Earlier this month, I published an article exploring how Equality, Equity Diversity and Inclusion took over the British workplace, focusing on the response to the George Floyd killing and how this, with lockdown, created a huge demand for EDI, lowering the quality and elevating EDI from a minor sub department in HR to a core function of organisations. Now, in Part Two, we explore how Corporate Environment, Social Responsibility and Governance (ESG) policies are driving EDI and political ideologies into smaller businesses.
Why is EDI an issue? Surely it is a good idea? Well, since the Cass Report earlier this year, the publication of the Department of Business and Trade’s report into EDI (March 2024), the Free Speech Union’s Dynata report (April 2024) and the Policy Exchange report (May 2024) suggest there are concerns that the road to hell appears to be paved with good intentions. All these reports highlight significant issues with EDI as it has been implemented and indicate that it is having the opposite effect of that intended; driving division, exclusion, isolation, stress, fear and ultimately job loses with hundreds of thousands having left their employment due to their reaction to EDI training or having been fired, possibly unlawfully, for having opinions that clash with those being taught through EDI. You can read about this here.
Encouragingly, there is now an open discussion amongst a small number of influential HR people on LinkedIn since March this year. This has simply not happened before, with any dissenters being silenced through personal attacks. The topic of this discussion is the negative impact poor EDI is having on productivity, staff turnover, and therefore revenue, and how this can no longer be ignored.
The Free Speech Union’s report, quoted above, makes for some very concerning reading. There is often a misconception that most people in Britain work in large organisations. It is depressing that every time a politician comes up with another ‘business initiative’ they secure the backing of large corporates, completely ignoring that most people in the U.K. (61%) work in small to medium sized businesses – i.e. under 250 employees. SMEs account for 99.9% of all U.K. businesses. Yet the report indicates that 65% of U.K. employees have experienced some form of EDI training either at their workplace or their most recent workplace. So why are so many SMEs putting their staff through EDI?
I run an SME, and having run several and worked for many over the years. I can tell you now that SMEs rarely, if ever, provide superfluous training to their employees, preferring to only train when there is a contractual or statutory requirement to do so. With tight resources, there is simply not enough time to spend investing in training that is not directly related to the role. So if that is the case: why are SMEs training EDI? Answer: their clients demand that they do before they are considered fit to supply. Much of this is sadly news for the general public and it shows the mendacity around using procurement to drive political ideologies. Such demands are made under the curtain of ‘commercial confidentiality’ and can therefore be hidden from public access requests. We’ve seen a similar tactic in education where activists hide content from parents behind ‘commercial confidentiality’ contracts.
About 30 years ago, we started to see the idea of ‘Sustainable Procurement’ entering the procurement profession. This was sensible; it was part of what used to be called ‘Corporate Responsibility’. Sustainable Procurement meant that you worked with companies which had firm policies around things like Health and Safety, ethical waste disposal policies, ethical sourcing, etc. As time went by, we saw environmental issues being added. Suppliers had to demonstrate that they were actively reducing carbon emissions. We also began to see the ‘S’ – Social Responsibility – becoming part of this. Customers wanted reassurance that suppliers took issues like discrimination seriously. By 2004, the UN had formally identified ESG as an idea in their report ‘Who Cares Wins’. ESG was here to stay.
And, who could possibly argue that it was a bad idea? Well, as I have already said once in this article, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We were told that people were increasingly concerned about social justice and environmental justice, although we were never told who was concerned or how much they were concerned. Controversial policies like Net Zero were added into the ESG mix, controversial because they had rarely been debated. People were unilaterally informed that they had no choice but to comply with these new policies, no matter how much they cost. ‘Diversity’ was narrowly defined as diversity of appearance, sexuality, gender, sex, ability, rather than diversity of experience, thought and opinion. ‘Inclusion’ was corrupted through intersectional identity politics, and ‘affirmative action’ was now based on immutable characteristics of identity groups, based on assumed privilege rather than on individual socioeconomic circumstances. By the 2010s, private equity firms were putting ESG front and centre, making it a condition of procurement. The World Economic Forum developed a points system so companies could assess their ESG ‘rating’. Suddenly, it mattered whether or not your company ‘celebrated Pride’, and scores were allocated for increasingly radical support for increasingly radical ideas. This was ‘Corporate Wokery’ – the deliberate politicisation of the corporate world so companies could now be used to drive recalcitrant populations into accepting increasingly Left-wing policies.
