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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“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.”
100% Everything beyond this is a rabbit hole. Covid, if it actually exists, was a bad flu of the kind the human race has lived with since time immemorial. We are social animals. If the social contract is broken then we’re done for.
Also I didn’t need to be the son of a Vicar to point out that everybody should be welcome in the house of God. Calvin Robinson knows this unlike that fake & Marxist, Globalist Archbishop who seems intent of destroying the Church.
Absolutely bang on tof.
I agree with you and with the author.
BUT, we are in a minority. Most people will put safety before freedom. That’s just how it is and how it has always been which is why we can find quotes on the issue going back hundreds of years.
So both arguments need to be made. That it’s wrong but also it should be pushed relentlessly that they are not safe.
And the safety argument is the one that really worries the vaccine industrial complex and for good reason – because it is the one that is most convincing to most people. You can write all you want until the cows come home about the importance of bodily autonomy and the principles of freedom. They won’t censor you for that. Put up some data questioning the safety of the jabs and they’re on you like a rash.
I’ve shifted my thinking quite a lot on this because I have always felt that the “you can’t force stuff into my body argument” was an absolute clincher. But clearly it isn’t and I think the safety argument, if pushed properly and relentlessly, will get more people to the same place.
The safety argument, if pushed properly is unassailable. Medications always cause harms. Not badly, not to everyone, but they unquestionably do. Anything that goes into our bodies will cause someone harm to someone. If you push that idea hard enough and create enough doubt then they have to fall back on their back up argument – it does more good than harm. And THAT argument is so much harder to win for them.
The whole vaccine industry is predicated on the fantasy that vaccines are for all intents and purposes harmless. Pop that bubble and it’s over for them.
You are probably right, I have just run out of patience and energy. I just want to be in a different country from the idiots who value the illusion of safety over their freedom and over my freedom. They can all just jog on.
Give me a heads up if you find a country like that…
I’m not aware of one. Some US states may be a bit like that but the US federal govt keeps trying to expand its power over the states.
Biden, not the federal government. And prayers the democrats are out in the street after the election in November.
Well surely the Federal Government’s power, budget, reach, influence has been increasing since the founding, more or less irrespective of the party running it. One key moment, which I had not been aware of until recently, was that Senate was appointed by state legislatures rather than directly elected, until 1912. The Federal Govt is not just the President, it’s also the Senate (currently Democrat controlled) and the House, and the Federal courts. Activist lefty justices have been eroding states’ rights for decades. I think it’s inevitable if you create a body like that it will try to expand its power, especially as the world become more global and the Feds control the military.
The vaccine injuries compensation programmes set up by governments back in the day are the evidence needed that govts. recognise the potential failings and harms that can be caused by their public health programmes which push vaccination schedules. These pre-date 2020 and indemnity for pharmaceutical producers. Take away the indemnity and the whole business model should fall apart. The issue is govt. capture by pharma.
100%. Has anyone heard one politician running for office right now, mention bodily autonomy? No, me neither.
Heritage:
“Medical autonomy and informed consent must be upheld and never again breached as it was in the Covid period. There must never be any coercion, threat, penalty or punishment for choosing not to take a particular medicine or vaccination”
Alliance for Democracy and Freedom:
“All individuals have inalienable rights to Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Association and Assembly and Complete Bodily Autonomy. These rights can never be removed by any government, legislature or court of law.”
Freedom Alliance:
“HEALTH FREEDOM & BODILY SOVEREIGNTYWe defend…➢ Healthy lifestyle choices and a healthy living environment.
➢ People’s freedom to make their own uncoerced medical choices.
We oppose…➢ Lockdowns
➢ State overreach regarding medical choices.
➢ Vaccine passports or any other type of health pass.”
Good article, logical and well argued.
An interesting article and one I very much agree with. Calculating excess deaths implicitly requires us to calculate expected deaths and from that we should be able to see that many of the excess deaths did not start until the vaccine roll-out.
2019 was a relatively benign year with fewer deaths than expected in all the age bands previously reported by ONS (for England and Wales combined). Exactly how benign is debatable depending on the baseline calculation method used.
The idea that many of those vulnerable people who did not die as expected in 2019 were still alive and perhaps even more vulnerable in March/April 2020 helps explain the first main peak of ‘Covid’ deaths. What it does not help with is the excess we see in 2021. It’s this we need answers for – or ‘permission’ to ask questions about it.
I do believe the government has the data and will not release it. Why not, if it is so effective and saved so many lives, they should be shouting it from the rooftops like matey from GMTV and that dumb sidekick.
Hmm. Quarantine was a well established policy for centuries. When a ship arrived in port, everyone aboard might be detained for 40 days before being released into the wild, and protests about personal liberty would get you nowhere.
Lockdown was supposed to be “three weeks to flatten the curve” or restriction of liberty for just over half of forty days. It was the extension of lockdown for months on end that trashed everything.
