible for anything concerning the acknowledged genocidal ‘disaster’ of World War 2 and those tried at Nuremberg should have been acquitted!
The fucking Lancet! We won’t forget the hydroxychloroquin hit piece… Incidentally, i know the manipulated death figures for the coof were grossly exaggerated, the malevolent misuse of the PCR test facilitated that egregious lie. There was no all cause adjust excess mortality for 2020, Excess death’s only started to climb after the rollout of the experimental cytotoxins!
Or the lab leak cover-up. Big issues at the Lancet.
Why is the Daily Sceptic publishing this Gates-funded ‘pandemic’ propaganda that falsely asserts the ‘pandemic death toll’ was not 5.9 million (which every sane person knows is a totally inflated statistic) but a whopping 18.2 million.
It naturally concludes that “strict lockdown and mediation interventions” helped save the day and experimental injections lowered mortality rates – so we will need much more of this in the future.
This is fake news on steroids – yet the DS reports it with glee.
It’s published because Lockdown Sceptics do not censor information.
That is a claim – you are perfectly at liberty to counter the claim with evidence against it. And we will be able to read both sides.
This is how an informed democracy works.
“Lockdown Sceptics do not censor information” – are you having a laugh?
Have you ever tried to get anything published here about the Bolsheviks who were responsible for murdering millions of White Christians in Russia? What were the ethnicites of leading Bolsheviks that made up the first Politburo? What element of society was the driving force behind the rise of German Bolshevism and indeed the revolutionary creation of Weimar Germany? What was happening to Germany economically, culturally and socialy during the Weimar Republic that led Germans to turn on a section of society that controlled finance and was dominant in commerce, the media, culture and entertainment industries? What was the content of the books and leaflets that were censored in post-Weimar Germany? Who in 1933 declared war on Germany with the view to utterly destroying Germany and the German people?
As for this article, the Daily Sceptic publicised Gates propaganda without even so much as questioning the content yet the site carries a banner “Question Everything”. Not exactly living up to its name is it?
Well, the things to which you allude are arguably off-topic though I accept that’s probably not why they were censored – if indeed they were. Have you had such posts removed?
I think you’ll find that among those who advocate strongly for freedom of speech, like Toby Young, anything that some would consider overtly racist is a step too far. I think TY deserves huge credit for this site, and for the FSU. I think he genuinely believes in these causes, and has put himself above the parapet, and done a lot more for these causes than most. But he’s not a free speech purist – there are very few of those around nowadays.
The only vaguely mainstream site I can think of that has plenty of what people might consider racist posts is The Unz Review • An Alternative Media Selection – The Unz Review
They are obviously off topic here, but I was asked to show how the DS censors.
Reading your post, you seem to imply that discussing these historical facts is ‘racist’.
Is that your position?
I’m against censorship if any kind and think that “racist” material should be published and discussed freely
I think the kind of things you allude to may well be considered racist and unacceptable by many, even free speech advocates like TY, and would not be surprised that DS removed anything “racist”
If people believe that stating certain historical facts is racist, that merely demonstrates the level of control those powerful few who enjoy that particular form of protection have over society.
“Question more” is the banner of RT- Russia Today – which is presumably why we British “plebs” have been denied access to it.
I thought we were down to 17,361Covid deaths attributed solely to Covid up to September 2021 without any other underlying causes?
Add in the totally fraudulent PCR tests and you get 152,872 deaths within 28 days of a “positive”(?) test.
This figure seems pretty meaningless as a PCR tests cannot differentiate a live Covid infection from a dead trace of one of 52 possible viruses and if run at 45 cycles of amplification – as it is by the NHS ( the recommendation is only up to 25 cycles for any kind of accuracy ) will deliver around 97% ‘false positive’ results .
It was lower than 17,361.. here’s a link with the figures below..
An FOI (freedom of information request) to the ONS produced a figure of 6,182 DEATHS solely due to Covid.
COVID-19 deaths and autopsies Feb 2020 to Dec 2021
Release date: 17 January 2022
TOTAL : 6,182
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
My maths is very rusty nowadays, but worst case scenario >400 per 100K person years or to put it another way >0.4% person years worst case. As 1% of the population die each year and many of that 1% die of respiratory diseases anyway, what is the percentage above the normal?
Extract: ‘The development and deployment of SARS-COV-2 vaccines have considerably lowered mortality rates among people who contract the virus and among the general population.’ As per the Tweet.
Not the focus of the paper, but note that the study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
So it is a lie then?
Now that is interesting. That means that Scotland and Wales, despite having harsher restrictions, had a higher mortality rate.
Indeed, not only did Sweden not do significantly worse than their much stricter neighbors, neither did Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Brazil, Florida, North Dakota, or South Dakota. Even Arizona was similar to their much stricter neighbor New Mexico.
