As a friend or family member of mine, I’ve noticed you’ve been surprised at our diverging views on the world’s reaction to the spread of Covid19 caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus.
Covid-19 is clearly a real illness caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus, but below you’ll find hundreds of links to evidence that the threat was grossly exaggerated and the medical, commercial, regulatory, legal, political and social responses to it were hugely more dangerous to health and personal freedom.
Below I share the evidence. Sources are almost all from government websites and peer-reviewed research. I’ve tried to highlight where that isn’t the case.
There are so many links that reading them all will take you weeks, so I suggest you start by reading the entire page before going back to study the sources you’re particularly interested in.
If you notice any incorrect data, or have any other sourced data or sound evidence to add, please let me know.
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It’s striking how far policy has diverged from long-agreed and peer-reviewed science in the C19 era. You don’t find tens of thousands of virologists, immunologists, doctors, pathologists and published scientists openly refuting the importance of surgery, of hospitals, of medical interventions for serious illnesses like HIV, Malaria, TB or polio, for example.
And yet since last year, tens of thousands of medical professionals have been openly refuting movement restrictions, C19 vaccine mandates, ubiquitous mask wearing, and even that C19 is something we should have worried about at all, compared to serious illnesses.
Here are some examples of extremely qualified medical professionals openly refuting commonly held beliefs about C19; Dr Zoe Harcombe PhD, Anders Tegnell, Martin Kulldorf, Charles Brewer, Andrew Bamji, Professor Sunetra Gupta, Professor Peter Doshi**, Jonathan Engler and Dr John Campbell, to name just a few that spring to mind. There are hundreds of peer-reviewed papers that refute the widespread policy of restrictions and forced vaccination’s effectiveness, some notable examples here. Here is a US-based pharmacist explaining in simple terms how risky it is to give Covid vaccines to children, when compared to their much lower risk from Covid.
These are not crackpot conspiracy theorists, but hard scientists, appalled at the way that business is crowding out science. For an explicit take on this, here is Dr David Healy then Prof Doshi clarifying that Pfizer does not do science… it does business, in a recorded US government Senate hearing. [strangely deleted from Youtube, perhaps for copyright violation? You can find it elsewhere with a search.]
One of the clearests explanations of how the statistics presented by government, then in turn reported by newspapers and TV, is so far from correct, is from Norman Fenton. Fenton is a Professor of Risk Information Management in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London and a world expert in data and statistics analysis. You can watch his explanation here where he explains why the concept of reporting ‘cases’ is misleading, and how it’s possible to ignore testing to reveal how relatively harmless Covid is, and shockingly, how there’s no evidence of the effectiveness of the vaccines (though note, multi-country data shows these are not vaccines but immunotherapy drugs).
There is particularly powerful and unprecedented dissonance concerning C19, between governments and the media on one side, and medical and data professionals on the other.
** Prof. Doshi’s claim in his speech, linked above, that the definition of the word ‘vaccine’ has been altered to suit Covid drug distribution is visible here and here.
How Serious Is Covid19?
The simplest way to find out how serious an illness is, is to look at how many people it kills. Handily, many governments also share this information. The number of people in hospital with it is also useful and we’ll look at that later. Polio for example has a reasonable ‘case fatality rate’ but an unusually high rate of incapacitation. But mortality is a useful place to start.
Most of the evidence in this explainer relies on UK data, as that’s the easiest to access, but every time I check other countries, it is very similar. For obvious reasons; most developed countries have similar rates of per-capita medical spending, similar rates of ill-health in the population, and similar demographics.
I also frequently refer to US$, to make it easier to read wherever you are, since it is the global reserve currency.
The UK has a reasonable health service, at a cost of about $4600 per year per person. For context, Swiss people contribute about double that. India contributes about 1/16th of that, about $275 per person. Each system does this in different ways, but per person per year is a useful metric.
First of all, let’s establish context. How many people die each year in England from various things? How many people die in England every year of all causes?
About 350,000 people die every year in the UK. The majority of these people are, as you’d expect, over 70.
So about 6,700 people die every week in the UK.
Heart disease kills about a third of these; so about 105,000 a year; 2,200 a week.
Cancer kills just under a third of these, so about 100,000 a year, 2,000 a week.
Again, most people dying are over 70. You can find the age breakdown here.
Respiratory diseases kill about 70,000 people a year, which includes colds, flu, pneumonia, etc.
So respiratory diseases kill about 1,500 people every week, or 215 every day in the UK.
No one I know has told me they have ever considered these figures, or considered the actual risk to themselves from these significant causes of death.
What about things that we completely ignore, like the danger on the roads or in our homes?
Included in the total figure of 350,000 people who die every year in the UK;
2,000 people die every year on the roads. Much more striking is that 25,000 people a year are “killed or seriously injured” on UK roads.
Household accidents kill about 6,000 people every year. That’s 115 every week, 16 people every day.
OK, so now onto Covid19.
In 2020, according to the UK government’s published statistics, Covid killed 72,000 people.
Seems like a big number, right?
To put that big number into context, which is important, there are a few things to consider:
Just the same as most illnesses, most people who die with Covid are over 70.
The fact that most people who die of an illness are over 70 is perfectly normal and not something we usually ever mention.
Most people (70% in the UK and pretty much everywhere) who die of anything are over 70.
So saying that any illness disproportionally affects old people is pointless, since most things do. It would be unusual if an illness disproportionally affected, say, people aged 21-30, or 5-10, since that is unusual.
The life expectancy of someone in the UK, similar to other developed countries, is 81. As you pass the age of 70, your risk of dying from anything goes up significantly. 7 out of every 10 people who died in the UK last year were over 70.
Again, this is perfectly normal and not something we usually discuss, because we instinctively know that when we get older, we get closer to dying, unless we’re unlucky and die before then.
So how many people has Covid19 actually killed in the UK. Fewer than die every year in household accidents - falling off chairs, down stairs etc.