Er, quarantine and lockdown are two completely different things.
Too bloody right. Nothing in the Public Health Act about locking up healthy populations. And they were supposed to report on the potential deaths & economic damage that it will cause. Cost-Benefit Analysis.
I’m sure when the PHA was being debated, nation blanket restrictions were never considered. The Civil Contingencies Act was meant to be used for national emergencies but that required a regular debate in Parliament to renew the powers so they probably decided that was far too much trouble.
I don’t think quarantines were much use either. Take a read at this interesting article.
https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/article/quarantine-used-to-be-a-normal-part-of-life-and-wasnt-much-liked-then-either
Just because something is government policy for years on end doesn’t make it effective.
There’s no precedent I am aware of for quarantining people for a bad cold, nor for quarantining an entire population including most people who are not ill, nor for quarantining people when the “disease” is already endemic.
Even more to the point, evidence-based WHO and national pandemic recommendations up to 2020 dismissed isolation of well individuals as ineffective and harmful.
And that was the position of the Influenza Paper or pandemic preparedness papers and the WHO before being thrown into the bin. No money in that!
There are other similarities too. Quarantine was often not applied for important (ie rich) people. So, lockdown for everyone else but bring your own booze to Friday afternoon elite wind down.
Nothing changed then!
We don’t lockdown for a touch of ‘flu.
We
don’tshouldn’t lockdown at all.Lockdown was never supposed to be “three weeks to flatten the curve”. This statement was just a ruse US lockdown hawks used to get something resembling a Italy/ China style lockdown to be implemented at all.
“At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.”
“No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it,” she admits.
https://brownstone.org/articles/dr-birx-praises-herself-while-revealing-ignorance-treachery-and-deceit
You cannot lockdown with any effect for an airborne novel,pathogen.
Ben Habib for Reform leader. According to pundit Campbell on Five Live in an interview with Farage, Nigel said Habib was silly for suggesting turning boats around and forcing them back. So what is Nigel’s master plan? Let me also remind people Nigel supported Blair over the jab rollout, and apparently banged pots for the NHS, though I don’t remember that. Any more of that from Nigel and I will think he is some sort of controlled opposition.
I don’t think he is controlled opposition any more than his mate Donald Trump is. I think both were taken in by the Covid scam though. Both are genuinely hated by the establishment.
When I saw Farage on YouTube declaring that Bliar should be put in charge of “vaccine” roll out I was seriously questioning his motives. There is still a question mark over Farage as far as I am concerned.
The most disturbing thing about Covid was the mindless acceptance of all the idiotic restrictions by 99% of the population. Empowered by all the ‘subtle’ coercions ‘You can’t play tennis here because we have been closed by our insurers’ etc
Groupthink, Nazi-like
This site was the first home of non-groupthinkers once Covid kicked off. We are just normal people, but perhaps with our eyes and minds wider open?
The Groupthinkers want to be told how to behave, it seems, and their masters control all of the Uniparties
“The Groupthinkers want to be told how to behave”
It’s worse that that – they also want everyone else including US to be forced to behave in a certain way, otherwise they think it’s “unfair”. For that I will not forgive them.
I was blogging on COVID from March 2020 onwards. I thought recently it might be a useful kind of “war diary” for posterity, as well as debunking the “nobody knew anything” trope, if I turned the material into a small paperback. But it turns out to be 420 academic-scale pages for 2020 alone, so the “Journal of the SAGE Year” project is shelved.
Nevertheless, some of those without PTSD might find it a useful contemporaneous archive from a doctor who had just completed a book on state propaganda and ideological deception!
Thanks Jon, you have some very interesting articles on your blog. Worth a pootle when I have a quiet half hour.
hear hear ! i rabidly hate the masks more than anything. the sign of compliance [ and stupidity ]
thank you toby and all for this life saver of the daily sceptic and lockdown sceptic before that
think i found out about it in october 2020 [ or earlier?]via the daily mail.how did everyone here find their way here i wonder
I also think that there was a novelty value to it: people thought this is new and we are all in it together (a bit like the olympics or national football: you are supposed to be interested and supportive). At the time it felt to me like a dress rehearsal and there was a feeling of waiting to see what was going to happen next.
Abi Roberts talks about Neil Oliver. There is no pleasing this woman!
Neil Oliver meets Tucker CarlsonSTRAP IN.ABI ROBERTS
JUN 21
Early this morning, after a warm salty gargle, (not the fun kind), I settled down to watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with Neil Oliver.
Mary, Mother of God.
Within about two minutes I had shaken myself awake with disbelief. Nevertheless, I ploughed on through just over two hours and twenty minutes of rehearsed, carefully curated, falsely modest, virtue-spunk.
Throughout the cosy wood-panelled discussion in Tucker’s dacha-like room, the bearded, lyrical whisperer proceeded to dollop ejaculatory praise all over… wait for it… Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and George Galloway. The cumtastic Jordan Peterson reach-around was for Peterson’s recent proclamation that those who actively participated in the crimes of the last four years could be compared to Germany in the 1930s.
