commentary
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This commentary is short (600 words) and designed to be an easy read. Thus, I have written with a light technical touch and offered references throughout the text for those who would like to read more. The Appendix is lengthy and detailed (1600 words).
This commentary is short (600 words) and designed to be an easy read. Thus, I have written with a light technical touch and offered references throughout the text for those who would like to read more. The Appendix is lengthy and detailed (1600 words).
To begin I would like to state that Covid-19 is a real disease and some people have died directly and exclusively from it. That is an observable fact. Another observable fact - vaccines are a good thing. Although all vaccines have the potential to cause harm to some, in general, the benefits to the very many outweigh the harm to the very few. There are no wild theories in this commentary.
I Was Wrong
In my March 2020 commentary, I stated that according to the World Health Organization (WHO) Covid-19 had an infection fatality rate of 3.4% - 30 times more deadly than the flu. Furthermore, I suggested that "Governments are desperate to avoid panic so they have been downplaying the seriousness of the disease to some extent". I was wrong. When the observable facts changed, I changed my mind. So, I would ask the reader to consider this article with an open mind.
My central argument is that we overreacted to Covid and indeed the cure was and is worse than the disease. Moreover, the general public have been bamboozled with a relentless barrage of meaningless statistical drivel and a media driven fear frenzy. A new lexicon took hold. A person who was not sick and yet tested positive for Covid was described as a 'Covid Case'. A person arriving in hospital with a broken leg that passed the obligatory Covid test was described as a 'Covid Hospitalization'. A person that died from cancer and yet passed the obligatory Covid test was described as a 'Covid Death'. This new language was very misleading. I hope this article will untangle the truth and give people a better perspective on Covid 19.
All numbers given in this piece can be easily fact checked by the reader in either the main body of the text or in the appendix. We begin with some numbers to provide a little context.
IRELAND 2020 -2021
Road Deaths 284
Suicides 739
Covid Deaths 151
Covid Tests 10,000,000
The Irish government and legacy media say almost 6,000 people died from Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. And yet these deaths are not showing up in our national mortality statistics. The Irish public believe that more people died than normal in Ireland in 2020. This is simply not true. This public perception is represented by the red bars in the chart below. Reality is the blue bars. This is Central Statistics Office of Ireland (CSO) data.
The government claims that 2,237 and then 3,675 people died of Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. If this were the case our death rates per thousand would be 6.8 and 7.3 (see Note 1 for more details). I cannot state it emphatically enough:
IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE 2,237 / 3,675 COVID DEATHS IN IRELAND AND HAVE A 6.4 / 6.6 DEATH RATE IN 2020/21.
According to the Central Statistics Office of Ireland we lost 151 exclusively to Covid in 2020/21, half of whom were over 85 (see table below & Note 2, courtesy of Eddie Hobbes of Hobbes Financial).
To put 151 Covid deaths into context, consider that during this 'pandemic' an Irish person was five times as likely to die from suicide.
Overcounting Covid Deaths and Hospital Data.
The World Health Organization instructed health authorities around the world to carve Covid deaths out of their existing data collection systems and give it a separate standalone designation (Code – UO7). This had the effect of making Covid related deaths look like extra or new deaths. It allowed politicians and media pundits all over the world to make outrageous claims. For example, US President Joe Biden claimed that America lost more people in 12 months to Covid than in all their foreign wars combined - absolute nonsense. (As an aside, financial incentives in the US encouraged rampant overcounting. For an example of how grotesquely distorted US numbers are, consider this, the United States has about 4% of the world's population and about 16% of the world alleged Covid deaths).
In 2020 the expected number of people died of the 'usual' causes. However, continuous and relentless testing for Covid ensured that many 'normal' deaths were counted as Covid deaths. No extra deaths, just the same deaths accounted for in a different way.
In the time that it took 151 people to die of Covid, Ireland performed 10m Covid tests (Note 3).
We didn’t just overcount deaths, we overcounted Covid related hospital admissions and ICU patients. Our healthcare system was not at bursting point as breathlessly reported by our legacy media, (see Note 4 for data on ICU occupancy rates, trolley count etc).
