During the 24 weeks from March 24th 2023 to September 1st 2023 there were 32,130 registered deaths due to heart failure in England. In 2020 we had expected 25,512 heart failure deaths during the corresponding weeks, a difference of 6,618. If we extrapolate to 52 weeks then, at the prevailing rate, we’ll see 14,339 more deaths from heart failure in 2023 than we expected in 2020. To put this in some kind of perspective, that’s equivalent to the total number of deaths from all causes in Lancashire in any single year, or, if you’re not familiar with Lancashire, it’s about the same as the total number of deaths in Devon and Cornwall in a single year.
Deaths from heart failure over the past 24 weeks have been 26% higher than the expected level in 2020. The source of this rather alarming statistic is the latest report from the Department for Health Improvement and Disparities.
However, it doesn’t report it in quite the same way. It compares heart failure deaths in 2023 with ‘expected’ heart failure deaths for 2023, without mentioning that ‘expected’ heart failure deaths in 2023 are 8% higher than in 2020. Inflation affects heart failure deaths just as much as it does the pound in your pocket, it seems!
Figure 1 shows the level of registered heart failure deaths in 2023 measured against the ‘expected’ level for 2020 and 2023. These are shocking figures. But what’s the cause?
Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty offered up ‘delays to the prescription of statins’, before this theory was thoroughly debunked by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson in a Substack post, subsequently reprinted by the Daily Sceptic.
Some cardiologists, such as Drs. Aseem Malhotra and Peter McCullough have pointed the finger at the mRNA vaccines.
Others blame the tendency of the lockdowns to reduce activity levels and force us into unhealthy lifestyles.
For me, two chance meetings at a riverside pub garden encapsulates the role of pharma and non-pharma interventions in this sorry state of affairs. Which of these paths bears the greater burden of responsibility, I leave it up to you to decide.
Picture the scene: a warm summer evening during the recent fine weather, a pleasant pub garden, boats and paddleboarders drifting by. A friend came over. He’d been a zealous masker and social distancer. He had fallen out with various people over his over-zealous compliance with the whole Covid theatre. But surprisingly his opening words were to inform me that the 43 year-old girlfriend of a mutual acquaintance had just dropped dead and, amazingly to me, he blamed the vaccine. He then went on to tell me about John Campbell, adverse reactions and the dangers of spike proteins. I agreed that it wouldn’t be a surprise if the vaccine had been a contributing factor.
We hear this story again and again. Vaccine injuries and deaths are a real thing. The real-world benefits of mRNA vaccines are very debatable. ‘Cases’ peaked in January 2022 at three times their previous peak and after 90% of the population were vaccinated. According to Euromomo, excess deaths across most of Europe in post-vaccine roll-out 2022 were 7% higher than in 2021 and only 2.7% lower than in pandemic ravaged 2020.
As my first friend was leaving, a second old friend came along. He used to regularly cycle in the same group as me but hadn’t been since the lockdowns. Now, here he was, 10 kilos (1½ stone and 3.2 points on the BMI scale) heavier, explaining that he’d never really got back into cycling after the lockdowns and now he felt he’d be so far off the pace he’d struggle to keep up and where’s the fun in that? He then went on to say that, the end of cycling aside, the first lockdown had been the happiest period in his family life. He’s a bit of a Lefty, and, true to form, made an abrupt Left turn and went into the merits of UBI (universal basic income), how wonderful if everyone could frisk in their garden in late spring sunshine and to hell with work. Lounging on the riverbank in the late summer sunshine I could have easily been persuaded that he had a point!
As seductive as this notion may seem, I was reminded of a fascinating paper produced by the ZOE group back in July 2020. (You can see the study here, though perhaps the video is more easily digestible.)
The study looked at the lifestyle impact of the first lockdown across a number of factors, one of which was weight. The results across all the factors were bi-directional, meaning that some people put on weight and some people lost weight. Likewise, some people increased their activity levels while others reduced theirs. Some snacked more, some snacked less.
Figure 2 shows the impact on weight. With over 200,000 participants this was a huge study. Participants were divided into two groups: low DI and high DI. DI stands for ‘disruption index’; it indicates the degree to which someone’s lifestyle was impacted by the lockdown.
Body weight change was highly variable among individuals. In the Low DI group, 33% of participants lost a mean of 4.4 kg and 34% gained a mean of 3.7 kg. Amongst the High DI group, 33% lost an average of 5.5 kg, while 34% put on an average 4.2 kg.
The change for the population as a whole was about zero, but this masked big variances at the individual and sub-group level. There were many examples where people were spurred on to change their lifestyles, but as a general rule the fit got fitter and the fat got fatter. This friend, having gained a few kilos in the first lockdown, was now distinctly overweight and compounding the problem year after year.
I would argue that the picture unearthed by the ZOE lockdown study is probably indicative of what would happen if UBI allowed people to absent themselves from the workforce. I suspect WFH (working from home) for some people also emulates a less extreme form of lockdown, leaving more time for both strenuous activity or sloth.