Hard to believe isn’t it? But here are the UK govt statistics.
That’s right… everyone who dies from Covid19 is already seriously, mortally ill, or so old that natural causes (old age) are going to get them.
Hard to believe isn’t it? Here are the UK govt statistics on life expectancy (more on this below)… that has changed by such a tiny amount, it’s statistically insignificant.
Here is the medical officer trusted by the UK government, clarifying that Covid is mostly harmless - that most people will never get it, and that those that do, only a minority of those will get any symptoms, only a minority of those will be ill, a minority of those will need to go to hospital, a minority of those will be seriously ill, and a minority of those people will die.
Most people will never get Covid.
Most people who get it, won’t even know they’ve got it; they’ll have no symptoms.
Most people with symptoms will only be mildly ill.
Most people who are ill enough to go to the doctor, will recover.
Most people who are ill enough to go to hospital, will recover.
Most people in hospital who become seriously ill with C19 will recover.
A minority, of the minority, of the minority, of the minority, of the minority, of the minority of the population will die from Covid19.
If you know your statistics, that is six levels of multiplication of an increasingly small number, all of which are a small fraction of 1, so at each level, the probability of the outcome drops by a factor of more than 100.
Comparing Covid19 to Other Virus-borne Illness
The flu, or ‘seasonal influenza’ as it’s commonly called, apparently kills between 10,000 and 30,000 people in a normal year in the UK (links to the data follow below). The number varies because ‘flu, like any virus, constantly mutates, and some mutations are more infectious than others. Some have more severe symptoms than others.
Importantly, we don’t test people to see if they have the flu virus. We base whether they died from, or with, the flu by assessing their symptoms, and deciding that they are a ‘case’ of the flu. Because that’s what ‘case’ means… it means someone who has the symptoms of an illness, who may also be tested for confirmation. At least, that’s what the clinical definition of a ‘case’ of an illness has been, since medicine began over a century ago… until 2020, when it bizarrely changed abruptly for Covid19. The “case classification” section here makes it very clear that clinical evidence must be present, but the analysis described here shows how messy the definition of a ‘case’ is when Covid19 is concerned.
Flu’s surprisingly high death toll also highlights another issue with the flu; flu vaccines don’t work very well…. Do you get the flu vaccine every year? If you don’t, why not? You’re contributing to the flu’s death toll.
Did you get a flu vaccine in 2018? If you didn’t, you contributed to a pandemic and chose to put the elderly and frail at greater risk.
Why doesn’t the flu vaccine work very well? It’s because the influenza virus that we catch it from mutates too quickly.
By the time the vaccine has been made, distributed and injected, the flu virus has often mutated into a variant that the vaccine does not protect you against, or the prevalent strain in the population that year is different.
It’s also why despite more than 50 years of trying, there is no vaccine against the common cold, nor many other illnesses we get from time to time, sometimes making us feel unwell for a week or two, sometimes for up to a few months (see ‘post viral syndrome’).
In 2018, there was a flu pandemic that hit the UK. Strangely, no one I know in the UK who has spoken to me about Covid was aware of this extreme crisis that hit the UK health service. The pandemic was mostly caused by the B/Yamagata and H3N2 strains and it killed more than 22,000 people.
Strangely, when I tried to find the hard data to confirm that number from the UK government, it quickly becomes clear that around 22,000 is the number of deaths from flu and pneumonia, not just the flu. And you’ll note from the links here, the numbers vary; generally it’s thought to have killed more than 30,000 in the UK alone, and hospitalised many tens of thousands more.
There are no tests for the flu in common use, other than assessing if the patient is a flu ‘case’ in the correct manner. As explained above, that means confirming they have flu symptoms.
I won’t digress into why flu and pneumonia statistics are grouped - but rest assured the pairing is what we think of when we consider ‘flu deaths’.
The flu pandemic in 2018 in the UK caused a huge crisis in the NHS. A crisis that no one I have spoken to in the UK since Covid appeared noticed.
So to summarise…. Covid19 killed 70,000 people in the UK in 2020, according to the UK government, which is about one in every thousand people.
Compare this to the flu plus other respiratory diseases that kill more than 70,000 people in a bad year, but that are never mentioned, never specifically targeted by policy, nor made the reason for peculiar restrictions like “limit social contact” when we know for certain that more social contact has a positively causative relationship to good health and a strong immune system.
Physical contact boosts your immune system, making you less likely to get ill from anything. The science (defined by longstanding peer reviewed papers) concludes that enforcing reduced social contact will raise all-cause hospitalisations and mortality.
It’s unclear why the UK government has spent more than £300 billion to try to prevent Covid19, when its expenditure to combat respiratory diseases is close to zero.
The Numbers Are Funny
The UK government’s main statistics page for C19 shows that in 2020 Covid19 killed 72,178 people.
That page also explains clearly that the mortality figures are inflated in an unprecedented way.
A death ‘from’ Covid is actually “a death in a person with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test [who] died within 60 days of the first specimen date.“ Here’s a screengrab, because it’s such a preposterous, unprecedented definition it needs to be seen to be believed.
Yes, that means that someone who died of any cause, but had tested positive for Covid up to two months beforehand is included in the published figures.
Is this how mortality is attributed to an illness?
Never before 2020, in the history of medicine.
To recap on how we know how absurd this is, the way we attribute deaths to causes is by referring to death certificates, written very carefully by coroners. They assess symptoms and other information very carefully. They use the clinical definition of ‘case’ that has stood for over a century.
It’s how we have calculated deaths from particular causes since records began.
What governments and statistics bodies have never done, is use a positive test for a virus in the months leading up to a death, and then attribute presence of the virus to an illness that then caused the death.
Of course the virus SARS-Cov-2 can cause the illness called Covid19, but it is not a 1:1 relationship. You’ll often have all sorts of viruses in your nose that do not make you ill. You may have SARS-Cov-2 in your nose, but never fall ill with Covid.
