In a recent interview that ‘went viral’, vaccine sceptic Ed Dowd claimed that the deaths of U.K. 0-14 year-olds were up by 22%. Fact checkers went into overdrive to rubbish the claim. Though rather than countering the data unearthed by Dowd, and which to the inconvenience of the fact checkers were factually correct, they tended to rely on dubious claims that vaccines had saved X million lives – according to models rather than real-world data. As usual, they didn’t engage with the actual data available.
I’m reluctant to do the fact checkers’ job for them but I thought you might appreciate understanding what truth there was in Dowd’s assertion. I then wanted to point out the danger of putting too much faith in individual analysts. We all need to be wary of people overstating their claims, whichever ‘side’ they are on.
The data I’m going to use come from the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities’ (OHID’s) wonderful online tool that it stopped updating back in December 2023 when, in its wisdom, it opted for a new way to calculate ‘expected deaths’, using a methodology so complex as to defy any mortal man from sorting the sheep from the goats. The OHID data only cover England.
The OHID data are less granular than those used by Dowd, but they show much the same thing, though for a wider age range covering the 0-24 age-cohort. What’s more, it’s easier to access.
Here are the charts published by the OHID. The top chart shows weekly excess all-cause deaths for 0-24 year-olds and the lower chart shows total weekly all-cause deaths for the same age group. The little orange bits are ‘Covid’ deaths. As a rule of thumb, about 100 0-24 year-olds die each week in England.
Looking at these two charts should you be alarmed or reassured? In both charts you can see deaths start to rise just after the start of the vaccine rollout period. Coincidence?
Firstly, let’s see if I can alarm you. In 2020 from the start of the first lockdown to the year end there were 3,497 deaths in the age group, that’s 416 (11%) fewer deaths than were expected. Let’s gloss over the fact that, despite a supposedly ‘once in a century’ pandemic, 2020 was the safest year ever to be a 0-24 year-old – though it wasn’t safe because young people were protected from Covid but because road accidents and murders, the big killers of young people, decreased. Conversely, from April 2023 to December 2023 there were 4,142 deaths, 645 (18%) more than in the same period in 2020 and 418 (11%) more deaths than were expected.
There you go. Ed Dowd was right, and not just for the 0-14 year-olds but for the expanded 0-24 year-olds too. Deaths among young people were 22% higher in 2023 than they had been in 2020.
Now, using exactly the same data let’s try and reassure you.
Let’s look at the 12 month periods starting from week 12 (week ending March 27th in 2020) for each year from 2020 to 2023. Over the full 196 week period there were 19,477 registered deaths of 0-24 year-olds. This was 574 more deaths than the 18,903 that we expected. The difference is 3%. So, over the entirety of this ‘once in a century’ pandemic only 3% more 0-24 year-olds died than we expected; surely a triumph for Government policy!
Let’s now add the missing years and look at the 12 month periods starting from week 12 for 2020, 2021 and 2022, and the 40 week period from week 12 for 2023.
In Figure 3 excess deaths as a percentage of expected deaths are shown by the red line. Rising from a low of –7% in 2020-21 it rises to +11% by the end of 2023. Likewise, the 3% overall excess deaths for the entire 196 week period is shown by the red column on the right-hand side of the chart.
Clearly, Covid (the dark blue boxes) didn’t much influence the deaths figure in any year, peaking at 2% of deaths in 2021. Bearing in mind that virtually all those deaths would have been ‘with’ not ‘of’ Covid, you can see how minimal Covid was for this age-cohort.
From trough to peak we can see that using these 12 months figures there was an 18% increase in deaths, but this is a distortion that overstates the situation because it compares trough to peak.
However, while Ed Dowd was overstating the trend in one direction (by using the abnormally low 2020 figure as a baseline), the ‘fact checkers’ and Government bodies were understating it in the other direction. An 11% increase is really quite dramatic and annually rising fatality rates in the 0-24 year-olds deserve a bit of investigation.
It’s beyond comical the way articles, such as this one in the Telegraph last week titled ‘Has the pandemic made us sicker?‘, mention an endless list of possible causes of excess deaths in countries around the world, but fail to mention the possible link to mRNA vaccines. The BTL commentators are rather less circumspect!
