On May 5th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a new report estimating global excess deaths at 14.9m for two years of the pandemic 2020-21 as the true COVID-19 mortality toll, nearly triple the official toll of 5.44m. “Excess mortality” is the difference between the number of deaths that would be expected in any time period based on data from earlier years and the number of deaths that have occurred. For countries with robust data surveillance, reporting and recording systems, this poses no real difficulty. Unfortunately, these conditions are not met in many countries. Therefore their excess mortality can only be estimated and the accuracy is a function of the reliability of the methodology and modelling used in the exercise. Given the overwhelming evidence about the flaws and deficiencies of Covid-related modelling over the last two years, and the damage caused by governments trusting modelling projections over real-world data, this should immediately throw up a forest of red flags about the WHO report.
A second reason to be sceptical is the less than stellar role of the WHO in its well-known Covid-related deference to China, the abandonment of its own summary of the state of the art science on managing pandemics from October 2019, its willingness to manipulate definitions of ‘herd immunity’ in relation to vaccines and natural immunity in order to fit with the experimental pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that came to dominate Covid policy around the world, and its self-interest in expanding its budget, authority and role in steering global health policies and management by means of a new international treaty.
A third ground for scepticism is they ascribe the total death count to the direct effects of Covid “due to the disease” and indirect effects “due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society”. The first part is questionable because it fails to distinguish between deaths with and from Covid. The second is disingenuous because the indirect toll of the NPIs (lockdowns, masks, induced fear, lost schooling, lost jobs, cancelled screenings and operations, aborted immunisation programs, disruptions to global food production and distribution, etc.) and vaccine-related adverse events will prove to be significantly higher than the indirect effects of the disease per se. Any study that fails to disaggregate deaths caused by the disease and by policy interventions to mitigate it lacks credibility.
Like many others including Will Jones on this site, I was especially struck by the new figures for India. The report pushes India up to the very top of the Covid mortality toll with 4.74m deaths, nearly 10 times more than the count of 481,486 (as of December 31st 2021), almost one-third of the world total. Sorry, but that is simply not credible.
India’s geographic diversity, population size and economic conditions make data collection especially challenging. In public lectures in Australia and Canada, to drive home the point about the scale, I usually comment that the entire Australian population is a rounding error in 1.3bn-strong India. It suffers from persistent and widespread mass poverty – India is a country of a few mega-billionaires amidst the world’s biggest pool of poor, illiterate and sick people bar none. It might be nuclear-armed, but state capacity when it comes to administration and public and social services is easily the worst of all major economies. The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible and high quality healthcare is neither accessible nor affordable for ordinary Indians. The best doctors work in the public sector, in medium to large clinics and hospitals in metropolitan centres and as individual practitioners in most towns and villages. Consequently, health statistics are not all that reliable. But this is a general pathology, not one unique to COVID-19.
From everything I know about India, the WHO estimate does not align with overall death data, historical trends and Covid death compensation claims on the Indian Government from states. Indian experts believe that official statistics capture over 90% of all deaths. But this also means that about 10% of deaths would have been missed in previous years, yet the WHO’s ‘excess deaths’ count uses the official numbers as the baseline against which to estimate the impact of Covid. In a related vein, why would under-reporting be limited to Covid-related deaths and not, say, to suicides with its heavy social stigma and traffic accidents where the operators of overloaded buses and vans would try to drastically reduce actual numbers in order to hide the illegal loads (Figure 2)? The WHO estimates are flawed also in relying on 2019 deaths instead of using a five year average 2015-19 to wrinkle out anomalies in any given year.
Estimates of India’s total annual death rate range from 738 per 100,000 people by the World Bank to 1,030 per 100,000 people by World Life Expectancy. The total annual death toll therefore would be somewhere in the 10-13 million range: a very wide range. The WHO estimate of the death rate for 2021 is within the higher range from World Life Expectancy. Simply put, the WHO estimate of all-cause deaths is within any realistic estimate of the margin of error in India’s unique circumstances of scale and state capacity.
