It was an evening in mid-March 2020. Almost two years had passed since I retired from the University of Arizona, where I was a Professor of Epidemiology in the College of Public Health.
I was watching the news from Israel, the country in which I lived during the first three decades of my life. The reporters were broadcasting a forthcoming catastrophe, a doomsday in the making. It was all about a new coronavirus epidemic which erupted in China and had reached Israel, Europe and parts of the U.S.
Like everyone, I have been following the news from the Far East since the beginning of the year. Although infectious diseases were not my subject matter research, epidemiologists are trained to think critically, to question what many accept at face value. The picture that emerged was far from clear. A few observations did not fit well with the apocalyptic predictions.
So, I decided to write a short article in Hebrew and submit it as an op-ed to a newspaper in Israel. That’s how the series of essays now published as The Covid Pandemic: Unconventional Analytical Essays (2020-2023) started. It was supposed to have ended about three years later with my summary of what has actually happened in Israel (as opposed to the official narrative), but I added a few more later articles on Covid vaccines. In between, I wrote about many aspects of the pandemic, drawing upon data from Sweden, Denmark, Europe, Arizona, the US, the U.K. and Israel.
Forty essays are included in the book. The first one was titled ‘Hold off on that Apocalyptic Consensus About the Coronavirus’ (March 24th 2020). All of them were written for the public at large and were data driven. They were not based on ‘opinion’ or ‘intuition’. They are science, as best as I know it. If written in a formal, academic style, many of these essays could have been submitted to epidemiology journals. Whether they would have passed the guards of official narratives is a different question.
What will you find in the book?
Back in 2020, I devoted several essays to lockdown-free Sweden and showed, unequivocally, the futility of lockdowns and the misleading comparison of Sweden to neighbouring Nordic countries. The last one in this series, published in 2022, was titled ‘Sweden or the World: Which was a Cautionary Tale?’, paraphrasing headlines that claimed the opposite in the spring of 2020.
Several essays have estimated the death toll of panic-triggered responses to the pandemic. By September 2021, before the return of the flu, between 15% and 30% of the excess mortality in the U.S. may be attributed to the so-called mitigation efforts (‘The Mystery of Unaccounted Excess Deaths in the U.S.’). These were lives that were lost in vain — at least 115,000 deaths and possibly twice as many. The consequences of lockdowns and disruptions of normal life did not end in 2021. Lives have continued to be lost in many countries, including the U.K. Some of the mechanisms are described in my essay ‘Covid: The Death Toll of Panic’.
In numerous essays, I studied excess mortality and explained why trends should be examined over an entire winter (‘flu years’), not by calendar years. Using this approach, I estimated the excess mortality in Europe (‘How Severe was the Pandemic in Europe?’). In the first year (2019-2020), it was only somewhat higher than in a previous season with severe flu (2017-2018). The second year (2020-2021) was very harsh but far from apocalyptic – about twice as severe as 2017-2018. In both years, all-cause mortality would have been lower without lockdowns.
Over a dozen essays cover various aspects of Covid vaccines. I showed severe biases in influential studies from Israel and estimated the correct effectiveness against Covid death, which ranged from mediocre to zero or sometimes negative, in the frail elderly. Using data from the U.K., I showed the questionable effectiveness of the first booster and the futility of the second (fourth dose). In three essays, I estimated the short-term fatality rate of Covid vaccines, which was unacceptable but fortunately not as high as others had suggested. Long-term fatality is difficult to estimate. One essay describes unacceptable rates of side-effects, as found in a largely unknown official survey in Israel (‘Downplaying the Side Effects of Boosters’).
Did Covid vaccines save millions of lives? Not according to a comparative analysis of Israel with Sweden in the winter of 2020-2021 (‘Thousands of Averted Covid Deaths in Israel: Science Fiction’). Nor did they reduce the delayed death toll of Covid in Denmark (‘Lockdown and Vaccines: Lessons from Denmark’).
In the last essay, which imagines a future perspective on Covid vaccines, I wrote:
Twenty years later, we are still studying the long-term morbidity and mortality consequences of disseminated lipid nanoparticles (the mRNA carriers), self- manufactured toxic spike protein and aberrant proteins in various tissues, elevated levels of IgG4 antibodies after repeated injections, and the integration of foreign DNA fragments into the genome.
These days, a group of scientists is studying cancer cells from vaccinated patients to determine if foreign DNA is present there. Chances are that you will not find much on this topic or on other vaccine-related effects in mainstream media. So, keep following the Daily Sceptic and Brownstone, as I have been doing for a long time. No end is in sight to the saga of Covid vaccines.
Dr. Eyal Shahar is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Arizona. His new book The Covid Pandemic: Unconventional Analytical Essays (2020-2023) is available now.