Testing… For What
I was surprised recently to discover that the Covid test isn’t a Covid test. PCR and antigen tests commonly in use test for presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus in the nasal cavity.
They do not test for Covid19, which is an illness.
The first barrier in our immune system, as far as your nose is concerned, are your nasal hairs. Huge things get stopped there. Next up is the mucus at the top of your nose, where you’ll frequently find all sorts of virusses in the process of being destroyed by your immune system.
From there, it gets complicated, but most of the virusses in your nose won’t make you ill. They may pass the mucosal barrier in your nose, only for your immune system inside your body to destroy them.
They may also be there because you are already ill, and in a narrow window when you’re infectious.
So how do we test for Covid19? We don’t. We test for presence of the virus that may cause it, near the outside of our bodies before our immune systems have started their amazing work.
You can have SARS-Cov-2 in your nose and not be ill (a positive test result) and you can also have Covid19 without virus in your nose (a negative test result).
So we need to remember that included in almost every country’s Covid19 mortality data are many people who test positive for SARS-Cov-2 virus in their nose, but who are not, and never were, nor will be, ill with Covid19. As I’m certain you’ll find this hard to believe, this is clearly evidenced in many places online; here, here, etc. It also of course includes people who have been ill with Covid19 and have recovered, but who may still have some of the virus in their nose, either as a result of their illness, or from having breathed it recently.
I just had a PCR test. The official letter says that I am ‘negative’ for Covid19, even though that is categorically an incorrect statement based on the test I just had.
Here’s a letter recently published by the British Medical Journal (paywall link with useful summary) by a retired NHS doctor;
“Both professionals and the Department of Health and Social Care are still failing to distinguish between infection with SARS-CoV-2 and covid-19, and positive tests continue to be reported as cases of covid-19. Covid-19 is a severe immunological consequence of SARS-CoV-2 infection but is not universal. It requires the development of hypoxia and biochemical and immunological indicators.“
This is just part of the reason that Covid19 is thought to be far more dangerous than fundamental data and evidence indicates.
It’s hard to imagine, but there is no controlling to account for the rise in testing. By ‘controlling’ I mean the scientific definition of the term, where you ‘control’ a factor that is known to skew results so that in the final conclusion of your tests, the controlled factor does not skew the results and make the inaccurate. Countries around the world (and media) are breathlessly reporting rises in ‘cases’ without noting that anything rises when you look for it, and that the rise in cases is simply because of a rise in testing among the healthy population.
If you tested widely for IQ, you’d find a rise in illiteracy! If you tested for flu using PCR or antigen tests, you’d find enormous rises in flu ‘cases’. You’d also find, if you blamed the flu for every death where there was a positive flu PCR or antigen test within 28, or even 60 days of the death, that of course ‘flu deaths’ had rocketted.
Why would the UK government, and others, attribute deaths to an illness in such a misleading manner, using an unsuitable test?
Why the un-evidenced, un-scientific and grossly misleading reporting of cases at all?
I have no idea.
Covid19 Data Inconsistency Evidence
This is so surprising I thought I was missing something, until I discovered that over-reporting has been standard practise elsewhere. Here’s a chief medical officer in the USA explaining how loosely the definition was applied in her state of 13 million people;
Has Illinois changed its definition since this statement was made? Maybe… maybe not. Should this ever have happened? No. If the policy has been changed, have the data been corrected before the change? Who knows!
Note too that Illinois’ Covid19 response decisions were made using inflated incorrect data.
So it is certain that the UK’s figure of 72,178 people dying of Covid19 in 2020 is incorrectly high. The number of people who died because of Covid19, including the fit and healthy, and people already dying of serious illnesses, must be much smaller than 72,000.
Even if we use the figure of 72,000, Covid19 is not serious.
Updated Apr2022: Thanks to a Freedom of Information request that went completely unreported, the Office of National Statistics had to publish actual deaths caused by Covid, and nothing else, in early 2022.
Unsurprisingly to me, the numbers are tiny; 1/20 of the number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads in the UK were killed by Covid. A fraction even of those killed in household accidents. Read the audited data for yourself here.
Hard to believe isn’t it, that Covid is less harmful than risks you’ve ignored your whole life isn’t it?
Here is more evidence from the UK govt showing we need not be concerned about Covid19: When ranked for seriousness during many monthly data releases in 2021, in one of them while many Brits believed it to be a serious risk, Covid19 was just the 26th most serious cause of death in the UK. Its position of course fluctuated… but overall all-cause mortality was lower in 2021 than ever before, and though it was higher in 2020, it was only as high as 2018, when no one had ever heard of Covid19 (when using age standardised calculations), or worried about any respiratory virusses.
Here’s a graph showing how mortality rates have trended down since 2001 (click the graph for the full description of the calculation of the y axis).
In Wales, which is part of the UK and has a population of 3.4m, “COVID-19 [] numbers [of deaths] were too small to reliably rank against other [] causes of death,“ according to the data linked above.
This is how we can conclude that the data shows C19 is no more risky than illnesses we never consider, like the flu. For a death to be attributed to flu, the full definition of ‘case’ must be concluded by the coroner, which includes clinical and optionally lab confirmation because remember, we don’t test for flu, we look for symptoms. Whereas for Covid19, the definition is extremely wide, including people who aren’t even ill with symptomatic Covid19.
To clarify, if someone died of any of the UK’s leading 25 causes of death, but who had had a positive SARS-Cov-2 test in the preceding 60 days, according to the UK government they have been counted as a “death from Covid”.
So we can definitively conclude that C19 is considerably less risky than heart disease, lung disease, cancer, and even car crashes if you’re 16-25 years old.