Vaccine Madness
In healthcare terms Covid 19 was no different to a flu season. In fact, more people died per head of population in 2016 than in 2020! The data shows that you are twice as likely to die due to a road accident than Covid 19 (see www.rsa.ie).
So, we have to ask ourselves, what is the benefit of asking the entire population to take a new drug? What is the upside and more importantly is there any downside to a mass drug experiment? You don’t have to be a medical expert to ask a commonsense question. Unfortunately, too few of Ireland's medical practitioners asked this question. On average Irish GPs were paid €70,000 per head for Covid services and vaccinations (Note 5). This may have dampened their curiosity and clouded their judgement.
In 2021 Irelands death rate moved up to 6.6 per 1,000. Covid did not become more lethal in 2021 and vaccines were supposed to help. At the time of writing, the Irish medical community is not investigating the rise in our death rate.
Worldwide, the data pertaining to vaccine deaths and injuries is starting to pour in (Note 6). It makes grim reading. The key takeaway is that otherwise healthy people should not takes drugs for trivial diseases.
Conclusion
It appears as though Covid hysteria is quietly diminishing. The general public have exhausted their fears of Covid, and governments are focusing on new manufactured crisis’s. However, history will not allow Covid to go quietly into the night. The data ensures that it will be recorded as a period of mass psychosis.
Appendix
Note 1 – Death Rates
Death rates are produced by all countries around the world. Quite simply they are the number of people that die per 1,000 in the population. For example, if a country had a population of 1,000,000 and 5,000 died in 1 year, we would say that the death rate per 1,000 is 5.
Government Covid mortality data can be seen online at the government website here. The count for end of 2020 and 2021 is 2,237 and 3,675 respectively.
The data table below is sourced directly from the Central Statistics Office of Ireland.
The chart below shows the public perception (red bars) of the ‘pandemic’ on Irish mortality versus the reality.
Note 2 - Exclusive Covid Deaths
This Data is courtesy of Eddie Hobbes of Hobbs Financial (https://eddiehobbs.com/) as part of his correspondence with Gerard Doolan (Central Statistics Office).
Note how few deaths there are under 75!
Note3 – Covid Testing.
Government Covid testing data can be seen at https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/. The count for to the end of 2021 is 10m.
Note 4 (A, B, C &D)- Overcounting Hospital Data
All patients admitted to hospitals were subjected to a Covid test. Therefore, some patients admitted to hospital due to accidents, strokes or terminal cancers were counted as 'Covid hospitalizations.' This overcounting helped to create the impression that Irish hospitals were overrun with Covid admissions.
A
In fact, Irish hospitals were not stressed at all. Government policy aimed to evacuate hospitals to be ready for a surge of covid sickness. They succeeded. The chart below demonstrates the slack in hospitals. On average from 2017 through 2019 we can see that for every 100 beds in HSE run hospitals about 6 were empty. We might describe 6 empty beds out of every 100 normal for HSE runs hospitals.
B
See below the raw data as published by the HSE in response to a freedom of Information request from freepress.ie. https://freepress.ie/2021/03/exclusive-irish-foi-data-release-proves-there-was-no-pandemic/
Below is a subset of the data for 2019 and 2020 (March –December). In 2019 there are 107 monthly reports showing hospitals operating at excess capacity. In 2020 there are only 12 such reports. I have highlighted the overcapacity months for both years below.
C
The Irish Nurses & Midwives Organisation (INMO) performs a trolley count in the nation's hospitals. People on trolleys are presumably waiting to be admitted into hospital. For every 10 patients on trolleys in 2019 there were only 3 in 2020.
www.inmo.ie/Trolley_Ward_Watch_Analysis
D
An examination of ICU occupancy reinforces the point. The chart below shows that Intensive Care Units operated below their baseline capacity in 2020. Not one bed of the additional surge capacity was used from March to December.
This data is from the National Office of Clinical Audit. The chart given is from page 2.1 Figure ICU_Activity_during_COVID-19
Note 5 – GP Pay
Irish Times May 31, 2022
“GPs received more than €210 million in payments for their work in vaccinating people and treating patients remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, new figures show.
