Aletho News

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis

By Simon Elmer | Architects for Social Housing | January 27, 2021

It’s official. The UK now has the ‘highest COVID death-rate in the world’. To use a phrase repeatedly employed by our Government throughout this crisis to describe the new technologies and programmes of the UK biosecurity state, our national version of the global coronavirus pandemic is ‘world-beating’. In the UK, with only the 6th largest economy in the world, we’ve managed to beat even the epidemically obese USA, which as in most things leads the world in ‘COVID-19 deaths’, as well as the systemically impoverished Peru, which at one time combined the 6th strictest lockdown restrictions in the world with the highest mortality rate. However, although UK’s new pre-eminence has been headline-news in the mainstream media and retweeted across social media, a quick check shows that this only refers to the seven-day average of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the week before it was reported. In COVID-19 deaths per million of the population the UK (on 1,471 on 27 January) is still lagging behind Gibraltar (2,048), San Marino (1,913), Belgium (1,797), Slovenia (1,647) and the Czech Republic (1,473), and is closely followed by Italy (1,431) — although, if it’s any consolation to the COVID-faithful, we have a higher number of ‘COVID-19 deaths’ than all these countries.

I make no apology for writing flippantly about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, because it’s in precisely this manner that these deaths are being used by our governments and media, and I want to begin to challenge their cynical manipulation of the statistics by showing how easy it is to manufacture a ‘news story’. As always — although we appear to have forgotten it along with everything else we knew about the world in which we live — the old adage about ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ holds true to this greatest of all lies, the manufacturing of the coronavirus crisis. What I want to do in this article, in contrast, is look at the figures for the mortality rates, places and causes of death in England in 2020 that are slowly being published by the Office for National Statistics in 2021, and discuss what they can tell us about what really happened last year. The figures aren’t conclusive, as the changes to disease taxonomy, protocols for filling in death certificates, criteria for recording deaths, and the flawed testing programme mean we’ll never know how many people actually died from COVID-19 in the UK in 2020; but if we analyse these figures accurately and in their context, it is possible to see some way through the deception to the reality they conceal.

1. Laying the Foundations

I have written about this in considerable detail in Manufacturing Consensus: The Registering of COVID-19 Deaths in the UK, and if you are not familiar with these changes you can read about them there. But let’s start with the problem of taxonomy. On 5 March, at a time when the UK had attributed 1 death to COVID-19 and identified 108 ‘cases’ of SARS-CoV-2, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care made The Health Protection (Notification) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 into law. This first amendment, which would not require resolution by Parliament for 40 days from when it returned from its extended recess on 21 April, added COVID-19 and SARs-CoV-2 to the list of, respectively ‘notifiable’ diseases and ‘causative agents’. Under this change to legislation, medical practitioners have a statutory duty to record COVID-19 on a death certificate — as they do not, for example, with pneumonia, the primary cause of death from respiratory diseases.

On top of these changes, there’s the problem of the criteria for the deceased to be recorded as a ‘COVID-19 death’. On 31 March, the Office for National Statistics announced that, in order for a death to be included in its records of ‘COVID-19 deaths’, the disease merely has to be ‘mentioned’ anywhere on the death certificate, without it being ‘the main cause of death’. This includes as a ‘contributing’ factor when ‘combined with other health conditions’, or when a doctor has diagnosed a ‘possible’ case of COVID-19 based on ‘relevant symptoms’ but with no test for SARs-CoV-2 having been conducted, or when the deceased tested positive for SARs-CoV-2 but a post mortem hasn’t established the actual cause of death.

As if this weren’t enough to increase the official tally of deaths attributed to COVID-19 far beyond the numbers of UK citizens that actually died of the disease, there’s the additional problem of the changes to how death certificates record the cause of death. On 20 April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued the ‘International guidelines for certification and classification (coding) of COVID-19 as cause of death’. These instructed medical practitioners that, if COVID-19 is the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or ‘assumed’ cause of death, it must always be recorded, in Part 1 of the death certificate, as the ‘underlying cause’ of death. In contrast, co-morbidities such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes or chronic respiratory infections other than COVID-19 should only be recorded in Part 2 of the death certificate as a ‘contributing’ cause. To clear up any confusion this may cause to a doctor filling out the death certificate of an 80-year-old patient who has died of cancer and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 post mortem, the WHO instructed medical professionals: ‘Always apply these instructions, whether they can be considered medically correct or not.’