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“But never let a good crisis go to waste”. —–“We must act now”. ———I think there are two aspects to this (1) Big government, unlike small government must always be seen to be doing something, even when doing nothing might be more expedient, or as my old dad used to say “When in doubt do nothing”. (2) Big Government see opportunities for a Power Grab. eg The climate crisis. It gives huge opportunity to enact policies you have long craved but had no excuse for. The climate crisis and covid gives that perfect excuse.
Might be worth noting that muscles only generate a useful force when they shrink; they do nothing while expanding, except use up spare energy, acquire on-board fat, putting on weight etc. Large organisations are somewhat animal-like to that extent.
Yes. Don’t just do something, stand there!
The other thing to mention is that gathering data before making a decision – what some of our military refer to as OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) – is not ‘doing nothing‘ no matter how hard the media is stoking people’s fear.
The “climate crisis” is wholly manufactured – Club of Rome 1972.
As a nobody, Dr Eyal, I could also see it was being over-hyped. I just looked out of the window of my living room at the calm streets, strangely free of corpses, instead of staring at the smartphone “my government” had hacked.
Then, during the days and months and years of “curve-flattening” which followed, I also monitored age and population adjusted deaths per 100k per year, for a more data-driven, scientific approach. Same result. No pandemic.
Incredible, innit…?
The only reason it could be called a pandemic was that WHO changed the definition.
Now they are pushing for more power with the World Pandemic Treaty.
They are dangerous and need to be stopped.
The billionaires pushing this must be cut off from influencing world policy.
The second day of lockdown, I emailed a very long email to my Tory MP suggesting that it was a bad moveand gave a number of reasons which have proved to be entirely correct including the ‘tinder’ deaths of older people (like me) dying sooner although I did not envisage the unhelpful moving of elderly people from hospitals to care homes.
However, what drove my cynicism of lockdown was the total acceptance by the Government of Neil Ferguson’s modelling at Imperial College. He was wrong about BSE, Foot & Mouth and Swine Fever over 20 years and yet Boris’s Government believed his ridiculous figures.
It was also clear to me that when a little Chinese dominated North Italian village was the start of the suggestion for lockdown and then embraced by the Chinese, they had to be a cover-up from a lab released virus in Wuhan. The inevitable denunciation of that by Fauci who was know to have provided funds for ‘gain of function’ research only hardened my view there was a conspiracy.
I am not a epidermiologist just a retired dairy farmer – what do I know? I do know that it was an excuse of a power grab by the progressive Left elites and funded by the WEF types and the same is creating the ridiculous Net Zero policy which is going to be a heck of lot more costly than Covid.
As a Mathematician it was obvious that talk of exponential growth was mere hype. A quick literature review showed that the epidemiological models didn’t grow exponentially either.
As a former Civil Servant, I could see straight away that Covid was being over-hyped. I’ve written enough Government bollocks in my time to recognise it when I see it.
What is more surprising is that more people didn’t realise that it was being over-hyped. I watched the first couple of daily briefings and told my son that it was rubbish …. nothing was being put into context.
Since I pay no attention whatsoever to the BBC or the other MSM (apart from the DT) I was already digging around the net and reading blogs which were “calling them out.” When the first lockdown was imposed I knew straight away that they had downgraded Covid from a High Consequence Infectious Disease FIVE DAYS EARLIER.
No “journalist” questioned that, or called them out. That was the first real indication that what we were being told was bollocks.
Me too. I smelt bulkshit within the first few days. Chinese communism involved? Must be some bollocks here somewhere.
Toby’s Lockdown Sceptics became my go to site throughout the scandic.
No journalist even mentioned HCID, if they had its highly possible things might have been a bit different. They are a disgrace to their profession, every last one of them.
Only a few independent journalists dared to speak out!
It’s possible a lot were taken in, but its no excuse, its the job of journalists to hold government and parliament to account.
The neo communists emerged from under their poltical rocks, and scurried about infecting our decision making with their vile and odious opinions. Communist minded ‘experts’, like the Marxist womyn, Michie, provided their control freak advice to embed their mi d viruses into our body politic.
Great article and I look forward to reading the book. With Brazil effectively outlawing Twitter/ X the concern has to be that other countries will follow suit. If this was a plandemic, which is looking far more likely, those that orchestrated it could never have predicted that Elon Musk would have preserved freedom of speech. The Indoctrinated Brain by Dr Michael Nehls and the substack articles of from Christie Laura Grace and her latest findings on RNA/DNA/LNP are horrific. I hope the Daily Skeptic and Brownstone, Twitter, Substack etc which have done so much to keep freedom of speech alive, are allowed to continue to do so. Using a VPN seems to be the advice of Musk to Brazilians.