As society took a large leap to the Left in the 2010s, the population was told that it was unacceptable to question the new givens. So, question Net Zero, whether trans women are women or ask why affirmative action resulted in lots of public school-educated black people working at the BBC and no working class Glaswegians, and you were not only told to shut up, but you were smeared as being intolerant, deplorable, a racist, homophobe, transphobe, etc. As the new orthodoxies were adopted wholesale by the establishment, they were added to ESG and therefore procurement requirements. It was no longer sufficient to demonstrate that your business had an Anti-Slavery Policy and an Asbestos Policy. You had to demonstrate that you were ideologically aligned. So, procurement started to demand evidence that Equality, Equity Diversity and Inclusion was being taken seriously by suppliers, and provide evidence not just of policies but also evidence of training.
So, if you were selling paperclips to your local NHS Trust, suddenly you had to demonstrate that you had an EDI policy and that you trained your staff in EDI. Small businesses would frequently turn to the internet and, in a box-ticking exercise, purchase the cheapest online EDI training available. Unfortunately, as we have learned from the reports quoted above, EDI needs to be very carefully and sensitively deployed, and even more carefully trained if you do not wish to piss off a significant proportion of your workforce (63% in the FSU report). Poor quality EDI is likely to create significant issues for SMEs, and any issue that impacts the happiness and wellbeing of staff is far more of a problem for smaller employers who cannot afford staff turnover issues or disengaged, disinterested staff.
A constant refrain of ‘woke’ policies is that in their rush to force them onto people, those advocating them forget two major points. Firstly, they lied about the positions taken by ESG and EDI as being ‘settled’ and beyond debate to the point that if you dared question them, you were morally reprehensible. Secondly, that social engineering – which is what this is – is both extremely complex and difficult to do successfully. Crude attempts to force radical ideologies onto a population are always doomed to fail when the population starts to question why even asking a question is unacceptable. All it takes is for someone to point out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes, and the whole edifice comes crashing down.
And that is what we are seeing now. People are no longer afraid of being smeared as something they are not for simply questioning the adoption of a radical policy that was fringe until a few days ago. They tend to react badly when ‘Unconscious Bias’ trainers call them all incorrigible bigots who need to be ‘fixed’ by their employers. Corporate activism is collapsing all over the world because, like its partner in politics, it has over reached itself. It is one thing to ensure that a supplier disposes of its waste water properly; it is quite another to demand that the same supplier sends its management team on your EDI training courses, as happened to one of our clients recently at an NHS Trust.
‘Get woke, go broke’ is being proven from Hollywood to Hull. People are weary, fed up and bored of the constant demands of activists. They have woken up to the cynicism of corporate wokery and they are voting with their feet and their wallets. Last week, Kemi Badenoch, the U.K.’s Business and Trade Secretary, urged businesses to focus on their customers and to avoid politics and activism. So ingrained is the issue that in her own department, the Royal Academy of Engineers is recruiting another EDI specialist to join its team of 15 EDI specialists. With Pride 2024 on the horizon, we can fully expect the volume around this debate to increase.
However, the pressure on SMEs is relentless, and it is our opinion that unless specific legislation is written, protecting employees from political or ideological training in the workplace, this issue will not be solved any time soon. Of course, an entire industry has built up to supply training in: ‘diversity’; ‘inclusivity’; ‘allyship’. A quick glance at LinkedIn will indicate how absurd this has become with one ‘consultant’ urging men to get their nails decorated for ‘inclusion’. More serious is this blog article from lawyers Shoosmiths advising corporate clients how to drive (read ‘bully’) EDI down their supply chains.