It’s perhaps worth just reminding ourselves of the degree to which the U.K. has become a nation of fatties. Figure 3 shows the proportion of overweight and obese over 18 years-olds by English region.
It’s a sorry tale.
But it’s not only some adults who displayed a tendency to put on weight during the lockdown. More worryingly still, children followed the same path.
Figure 4 illustrates the degree to which reception age and year 6 boys and girls saw obesity levels accelerate dramatically in 2020-21. While the ‘reception age’ kids’ mean weight went back to its pre-pandemic levels the mean weight for year 6 kids didn’t, showing about a three percentage point increase.
Among the ‘severely obese’, the impact of the lockdowns is even more dramatic, as shown in figure 5. Among year 6 boys there’s been an increase of about a a third in the number of the severely obese.
All too predictably, these increases in obesity tend to follow levels of family deprivation. Figure 6 shows that the most deprived kids are about twice as likely as the least deprived kids to be obese. In addition it shows that during 2020-21 the kids from the poorest homes were about three times as likely to become obese as kids from the better off homes.
Of course, the solution for my cycling-lapsed friend is, in the Tebbit tradition, to get on his bike. The same goes for just about everyone else. But that’s not how the health professionals seem to see it. Rather than take responsibility for your own health, the taxpayer is going to be landed with a bill for ‘Wegovy’, the brand name of ‘semaglutide’, a drug that NICE claims could help people reduce their weight by over 10%, if implemented alongside nutrition and lifestyle changes.
Wegovy is made by pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. Its share price has doubled in the last 12 months and went up 400% over the past five years. It’s been a good time to be big in obesity!
Let’s roll forward 10 years. The NHS has been spending countless millions of taxpayers money on Wegovy, what’s the result? More obesity, the same level of obesity or less obesity? My money’s on more. What’s more, Wegovy comes with its own fair share of side-effects. Stop taking it and your weight tends to pile back on.
The story with Covid was clear: look after your health and there’s nothing much to worry about; pharma and non-pharma interventions simply weren’t required. Exactly the same is true with regard to weight and general health. But how do we help people realise that salvation doesn’t reside with Big Pharma?
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The short answer is No it is not time to start the Dangerous New Virus!!47 game afresh. It’s time to end it.
A thorough and interesting article covering the origins of Omicron. Was it the result of a lab leak in S. Africa where virology/vaccine research was taking place?
https://www.stopgof.com/english/omicron-origin/
This article isn’t awful, but I don’t think it’s really a good fit for the Daily Sceptic readership. If it appeared in the Guardian then maybe TDS could have a an article about that. That would be mildly newsworthy.
The principal problem with this article is that it accepts the ‘Covid was really dangerous’ lie. A quick look at the footnotes to that FT chart should make the problems with it immediately obvious. The statement that Covid once was 20 times as lethal as the flu is arrived at by comparing all deaths where Covid was mentioned AT ALL on the death certificate (most likely massively overstating Covid deaths, with infection data from the ONS (quite possibly massively understating infections). That then is compared to IFR for regular flu – which the footnotes suggest might have been done properly (who knows of course).
No, this is the biggest lie of all and the one that we must keep challenging as everything that followed flowed from it. Expecting the average person to understand the reasons why vaccine coercion and lockdowns both don’t work and are morally unacceptable, even in response to a truly lethal virus, is too ambitious.
Separately, I’m quite happy for people to believe that Omicron is the much less lethal end state of Covid. It provides and ending of sorts to this story. I don’t want people to believe that Covid is still out there hiding, waiting to kill us all.
Indeed. Only 6000 people out of 130k deaths classified as Covid deaths in England&Wales had Covid as the only cause on their death certificate.
And that is an official figure, likely still overestimating the real one in light of the prohibition of autopsies and other dynamics at play here.
My first thought when reading the headline was, is it time to accept that CoVid 19 is not CoVid 19?
CoVid = abbreviation of Coronavirus Disease = Common Cold.
The ‘19’ (2019) was to give the pretence that it was a ‘novel’ disease caused by a ‘novel’ virus, instead of the same disease that is caused by a number of viruses, including other ancient coronaviruses, of which we have another rather mild variant.
It should have been called JAC… Just Another Coronavirus.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the internet suggested it stood for.. ‘Certification Of Vaccination ID – (AI = 1,9)? They’re kidding!!!
Unfortunately the regulators behind the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the Big Pharma have no incentive to lose the extraordinarily profitable EUA. Pesky safety trials to ensure a new product is safe and effective are simply not profitable, and as there is no liability then unsafe and ineffective is just fine provided it is highly profitable.
Of course there could have been no EUA had there been any safe and effective treatments like ivermectin and HCQ…. hence the cheep effective treatment bashing by Big Pharma lackeys.
Is it time to start building a gallows yet?
And the Times muppets will not allow their journalists to properly investigate this conflict of interest. Probably for similar reasons.