The UK govt bulletin I just linked to also states: “There were 38,611 deaths registered in England in June 2021. This was 1,275 fewer deaths than in June 2020 and 310 deaths more than the five-year average (2015 to 2019) (0.8% higher).“ You can easily see here that there is no significant move one way or the other to a normal ebb and flow of mortality.
I haven’t found any evidence Covid19 has caused a statistically significant rise in the overall death rate anywhere.
Remember that correlation is not causation, and also see the section in this article about resource re-allocation away from cancer treatment.
Dr John Lee, a retired professor of pathology and former NHS consultant pathologist, pointns out that if someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection isn’t normally recorded unless the illness is a ‘notifiable’ disease. Until coronavirus came along, the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK were recorded as due to bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age, etc.
“We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections,” he wrote. “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.”
Context Is King
There’s no doubt that Covid19 is new and that if you are seriously ill already, or immunocompromised, then it’s unpleasant to catch it… if you’re among the unlucky half of people who actually get any symptoms.
The main point I seek to make on this page isn’t that we should ignore it, only that we should put as much focus on it (govt spending, time spent worrying about it and talking about it, etc) as we spend on combatting serious risks we take for granted.
I’m disturbed that that is very much not the case.
Because remember, people die all the time.
A fascinating study from Sweden highlights more context. A healthy 35 year old woman has a 99.999% chance of recovering from catching Covid19. A 55 year old man with a serious illness already, called a comorbidity (nasty stuff, like cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney diseases, chronic respiratory diseases, chronic liver disease, diabetes mellitus, cancers with direct immunosuppression, etc), has a 99.2% chance of recovery, based on data they used in July 2020, long before many countries had imposed restrictions on freedom of movement and long before any vaccines existed.
Most interestingly, an 85 year old with similar comorbidities has a 79.9% chance of recovery.
And here’s the rub…. these are the same chances as these people’s risk of dying from anything in a year!
Go take a look at the study (linked above)… and note that the risks are so tiny, their graphs use a ‘log’ scale to make the tiny mortality rates visible - they start at a risk of 0.0001 per 1000, not 1 per 1000.
Or visit Oxford University’s calculator and go work out your own risk, based on your age and your health. Mine is 1/30,000 or so…. which is inconsequential. And remember, as far as I can tell, the QCovid calculator is using the UK Gov’s misleading figures, that I explained above, so your risk is very likely even smaller than it will calculate!
Your Age-related Risk
The following data all comes from this UK govt. web page. The figures below are calculated by taking age-related mortality and dividing it into the number of people of that age bracket in the UK. I can share my calculations if you like.
If you’re 0-4 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/2100 each year.
If you’re 5-9 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/29400 each year.
If you’re 10-19 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/10300 each year.
If you’re 20-29 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/3200 each year.
If you’re 30-39 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/1900 each year.
If you’re 40-49 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/900 each year.
If you’re 50-59 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/400 each year.
If you’re 60-69 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/200 each year.
If you’re 70-79 years old, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/80 each year.
If you’re older than 80, your risk of dying from anything is about 1/20 each year.
So this means if you’re aged 40-49 like I am, imagine a room filled with 900 people. It’s an enormous room. It’s filled with fit people, unfit people, smokers, chronically ill people and super-fit people (like me). By the end of the year, one of those people will have died. Is it likely to be me (fit and healthy)? Nope. Is it likely to be you, who is also likely in decent health? No!
Is it likely to be anyone, fit or otherwise? Yes; that’s the point of thinking of it like this, one person in the room of 900 will die from something within a year.
So what about Covid19 specifically? How likely is C19 to kill you?
The following 2020 data comes from the UK govt again, and remember, is based on the data and evidence I shared above that is wildly over-counted because of the issues with testing for Covid19 and the bizarre definition used of a death “from” Covid.
Also, the UK did not have severe restrictions in 2020 (few movement restrictions, no mask mandates). Those they had were barely enforced, and there were no vaccines in 2020.
If you’re 0-4 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/383000 each year.
If you’re 5-9 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/1400000 each year.
If you’re 10-19 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/227000 each year.
If you’re 20-29 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/78300 each year.
If you’re 30-39 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/28400 each year.
If you’re 40-49 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/8300 each year.
If you’re 50-59 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/2800 each year.
If you’re 60-69 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/980 each year.
If you’re 70-79 years old, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/340 each year.
If you’re older than 80, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/80 each year.
If you’re younger than 70, your risk of dying with Covid19, based on 2020’s data, is about 1/5000 each year.
So now to be relevant to me (you do this too!), I have to imagine a room with 8300 people in it, of all shapes and sizes and states-of-health. In this thought-exercise based on this real-life data, one person will die with C19 this year (assuming it’s similar to 2020, which it is turning out to be so far).
One in eight thousand is simply not a risk we ever consider.
Some other context; the all-age risk of falling down stairs and dying is about 1/74000. About 1/5000 people die from poisoning every year (US data). Alcohol kills 1/9000 people (UK data). Being pedantic, they are not directly comparable to the age-specific list above, but do serve to help us understand context.
Your risk of being healthy and dying directly from Covid19 and nothing else? Statistically, it’s nothing. In reality, the number is so tiny, to be irrelevant - about 1 in 50,000. Here’s Dr John Campbell, a retired Accident and Emergency doctor, explaining.
Do you still think Covid19 is serious?
If you look closely at those two lists, you’ll notice something unexpected. The likelihood of dying from Covid (the second list) is much less than your risk of dying from anything (the first list). Put another way, everything else is more likely to do you in than Covid19.
Yes, if you’re old, it is riskier, so by all means take the same precautions you always have around anyone with a bad cough, whether it’s because of Covid19, the flu, or a cold. No different to any other time in history.
So to clarify, the appearance of Covid19 in 2019/ 20 didn’t change the baseline of how many people die every year by any significant amount.
Practically speaking, it has introduced no added risk to your life.
That’s a surprise to you I’m sure. Can we check this by reviewing other data? Yes.