So, what about SMEs who are being forced to implement EDI by corporate or public sector procurement departments? How do you tick the boxes without damaging your business? If you refuse, you will simply be dropped as a supplier. Well, we’ve set up www.fairjob.co.uk to help you navigate this and to repair any damage caused by poor EDI to date. Get in touch if you need some help for your organisation.
We are seeing that the worm may have turned against the politicisation of the workplace, but there is a long way to go. If Labour wins next month, it could get a lot worse before it gets any better.
Dig in, folks.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The ‘Covid’ deaths are just not credible when compared with major common causes and knowing what we know about its lethality.
Walk down any street and three empty ambulance will pass you in one hour.
Whatever happened to Irish, Scottish and Welsh pubs?
Scottish & Welsh Refugees Expected To Invade England On New Years Eve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yKa5LIhbk
WE GOT A PROBLEM
We should continue to get out there and wake people up.
Thursday 30th December – 7pm
SUPPORT A PUB ON THURSDAY
Bracknell & Wokingham Meet in the Pub
The Ship Inn, The Barn Area
104 Peach St, Wokingham RG40 1XH
***********************
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham – Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Join our Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
… and the 8-year baseline covers the all-time low in mortality, being far too short to give an accurate comparative picture.
Essentially – nothing much is happening, except demonstrating the uselessness of the snake oil.
Rick, I think the younger age group numbers of overall excess deaths are starting to demonstrate ‘something else’ is happening, and its not good.
Didn’t this spike coincide with the push on the third injection roll out?
I compared the final graph with the Z chart on EuroMomo for England. They both tell the same story , that of a normal pattern for a normal above trend period mid-winter from respiratory disease.
But the real story is the excess death graphs. The full effect of vaccinations and lockdowns is there for everyone to see. 15-44 years excess deaths massively positive, over 65years negative.
Governments have been, and still are, killing their younger citizens to ‘save’ the elderly.
Couldn’t one infer they’re trying to save the elderly, but lower mortality in +65 category is simply because a chunk of vulnerable have already died such that it is an illusion it is ‘negative’. One would expect this cohort to catch up again once medical neglect etc catches up?
Quite possibly. One caveat to my comment. The over65s are negative compared to last year, but are still positive to longer term trend, you have to go to over 85s to see a halving of last year’s excess. And this most definitely is probably because of the effect you allude to, ‘low hanging fruit’ etc.
The awful story is in the 15-44 yrs where the excess is twice that of last year. That really can only be a combination of the vaccines and reduction in health services for other illnesses. Although as this is across all Europe and many health services have continued with normal provision, it points increasingly to the vaccines.
Are you talking about these charts?
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
I attach the screen shot for 15-44 age group. Notice that the total weekly deaths across the whole of Europe in this age group are only between 1500 and 1800. So the excess deaths are only a few hundred a week for the whole of Europe.
There is a peak at the end of this year but this could have all sorts of causes. It might be Covid – both Delta and Omicron grew fastest in this age group in the latter part of the year – unlike previous outbreaks. It wouldn’t cause many deaths but then very few deaths would show up as an excess in this age group.
Forgot to attach the screenshot.
No not that graph, the ‘Excess Deaths’ for 15-44 years graph. And I specifically referred to the increase over last year. I have seen no analysis that suggests that the Delta or Omicron variants are more dangerous to the younger age group rather than elderly with comorbidities. That more younger people might be recording positive tests is irrelevant. However overall increases of excess deaths is not.
I am so pleased you think that its irrelevant that over 6,000 more people in this age group have died , those with many years of life.
Your continuing defense of the indefensible is trying.
