A new paper in the BMJ assesses the worldwide effects of COVID (and simultaneously its management) through excess death statistics.
The time-honoured, and the most reliable, method of assessing epidemics and pandemics has always been to count the excess deaths above average numbers during the period of the outbreak. This is because death is a very clear and easily measured indicator of the exact bad outcomes of a disease, which is independent of misdiagnosis and so on. Under usual circumstances, a spike in deaths when a novel infectious disease has emerged is pretty likely to be a good measure of the number of fatal cases – unless a World War happens to break out at the same time.
I mention the confounding factor of a World War because COVID-19 is unique, in history, in the degree of medical and political interference in its course. Some of these interventions (PCR mass-testing, for example) certainly exaggerated the number of cases diagnosed, as I pointed out at the time, but would not have significantly affected the excess deaths. A false positive PCR in a healthy person doesn’t make them die, and a false positive in a case of, say, fatal influenza, is still an excess death.
But we all know, by now, the measures that potentially might have increased the excess death rate, from lockdowns with their effects on health care, social isolation, loss of income and so on; through the prolific use of dangerous medical interventions (midazolam and opioids in the elderly, ventilators, unproven anti-virals – not to mention the enforced witholding of beneficial treatments like steroids, antibiotics, Vitamin D and ivermection); and finally to mass, often mandatory, “vaccination” with entirely novel and inadequately tested mRNA vaccines.
These considerations make the bottom line count of excess deaths from 2020 through to the end of 2022 all the more astonishing. The total excess deaths for that period, worldwide, amount in the study to just 3,098,456. No global data is accurate to a single digit, of course, so if we round it off to 3 million, and assume the world population to be 8 billion, the percentage of people who died from the “COVID phenomenon” over the whole three years was 0.03% – just one in 3,300 people, or in Britain, close to the average, a tad over 2,000 people compared to the one-and-a-half million-plus total of deaths in that time, or 1 in over 750 deaths.
That is comparable to the death toll from 1968-9 Hong Kong Flu in just one year, rather than three, an epidemic that few of us even noticed and fewer remember. It’s nothing compared to the Spanish flu the politicians kept using as a bogeyman, which killed 25-50 million souls. And it was around a thousand times less harmful than the Black Death. And so even taking the grand total, the “worst pandemic of all time” barely measures up as a pandemic at all, especially once one starts subtracting the excess deaths from starvation in poor countries, suicides, under-treated cancer and all the rest.
The excuse that it would have been worse if the draconian measures hadn’t been taken is refuted by the fact that there is little to co correlation between the measures taken and the excess deaths in any particular region.
But the grand total itself is misleading. You will remember that, in most areas, there was a massive initial peak of (assumed) infections, followed by a second peak the following winter (the exact pattern varied widely according to locality). By the end of 2021, the far less lethal Omicron variant began to sweep away the earlier forms and, essentially, hardly anyone was then dying of the COVID respiratory distress syndrome any more. But that pattern is not reflected in the annual excess death figures, which are:
- 2020: 1,033,122 (one in ten thousand or so)
- 2021: 1,256,942 (significantly higher)
- 2022: 808,392 (inexplicably still some 80% of the number at the height of the “pandemic”)
The worst year, then, was the year when COVID outbreaks were waning, and when mass-vaccination was being pushed around the world. And unlike every other viral pandemic in living memory, death rates remained high once the disease itself faded, though the dedicated were still being pumped full of mRNA shots. Though not included the study, excess deaths have continued high in 2023 and 2024, apparently only really beginning to tail off this year – which I’m sure has nothing whatever to do with the loss of interest in getting vaccinated and may even be simply incomplete data. Other studies suggest that much of the excess death is not from infectious disease, but from cardio-vascular problems. It’s an ongoing epidemic which is being ignored as much as the 2019 jobby was a global obsession.
It’s not a good look, is it? That’s presumably why, unless you read the BMJ or The Daily Sceptic, you’re unlikely to be given a good look at such studies.