From the very beginning of the manufactured COVID-19 crisis, observant critics have been pointing out deviations from accepted scientific and medical norms in the diagnosis of this new clinical syndrome, and the attribution of deaths to it.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford examined the various case definitions offered by national and international bodies, and concluded that there was no consistent definition of what a “case” of COVID-19 actually was.
Furthermore, contrary to accepted practice for infectious diseases, people who had no symptoms of disease whatsoever but had tested positive for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, using laboratory tests whose own manufacturers caution that they should not be used to diagnose disease, were counted as cases.
This is unprecedented. No one is diagnosed with the flu merely because they test positive to influenza virus; one would have to be actually displaying symptoms of respiratory illness to be counted as a “case” of influenza.
Way back in March 2020, retired pathologist Dr John Lee brought attention to the abrupt departure from standard practices of recording deaths from respiratory disease, that were only being applied to COVID-19 and not to influenza or any other respiratory virus:
“If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.
Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for Covid-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them: if any of these patients dies, staff will have to record the Covid-19 designation on the death certificate — contrary to usual practice for most infections of this kind. There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded.”
How prescient Dr Lee turned out to be. In country after country, when the medical records of people whose deaths were attributed to COVID-19 were examined, the overwhelming majority were found to be a) elderly and b) have multiple comorbidities which would be expected to reduce their already-limited life expectancy, as well as render them susceptible to any respiratory virus, including influenza and the host of viruses that cause cold and flu-like symptoms.
In Italy, for example, according to Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to the health minister,
“Only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three.”
Detailed analysis of supposed COVID-19 deaths in the US state of Tennessee found that 96.3% had at least one comorbidity, and the majority had close to three.
And in Australia, “71.2% of people who died from COVID-19 had pre-existing chronic conditions certified on the death certificate,” with the median age of death 81.2 years for males and 86.0 years for females.
To put it bluntly, we really don’t know how many people have died from rather than with SARS-CoV-2 infection – that is, we don’t know how many people whose deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 would have died within a few months anyway, due to advanced age and/or pre-existing life-limiting disease, if they had not been infected.
Some deaths that genuinely were directly attributable to SARS-CoV-2 infection have no doubt been missed, and some (probably many, if not most) deaths have been mis-attributed to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
That’s what makes all-cause mortality a useful measure of the overall impact of the advent of SARS-CoV-2, and I’ll be focusing on this (and some related metrics) in Part 1 of this mini-series.
Quite simply, all-cause mortality is the total number of deaths that occur in a given time period, irrespective of cause. If SARS-CoV-2 is truly a deadly virus, we would expect to have seen all-cause mortality rise in the first year of its emergence. And conversely, if the novel injections commonly called “COVID-19 vaccines” were truly safe and effective, we would expect to see all-cause mortality fall in countries that have administered them to a large proportion of their population.
How does these expectations mesh with reality?
All-cause mortality in 2020
In Australia, all-cause mortality in 2020 was lower than expected, with an age-standardised death rate (SDR) for January to October of 355.3 per 100,000 people, compared to the average SDR for 2015-2019 of 386.5. So in the middle of what we were told was the deadliest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu, with COVID death counters blaring from the chyrons of every news program, considerably fewer Australians died than in previous years. Huh.
An analysis of mortality data from 37 countries found that in 2020, all-cause mortality ranged from 4.3% less than expected to 14.4% more than expected. And here’s something strange: Latvia had 2.2% fewer overall deaths than expected, despite having the 22nd highest number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 per million of population (out of 224 countries).
Something fishy is clearly going on. Intriguingly, Denis Rancourt’s forensic analysis of week-by-week mortality data in the US and Europe found no “winter-burden mortality that is statistically larger than for past winters” in 2020, but did observe a sharp peak of excess mortality in several jurisdictions, that directly followed the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
However, this “COVID peak” was not observed in the seven US states (Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Arkansas) that did not impose a lockdown. Instead, Rancourt found, the presence of a “COVID peak” was positively correlated with the share of COVID-19-assigned deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, to which – inexplicably and disastrously – hospital patients were discharged at the beginning of the pandemic, seeding institutions full of vulnerable elderly people with sick individuals.
Rancourt concluded:
“I postulate that the “COVID peak” represents an accelerated mass homicide of immune-vulnerable individuals, and individuals made more immune-vulnerable, by government and institutional actions, rather than being an epidemiological signature of a novel virus, irrespective of the degree to which the virus is novel from the perspective of viral speciation.”
Rancourt and co-authors went on to conduct a similarly microscopic analysis of week-by-week mortality data in Canada from 2010 to 2021, and drew essentially the same conclusion:
“We find that there is no extraordinary surge in yearly or seasonal mortality in Canada, which can be ascribed to a COVID-19 pandemic; and that several prominent features in the ACM/w [all-cause mortality per week] in the COVID-19 period exhibit anomalous province-to-province heterogeneity that is irreconcilable with the known behaviour of epidemics of viral respiratory diseases (VRDs). We conclude that a pandemic did not occur.
In addition, our analysis of the ACM/w, by province, age and sex, allows us to highlight anomalies, occurring during the COVID-19 period, which provide strong evidence that:
* Among the most elderly (85+ years), many died from the immediate response to the pandemic that was announced by the WHO on 11 March 2020.