The sum equates to an average of €70,000 per individual GP…….”
Note 6 – Vaccine Fatalities and Injuries
It is hard to know where to start. There are numerous studies around the world showing excess mortality among the young immediately after vaccination. This link gives some indication of the daily growing list of studies -
The following commentary on a German Study will give the reader a taste of the kind of thorough research that is available online. I came across the article on Bob Moriarty's 321gold website. It is by Eugyppius and is available on substack.
Excess mortality in Germany 2020–2022 is a preprint by Christof Kuhbandner (a psychologist at Regensburg) and Matthias Reitzner (a statistician at Osnabrück) that applies sophisticated actuarial analysis to the publicly available all-cause mortality data provided by the German government. It turns out that when you account for historical mortality trends, the virus no longer looks so dangerous, and the vaccines no longer look so great.
From the abstract:
In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.
Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.
What happened in April 2021 was the beginning of mass vaccination across Germany.
As I’ve said many times, the first year of the German pandemic was a total nothingburger. There was no heightened mortality trend save for among the oldest groups, briefly, in December. In 2021, however, the Year of Maximum Vaccination, the authors estimate almost 32,000 excess deaths. Mortality rose across the board, especially among young, with those in their 40s seeing 9% more deaths than expected by their model.
Just looking at that 2021 graph, you can tell there’s something really wrong here. If it’s virus doing all this killing, why is it hardest on people aged 15to 79? How is it leaving the oldest Germans almost entirely unscathed?
They note that “The significant excess mortality in December 2020 continues slightly in January 2021, and then is mostly compensated until March 2021. That is, by the end of March, the cumulative excess mortality was close to zero. "These are what the funeral industry would call “pull-forward” deaths. In Germany, the virus mainly kills people who are about to die anyway, such that mortality spikes are followed by counterbalancing mortality deficits.
The authors continue:
In April and May 2021, a significant increase in excess mortality is observed, followed by a decrease up to August. However … the increase in excess mortality in April and May is not compensated for. In September there is again a significant excess mortality, which increases in November and is more than doubled in December 2021.
The April increase obviously coincides with the vaccine rollout, while the Fall increase aligns fairly well with the booster campaign. It’s noteworthy that dose 2 doesn’t seem as dangerous as dose 1 or 3; and that the mortality signal is very tightly correlated with the date of vaccination. As soon as you stop vaccinating, excess deaths recede.
As for people 60 and older, there are two distinct trends: Rising mortality coinciding, again, with the mass administration of doses 1 and 3 in the 60-79 bracket, and nothing special in the 80+ bracket:
The vaccines obviously do most of their harm by inducing adverse immune reactions, and thus they’re relatively safe in the very elderly, who have weaker immune systems. This makes the oldest Germans a useful control, as they are the most sensitive to virus-associated mortality, and the least sensitivity vaccine-associated mortality. Thus, to anyone who objects that it’s really the April case spike that’s making the vaccines look bad here, or that it’s Delta causing those problems in the Fall, the reply is simple: The old aren’t dying in April or September 2021, just the young. What kills mainly the young and spares mainly the old? The answer is not SARS-2.
As the authors note:
The maybe most surprising fact is that [2021] produces in all age groups a significant mortality increase, which is in sharp contrast to the expectation that the vaccination should decrease the number of COVID-19 deaths. The only exception is the last age group [80+] … However, when interpreting this finding, it has to be taken into account that there was a huge mortality deficit in 2019 and until October 2020 which was compensated in November [and]December 2020 and January 2021.
It becomes very hard to doubt that the excess mortality of 2021 is vaccine related, when you compare the relative chronology of deaths and mass vaccination:
There are also more specific mortality correlations by age bracket. Thus, the authors note the “further hint” that the vaccines are implicated in these deaths, “is the fact that the age group 0–29 has a peak in the excess mortality in June 2021 instead of April 2021,” precisely when these younger cohorts were lining up for their first dose.