And let’s not forget Somalia, who was one of the very lowest on the stringency index, yet similar excess deaths as their much stricter neighbor Kenya.
Is using excess deaths comparing like for like? I don’t have the figures to hand but, when I looked at the primary data some time ago, the annual death rate used to calculate UK excess deaths was lower than the preceeding years. This was one explanation for the higher excess deaths, ie dry tinder; elderly who in former years would already be dead were particularly vulnerable and often in care homes.
British Medical Journal provided this information but has been ignored, as far as I’m aware, by DS…
Thanks for this
It sure has.. and that graph was posted by Will Jones who writes for DS, so why they are still writing articles of the composition of the one we are commenting on is beyond me..
That’s a graphic from DS. See the name Will Jones.
But the regime’s celebrated 100,000 death milestone was measured over two years, breaking normal statistical practice.
And despite over 100,000 people dying, they weren’t excess deaths (except for those murdered in care homes during “the first wave”). Mortality rates stayed the same.
Why is this still ignored by DS? It’s the biggest crack in the official narrative.
An FOI (freedom of information request) to the ONS produced a figure of 6,182 DEATHS solely due to Covid.
COVID-19 deaths and autopsies Feb 2020 to Dec 2021
Release date: 17 January 2022
TOTAL : 6,182
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
The excess death rate between March 2020 and now, in absolute number per 100000 – what an idiotic statistic to draw such conclusions from. Excess over the famous “five-year mean” is it? What happens if you take a 10-year mean? Why not take the excess as a z-score anyway? In some countries the death rate probably goes up and down like a tart’s knickers; in others, the standard deviation is probably small. Or it could be taken as a percentage of some kind of “average” death rate. It’s a bit like shoving cornflakes up yer bum – there are lots of ways to do it. Doubtless they all mean something. And academics must publish.
Still, I guess fewer office workers caught their knobs under photocopier lids when they were “working” from home. Lockdown works, I tell you!
(The much higher Covid death rates in Central and Eastern Europe are mainly due to lower levels of vaccination.)
I seem to have missed the corroborative data for this claim. Anyone able to help and direct me to it?
Is it perhaps among the data that the ‘vaccines’ stop disease/transmission or when you do get it it is Less Serious™️?
“I seem to have missed the corroborative data for this claim. Anyone able to help and direct me to it?”
Yeah.. its in the folder labelled ‘bullsh*t’..
I thought this had been put to bed ages ago..
A FOI to the ONS produced a figure of 6,182 DEATHS solely due to Covid.
COVID-19 deaths and autopsies Feb 2020 to Dec 2021
Release date:
17 January 2022
TOTAL : 6,182
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
How did they determine that a death was solely due to Covid? Several viruses and bacteria too can cause pneumonia. Often these are rife in hospitals. Did they test to rule them all out?
If you look at pre-pandemic tables of pandemic preparedness country by country you will see that the US and the UK were rated the highest respectively: they could weather the storm the best. Interestingly this has been used as circumstantial evidence to show that that the release of this virus was an American attack designed to bring about differential damage with the Anglo-Americans being least scathed.
You can see the damage that has been done to this country. Utter devastation on every level. And the worst of it hasn’t even kicked in yet. Make of it what you will. A time will come when you stop making excuses for your compatriots.
Took one look at map with China, Australia and NZ the ‘best’ and didn’t read the rest.
One thing about this kind of discourse is that there is ZERO questioning of the reliability of the statistics in the first place. That is just accepted as a given – as if a medic filling in a Causes of Death form had only one way that he could do it, given “the facts”, and further as if he always does it that “only one way”. That’s simply not the reality. Official statistics in Britain are mostly no more reliable than they were in the USSR. In an alienated society, anything to do with “target indicators” always de-reliabilises the statistics. That’s true if the target is measured in material widgets, in reputation points, in currency, or (as is often the case in Britain) in bovine excrement. And no the “Artificial Intelligence” cavalry isn’t about to come over the hill and sort this human problem out.
I seem to recall that in the early days of the fascist epoch that began in March 2020 British hospital medics were told to write “Covid-19” in some cases of patient death even when no SARSCoV2 test had been carried out. Take all “deaths with Covid” figures with an enormous amount of salt, and for that matter all “excess deaths” figures too, because goodness knows what non-SARSCoV2-related factors affect annual death rates in the “normal” course of things. Don’t take an average just because you can. That may very well not be a sensible thing to do.
PS In other news, President Zelenskiy says the Russians will have to raze Kyiv to the ground in order to take it. I know his background is in TV comedy, but he doesn’t GET the public relations side of a war leader’s job, does he? Only a war leader who is a complete idiot says something like that. Saying “We will not let you take our capital city” is something very different, but that’s not what this guy said.