Life Expectancy Since Covid19
We can check to see if average life expectancy in the UK changed in 2020. It’s usually 82.
So what was it after a year of Covid19 in the population? Barely changed at 81. Was Covid to blame?
Because so many NHS resources were shifted from cancer treatment to Covid, it’s impossible to know if people died younger because of Covid, or because other treatments for serious illnesses were witheld.
MacMillan, a leading Cancer charity, has labelled the UK’s un-evidenced C19 policies ‘devastating’. And it’s been worldwide. Malaria drug distribution was stopped in Africa because of Covid!
Malaria is many times more fatal than Covid, and particularly so for children and babies.
The Case Fatality Rate for cancer is around 50%. About half of the people diagnosed with cancer will die from it. That’s 50 in every 100. A reminder that Covid19’s CFR is less than 1%, or just 1/100. Fifty times less serious.
And again, context is important here. The difference between life expectancy in the UK varies depending if you live in a nice area, or a deprived area… by TEN YEARS! So should the UK govt have spent hundreds of billions of pounds on Covid, or on increasing access to healthcare in deprived areas of the UK?
Which one will change life expectancy more? We already know!
Are you still worried about Covid?
Are you still happy with the UK’s, and most other countries’, spending on it?
These trillions of dollars (UK plus others) could have been spent on health services broadly, to make them more robust against all risks, both current known ones and future unknowns.
Excess Mortality
Given how poorly the data is being captured and reported, there is one way we can bypass the issues in the mortality evidence. We can look at all-cause mortality.
If that leapt higher last year by an enormous amount, it might justify the enormous expenditure on Covid, and the enormously profound restrictions if causality could be established.
Here is a graph of the last 30 years of mortality in the UK, mixed up.
Spotting 2020 should be easy;
Which one do you think was 2020? Strange that none of the last 30 years have significantly higher mortality.
It turns out that when ranked, last year was the 20th least notable year for mortality in the UK, out of the last 30 years.
(When you compare this to all-cause mortality in other countries, you’ll find the same result.)
Here is the graph with 2020 on.
Now, if you line them all up in order, you will see that 2020 was higher than the years before it, but was at the same level as 2010. Hundreds of billions of dollars were not spent in 2010, nor enormous societal movement restrictions imposed, to try to lower the number of people dying in 2010 from any cause, let alone a specific one.
We do not know why more people died last year in the UK, but as evidenced above, the UK’s leading cancer charity is unequivocal that with resources taken from an illness that kills half of those who get it, to an illness that kills at most on in every thousand people who get it, it’s unlikely that the small rise in all-cause mortality in 2020 in the UK was caused by the illness Covid19.
Perhaps the near halving of UK hospital beds since 2010 has something to do with it?
If like me you struggle to understand that correlation does not equal causation, this is one of the better articles I’ve found on it.
Even if we assume causation (with no evidence of it), it is hard to see that the expense of the measures introduced to reduce Covid19 show a reasonable cost-benefit.
You can find editorial coverage of the emerging evidence here (paywall).
Here’s a study spanning 60 years of French data, encompassing other countries, that also concludes that Covid19 has not caused any excess mortality at all.
Here’s a summary from Canada’s government showing how 90% of deaths caused by, or of people with, Covid are people who are already chronically ill. Another dataset that strongly suggests that intense restrictions on the general population, aside from whether they are scientifically valid, are pointless.
Hospitalisations
In mid 2022, the Swiss government introduced their own bizarre version of vaccine passports. It’s bizarre because although you could no longer walk into a restaurant in Switzerland with seating for, say, 10 people, without proving you’ve been vaccinated (even if you have natural immunity), you can walk onto a bus or tram filled with 80 people, without it. You can go to a party of 30 people that you know, without it. You can spend all day in an airport, without one.
Without any hint of irony, members of the Swiss Federal Govt (what Brits would call “MPs”), exempted themselves from needing them while at work.
In France the rules change depending on which page of the government’s website you visit, which language you set the page to, and are being arbitrarily updated so quickly that no one I’ve spoken to who is enforcing them know what today’s rules are.
Make any sense to you? It makes no sense at all scientifically, since the SARS-Cov-2 virus doesn’t have any senses to tell if someone it’s going to infect is friendly or not, or on a tram or bus, or in a restaurant, or in a govt. chamber.
It certainly is unable to threaten people standing up in a restaurant (who must be masked) from those sitting down (who can be maskless). This absurdity even holds in restaurants and bars with high tables and high chairs, where those seated unmasked, and those standing masked, are eye-to-eye.
But I digress. The Swiss government said these vaccine passports are essential to stop the serious threat to its hospital capacity.
So how many people are in hospital in Switzerland with C19? 80 per million, or about 700 in total (as at mid Sept 2021).
December 2021, around one person out of the entire population of Geneva MULTIPLIED BY TWO (440,000) is dying every day with Covid… while all the residents of the city that I know believe they are in the grip of a serious pandemic (based on Geneva Canton’s own Covid dashboard). About 10% of hospital beds are taken up by people with Covid - no more (likely fewer) than would have the flu in a normal year, if we ever tested for the virus that causes flu as a matter of course.
How many hospital beds are there in Switzerland? About 45,000.
So just 1 in every 64 beds in Switzerland is occupied (at time of this graphic in mid 2022) by someone with SARS-Cov-2 in their nasal cavity. That’s a 1.5% occupancy rate. And remember, they’re unlikely to be there because they are ill with Covid19.
It’s a similar proportion in the UK.
What on earth is going on?
There is absolutely no crisis in hospitals in Switzerland, the UK, or anywhere else that I’ve looked, because of C19.
Yes, the Swiss government lied openly about their motives to introduce vaccine passes, while also exempting themselves from needing one (“legislative assemblies” are exempt).