There were other changes to how ‘COVID-19 deaths’ are recorded in the UK, implemented by the National Health Service, Public Health England and the Care Quality Commission, all of which contributed to the inaccuracy of the picture being painted by the Government of the threat of COVID-19; but the three changes above laid the foundation for the crisis. The tool most responsible for its manufacture, however, is the already infamous reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test.

Again, I have written about this at greater length in Part 2 of The Betrayal of the Clerks: UK Intellectuals in the Service of the Biosecurity State and in the addendum to Bowling for Pfizer: Who’s Behind the BioNTech Vaccine?; but, briefly, on 17 January, as part of its recommended protocols for RT-PCR tests, the World Health Organisation published the Corman-Drosten paper, ‘Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR’. Among the numerous flaws in this catastrophically destructive paper, which is being challenged in the German courts, the authors recommended using 45 cycles of thermal amplification of swab samples for SARS-CoV-2, which, as numerous subsequent studies have confirmed, is many times higher than the number of cycles (preferably less than 30) at which the specific coronavirus can be identified, infectious virus reliably detected, or its replication into a disease confirmed.

These protocols were adopted and repeated across the world, including in the UK. On 16 March, the National Health Service, in its ‘Guidance and standard operating procedure: COVID-19 virus testing in NHS laboratories’, recommended a cycle threshold of 45, with anything below 40 to be regarded as a ‘confirmed’ positive. On 28 September, it was estimated that, at even 35 cycles of amplification, 97 per cent of the positives in an RT-PCR test are false. Yet, as late as October 2020, in ‘Understanding cycle threshold (Ct) in SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR: A guide for health protection teams’, Public Health England continued to advise those administering the tests in this country that ‘a typical RT-PCR assay will have a maximum of 40 thermal cycles’, while also conceding that such tests are ‘not able to distinguish whether infectious virus is present’.

Finally, there is the medically inaccurate equation, which appears to have originated with the media — and especially the site Worldometer — of a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 with a ‘case’ of COVID-19. This ignores what Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and one of the most referenced scientists in German history, in an open letter to the German Chancellor published on 26 March, described as the ‘traditional distinction’ in infectiology between infection with a virus and its replication into a disease identified by its clinical symptoms and not by a fatally flawed test. Despite this, this fundamentally flawed equation has been accepted without question, adopted and repeated without commentary by every medical body in the UK, and used by the Government to fabricate the vast number of so-called ‘cases’ of COVID-19 on which the biosecurity state has been built with nothing more than traces of a dead virus.

Given these five changes, 1) to disease taxonomy, 2) to the criteria for attributing a death to COVID-19, 3) to identifying the underlying cause of death on a death certificate, 4) to identifying infection with SARS-CoV-2, and 5) to identifying the clinical presence of COVID-19 — all but one of which were in place before the end of March, 2020 — how do we establish how many people actually died of COVID-19 in the UK or, to the contrary, how many deaths from cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes, influenza and the other primary causes of death in the UK have been incorrectly diagnosed and/or recorded as ‘COVID-19 deaths’?

2. Competing Causes of Death

We can start by looking at the other pre-existing health conditions of the tens of thousands of deceased whose deaths, under the changes made, were attributed to COVID-19. In July 2020, the Office for National Statistics published data on ‘Pre-existing conditions of people who died with COVID-19’. To qualify as such, a pre-existing health condition must appear on the death certificate either below COVID-19 in Part 1, and therefore in the causal chain leading to death, or in Part 2, and therefore as a contributing cause to death, if COVID-19 is mentioned in Part 1. Alternatively, if COVID-19 is mentioned in Part 2 of the death certificate, a pre-existing health condition must appear as the underlying cause of death in Part 1.

Following these definitions, the ONS reported that, of the 50,335 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in England and Wales between March and June 2020, 45,859, 91.1 per cent, had at least one pre-existing health condition, with a mean average of 2.1 conditions for those aged 0 to 69 years of age and 2.3 for those aged 70 years and over. The accompanying dataset recorded that, in the 4 months between March and June 2020, the most common ‘main’ pre-existing health condition recorded on death certificates in England and Wales was dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, with 12,869 deaths constituting 25.6 per cent of all deaths attributed to COVID-19.

By a ‘main’ pre-existing condition the ONS means the condition that is most likely to cause death in the absence of COVID-19. How they derive this is complicated, and I won’t go into it here; but they take their lead from the World Health Organisation’s rules for identifying the ‘underlying cause’ of death, which as we have seen have been changed to ensure that COVID-19 always appears on death certificates in this category, and in doing so excludes everything appearing above Part 1.

After dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, ischaemic heart diseases — meaning those causing stroke through a blood clot or other blockage — were the next most common, with 5,002 death certificates recording it as the ‘main pre-existing health condition’ constituting 9.9 per cent of all deaths attributed to COVID-19. This was followed by influenza and pneumonia, which were present as the main condition on 4,582 death certificates. Of the 50,335 deaths attributed to COVID-19, 4,476 had no main pre-existing health condition on the death certificate, just 8.9 per cent of the total.

But that’s not all. When recording all pre-existing health conditions, their presence on the death certificates of ‘COVID-19 deaths’ is even higher, with 13,840 deaths attributed to COVID-19 having dementia and Alzheimer’s disease also listed, 11,029 deaths having influenza and pneumonia, and 9,820 having diabetes.

Unfortunately — and extraordinarily, given that we’re supposed to be in the middle of an ‘unprecedented’ epidemic threatening the safety of the UK public — since July no other data on the pre-existing health conditions, main and common, of people whose deaths have been officially attributed to COVID-19 has been published by the Office for National Statistics. I’ve written to the ONS to ask when they will update their records, and they responded that they are hoping to do so in February 2021. Why they stopped doing so in July I will leave to you to judge; but when these figures are published I shall add them to this article.

Until then, the National Health Service records of ‘COVID-19 deaths by age-group and pre-existing condition’ show that, as of 20 January, 2021 — so three weeks into the new year — 61,414 of the 64,111 deaths in England attributed to COVID-19 (the actual record says ‘tested positive for COVID-19’, which is medically meaningless), over 95 per cent of the total, had at least one pre-existing health condition. Of the remaining 2,697 in which a pre-existing health condition didn’t appear on their death certificate, just 486 were under 60 years of age in 11 months of this ‘epidemic’.

Of those with at least one pre-existing health condition, 26 per cent had diabetes, 17 per cent had dementia, another 17 per cent had chronic kidney disease, 16 per cent had chronic pulmonary disease, 13 per cent had heart disease, and 72 per cent of them had some other health condition. As we have seen, most of the deceased had more than one pre-existing health condition.

What these figures show irrefutably is that less than 5 per cent of the deceased whose deaths in hospital have been attributed to COVID-19 did not have at least one, and usually two or more, health conditions sufficiently life-threatening to appear even on death certificates and records changed to exaggerate the numbers of deaths actually caused by COVID-19. Based on the ONS figures for all deaths attributed to COVID-19 during the first wave of deaths wherever the deceased died, that figure rises to 9 per cent. Together, what these statistics very strongly suggest is that, without those changes to certification and recording, a large percentage of these deaths would not be attributed to COVID-19 but to the primary causes of death in the UK that appear as the ‘contributing cause’ on their death certificates and the ‘pre-existing condition’ in the official records.

3. Evidence for Lockdown Deaths

In addition to this evidence of systemic misdiagnosis and inaccurate recording of deaths in 2020, we can also look at the reports and predictions published by various bodies monitoring medical treatment, health and mortality in the UK. These both record and predict the increase in deaths in 2020 not attributed to COVID-19 but resulting from the withdrawal and cancellation of medical diagnosis, treatment and care as a result of the reprioritising of the NHS, lockdown restrictions, and the terrorism of the UK population by the Government and media. The figures they report are extraordinary, and cannot easily be explained away.

In March 2020, the National Health Service made the decision to free up 30,000 of its 100,000 hospital beds for general and acute care, postpone all non-urgent elective operations, and discharge all hospital inpatients who were medically fit to leave. This resulted in up to 25,000 hospital patients being sent into care homes.

In April 2020, the National Health Service reported a total of 916,581 attendances at Accident and Emergency in England that month, compared with 2,112,165 in the same month the previous year, a reduction of 57 per cent; and 326,581 emergency admissions, compared with 535,226 in 2019, a reduction of 39 per cent.

In May 2020, the Office for National Statistics reported that, in the previous month, deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease had increased above the average by 9,429 in England and 462 in Wales. This was 83 per cent higher than usual in England and 54 per cent higher in Wales, with charities reporting that a reduction in essential medical care and family visits was responsible.

In June 2020 a survey of 128 care homes by the Alzheimer’s Society showed that 79 per cent reported a lack of social contact was causing a deterioration in the health and well-being of residents with dementia, and 75 per cent reported General Practitioners had been reluctant to visit residents.