If only other less famous people had consistently pointed this out.
For those who might not know, Peterson angrily told millions of viewers, including the young, to “get the damn vaccine”. It’s particularly difficult to forgive this, regardless of his own well-publicised personal problems. Let’s not forget his Israel/Gaza commentary. For a man who has suddenly recognised historical, genocidal parallels with the last four years, isn’t it absurdly morally inconsistent that he tweeted “Give ‘em hell” to Netanyahu before he unleashed unholy hell on innocent men, women and children?
I scratched my sleepy, sun-kissed head. Why would Oliver single Peterson, of all people, out? I believe that the only reasonable explanation is that Oliver is signalling to the approved™️ commentariat bat cave. Like Peterson, Oliver has learnt whose arse to kiss publicly. You can rock the boat, and even tacitly call for revolution on Twitter (twice), but whatever you do don’t correctly call genocidal murderers evil cunts or you definitely won’t get asked on Rogan or Carlson.
Dear reader, at this point I must confess to a lingering personal disgruntlement. In January 2022, when Jon Gaunt savaged me live on GB News – Gaunt was defending mandatory Covid vaccines for NHS staff and saying children should have them – Neil not only didn’t pull Jon up on his bullying behaviour, he said nothing about it to me directly afterwards. In fact I remember he was very matey with Gaunt in the studio afterwards. I couldn’t believe it. When I messaged him to say how upset I had been when I got home, Neil replied to say that I shouldn’t worry, and that the incident hadn’t affected the show.
It was then that the scales properly fell
I remember her argument with Jon Gaunt, I thought she handled herself well and I don’t think Gaunt was invited back after that show, not just her. When I was watching that I thought to myself this is the first chink in the armour of the ‘safe & effective and Gaunt has just realised that he’s been batting for the wrong team, and he’s angry so on the attack.
Absolutely. The issue is the TYRANNY, not whether some aspects of the TYRANNY were effective or not.
The focus on excess deaths runs the risk of ignoring the potential other harms.
it should not be beyond the wit of man to analyse morbidities, comparing pre-vaccine and post-vaccine? There will be multiple confounding factors but may be a trend can be observed.
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.
The vaccines could never have been the safest and most efficacious because they were developed at “Warp speed”, i.e. supposedly within a few months, and had not gone through the standard 10 to 15 year period of necessary development trials and counter-checks by our excessively careful health authorities, the latter being determined that no medicine should ever cause harm to the population (ho, ho). Never forget Thalidomide.
And, if the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the PCR method said that it can never be used to determine disease, then that is good enough for me, so it is incorrect to even acknowledge Covid statistics: the only reliable data are all-cause mortality data, which clearly increased for all ages as soon as the doctors started pumping all that mRNA material into arms.
Nick rendell, OHID. Who are you again? Why on earth would YOU chose to demean Edward Dowd’s ongoing efforts to show how deadly the MRNA covid vaxxes are? Why aren’t you going after the gov’t medical advisors, the gov’t modelers, the politicians who locked us down, lied about the danger of a novel,pathogen, closed schools, insisted on six foot social distancing, masks, and on and on.
Edward Dowd, an ex Blackrock analyst is worth paying attention to. I am afraid when people like you try to undermine people like Edward Dowd, using data, you yourself admit isn’t worth the paper it is written on, I despair.
Nick, please find out why vallance, whitty and van dam gave the advice they did over and over again, when people like Drs. John Ioannidis, Michael Levitt, Raoult, Scott Atlas, Clare Craig, Ryan Cole, Harvey Risch, Peter McCullough, Zev Zelenko The great Barrington declarers and so many others did not agree with them. As a matter of fact Dr. Ioannidis was very clear what the infection fatality rate was for all age groups.
. The number of young athletes who have died post covid
. Correlation not causation. Great, let’s do autopsies on every single person who “died suddenly”.
please see Dr. Makis’ list of the doctors who have died in Canada, since receiving their covid
I object to your type of reporting, because you single out people like Edward Dowd and leave out ALL the people who lied to us these past four yrs. perhaps your next daily sceptic takedown might include the three medical advisors who were guilty of conflicts of interest and provided dangerous advice.
This chattering about the vaccines plays right into the hands of our enemy,. For if we mistake what we are involved in as a debate we are debating with liars and criminals which is nothing but a waste of energy. Arguing with so-called fact checkers is wrestling with pigs.
If we want to persuade our fellows who are reluctant to give up the seeming comfort of ignorance we are also wasting our energy. They are awakening in any event as the truth of what is happening becomes stark.
The Japanese, the one government that seems to have missed total corruption, are forthright in recognising mRNA jabs as a bio-weapon, and the continuing escalation of deaths and infertility has nothing whatever of benefit for anyone except those who serve evil.