But wait! What about Intensive Care Unit pressure? In the UK there are 14 people per million in ICU with the virus in their noses (again, not necessarily sick with Covid), and more than 2,000 ICU beds per million. That is not even 1/1000; it’s less than 0.01%.
The ICU data are similar in other countries I just checked - in Switzerland the numbers are 28/1m patients in ICU ‘with’ Covid19 and 3500/1m ICU beds, similarly less than 1/100.
And some personal context… No one in Switzerland has been under any restrictions (until very recently) all year and all the metrics (cases, hospitalisations, mortality) have trended down. Most of that time, no one was vaccinated (for more on this point see below). There have been many public gatherings during the year involving thousands of people, none wearing masks, without any surge in illnesses recorded (as there have been in the UK and elsewhere too).
These are often called…..
SuperSpreader Events
I’m sure you’ve heard of these. Any idea what it means? I’m sure you can imagine what it must be… but you might be surprised (or perhaps not) when I tell you it has no standard definition at all. It was barely used before 2020.
So let’s play a game. Let’s say someone walks into a small, poorly ventilated restaurant who has an active Covid19 infection… which to be clear means they feel a bit crap; runny nose and coughing.
This is a superspreader event. How many people do you think that person will infect over the course of the two hours or so they’re having enjoyable conversation? Let’s assume they’re in a restaurant with shared dishes too, in the middle of the table, that people are all serving themselves from.
How many people in the restaurant fall ill, with Covid19, if there are 100 people at this superspreader event, do you think?
What’s your number? 50? 75? 35?
Lucky for us, this so-called superspreader event was studied closely. Here’s the floorplan.
I’m sure it surprises you to learn that only 9 people fell ill among the 88 diners and, I’m guessing, at least 2 waiters.
Notably more than half of the people sitting at the same table as the infectious ‘index case’ did not get Covid.
How many people would have been infected if the index case had had a cold or the flu? A brief review of scientific literature (peer-reviewed) suggests the reproduction rate of Covid19 is similar to the flu. More here on that (the cold is at the very bottom of the graphic, as it’s not very deadly either).
Half of the people sitting at the same table as the index case were unaffected.
How many of those infected people died? None, that I could find.
And yet thousands of headlines used the undefined, emotive ‘superspreader’ term. It’s easy to see how we’ve all considered Covid19 to be much more serious than evidence proves it to be.
Here’s some recent research on the inefficacy of “Shelter In Place” restrictions, commonly mislabelled as “lockdowns”, which I’m not sure where to put in this article… so here is where it is!
“We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases.“ conclude the authors. Not surprising, since there’s no evidence that SIP policies work.
If you have any evidence concluding SIP policies are effective, please tell me (hint: there isn’t any… these are policies literally invented out of thin air by government leaders with no basis in data or science).
Here’s a cost benefit summary built by Professor Norman Fenton. It’s clear that this was not done before governments imposed these bizarre, and widely varying, restrictions. Or perhaps it was, and they did it anyway, for other reasons;
Long Covid?
Plenty of people I’ve asked have pointed me to various conferences about Long Covid, but that’s not evidence that it is a specific issue. I’ve been struck at its similarity to normal post-viral syndrome, when you have symptoms for months after contracting the flu, for example. Which is perfectly normal… and given Covid’s similarities to other respiratory diseases and other coronavirus illnesses we ignore, I’ve wondered if “Long Covid” is simply post viral syndrome.
New evidence is suggesting it’s not even that… take a look at it here. If you, like me, struggle a bit with the medical representation of the data, here’s an explainer article.
So yes, if you’ve had Covid, you may have some symptoms for a few months afterwards. But they’re nothing to worry about, nor is it anything unusual or specific to Covid, according to the science at the present time. Eat well, exercise regularly, drink water and get 7-8 hours of sleep and you’ll soon be better.
The Vaccines - Background
OK, so now onto the biggie. Covid19 vaccines. So far I’ve shown you the data proving Covid19 isn’t a serious illness, and furthermore that it is no more serious than mostly mild, sometimes unpleasant illnesses we take for granted, and much less serious than illnesses that our governments largely ignore; to clarify, illnesses that are not responsible for hundreds of billions spent without any cost-benefit analyses.
But in 2020, governments turned to drug companies and told them they would pay any price for a Covid19 vaccine.
If someone told you they would pay you anything to solve a problem… literally any amount of money…. do you think you’d come up with something? I would.
So more quickly than had ever been done before, in late 2020 we had several vaccines against Covid!
Were they approved for widespread and safe distribution to the world’s population? Well, of course not, that’s simply not possible to do in a couple of months; it takes years.
Do you think they were approved? You likely do…. because we were told they were.
In truth, they were granted something called “Emergency Approvals.”
Do we know they’re harmless when it comes to mid and long term risks? Nope.
Did the governments who spent hundreds of billions of your money on them, check the effectiveness? Nope.
Did they even check the data? Nope.
That’s right… the drug companies made drugs themselves, arranged testing themselves, published results of their own testing, and at no point did they, or have they yet, shared any of their data.
I do more due diligence before spending £100 on a home appliance than our governments did before buying these drugs, and forcing us to take them.
But that aside, the all important question is… do they work?
It looked like they did when they were launched. 42,000 people were involved in the trials… half were given the vaccine, the other half weren’t. Then what do you think the drug companies did? Test the 42,000 people to see if they got Covid?
Nope!
Strange isn’t it? I have no idea why.
But OK, let’s continue…. they waited to see who fell ill, then tested them.
How many people do you think, out of the 42,000 people fell ill? Remember, if we assume the vaccine worked, how many people among the 21,000 unvaccinated people fell ill?
What number do you have in your head? 2,000 ? 5,000? 800?
Does it surprise you to learn that only one hundred and sixty unvaccinated people fell ill. Fewer than 1/1000.
How many died? I’m sure you know where this is going… none.