Half of Britain’s journalists and other chatterers seem to think a palace coup to unseat President Putin may be imminent. Clue: it’s not – it really is NOT – but if you wanted to make such a case you might look at Nikita Khrushchev after the Turkey-Cuba missile crisis of 1962, but it took two full years for him to leave office, and hell, why should I try to make a case for those who don’t really know what they’re talking about? (Although it is tempting to wonder whether the reason Khrushchev isn’t getting mentioned much is because of his Ukrainian background
.)
Anyway…although the removal of Putin from office before Mayday is extremely unlikely, the same is NOT true of Zelensky. Zelensky seems already to have lost the plot, threatening to let Kyiv be razed before the Russian forces take it. What a tw*t. How long has this guy got in office? Quite possibly not long at all. We can know for absolute certain that the huge majority of Kiev residents do NOT want their city to be razed, and they do not consider the mentioning of that possibility to be a sign of strength either. His popularity among Ukrainians is probably in free fall, even if the troughers in Her Britannic Majesty’s House of Commons think he’s spiffing.
Where else has this research been reported? This is a rhetorical question as our media have become accustomised to ignoring any data that contradicts the mainstream narrative. The fact that we are even discussing international league tables of Covid deaths is an indication of how preposterous the debate has become. Eventually it will become apparent that most restrictions. not least lockdown, made very little difference one way or the other. Focussed protection and better health precautions in hospitals and care homes would have been a sufficient response in my view.
…and perhaps testing at airports etc if the virus had been detected early enough otherwise leave it. Sweden made some errors but nothing compared with other nations wildly disproportionate overreaction. There is one main lesson: don’t lose your nerve (or your reason) in a crisis.
Yep. A short French chap in a fancy hat once said something about military genius being the ability to stand in the middle doing nothing while everyone else runs around losing their heads.
Nature is reporting it big-time. They love the idea that the pandemic’s death toll was 3x greater than reported.
Does anyone (even members of the CCP executive) believe their numbers.
Since there are no viruses, CCP is closest to the truth on numbers.
The Lancet figures are from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021. For the first half of this time period no one was dying as a result of being jabbed with a covid vaccine. For the second half some of the excess deaths were caused by the vaccines – how many?
An indication can be gained by looking at the Euromomo statistics: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
The top graph, for all ages, has two clear peaks attributable to deaths related to covid infections in spring 2020 and mid winter 2020/21.
From April 21 to Jan 22 the graph shows substantial excess deaths for almost every week. Vaccine deaths were undoubtedly a contributory factor.
The UK vaccine regulator, MHRA, does not attribute a single death to a covid vaccine so it is necessary to estimate the number of vaccine related deaths using non-official sources of information.
The American entrepreneur, Steven Kirsch, has estimated that 150,000 Americans have died so far from the covid jabs: https://www.skirsch.com/covid/Deaths.pdf
The UK population is a fifth of that of the US so one fifth of 150,000 is 30,000.
If 30,000 Brits have died in one year from the jabs that is a rate of 42 per 100,000.
The Lancet study gives excess deaths for the two year period for the UK as 130 per 100,000. If Steven Kirsch’s figures are reasonable then a significant proportion of the excess UK deaths are due to the vaccines.
My own view is that Kirsch’s figures are ballpark right. This is based on the number of people I know/ know of who have died in the last nine months of illnesses I attribute to covid vaccines.
A long comment of the Lancet article divided in three parts with results in the third part
Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic:a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020–21
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821%2902796-3
Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J Stanton, T Gillespie, and J and E NordstromRole of the funding source:The funders of the study had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or the writing of the report.
Tried to read through this paper in detail. Not the easiest thing to do as most of the mathematical modelling and methods are not comprehensible for me but probably for others, who could discuss those points. I have therefore tried to look at the results and see if they are biological plausible or too odd.
There are so many obvious shortcomings of the preliminary calculations and then in the final estimation, all the results are based on modelling. Heard that before?
Yes, it has Ferguson’s stamp all over it. The megalomaniac effort to do a world estimation of something impossible to do. The authors dress up their guestimate in scientific veneer. They could have used only reliable excess data, age adjusted for certain parts of the world and those results would have been more accurate. No, they wanted to do a world calculation instead.
Have we an underestimation of covid deaths? Yes, most likely in certain parts of the world but at the same time possible overestimation in other parts. Is excess deaths a good indication of covid pandemic’s death burden? Yes and no in this covid pandemic. We have the first time in world history instituted pandemic measures which killed many people, which must be included in any excess deaths. They are not included in this estimate and the authors actually somewhat agree on that shortcoming.
However, perhaps exposing their bias, they say in the same sentence that even if measures against covid could increase deaths due to inaccessible health care, then at the same there could be less deaths due to less road traffic accidents due to immobilisations of LD.