Now I come to my point about being wary of people overstating their case even when they’re on the ‘right’ side. Ed Dowd is right to flag up that something is up, something needs investigating, but he’s wrong to overplay the data. Are recent excess deaths down to SADS, heart failure, murders, road traffic accidents or some other cause? Someone in authority should be looking into this and coming up with plausible explanations. It’s the same with Naomi Wolf and many other Covid critics: they can often overstate their case, to the detriment of the cause.
However, for me, the argument decrying the Government’s vaccine coercion, lockdown and all aspects of its Covid policy doesn’t rely on efficacy or safety; the core issue is individual choice. My body, my choice, my freedoms, my decisions.
The vaccines could have been the safest and most efficacious ever produced, yet still a coercive policy to get us to take them was always wrong. Their ineffectiveness and lack of safety merely makes the argument more persuasive. It’s the same with the lockdowns, masks, social distancing, the right to travel. Their rightness or wrongness doesn’t depend on how effective they were; rather it comes down to personal liberties. My Government shouldn’t be able to lock me up in my own home any more than it should force me to take a medical treatment against my will.
This brings me onto those who belatedly adopted ‘vaccine-sceptical’ positions. Many of them never took principled positions against coercion to enforce vaccine policy. Rather, in the light of the evidence that the vaccines were neither safe nor effective they’ve decided they object to unsafe, ineffective vaccines being coercively administered. But they were perfectly happy when they thought the vaccines were ‘safe and effective’ for them to be forced upon you and me, and some of them have still not renounced that view. These people are not on my team.
In the same way, many people now object to lockdowns. However, the grounds for objection too often are not that it was wrong to restrict personal freedoms by law – they were perfectly happy to have those freedoms curtailed at the time – they only objected when it became apparent that the measures were ineffective or unnecessary. This is not a principled objection, merely a pragmatic one.
Why does this matter? It matters because when the next pandemic arises, or some other challenge that looks likely to be met by the Government restricting personal liberties, you need to know who you can trust. Those whose objections to such policies are dependent upon their effectiveness and safety can’t be relied upon to jump the right way when the crisis hits. As Groucho Marx said: “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I have others.”
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As I’ve said before, masking is a filthy habit and terrible for the environment. Why is this still even a thing?
What’s really attractive is seeing someone wearing a white surgical mask with a dark vertical line above the nose, showing where grubby fingers have pushed up on the mask for days/weeks/months on end. Thank you for keeping me safe….
Not only disgusting but everyday I find myself picking the revolting things up off the pavement. If people really believe this is a deadly disease why are they throwing their germs around the streets of Britain?
I am constantly amazed when I see someone wearing one with the top edge underneath the nose, (A jaunty style called the ‘Chinnian’), as if the virus only arrives in the body by mouth. What kind of mentality do you have to have for that.?
Viruses can also enter via the eyes. Masks, as my mother would say, are load of old hooey.
Or ears. Or scratches in the skin.
Or eyes. Best put blindfolds on, eh.
Or a plastic bag over the head.
Full body armour is needed me thinks.
Or rolling around inside a plastic ball.
I think that the plastic face visors are even more amusing, so long as you are heavily into schadenfreude.
As I understand it, they are duty bound to treat, so you can simply refuse to wear one. They will try to make you feel uncomfortable but will relent.
Make them feel uncomfortable back. Ask them if you can have this in writing with name signed and printed, their address (or position or whatever) and what exactly they are demanding. Take a photograph of them. Tell them they’ll be hearing from you…
NHS First; Do harm – masks – jabs lockdowns
Stand in the Park
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Make friends & keep sane
Elms Field
Wokingham RG40 2FE
(near Everyman Cinema and play area)
Dead right! I find them offensive and if anyone, including ( and in particular ) health professionals wore one when speaking with me I’d ask them to remove it.
I have asked health professionals to remove their masks so that I can understand them better – post infection cognitive issues – all the hospital clinical staff did remove theirs, my GP refused as it was for my safety! Processing speech without the visual cues of lip movements & facial expression wipes me out.
The staff who did remove theirs were only too glad to do so!
