This is interesting but is it everything?

If you break the figures down, you see that the death rates are higher amongst those who had one of the emergency use injections than those who didn’t. See https://expose-news.com/2022/08/09/mortality-rates-lowest-among-unvacinated/ for a digest.

Who knows? There are too many uncertainties on both sides.

‘From COVID’ vs ‘with COVID’. Do we count second order COVID effects, e.g. capacity issues.

What falls under ‘Lockdown’? Track and trace spending? Political upheaval (we had a very high number of coups in 2021)? Boris losing his job? Reduced lifespan from lower earnings from worse education? Any effects of working from home?

How do we attribute effects? How much of the cost of living crisis is due to sanctions vs general economic stupidity vs COVID responses?

Too much uncertainty and unclear definitions to get anywhere near an answer. The better and well-trod question is whether they saved lives on balance. Lockdowns were obviously disproportionate; even if they saved lives on balance, the effect is pretty invisible and a terrible return on imprisoning an entire population for two years. To even be arguable, the lives saved should be obvious and visible from space.

But none of these are the effects that most worry me; I’m concerned about the long-term social and political impacts. WW1 gave us fascism and communism. The Financial Crisis crippled almost every political system in Europe, led to Brexit & Trump and produced a swing against free markets. What on Earth will imprisoning the population lead to? I don’t think we’ll be seeing stability anytime soon.

We should pray for a mild winter. The death rate amongst the elderly, otherwise, will knock the Covid rate into a cocked hat.

And it will all be the Governments’ ( plural ) fault.

If we use the Quality Additional Life Years formula adopted by NICE / NHS then lockdown has already been a total bust.
As has been pointed out, the side effects may be short in some areas (the NHS has reopened for business, yay!) and long in others (loss of economic growth, vaccine injuries) so the long term picture is even worse.
Tragically, the sacrifices have been made by the young to protect the old, an inverted morality not seen since WW1.

I’ve no doubt government action will have caused more harm than good; the trade-off of a year or two of low quality life for frail codgers against decades of healthy life for the young and middle aged pretty much guarantees that.

It might be hard to disentangle deaths by lockdown from deaths by vaccine though. The vaccines probably contribute both to death by Covid, by reducing your immunity to the Covid virus and by promoting the mutation of the virus, and death by non-Covid, by the direct toxic effect of the spike protein on your organs and by reducing your immunity to other pathogens. The best method of disentangling that I’ve seen attempted exploits the fact that vaccine injection campaigns occurred at different times in different countries. These analyses suggest that the vaccines have been killing huge numbers of people. And, necessarily, those estimates are only for short-term deaths. How many more victims there will be over the next decade, God knows.

Governments must know this: they have armies of statisticians who could do the same sort of sums as the independent analysts who publish on the internet. Unless, of course, their statisticians have been instructed not to perform intelligent analyses.

I’ve kept emails exchanged with an old colleague in early 2020 when we bewailed the reckless stupidity of lockdowns. It’s not that we were blessed with second sight; it was enough to be non-cretinous. But at least the whole debacle should shut up those fools who moan about our being ruled by PPE graduates. When those politicians put themselves in the hands of people with medical and scientific degrees the latter botched the whole thing. It must add up to the greatest display of governmental insanity since the rulers of the Xhosa followed the advice of their child prophetess.

Call me a fool if you like, dearieme. But someone with some common dog fuck instead of a PPE might have asked for a second opinion, asked some boffin in the bowels of Whitehall to do a cost benefit analysis, cast an eye over the (very basic, GCSE level) stats from the Diamond Princess, and asked the question “What have the kvnts got to gain?”.

“It must add up to the greatest display of governmental insanity since the rulers of the Xhosa followed the advice of their child prophetess.”

Well, Greta is now telling us to slaughter all the cattle, and they are buying it.

But of course, it appears that those gain-of-function nutballs have managed to re-create the 1918 flu virus.

Herd immunity anyone?

I call you a fool, Philip. It turns out that the problem isn’t PPE graduates, since the problem this time was wished on us by graduates in Medicine and The Science. Therefore the problem is something else. That’s logic for you.