Got it. So there were more excess deaths in 2021 than 2020 for this age group, and indeed every age group between 15 and 75. My point still applies, which is simply that this could be down to a number of things including Covid. There were far more people getting Covid in these younger age groups in 2021 than in 2020. It doesn’t mean Delta or Omicron are more dangerous to these groups than previous variants. But if there are more cases then you will get more deaths – even though it is a small number. The comparison with other age groups is beside the point. We are trying to understand why there more deaths in this younger age group in 2021 than 2020. Of course it might not be Covid. For example, as you say, it could be reduced health services, or it might be increased suicides because of increased depression (a common cause of death in younger age groups). Of course it is possible that, contrary to most expert opinion, that reaction to vaccine had something to do with it but it is only one of many possible explanations.
The recorded deaths on the various national systems post vaccinations , as you well know, understate the actual position ( some say between 10 and 40 times). ‘Expert opinion’ is worthless faced with these stats.
This is a common misunderstanding which I have responded to many times. VAERS etc post deaths reported following vaccinations. There is no reason to suppose these deaths are caused by the vaccinations. It is true that many more people die following vaccination than are reported because that is the underlying death rate. They would have died in that time period anyway.
This is confused by this document from 2019 appealing for more people to use the yellow card system. But that was before Covid when hardly anyone was aware of it. Now there is a blaze of publicity and you even get a leaflet telling you about the yellow card system when you are jabbed.
its amazing how most people have this ‘misunderstanding’ but you know best.
Give it a rest. You don’t convince anyone.
Wait 18 months?
‘Reputation’ ‘on the line’?
“The data shows no reduction in covid or death”
The last American vagabond video at 27:57 :
28:00 These spike proteins cross the blood brain barrier. . . . They have prion disease effects. We are going to see this in about a year and a half.
39:50: the outcomes of these prion diseases. The data shows that it is a problem for both {the virus and particular the vaccine}
. ?
https://www.flemingmethod.com/select-videos
Injecting the population with gene therapy is not going to save any age group from a respiratory virus that hasn’t been proven to exist.
Precisely. Once you have done your thorough research and come to this conclusion, the sheer immensity of this fakery is revealed in all it’s gore.
Most of what you have been taught, is nothing but lies and propaganda.
In a funny way, it is very liberating.
Don’t expect that analysis to appear on the BBC any time soon.
“The ONS announced last week that there were 48,180 deaths registered in England in November, which is almost 5,000 more than in October, and 15.6% more than the five-year average. November therefore saw a non-trivial rise in deaths.”
@Noah – x% more than the average doesn’t mean shee-yit. You need to consider the spread over the period that you’re averaging.
“Non-trivial” is also the wrong word here. You mean “significant”, but you haven’t shown that it IS significant, because to do that you need to consider spread.
As I have said before, consider these sequences:
10, 2, 18, 5, 15, followed by 12 (20% above 10, the mean and median)
10, 9.2, 10.8, 9.5, 10.5, followed by 12 (20% above 10, the mean and median)
The 12 in the second sequence is much more significant than the 12 in the first.
Not sure what you mean, but I’d like to understand.
Are you suggesting we need to understand the average level of variance from baseline before knowing whether this is unusual i.e. we might see +-7.7% from norm figures every year, in which case November is pretty normal and there may be no particular story to be extracted?
^ please ignore, the edits explain this perfectly and I agree
Last year, 2 WHO ICD codes where used to classify covid deaths, in February 2021 this changed to 4 ICD codes..
The first two, U07.1 was meant indicate laboratory confirmed, whilst the 2nd code U07.2, was virus not confirmed, but suspected, in the absence of a suitable testing facility, a clinical opinion or assumption is considered acceptable.
Is that a suitable and accurate way to attribute mortality?
When you say 2015 was “a year with no pandemic”, this suggests there was no international flu pandemic at this point. So to make this claim I guess we have settled on a definition of “pandemic”. Using this definition, is there a pandemic currently?