The caveats to official data notwithstanding, the WHO estimate would mean almost one-quarter additional deaths than normal. In fact it’s worse. Looking at the detailed tables, the 4.74m excess deaths is calculated from a combined excess death rate for 2020–21 of 171 per 100,00 people. This is disaggregated into 60 and 280 per 100,000 people for 2020 and 2021, respectively. That would imply a 38% jump in all cause deaths in 2021. Despite all the horror scenes we saw on TV of corpses lying in the streets and washed ashore on riverbanks, that’s just not possible. Perhaps the clue to the error lies in the title of the actual document: “Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 (modelled estimates)” (emphasis added).
Some Daily Sceptic readers had fun with this aspect of the WHO announcement. My favourite exchange was this:
India’s own estimates of excess deaths for 2020 compared to 2019 is 480,000, of which Covid-related deaths were just under 150,000. So over 300,000 excess deaths were due to non-Covid causes, which in itself is far more believable because of the impact of the lockdown measures on exacerbating most of the conditions underlying India’s leading causes of deaths. By contrast, in 2021 the Covid-related death toll was much higher at 332,492.
Much as I have been critical in the past of official dismissals of international reports on India including weakening democratic practices, in this instance the Government is right to reject the WHO methodology of mathematical modelling based on data on 17 Indian states collected from websites and media reports: “This reflects a statistically unsound and scientifically questionable methodology of data collection for making excess mortality projections in the case of India.” As well as defective data collection methodology, the report is marred also by three critically flawed assumptions: that uncounted excess deaths occurred only in 2020-21 and not before; they occurred only for COVID-19 and not other diseases; and Covid-related deaths were due solely to the disease and not caused by policy interventions to control and eradicate it.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General.
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“… the 1.4 million claimed sufferers of long Covid.”
Funnily, all of them are ‘vaccinated’.
Yeah.. funny that. It couldn’t be that toxic shite injected into people, of that we can be sure.
All those embalmers unable to embalm because of peoples arteries blocked by long rubbery clots were just making it up.. obviously ‘conspiracy theorists’..
Talking of long rubbery clots.. if you’ve a strong stomach.. see below..
https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/hydrogel-coagulates-blood-and-causes?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Huge rubbery blood clots..
https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/huge-rubbery-blood-clots-in-an-unvaccinated?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
How are the 1.2 million that arrived last year getting on ?
Ok I expect.. I doubt they’ve been jabbed!
Time to reshare Ed Dowd’s UK data. Lockdowns don’t cause disabilities. Enough of this ridiculous ignoring the obvious. ”The great resignation” indeed!
https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/1679185829372268544
Ignoring the obvious is the only game in town I’m afraid..
Here’s John Campbell’s latest ( 15mins ) and he takes us through the Australian data, which is shocking and even more so when comparing the adverse effects of the Covid jabs to those from traditional vaccines. At the 2min mark he even states he would never have taken the shots himself had he known what he knows now. Fair play to him for coming out and saying what many are probably feeling. So don’t tell me, you intelligence-insulting and patronizing MSM rag, that any of the above in your article is to do with flaming lockdowns! It’s all lies and you know it! We all know what’s killing and disabling people, both quickly and over the long term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l6Q2r5VWLo&ab_channel=Dr.JohnCampbell
Damn right we do.. the wretched injections, and many of them pushing the things knew they were harmful too..
But if I knew the virus posed a trivial threat to almost everybody and the gunk couldn’t possibly have been properly tested, why didn’t he?
(I stopped watching him when it became clear that he believed the CCP)
I think at that stage he simply trusted the establishment. He had no idea of what we know now.
Nothing to do with anything safe and effective?
How dare you!!!!!!!
While it could be that some of us have quit work a little earlier than normal, could it be that the attitude to minor illnesses has changed? A few decades ago, it was unusual to take time off sick due to minor “common colds”, for example. In those days most of them did not want to have too many days off in case it affected their chances of promotion.