My conclusion to this article is actually that it shows what a colossal mistake it was (almost certainly a deliberate one) to allow PCR tests to define the disease.
If COVID is a set of symptoms then you can’t declare someone has a disease just because of a test that indicates the probability of the presence of viral material.
We’ve spent 2+ years calling COVID many things that were not COVID.
Is Omicron not COVID? Almost everything that was called COVID since March 2020 hasn’t actually been COVID. Start with that.
Yep. PCR is a gigantic fraud, even without the ones instituted on top of it like non-standardization, arbitrary higher/lower CT for vaxxed/unvaxxed, non confirmation, single snippet search etc. that were all known by June 2020 the latest.
But a very profitable and absolutely essential one to create and milk a plandemic.
I read yesterday that thousands of tests got an EUA, but none has gotten full approval yet, to prevent liability issues.
What else does one need to know?!
Even worse, we’ve spent 2+ years calling people in perfect health ‘infected’ or a ‘case’ (as in an ill patient) when they were no such thing.
Let’s just go back to what we have done for decades and start calling respiratory ailments what we have always done – a cold when mild, a flu when worse. I find the point that a flu virus is far worse than a cold virus moot, as we now know one and the same virus can be a mild cold for some and can lead to weeks of bed rest and pneumonia for others. As generally we did not test for viruses, who knows how many of us in reality did have a flu virus but called it a cold as we were not ill enough to think otherwise.
And yes, above all, let us stop with testing people who are clearly not ill. Having a sniffle or a sore throat is not being ill, it’s being under the weather. The one thing Fraudci was right about (although it was in a vain attempt to try to hide that his pet poison was not working as advertised) is that people should only test if they are admitted to hospital. In someone that ill it may be worth knowing what the exact virus is, for the rest, stay home, have some Lemsip, get some rest, have some Vit D and C and move along.
PCR became the disease. It is a first in medical science that a laboratory reagent to detect a pathogen is a disease.
There can be no disease without symptoms. Being infected is not disease. Daily we are infected with a variety of micro-organisms which we don’t notice because they are innocuous, in insufficient quantity to cause affect, or our immune system bumps them off quickly.
Maybe all this is merely an artefact of testing for a “virus” which has only been characterised by computer simulation of a random sequence of nucleotides apparently found in patient zero (thank you China).
All the rest is a farrago of an intrinsically dodgy PCR/LFT regime?
There is clearly something going round but we have not achieved herd immunity because there is an insufficient reservoir of immune people, ie the had covid but never jabbed.
Unfortunately covid or whatever will continue to circulate due to the vast number of people jabbed with a none sterilising gene based product.
This is evidenced by the jabbed getting repeat infections, despite, or rather because of the jab. There is scientific evidence of VAIDS, OAS, and ADE.
See G.V.Bossche.
Yet we are still jabbing and jabbing kids.
Criminal and madness.
Me thinks Omicron was the wild version, created by leaky mass gene-therapisation against the original man-made bioweapon.
And the only really interesting question left is whether that bioweapon was released accidentally or intentionally.
If it carries on at this rate, ‘The Science’™️ will discover the Common Cold.
Must admit I am partial to Hobgoblin…
Maths teacher in the year 2030. “Today children we are going learn about the dangers of Mathematical Modeling and how it destroys society”
Omicron was never Covid-19 and neither were any of the other variants. Covid-19 is the serious hyperimmune state that may occur following SARS-CoV-2. The same syndrome occurs after other viruses and spontaneously. Different types of SARS-CoV-2 have different risks for Covid-19. Omicron simply has a lower risk. Using the terms SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 interchangeably, as continues to be done, is clinically and scientifically inaccurate.
One has to wonder whether lab leaks are more common than is being made out. No one has looked back at the sudden emergence of HIV/AIDS in the late 1970s, in light of COVID-19, for starters…
Dr Hope-Simpson was a sceptic who questioned medical orthodoxy. He studied chickenpox and shingles, showing how immunity conferred by natural chickenpox in childhood waned with age; the two conditions were known to be related, but the nature of the relationship was unclear. He showed that a virus could lie dormant in the human body for years or decades and reappear in another form. Later, the single virus responsible for both diseases was identified and isolated by Thomas Huckle Weller.
Hope-Simpson’s career-long interest in the transmission of respiratory viruses was equally inventive. He questioned the theory of person-to-person transmission being enough to explain the simultaneous appearance of influenza in places far apart. He proposed that influenza epidemics during winter may be connected to a seasonal influence, perhaps a lack of vitamin D, as outbreaks in temperate latitudes peak in the month following the winter solstice and disappear the following spring/summer. As the virus mutates, it becomes less virulent and more infectious until the outbreak ends.
Hope-Simpson describes the course of the COVID-19 epidemic pretty well so far, although this virus took longer than flu usually takes to “burn out.” Most respiratory viruses mature and change their character during an outbreak that begins suddenly and then gently subsides.