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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