These My correlation is bigger than your correlation! debates need to end. It’s unacceptable to force people to hide their faces, muffle their voices and inhibit their breathing in public, no matter who believes what this will or will not also accomplish. People who are convinced they absolutely cannot live with other people having such extreme rights are free to change their gender (insofar necessary) and emigrate to Iran. End of story.
I agree. I don’t think masks work – and the “science” backs me on that – but honestly I would not wear one even if it could be proved they did.
I will second that tof.
Seriously, what science? Whenever somebody wants to make an important looking statement about face masking, he puts some statistic together which contains the correlations correlating with what he wants to say. Pro mask people have statistics with correlations they claim demonstrate that masks work, anti mask people have statistics with correlations claimed to show that they don’t and/or have harmful effects. Nothing of this qualifies as science, it’s just two tribes of opposing sages bombarding each other and the world with meaningless numbers.
Science is observing some hithero unexplained real-world phenomenon, formulating a theory to explain it based on the observation and then designing and conducting repeatable experiments supposed to prove or disprove the theory. At least with our present knowledge and technical abilities, designing and conducting repeatable experiments proving or disproving that such-and-such a thing causes or prevents an infection with something as miniscule and omnipresent as airborne, endemic viruses is simply not possible as we cannot reset living organisms into the state they were in before the experiment started after it was completed and have no reliable way to cause presence or absence of these viruses.
Handwaiving while chanting syllables of power (or rather, wielding spreadsheets with numbers of power) is not science.
I was referring to the numerous studies which all fail to show any benefit. Call them science, call them what you like, but my point is that the case for masks has not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, though because of the huge complication involved the whole area is difficult – too many factors.
I suggest to call them policy-based evidence making[*]. Or rather making of something which can be passed off as evidence.
[*] Ironically, the German RKI (Robert Koch Institute) claims to be in the exact business of doing that,
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Institut/Ausbau_zum_Public-Health-Institut/RKI2025.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
as someone accidentally mistranslated the English produce evidence, put proofs in front of someone, into fabricate proofs.
Challenge: –
Explain how a (poorly fitting) cloth mask with pores around 70 nanometers diameter, can prevent passage of virions less than 1 nanometer in size.
This was pointed out at the start of the Covid scam and likened to the use of wiremesh fences to keep mosquitoes out.
Even accepted by WHO (until the dodgy contracts and brown envelopes for flying in masks from Turkey, China etc had been signed.)
Do your best. A convincing response may win you a banana.
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This is the output of apropos man | head -n 10
base64 encoded and it’s absolutely a good as any other kind of shit someone with more fantasy than creativity can make up. Please feel free to use it as reason for or against anything you want to support or oppose.
Thing is, we never saw this public masking before the shamdemic. If this virus ever was a serious threat, it has now at any rate ceased to be. Has anything changed to make the current situation different to 2019, apart from psychologically?
Oh, we did. In the middle ages, so-called plague doctors used masks to try to avoid succumbing to the plague. This didn’t work and the practice was again discarded. Until a Chinese guy called Wu (you couldn’t make this up) managed to convince himself that masks must work against the plague in 1911 (during the so-called Manchurian Plague). This then convinced our (still) boombaby overlords that another valid and pleasingly exotic (imagine it’s from China!) alternate truth had been found and hence, we were unkindly asked (or rather, harshly ordered) to forget what had been common knowledge for the last 600 years.
They proved with the jabathon that they are not interested in the best outcomes for their patients. Quite simply, there are far too many NHS employees who think the service exists for their benefit and see patients not as paying customers but as a massive inconvenience.
Quite right.
Like those bus drivers who are happy to drive a bus but hate picking up passengers. A few are to be found in every city.
“there are far too many NHS employees who think the service exists for their benefit“
But that’s just it – it does (like all other nationalised industries)
The article’s photo helps me identify seven idiots I hope I need never meet, let alone depend upon in any way, let alone for my health and wellbeing (mental and physical).
About to break into a high energy “Jeruselama”, routine by the looks of it.
I’ll be honest, the stupidest thing I saw today was when I went to an exhibition and outside the loos was a sign that read, “Please use before entering the toilets”, next to a big bottle of hand sanitizer. I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t have seen that pre-Covid and it just seemed to sum up the Clown World, topsy turvey reality that we all unfortunately must deal with. But not a single muzzle was spied ( not even on the 3 chahuahuas being pushed around in a buggy ) so that was a reasonable trade-off.