Sort of on topic. I worry about being injured and requiring a blood transfusion from an infected person. (Vaccinated)
Don’t worry. It’s unlikely you’d get a transfusion (person to person). More likely you’d get an infusion of red cells from a donor. These are pressed by separating the plasma and white cells, rinsing, then adding saline. Effectively “red cells in brine” if you like. So nothing like small proteins that were floating about in the plasma, and red cells don’t have a nucleus, so no issues there.
Thank you. Not a scientist and when I read that this crap is found in every cell for me this means EVERY cell.
let’s just pay people to stay home and do nothing for months. what could possibly go wrong, they said.
Workers will get right back in as soon as they’re allowed, of course.
WTF did they expect?
When they censor the truth bad things happen. Any comment, Marianna Spring??
”The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is in charge of the Ministry of Truth, which the government of the United Kingdom established in 2019 in reaction to what they claimed was the overwhelming volume of false information and fake news flowing online.
They called this Ministry of Truth, The Trusted News Initiative (TNI).
The AP, AFP, First Draft, Google/YouTube, Twitter, Reuters, Financial Times, Meta (Facebook), European Broadcasting Union, CBC/Radio-Canada, The Hindu, Microsoft, and The Washington Post are just a few of the influential partners in the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative.
It is the only “forum” of its sort in the entire world created to accept information that has not been authorized by The Ministry of Truth in real-time.
The Ministry of Truth’s (TheTrusted News Initiative) strategy was quite effective in preventing the dissemination of accurate information that jeopardized their attempts to completely dominate the information landscape.
Experts and scientists were effectively kept in the dark, with any research or conclusions that didn’t support the government’s version of events about COVID-19 being labeled as “fake news.”
It also resulted in a culture where people were reluctant to express their opinions, where governments exercised excessive control over what people knew and believed, and where freedom of expression and independent thought were suppressed.
The Ministry only provided the public with material it deemed to be “true,” although frequently this meant withholding crucial information that may have saved lives.
Millions of lives were tragically and needlessly lost as a result of the Covid-19 injections.”
https://theleadingreport.com/2023/07/13/bbc-could-be-responsible-for-majority-of-2m-excess-deaths-in-europe-due-to-misinformation-campaign-used-to-censor-the-dangers-of-covid-vaccines/
That just reminds me, I first complained to the BBC in early April 2021 –
YOUR COMPLAINT:
Your continual covid 19 fear propaganda
You are supposed to be independent. Your covid 19 coverage is nothing but government and big pharma’s propaganda. You refuse or are incapable of asking their “experts” any critical questions. You refuse to give any truly independent experts opportunity to give alternative views regarding vaccine safety, quarantines, actual covid death figures, masks etc. In no small measure you have propagated the totally unwarranted climate of fear which exists.
Do your job. Rediscover the art of investigative journalism and actually THINK. Do some research – look at what proper experts have to say – John Loannidis, Bryam Bridle, Geert Vanden Bossche, Mike Yeadon, Carl Heneghan, and if you want your eyes opening re the safety of vaccines – which you promote without question- read vaccinepapers.org .
You are promoting an ideology. Your censorship would make Goebbels proud.
I used to value the BBC. Not any more.
Finally what about your virtually non existent reporting of the “lockdown protests”.
Needless to say I got the usual fob off.
At the time I didn’t realise the extent to which they’d already been captured.
I don’t suppose any of this will feature in the “inquiry.”
Cost / benefit analysis. What’s that when it’s at home?
As soon as a ‘benefit’ is ‘one human life’ the discussion stops.
My mother died at age 93. She was desperate to avoid going into hospital where she thought they could keep her alive almost indefinitely. She didn’t like people ‘fussing’ over her but tried to be polite (not always successfully). I hope I’m a bit like her.
Correlation only proves causation when it supports the narrative, ergo ‘global warming’ did it, in the dining room with the lead piping. This story is very insulting to a thinking person’s intelligence. A higher than average number of people died in nursing homes, where they aren’t sat in the greenhouse but in a lounge with aircon and/or fans, out of direct sunlight, therefore the common denominator must be the excess heat. But we know that in the winter they’d blame the cold. Give me strength!