Or is this statement an attempt to highlight that we’re not “during a pandemic” in 2021 either?
2020-2021 was labelled ‘pandemic’ only by virtue of the WHO altering the definition to exclude any measure of mortality.
But also because of the 12-week death spike in care homes, undoubtably caused by the protocols in use, especially mass (over) use of midazolam.
British Mathematician & Professor of Risk Management, Norman Fenton, has uncovered that statistics related to COVID-19 deaths are being fiddled and manipulated in the UK in the most childish way.
The below picture of a graph shows in simplistic terms how they do it.
Norman Fenton revealed the method they use to be able to claim that: “The 48,180 deaths registered in England in November … is almost 5,000 more than in October”.
If Norman Fenton’s investigations revealed the truth, then that sentence should probably read: “The 48,180 deaths registered in England in November … is almost 5,000 more than were registered in October”.
The key word is “registered”.
What this professor discovered was that the authorities were not “registering” quite a high number of deaths that took place in a particular month (say in October). Instead, they held over registering these deaths until the following month (say in November).
Then using a slight-of-hand with words, the ONS can say: “Deaths registered in England in November were almost 5,000 more than in October”.
Professor Fenton’s investigations revealed that people who died in a particular month remained listed on databases (such as being a patient of a GP) for long periods after their actual deaths. The data banks recorded these people as being alive long after they had actually died.
Then at their chosen time-period, the authorities would register these people as dead, and then claim that in this period deaths were abnormally high.
Is this “moving of registration dates” issue described in the video you linked?
I had a skip through and couldn’t find it, and I’ve also read the paper they’re discussing in full but didn’t see mention of it there.
Listen onwards from 20 minutes into the video.
That was all about misclassification vaccinated Vs unvaccinated as far as I understood. I didn’t hear any claims about registration dates being deliberately moved.
If you listen to what the professor has to say, he’s fairly understandable about it, to quote him: “Now here’s the little trick, because this is neat, all I’m going to do now, is say, suppose the deaths, there’s a delay in the death reporting, let’s just suppose that that 50 [deaths] in week 1 gets reported in week 2 …”
People that push back against the COVID-19 Establishment have to be very careful with the wording they use. Or, they’ll be pounced on and their careers and lives ruined in an instance.
As I’ve said, if you listen to Professor Fenton, the manipulations in the statistics become clear.
I find it hard to believe that you will not take the time to listen to 200 seconds of the video, but yet took the time to make 2 replies to my comment. Thus, I suspect that your main purpose here is to disprove or rubbish what I’ve said in my comment, and to insinuate to other readers that the hyperlink I posted is just a random link that offers no proof of what I’ve said.
Thanks, I’ll have a listen
Unreasonably defensive in my view. My aim was to better understand, because I had already read Fenton’s full paper and found it fascinating and quite concerning. I did a brief blog post about it here: https://drkmatr.substack.com/p/are-deaths-following-vaccination. I’ll probably do more, so I need to be sure I know what I’m talking about beyond just a cursory understanding.
I therefore have zero motivation for rubbishing what you’re saying.
I think my question still applies to be honest, because there are two questions to be asked:
In my view, the video suggests (1) is a clear possibility. The supporting paper also infers this is the most logical explanation for the data we’re seeing. However, I’m still struggling to find any suggestion that (2) is happening, or evidence to support this, hence my question.
To quote Fenton from the above interview:
Got to use up all that midazolam
Midazolam is now cheap on world markets. America used to be the biggest hoggers of this horse tranquiliser, but the current wokism there means they are not executing as many criminals as they used to.
But the UK stepped in, and the Midazolam manufacturer’s share prices stayed steady.
The simple fact is; I have not taken the jab and I am fit and healthy. And that is the way it is staying.
Re previous topic, “have to treat Covid like cold to save NHS” Paul Hunter, University of East Anglia.
” The infected is not going away although we are not going to see severe disease for much longer . . .” Get that from the Nudge unit did he?