Maybe it was the modern version of the old engineers joke that you could always tell an engineer, because they were the ones who washed their hands before having a shit.
My GP surgery in Wales still insists everyone wears a mask when coming into the building, and the reception staff are pretty aggressive about enforcing the rule.
I’m not sure, though, whether the nurses and doctors in the surgery could refuse to see a patient who refuses to wear a mask.
And even if in theory they shouldn’t refuse, I’m not sure what a patient could do to force the issue if they were refused an appointment in practice.
Has anyone on this site challenged such GP rules successfully where they live?
Absolutely.
Tell ’em you are exempt.
That should suffice.
I remember two instances where I had to go further, both in the District Hospital.
The first was the kind official who said that without a mask I must stand 2m away from her screen. I, of course, complied but made a performance of not being able to hear / understand her. She tired of this dumb show before I did.
In the other instance, I was curtly reminded that “We do have Covid cases in here, you know!”, to which I responded “Well, I never! Who would have thought it. Sick people in a hospital! Do you also have ladies who are pregnant and due to give birth, in another ward, perhaps?”
She didn’t persist.
Many thanks for your reply, and I’m v impressed with your determination to resist this particularly stupid ‘health’ measure!
It’s happening again because only a very small proportion of the general public read beyond the headlines, which are produced by institutions that refuse to tell the truth, presumably because they fear they’ll lose their funding (by Gates/Soros/whoever).
I have now written twice to the CEO of Bedford NHS Trust (David Carter) asking him for the rationale behind forcing people to wear masks in hospitals and GPs surgeries and………..
Surely the sunk cost fallacy with regard to all the PPE that is still unused and being stored somewhere – what better way to get rid of it than persuade everyone that they need to use it?
The Mask re introduction is just an excuse a cover if you will excuse the pun for an NHS that is so incompetent, so utterly self absorbed in keeping itself fully stocked up with tax payers cash, without supplying anything other than a 3rd world service, it has cunningly found a blame. Us, If we don’t wear a bit of cloth over our faces when entering its hallowed halls of death, we are the ones responsible for its inability to perform, the bit of dirty cloth on your face is according to the NHS the best medicine, the cure all and preventative for all diseases, and if not worn then its our fault that the system is breaking down.
We own the NHS, we decide, its unfit for purpose, its management structure and people couldn’t manage a sh– flow in a sewer, so deny them their excuse, refuse the cloth covering and sue those who have the temerity to treat us as saps.
Typical NHS behaviour. Two pig ignorant administrators in positions of such authority that they can make bovine faeces decisions in the total absence of any empirical evidence and absolutely nobody with the relevant clinical expertise can challenge these thickos.
This must be why “the NHS is the envy of the world” Ho, feckin ho ho.
Surgeon tells it like it is…
Save the image I posted below. And bookmark this
https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
“More than 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms”
The tale of the young lady on GB News this week who has hounded by 11 hospital staff members, threatened with being dragged out and the police called because she refused to wear a silly mask with 650-micron holes in it. (A micron is a micro millimetre, or one thousandth of a millimetre)———–The virus is only 5 microns so will and does easily pass through the mask. Imagine throwing 100 snooker balls at some scaffolding. Sure a few balls may hit a pole but most will go straight through. ———–We now live in age where “official science” masquerades as “science” and it is used in a kind of scientific dictatorship where no questions are permitted, and we must simply obey. Just like the “official science” regarding climate. The climate we are told is changing due to humans and that is the end of that discussion. No questions are permitted. Even when the facts don’t fit the theory, which is mostly all of the time, we must all pretend that they do, or we will be dragged out into the street in the case of the young lady on GB news, or have not a rag left on us because we are “climate deniers”, one of the most truly unscientific and infantile terms ever.
Just refuse. My GP receptionist asked if I would wear a mask and I said no. Nothing more was said. At a hospital for tests, the letter said masks must be worn, there were signs everywhere saying they must be worn and everybody was wearing them. I didn’t and nobody said a word. Be brave otherwise the government wins.
FOIA request for their so-called evidence, me thinks.