”In the second quarter of 2023, over 39,000 people died in the Netherlands, 1,900 or 5 percent more than expected for this period. In three weeks of June, there was excess mortality among people in long-term care and senior citizens. This coincided with a heatwave in the country, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported on Friday.
June 2023 was the warmest June since temperature measurements started in the Netherlands in 1901. Temperatures were over 3 degrees higher than typical. Elderly people and people with weakened systems are vulnerable to heat.
In the second quarter, about 150 more people died per week than expected, but there was only excess mortality during weeks 23, 24, and 25 – the three weeks in June when there was a heatwave in the country. Excess mortality is when the number of deaths is so much higher than expected that it exceeds the accounted-for fluctuations.
The higher-than-expected number of deaths in the second quarter can also partially be attributed to a flu epidemic in the Netherlands in April. Covid-19 is also still circulating in the country, though the number of virus particles in sewage water decreased in the second quarter. According to CBS, 319 people died of Covid-19 in February, the latest known figures.”
https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/14/heat-wave-causes-5-percent-deaths-expected-june
I am not alone in my scepticism. So all these elderly people ”dying from the heat”, what exactly do the doctors put as the cause of death on the certificate? ”Heat stroke”? From sitting in a lounge in the shade, far away from any actual direct sunlight? Crazy. A heat wave = causation of death but all of those serious adverse event reports = coincidence.
https://twitter.com/BareReality/status/1679772952139649025
I asked a friend of mine about these absentee rates – had he noticed this in his business? He said no, there is no difference whatsoever in absentee rates in his business with about forty people. He was aware of these figures (and most are vaccinated, he assures me although he never asked them, considering it wasn’t an appropriate question to ask employees) and he put it down to them having stayed open all the way through the lockdowns, if only with a skeleton staff initially and then staff coming back as soon as they felt able. I’m not a fan of vaccines (and that’s been the case for at least twenty years) but I think it is too easy to just jump on that as a reason for this increase in absenteeism. I think there are many factors at play here including psychologically it being OKay to be off work for a sniffle (fear of contaminating the office) as mentioned by another commenter.
I somewhat disagree – but have an up-tick for a sensible argument.
Except for the pesky fact of continuing excess deaths, I would suggest malingering, quiet quitting, and hypochondria are causes of the disability increases in the UK and in the US. Are people sicker–the excess deaths would indicate so. I personally don’t know anyone with a chronic illness, new disability, adverse jab effects, or death from covid. Maybe I need to get out more….
He’s not in the public sector!
Britain’s public finances crippled by 26 years of mass immigration.
I’d love to know what the supposed skills shortages are, whether they are in the private or public sector, and where they are geographically. Maybe they are just down to vacancies in zero hours jobs that people only do short term until they find something else. Does anyone know of any statistical analysis?
Trying to remove those stupid 2m lines from our church floor. Governments have left humanity a catastrophic legacy eminating from the big Covid-19 lie. History will judge them harshly. The golden rule is NEVER believe what the government tells you.
Hmmm.. Elephants and rooms spring to mind.
I’m largely economically inactive by choice. (I have an arrangement (you can’t really call it a contract) with a small local company which means I work when they need an extra pair of hands and IF I want to.)
Fortunately, I have a pension, savings and a BtL which means I can afford not to be a wage slave. I’m prioritising a very nice lifestyle over working and paying tax to the moronic Government which stripped me of my Civil Liberties and Human Rights over a virus they KNEW was only dangerous for a small and easily-identified section of the population.
I didn’t cause the devestation.
Lockdown served to erode the work ethic of much of the nation and embedded a dependency culture. The benefit system in the UK incentivises chronic sickness particularly. Decades of welfare statism were causing society and economy to decay gradually and Lockdown greatly accelerated the decay. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’re doomed.