This got into Local Live Online (mirror group news) this morning even though it’s not local which means it’s been pushed there by Mirror Head Office and probably every othe online local too so a Major Effort.
There is no overwhelmed NHS, I’ve been inside it since 20/12/21. In-patient major regional hospital. Bank Holiday staffing levels have been completely normal with some staff not required to cover any holiday shifts at all.
Only Domestics were short staffed “because staff off sick for Omnicon”.
Then suddenly yesterday they are miraculously fully staffed but only because “it’s still Bank Holiday so Double Time”.
Anecdotally shooting from the hip
Omicron seems to have run it’s course in South Africa. It is reported that symptom are not serious and things are fizzling out
Meanwhile in the UK it seems everyone I know has contracted covid in the past few weeks
Hospitalisation figures in the UK seem to support the suggestion that symptoms from Omicron are less severe
There are differences between SA and the UK. The obvious differences are mass ‘vaccination’ and the ages of the respective populations
There could be another explanation for low hospitalisation in the UK. The explanation could be that the jabbed up are dying from ADE before they ever get to a hospital
A question for the data analysts on here…Is there any data anywhere, that differentiates between those who died with just C19 on their death certificate, as opposed to those who died with C19 and Pneumonia? Are these then counted twice? I remember last year this was a talking point, which seems to have faded away.
Following the April spike last year, the deaths from C19 seem to have tracked fairly closely to other years average for pneumonia.Is it possible that somebody can die of both pneumonia and C19?
The ONS now attempt to differentiate “with covid” and “of covid” and they split this in the weekly deaths data – they don’t make the specific distinction you describe.
Thanks, as I thought. I wonder what would happen to the C19 numbers and the Pneumonia numbers, if they were all clumped together, as is done with flu/pneumonia.
Hehe yep fully agree, I suspect we’d see it disappearing into the noise.
Unless you you know the typical variation from month to month it is not possible to say whether 8% over the five year average is significant or not. The graph for 2021 would suggest it is not.
Just noticed the ONS says the rise is statistically significant – ignore my comment!
I would hardly say they are non-Covid causes, only that they weren’t caused by a Covid infection in the deceased, but they were clearly a consequence of the Covid panic.
So government clumsiness and overreach causes, not COVID.
Just like the damage to the economy which is also incorrectly referred to economic damage caused by COVID. No, it’s damage caused by elected officials and technocrats running the show.
We need a new category – For Covid
Could we have this note every time covid deaths are discussed?
The point only seems to be made these days when discussing deaths that are reported as being from non-covid causes.
… and, as I’ve remarked above, the so-called ‘Covid’ death figures really are not credible, given what is known about this ‘non-high consequence’ virus. My guess is that a hell of a lot of other respiratory deaths are in those figures. Look at ‘pneumonia’.
Can someone please explain to me the ‘age-standardised’ bit? 2021 will be the deadliest year in the UK since 1918.
However, ‘age-standardised’ doesn’t look that bad. The thing is average life expectance in the UK has been virtually static since 2015, and since 2018 it’s actually been going down, so people are effectively not getting older. So how can we use an ‘age-standardised’ calculation to make deaths seem lower?
My understanding, obviously a contrived example:
Imagine a Population A, with 100 people aged 0 – 49, and 1000 people older than that, with a life expectancy of 65 years.
No imagine Population B, with 1000 people aged 0 – 49, and 100 people older than that, with a life expectancy of 65 years.
Population sizes and life expectancy are the same in both. Which group would you expect more deaths in, within the next year?
It also takes into account the overall size of the population which has been increasing for decades; so the % of the overall population is critical. This is why the BS from the BBC saying “worse deaths since WW2’ was statistically false.
Yes, I understand that, but the UK population fell in 2020 from 2019, and the life expectancy reduced as well.
We don’t have full figures for 2021, but I think it’s going to be similar.
I just don’t believe these ‘statistics’.