There is a false dichotomy in contrasting deaths from lockdown against those from covid. In the absence of lockdown, lots of people would have got seriously ill in a short period, which would have overwhelmed the medical ability of the country, leading to lots of people dying of non-covid causes due to staff being sick with covid and hospitals being full of covid cases.

Or to put it another way, lockdown was caused by covid, so deaths due to lockdown are deaths indirectly due to covid. Though there are plenty of fools who think that there was some magic alternative which could have avoided overload. Well, technically there was, and it was used to tackle the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, but I don’t think wholesale slaughter of the infected and their contacts would have been a popular policy.

@Charles:
Absolutely. Just like it overwhelmed all the countries and states which foolishly failed to Lockdown. And how healthcare systems collapsed everytime measures ceased.

And even if it were true, I wouldn’t bet on the sustainability of a healthcare system which can’t triage or a state that can’t manage a disease with a single pathology despite billions in funding and a year of preparation.

@The Sage

Spot on. Two Tele articles on excess deaths and jabs not mentioened

This despite surge in excess deaths after every jab / booster rollout

Heart attacks / strokes in under 40s inc under 18s were rare, now they’re ‘new normal’

Gov’t response: we won’t investigate, keep jabbing

This deserves wider circulation:
https://philharper.substack.com/p/pfizers-own-data-showed-vaccine-creates

Ie the jab in itself creates more adverse events requiring hospitalisation, than the number of hospitalisations due to severe Covid it prevented back in 2020, derived from Pfizer’s own data they were so reluctant to release.

The Pfizer clinical trial data, especially safety, is basically uninterpretable in terms of working out a benefit/risk ratio. There is little point trying. Harper makes a good point on NNT vs. NNH, but the numbers are simply too small to be reliable.

Besides, the primary endpoint (the claim as to what the product does) was any infection, not severe infection. The narrative has been turned on its head, and as with all good magick tricks, most of the audience did not notice the shift from “95% effective in stopping you getting covid” to “your covid was less severe thanks to the vaccine”.

Now, there is some truth in the latter claim, at least for some brief period of time, but working out how much and for how long is a bugger in a 80%+ vaccinated population with a bunch of important confounders between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

The most fruitful line of inquiry is why the trial was stopped after 3 months (we know why, and Pfizer knew why). The second most fruitful, how far Pfizer departed from an ITT-type analysis by ignoring infections occurring prior to 28 days (or 14 days, I forget) after dose 2, and kicking out of the trial patients who got infected between dose 1 and 2.

I’ve said before, but as bad as the safety of this product is, it is not bad enough to show anything interesting even in a trial of 30,000 people, or even reliably in the general population. It is the poor (long-term) efficacy that should bury the product, not its safety.

There are also problems with looking at this kind of thing without knowing what you are looking for:

“However, in a strange editorial decision, commenting on these figures the MHRA said “there was one serious adverse event of anaphylaxis 9 days after Dose 2 of BNT162b2; this was due to a bee sting. No significant concerns are raised.” The bee sting detail, intentionally or otherwise, seems perfectly placed to dampen the imbalance in SAEs between the groups. It’s the only real comment we get from the MHRA on these numbers”

This is not strange at all – you would be specifically looking for anaphylaxis events after a treatment like this. The license even states “Close observation for at least 15 minutes is recommended following vaccination” – this is because of the risk of anaphylaxis. The MHRA comment is that none caused by the product were observed in the trial (you don’t get anaphylactic reaction to anything 9 days after exposure).

On related events, what happens is the treating physician is asked their opinion on whether the adverse event was related to the product or not. Opinions differ on whether this information is of any value (I think it is of minimal value). I will observe only that 4 out of 126 SAEs being considered related is very low compared to most clinical trials, but realistic given the setting.

Tim, if you had read a couple of sentences down the press release you would have seen

“Over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus.”

We’ve never once seen a retraction on these pages and I don’t suppose we’ll see one now.

“If we use the Quality Additional Life Years formula adopted by NICE / NHS then lockdown has already been a total bust.”

Indeed. From teh beginning, the refusal of government and the health services to use the NICE QALY framework for Covid was clear evidence that the whole approach to Covid was utterly mad – totally at odds with every other healthcare policy undertaken in the previous two decades.