Daily Sceptic Editor Will Jones wrote a piece this week concerning an article in the Lancet highlighting the high level of deaths occurring particularly among young and middle-aged people from causes such as heart failure, cirrhosis and diabetes.
Will pointed to an article in the Mail about the Lancet article, which to me seemed little more than a rehash something I wrote almost two months ago using exactly the same data from the same sources. However, if you read my article you’ll appreciate that the situation is rather worse than that presented in the Lancet or Mail due to the high level of ‘death inflation’ that mortality statistics have been subject to in recent years.
Nonetheless, the conclusions of the Mail and Lancet were similar to mine in that we all suggested that perhaps someone should be asking “why are all these extra deaths occurring?”
Unlike the Mail or Lancet, though, I would not wish to dismiss the idea that the vaccines might have something to do with the 26% increase in ‘expected’ deaths from heart failure since 2020 and the actual deaths from heart failure in 2023.
In contrast, the Mail rejected any idea that the vaccines might have anything to do with it (not a view shared by their ‘below the line’ commentators who seemed fairly unanimous on where blame lay!)
Indeed, the Mail’s article included this sentence:
Anti-vaxxers have claimed excess deaths are down to Covid jabs but scientists insist that the injections, which have saved tens of millions of lives globally, are not to blame.
Oh, that’s all right then. It wasn’t the vaccines wot done it after all! Silly me for even wondering.
But where exactly where does this “tens of millions of lives” saved globally come from? Well, blow me down with a feather, it’s none other than those well-known pantomime villains at Imperial College London. The claim comes from an article published on June 24th 2022 stating that 20 million lives were saved by the vaccines in the 12 months from December 8th 2020 to December 8th 2021.
By December 8th 2021, a total of 5.32 million people had, according to Our World in Data, died of or with Covid. According to the good people of Imperial College London, if the vaccines hadn’t existed, 20 million more, some 25.32 million people, would have died by that point.
Figure 1 puts these ‘saved lives’ in context. The blue line titled ‘World’ is the figure for ‘actual’ deaths. The vastly higher purple line is the implied deaths line if Imperial’s figures are correct. The difference between the lines is the 20 million ‘saved’ lives. (See a similar chart produced by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil last year.)
Is this in any way credible? Well, perhaps the first place to have a look is the vaccine stats. To die of or with Covid by December 8th 2021 you would have had to catch it a few weeks earlier, perhaps November 10th. Figure 2 shows the proportion of the world’s population who were vaccinated between December 8th 2020 and December 8th 2021; it wasn’t until November 10th 2021 that 50% of the population had had a single jab. At the beginning of June only around 10% of the World’s population had been jabbed.
Of course, the only possible explanation as to how, despite only vaccinating a minority of the world’s population, the vaccines supposedly cut deaths four-fold is that it must have been the ‘unvaxxed’ who kept dying, right?
Now here we have to revert to U.K. data as deaths by vaccination status haven’t been published by many countries. But let’s see what we can do. Figure 3 is taken from Table 13(b) of the UKHSA’s Vaccine Surveillance Report for week 13 2022. It shows that only 7.9% of all Covid deaths within 60 days of a positive test were of the unvaccinated. Which, of course, means that 92.1% of Covid deaths were of vaccinated people.
The same report also shows us that of the most vaccinated age-cohort, the over-80s, while about 93% were vaccinated, 7% weren’t.
Clearly, the unvaccinated weren’t dying at a disproportionate rate to the vaccinated. The Imperial claim of 20 million saved lives is nonsense. The very real questions over why so many people are dying remain very much open.
When, in a couple of months the Mail ‘breaks’ the story, “Experts cast doubt on Imperial’s claim that vaccines saved 20 million lives”, you can say, with a degree of satisfaction, “Call that news? We sceptics have known that for yonks”.
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We will know tomorrow morning. All my family voted Reform.