Yes, that example makes sense, but it’s not the UK’s situation. People are not staying the same age, they are getting younger. Any population increase is driven by immigration and these people are predominantly young and healthy.
I’m basically saying that these age-standardised statistics are nonsense.
I thought the median age was rising.
Well using figures that show that must be how they are calculating it.
I simply don’t believe it’s true, how can it be?? If life expectancy is reducing and immigration is predominantly young and healthy people, and at least a good chunk of the emigration is from retirees?
Virtually no one retirees to the UK, but plenty of UK citizens want to retiree somewhere warmer and cheaper.
Immigration numbers would need to be impossibly underestimated to produce a median age that’s dropping.
Net immigration in 2020 was 21k, and immigrants and predominantly younger, whereas emigrants are predominantly older.
Plus an overall lowering of UK life expectancy.
I’m probably being a bit slow here but I’m not sure I understand which bit isn’t making sense.
Some further resources if you’re interested in the methodology:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/weeklycovid19agestandardisedmortalityratesbyvaccinationstatusenglandmethodology
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20160106020035/http:/www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/user-guidance/health-and-life-events/revised-european-standard-population-2013–2013-esp-/index.html
My point is that it’s bullshit, ‘age standaridised’ is a statistical calculation, and there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
If the argument is well it’s statistics so they have to be correct, well then we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Statistics are like miniskirts, they reveal some interesting figures while hiding the important bits.
Cliches aside I do think there is value in ASMR calculations personally. I don’t believe they’re bullshit provided people are cognisant of their limitations.
I’m not in the “some statistics are misleading therefore all statistics should be ignored” camp, more “some statistics are misleading therefore all should be viewed with caution and an awareness of potential shortcomings”.
OK, perhaps I shouldn’t have said bullshit, I’ll rephrase.
I believe they’ve used incorrect models of the UK population to come up with their figures.
They are still using patterns of yearly population growth that are not true since COVID hit, and they are also using models of increased life expectancy that also aren’t true.
They are specifically using these outdated patterns to make the increases in deaths seem less than they actually are.
Ah I get you, that makes sense, cheers!
The simplest way of looking at the 1918 bullshit comparison, is that there were far more road deaths this year, than in 1918. We know this is because far more people drive and have cars, not because cars have become less safe.
I wasn’t making a comparison of death rates, simply stating a fact.
If the figures are consistent – using a single month is a hostage to fortune on reporting delays and influences such as weather – the excess deaths are worse than the headline as expected deaths are lower than averages of past years due to consistently declining mortality (at least until Covid hit).
The devil is in the detail though. What is the excess mortality by age?
Like this. Spot the pandemic? Thought so, me neither.
Excess deaths caused by the killer jab, unnecessary lockdowns and the NHS scaling back medical care for anything other than Covid.
Is the real truth
Can anyone say…. ‘Codon Optimization’
STOP TRANSFECTION NOW!
I wonder what proportion of the additional people dying have taken any special injections recently?
The average age standardised mortality rate for Oct 2020 was less than October 2019 (that’s right lower in the pandemic year just before the government locked us down). Now the last 5 years may have been unusual (for a variety of reasons), so I think the comparison should be made to a longer average than the last 5 years – maybe compare to last 20 years (or since the year 2000)? Then I expect there will not be much difference, with the exception of April 2020.
Whatever the merits of using ASMR’s to analyse data the fact remains that there have been some 83k excess deaths in England & Wales in 2020 and a further 53k so far in 2021, when compared to the 5 year average from 2015 through 2019. The population size and age structure have not altered enough to alter the fact that a compensatory fall in Non-Covid mortality ought to follow, all things being otherwise equal.
Non-Covid mortality has been on a rising trend throughout 2021 and this suggests that something is seriously wrong. This may be coincidental to the vaccination drive, but it certainly needs to be investigated. The ONS can produce age related mortality data by vaccination status so this is what needs to be interrogated.