* Predominantly young males (0-44 years, and also 45-64 years) probably indirectly died from the sustained pandemic response, in the summer months of 2020, and into the fall and winter, starting in May 2020, especially in Alberta, significantly in Ontario and British Columbia, whereas not in Quebec.”
Demographer Dana Glei confirmed that “nearly 2/3 of excess deaths among younger Americans appear to have resulted from causes other than COVID-19” and that these deaths – mostly from drug overdose and homicide – were “likely to be an indirect result of economic distress, the disruption of normal life, and heightened uncertainty related to the pandemic.”
Parenthetically, it’s important to point out that all these factors were direct results of government policies that impacted negatively on the lives of working-age people, rather than of the virus itself, which causes severe illness and death predominantly in older individuals. It’s intellectually dishonest to attribute the social and economic devastation wreaked upon the population to “the pandemic”, as if a virus had the power to shut down businesses, close schools and churches and stop people from seeing their loved ones.
All-cause mortality in 2021
Now, what about 2021? What happened to all-cause mortality as countries rolled out COVID-19 injections? Again, if the injections worked – that is, protected recipients against COVID-19 – and were as safe as we were promised they were, we would expect to see all-cause mortality drop.
If vaccines save lives, there should be fewer people dying in countries with high vaccine uptake.
In Europe, excess mortality (all-cause mortality above expected rates) in people aged 15-44 during the second half of 2021 was nearly double what it was during 2020, although vaccination rates across the continent averaged at least 70%. Adults aged 45-64 also had somewhat higher excess mortality in the latter half of 2021 than in 2020, whilst in the oldest age groups, excess mortality was lower in 2021, most likely due to the “harvesting effect” – a large proportion of people with compromised health died in 2020, leaving fewer frail people to die in 2021.
In Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands and Germany, COVID-19-related deaths were dramatically lower in 2021 than 2020. However, bumps in all-cause mortality in 2021 coincide with the timing of the COVID-19 injection in all of these countries bar Sweden.
In the US, excess mortality has been higher for all of 2021 (up 15% on expected deaths) than 2020 (up 13.6%).
Once again, the greatest excess mortality is seen in younger age groups that have an exceptionally low risk of dying of COVID-19, but have been exposed en masse to experimental injections. For 0-24 year olds, excess mortality in 2021 was close to double what it was in 2020:
25-44 year olds and 45-64 year olds also had significantly higher excess mortality in 2021 than in 2020:
75-84 year olds had roughly equivalent excess mortality in both years, and the 85+ group had higher excess mortality in 2020 than in 2021, indicating a harvesting effect as would be expected given the carnage that occurred in US nursing homes in 2020.
OneAmerica, a major provider of life insurance in the US state of Indiana has disclosed that death rates in their working age population (aged 18-64) are an unprecedented 40% higher than before the advent of COVID-19, but the vast majority of deaths claims are for non-COVID-related deaths. Both short- and long-term disability claims have also risen dramatically.
According to the company’s CEO Scott Davison,
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica… A three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic… so 40% is just unheard of.”
Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64
Remarkably, India’s life insurance industry has also experienced nearly the exact same increase in deaths claims, which were up 41% in 2021 compared to 11% in 2020; once again, claims for COVID deaths have decreased whilst non-COVID death claims have increased.
Here in Australia, the age-standardised death rate (SDR) for January to October 2021 (the latest date for which the Australian Bureau of Statistics has adequate data) was 357.8 per 100,000 people, which was slightly higher than the SDR of 355.3 per 100,000 people for the same time period in 2020. In particular, the number of deaths in September and October was slightly above historical averages .
While the number of injections administered to the Australian population ticks ever upward, new deaths attributed to COVID-19 have increased dramatically. In fact, more Australians are dying of (or with) COVID-19 now than in 2020, when no vaccine was available, despite 77% of the entire population being “fully vaccinated” and another 3% being “partially vaccinated”.
Australia’s experience is not unique. Mathematician Mathew Crawford has produced a fascinating case study of Vermont, the most highly-vaccinated state in the US (I’ve updated the figures in his article based on information current as at January 14, 2022). 78.3% of Vermont’s total population is fully vaccinated, and 100% of those 65 and older have received at least 1 dose. And yet, Vermont has seen its COVID-19 death toll blow out from 120 deaths before the vaccine rollout began to 370 deaths after it began.
Looking at countries with low, moderate and high COVID-19 deaths per million population (graphs below from Kathy Dopp), it’s clear that the majority of countries have higher COVID death rates after their vaccine rollouts than before and that, tragically, many countries that had essentially zero deaths from COVID-19 before they began injecting their populations – such as Taiwan, Laos, Tanzania, Vietnam, Cambodia, Fiji and Timor-Leste – are now seeing their death rates shoot up:
The data are clear: more people are dying now, of both COVID- and non-COVID-related causes, since the drive to inject every man, woman and child on earth with novel, poorly-tested experimental medical technologies began.
The question is “Why?” And that’s what I’ll be attempting to answer in Part 2. Stay tuned.
Thanks again Robyn for another excellent and helpful post, am definitely staying tuned for part 2!
Your work is impeccable as always. Despite the negative political and social ramifications of all this I find data analysis like your morbidly fascinating. If we still had a functioning science arm there are so many leads I would love to see pursued.