Is that believable in Africa? Millions starving, inaccessible TB services, inaccessible child vaccination programmes. Then same as deaths of lower traffic accidents? The authors lost further credibility just reading this.
This dual hammer with deaths of covid and deaths of the contra measures makes any excess death estimate of the covid pandemic much less reliable than previous estimates of flu pandemic mortality.
Finally in the discussion the authors still mention masks, SD and reduced mobility and the lack of those glorious measures in Africa as an explanation for, according to them, high excess death rates calculated for Africa. If the authors had any credibility left this was the final straw.
Let us go into shortly about their methods. They lack mortality data form almost all of Africa, big parts of Middle East, China many Asian countries, reckon more than half the world population they have no data at all of excess mortality and only modelling.
They included latitude as a variable and then come up with hugely inflated figures for equatorial countries and southern states in US. Ironically, they mention The Economist (whose analytical model has not been peer-reviewed, using a machine learning algorithm with a vast list of covariates to produce excess mortality) estimates for 187 countries. The Economist seems to come up with the exact same world figure 18 million dead of covid, the same figure as they themselves produce!
Six models were used to estimate expected mortality; final estimates of expected mortality were based on an ensemble of these models.
Now direct quotes for those of you, who can understand this
“Ensemble weights were based on root mean squared errors derived from an out-of-samplepredictive validity test. As mortality records are incomplete worldwide, we built a statistical model that predicted the excess mortality rate for locations and periods where all-cause mortality data were not available.”
“With the selected best model, we ran a prediction process using 100 draws for each covariate and 100 draws of estimated coefficients and residuals, estimated from the regressions run at the draw level using draw-level input data on both excess mortality and covariates. Mean values and 95% uncertainty intervals were then generated at national, regional, and global levels. Out-of-sample predictive validity testing was done on the basis of our final model specification.”
Results
First quoting Clare Craig very pertinent comment
“Their modelling led these excess death estimates per 100k: Ireland 12.5 Canada 60 Finland 80 UK 127 Brazil 186 Ecuador (who had huge reported excess deaths after a military lockdown): 333 Botswana 400 Lebanon 416 Peru 529 Lesotho 563 Bulgaria 647
Why would the mortality be 5 times higher in Bulgaria than the UK? Why would a disease that kills the elderly, frail and obese kill 43 times as many in Lesotho as Ireland? It makes no sense”
Vaccine shills have already interpreted this article that the successful vaccination campaign in UK versus only 30% uptake in Bulgaria explain this divergence. They don’t make the comparison UK and Lithuania with similar vaccine uptake but almost 4 times more excess deaths in Lithuania.
A Swiss commenting found that in Swizz data, where they estimated 15000 excess deaths, but if you instead adjust for age, there is no excess deaths at all in 2020-2021 compared to 2010-2019 average. Quite a big fault not using age adjusted excess deaths when available.
Two other Clare Craig comments
“In Japan 18,400 covid deaths. The paper scaled this up to 111,000 modelled excess deaths. In the meantime China, was said to have had essentially zero excess deaths”
Why would a developed modern resourceful nation like Japan not detect these 90 000 extra covid deaths?
“Why the hell don’t they trust the Australian and New Zealand official data? In the article “We estimated that several countries, including Australia and New Zealand, have had negative excess mortality during the pandemic.”
Australia has reported in the real world, slight excess deaths 2020/2021 compared to average 5 years earlier but age adjusted slightly lower. But the authors get in their calculation negative excess death because it suits the author’s idea of effective zero covid measures? The same with NZ which has a slight excess mortality in reality.
Africa. A continent with an age structure which would automatically give them a low covid deaths with so few elderly. Not according to these authors. They estimate 50-100 more covid deaths than registered. Unbelievable.
Strange thing in US data, They factor in a latitude effect and Texas should have 50 % more covid deaths. But the most bizarre outlier is Vermont in the north where they estimate 4 times more covid deaths than registered. Why different from all other surrounding states in the North ?
Why should neighbouring Iraq and Saudi Arabia have 6 times difference in excess deaths of covid?
China with no data is just estimates. The model says though they had only 4800 covid deaths reported China ”should have” 17900 (with CI 7540-30100).Is this believable in a 1.4 billion people country? Lancet has been accused to be a Chinese puppet and swallowing all Chinese figures. Even daring to do an estimation is pure foolishness.
Instead of using available data from selected countries they have done world-wide estimations using modelling and coming up with “guesstimates” dressed up as science.
This report has been quoted favourably by some as it does not support LD comparing Sweden and UK. Make no mistakes in the flavour of this report. The usual LD modelling cabal giving us all the fancy modelling of deaths a la Ferguson. They have now done this to promote SD, masks and mass vaccination versus targeted vaccination.
The conclusion of this modelling. Garbage in garbage out.
by ow the main cause for excess deaths will most likely be vaccination related deaths….