Here are the Pfizer numbers…. and here are the ones from the Moderna trials that show similarly tiny numbers, and no deaths.
How many children were included in the trials? None.
Remember, these people in the trials aren’t being studied in labs and hospitals full time… during the trial they led their normal lives.
OK, so did the vaccines work? In terms of suggesting that they reduced symptomatic Covid19 infections relating to the virus mutations present when these trials were done… yes.
Remember though, that they were unable to test them in any way for mid or long term safety.
It is not my opinion that these are not approved vaccines… again, this is clearly evidenced as fact. You can read it in the FDA’s published EUA: “.. In order to mitigate the risks of using this unapproved product under EUA…“ (my bold for emphasis).
In the UK the language is slightly different but the situation is the same; the vaccines were rolled out before being licensed. Although they were tested (details above), licensing happens after the vaccine has gone through all three phases of pre-launch trials, which the Covid19 vaccines haven’t.
Have you had a Covid19 vaccine? Did your doctor tell you they haven’t been fully approved, when all the other vaccines we’ve taken have been?
Were you correctly informed of the extremely low risk of catching symptomatic Covid19 and the vaccines’ unknown risks, before you gave informed consent?
Do the Covid19 Vaccines Work?
Let’s take a look at the data…. I’ve included Israel because they were quick to coerce their population to get a C19 vaccination.
Do you spot a pattern? Of course you do ….. most people in these countries have been given vaccines against symptomatic Covid19.
So what would you expect to see when you then look at a graph for cases of Covid19?
You’d expect to see them go down as vaccination rates rose, wouldn’t you?
As vaccination rates rose… cases didn’t fall, they rose.
They then fell during the same summer months, just like they did last year, because Covid19 is seasonal, like the flu.
Now it’s autumn, and more people are vaccinated than ever, and are cases at all time lows? Nope.
There is no robust data suggesting correlation between vaccination rates and mortality, positive tests or hospitalisations that I can find.
In fact, although it’s easy to visually see from vaccination rate data that the vaccinations don’t work, there is no peer-reviewed research appearing that confirm it. Here’s an example.
The conclusion this data shows is that Covid19 vaccines don’t work very well. If at all.
What about if we look at hospitalisations? After all, the vaccine doesn’t stop you getting C19, it stops you from getting seriously ill, apparently. And as we have seen, ‘cases’ is a profoundly misleading term as it’s being mis-used.
No indication that the C19 vaccines work there either.
There is a clear pattern to this data that’s easy to see; just like the flu, Covid19 is seasonal. It’s worse in the winter then better in the summer.
And notice that 2021’s pattern is very similar after the vaccines were rolled out, than 2020. In many countries it’s worse.
So no, the Covid19 vaccines don’t work very well now, if at all.
And for the first time, a medicine’s ineffectiveness is being blamed on people who haven’t taken it.
Why is that? That’s too detailed to go into here… and it’s not important either.
Probably the same reason that flu vaccines don’t often work, and why there’s no vaccine for the coronavirus that infects us regularly that we take for granted - the common cold. The data strongly suggests that Covid mutates faster than a vaccine can be made and distributed effectively, like flu and cold viruses.
Governments are ignoring the data. And you probably have ignored it too…. most people have.
And the vaccine companies? They’ve cashed their blank cheques…. as any public company should! Go buy shares in them! I already have.
Should You Get Vaccinated Against C19?
If you’re old and/or immunocompromised…. if you want to.
If your employer or country is saying you should, or forcing you to, if you want to, but there is no real-world evidence that they work to reduce hospitalisations and mortality.
If you’re a girl or young woman aged 12-30…. probably not!
If you’re a boy or young man…. if you want to! The worrying heart problems thought to be caused by the mRNA vaccines are close to the baseline rate that usually happens in society, and that we never notice.
If you’re 12-15 years old, no, according to the UK’s panel of immunisation experts who concluded “The margin of benefit, based primarily on a health perspective, is considered too small to support advice on a universal programme of vaccination of otherwise healthy 12 to 15-year-old children at this time.” Strangely the UK government are ignoring this advice, issued by the panel of experts they’ve trusted for decades.
IN ALL CASES… particularly children and old people with smaller muscle mass, if you choose to be vaccinated, Insist that the person giving it to you aspirates the needle. This is a common safety practice that has strangely been ignored, and may be the main reason for the most publicised side effects. More on that here.
On the other hand, are you happy to take an experimental drug when large respected organisations are saying things like “understanding the short- and long-term effects of the [Covid19] vaccine on reproductive health will be important“ ?
I’ve bolded those words… Do you think, as I do, that short and long term effects of a drug are important to understand before it is widely distributed?
Here’s Pfizer’s Information Fact Sheet that says; “The possible side effects of the vaccine are still being studied in clinical trials.“ (updated September 2021). Ever seen that before on a drug you’re taking? Unless you’re part of a new drug trial, you won’t have…
Certainly all the other vaccines that you and I have had have been fully and properly approved, which includes being tested over the long term (usually considered to be about 3 years).
The Covid19 vaccines haven’t been, yet. And since there’s also increasing evidence they don’t work… why bother, if you haven’t already?
Conclusion
You shouldn’t worry about catching Covid19 at all.
You should be concerned about why we’re being coerced to worry about Covid.
You can’t catch it by touching things. OK, technically you can, but the likelihood of it happening is so vanishingly tiny, you don’t have to worry about it.
The likelihood of catching Covid19 is from surface contact is “very low”. If you remember your probability maths, “low risk” + “very low” = still very low. Put it entirely out of your mind.
If you know you’ve had Covid19, then you’re very likely immune from catching it again for a very long time, possibly for life, based on research appearing now specific to Covid (note; preprint). The broad science on post-case immunity has been settled for decades, and it’s extremely unlikely Covid19 is markedly different. More on this here, here, here, here, here (preprint) and in many peer-reviewed, longstanding studies.
Should you wear a mask? The evidence is crystal-clear that masks make no difference at all to the spread of Covid, based on analysis of their real-world application over the last 18 months, and lab analysis; We know for certain that Covid19 mainly spreads in the tiny aerosols we breathe (that are mostly around 4-8 μm in size). They’re all smaller than the microscopic holes in masks (80 to 500 μm wide), not to mention the gaps we all leave around the edges. So no. There’s no point in wearing masks. Here’s the Uni Oxford’s CEBM on it, the BMJ and NEJM too.
Here’s a snapshot of their complete lack of effectiveness…. pretty much the only time that ‘cases’ as a metric is worthwhile (they’re not correlated to mortality or hospitalisations);
The SARS-COV-2 virus is a thousandth the size of the tip of a human hair, and the aerosol particles it floats around on are not much larger. When you’ve stretched a piece of paper over your face, can you slip a hair down the side between it and your face?
If you’re silly enough to think “well it must help”… asbestos particles are hundreds of times larger…. would you wander around an asbestos-infested room breathing through a paper mask because it is better than nothing?
That’s why it’s illegal to work in an asbestos area with anything less than a respirator. Because that’s the only thing that will protect you from breathing things thousands of times larger than SARS-COV-2.
And the “well it must help” which is prevalent with much upside-down, ignore-the-evidence thinking, is called the ‘intuition fallacy’.
If you want to hear how useless masks are to limit the spread of respiratory disease, here’s an expert (Steven Petty).
While we’re on the topic of masks, there’s no evidence that mask wearing works even in the operating theatre. That’s right, not even in surgery. This was first discovered in a groundbreaking paper in 1981, and since then many more peer-reviewed trials have failed to find evidence that supports their use; here’s the 1981 study, and here are more studies since then. It turns out that doctors and surgeons began wearing them on a whim over a century ago, and no one thought to test if there’s any point until many decades later.
So imagine there’s a 1 in a 1000 chance you wet yourself, and the government insists you wear a nappy, just in case. Now imagine that the government insists you wear a nappy to prevent your neighbour from wetting themselves. That’s how absurd the widespread use of masks is in the population.
Get on with your life… and tell your friends, family and our politicians to, too.
One day we might face a big risk, but right now we’re safer than we’ve ever been.
Appendix
Below I’m putting data, evidence and sources that don’t fit anywhere above, or involve statistical analysis too advanced for easy reading.
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Prof. Norman Fenton (world-famous statistician) explains how a simple reporting lag of one week skews data to give the illusion that vaccinations are working. This hurt my brain so much to read that I dug in and reverse-engineered his spreadsheet to prove to myself that it does indeed happen. Ping me and I’ll send it to you so you can see for yourself.
“This reporting bias is one type of bias that might be called ‘reporting lag censoring’,” writes Professor Fenton, “a phenomenon whereby structural or process factors systematically interfere with when data is handled and reported with the consequential effect that it is then misinterpreted, leading to false conclusions.”
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Where did the virus come from? At first the prevailing message was that it was a natural spillover from bats. Never mind that the bats it supposedly came from were not local to the town it first infected a human, and that is still the case. Never mind the coincidence that the first outbreak happened a few hundred meters from the “Wuhan Institute of Virology” where novel coronavirusses are studied in ‘gain of function’ experiments. Never mind the coincidence that China is refusing to share any data about the outbreak. And yet we were told for months in 2020 that all these things were just coincidence. Until suddenly, it became increasingly accepted as likely toward the end of 2020. Now there’s new evidence, making it look even more likely that it was indeed, an accidental lab leak…. here’s an outline.
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Thank goodness that the Bangladesh mask study that the press were in a frenzy about three months ago, that was misreported as having been conclusive when it was an unverified preprint, and that was clearly hurried and therefore likely inconclusive, has been shown here to be inconclusive, at best, thanks to their release of data and subsequent peer review.
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This article sums up what a load of rubbish the idea of “Long Covid” is, including many links to the science. Is it possible to be ill for a long time? Yes. Is it possible to have had symptomatic Covid and be ill for months or even years afterwards? Yes. Is there a proven causal relationship between symptomatic Covid and other symptoms that last for months afterwards, or indefinitely? No, none at all.
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Professor Norman Fenton calmly destroying the basis of the worldwide hysteria, by explaining the data. He explains many of the points I’ve raised above, but since several of you have pointed out that I am unqualified to refer to scientific proof, then please watch this renowned expert instead;
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Update that I posted in Dec 2021 : France, Switzerland and the UK have inexplicably tightened rules already in place, and invented new ones, in response to near-zero hospitalisations and mortality. For example as at Dec 18th, in Switzerland one person out of every three hundred and seventy five thousand people a day are dying with Covid. Imagine twice the entire population of Geneva standing in one place in an immense crowd…. and just one person from that unimaginably huge crowd a day is dying with Covid a day. In other words… an inconsequentially tiny number of people. Fewer than die on the roads, or from household accidents. In France, 228 people per million are in hospital with Covid, when France has 6,000 hospital beds per million. Crisis? Not even slightly, yet the destruction of normal life, hospitality and travel businesses intensifies.
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Link to an article explaining the infamous and misleading Bangladesh mask study, with many more links to real science working…. and sometimes being stymied.
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How did it go in Sweden, who ignored all the massive hysteria? Very very well. Unsurprisingly. More here.
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Why was everyone hysterical about Omicron, despite the South African Health Authority who discovered it doing all they could to tell everyone it is harmless? Maybe because they were forced by EU heads of state to lie about it! Sounds like a mad conspiracy theory, yet it is whata happened, according to one of the EU’s most respected newspaper’s investigation. More here, and here’s the article in German in Welt.
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The mRNA vaccines aren’t apparently effective now that they have faced the scrutiny of actually proper RCT trials (preprint link so this will need to be checked once it’s undergone peer review).