In July 2020, the Office for National Statistics reported that there were 16,000 excess deaths in March and April not attributed to COVID-19 as a result of changes to emergency care and adult social care under lockdown. The ONS estimated a further 26,000 excess deaths over the rest of 2020 from the same causes, and a further 1,400 excess deaths resulting from changes to primary and community care, with cancer diagnoses, GP referrals and emergency representations stopped or reduced. The same month, the Nursing Times reported that, between March and May, deaths from diabetes at home and in care homes had risen by 47 per cent.

In August 2020, the Institute of Cancer Research reported that a delay of 3 months across all 94,912 patients who were due to have surgery to remove their cancer over the course of the year would lead to an additional 4,755 deaths. Taking into account the length of time that patients are expected to live after their surgery, this delay would amount to 92,214 years of life lost. The report estimated that surgery for cancer affords, on average, 18.1 years of life per patient, of which on average 1 year is lost for a 3-month delay, and 2.2 years are lost with a 6-month delay.

In September 2020, Cancer Research UK reported that, in the 6 months since lockdown, cancer screening was cancelled for 3.2 million people, and that between March and July there was a 39 per cent drop in the seven key diagnostic tests for cancer in England. It also estimated that, between April and August, around 350,000 fewer people than normal in the UK were referred with suspected cancer symptoms.

In October 2020, the Office for National Statistics reported that, between March and September, there were 2,095 excess deaths at home from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease above the 5-year average for England and Wales, an increase of 79.3 per cent. Also in October, the British Heart Foundation reported that, between March and September 2020, there were more than 26,000 excess deaths in private homes across England and Wales, of which  there was an increase of 25.9 per cent in deaths from heart disease in England and of 22.7 per cent in Wales.

In November 2020, the British Medical Journal reported that even a month’s delay in cancer surgery increases the risk of death by 6-13 per cent across all common forms of cancer, with a 3-month delay increasing the risk by approximately 25 per cent, rising to 44 per cent for treatments like bowel cancer chemotherapy.

In December 2020, the National Health Service reported that, in the 10 months since March, attendances at Accident and Emergency in hospitals in England were down by 6,887,183 from the same 10 months in 2019, a 32 per cent reduction; and admissions to A&E were down by 1,052,807, a 20 per cent reduction. In comparison, January and February of 2020 had seen almost exactly the same in both, with just 16,000 fewer attendances and 200 more admissions. These figures include the changes to records made in August, when the figures for A&E began to include booked attendances.

In January 2021, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, in a study of 66 UK hospitals, reported that, during the first lockdown, daily admissions for myocardial infarction or heart attack (the blue line in the table below) and heart failure (red line) decreased by 54 per cent. Admissions recovered to 95 percent of pre-lockdown levels by June; then fell again between October and November to 41 per cent for heart failure and 34 per cent for heart attacks. In both instances, there was a clear correlation between lockdown and reduction in medical care.

That this evidence of the devastating effects of lockdown on the health and lives of the UK population, and in particular the elderly and frail, should be dismissed by medical professionals unreservedly promoting lockdown in mainstream and social media is concerning, to say the least. But it also shows that emotive reports by doctors apparently addicted to their new-found stardom on Twitter are no basis to policies which are not only having a devastating impact on the lives of nearly 68 million people but, according to these reports, have already caused the deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens and will continue to kill tens of thousands more, for as long as these restrictions are imposed by the Government, enforced by the police and complied with by the public.

4. Recovering the Dead

But — comes the response from the COVID-faithful — if these reports and predictions are accurate, wouldn’t the huge increase in deaths show up at the end of the year on the records of overall mortality? Well, yes and no. Let’s take a look. In January 2021, the Office for National Statistics published ‘Deaths registered by place of occurrence’, in which it records, in the accompanying dataset, the following deaths between 7 March, 2020 (week 11 of the year) and 1 January, 2021 (week 53).

The first statistic that leaps out of these tables is the 40,114 excess deaths over the 5-year average that occurred in private homes in the last 43 weeks of 2020, only 3,881 of which were attributed to COVID-19. Even with all the distortions to how these figures have been produced, this still leaves 36,233 excess ‘non-COVID’ deaths at home. In addition, there were 26,202 excess deaths in care homes over the same period. Here, however, 20,574 were attributed to COVID-19, largely on the say-so of the private companies running the homes and without a corroborating medical diagnosis, leaving 5,628 excess deaths. That’s a total of 41,861 deaths above the 5-year average unaccounted for. Surely, here is the proof of the human cost of lockdown?

Unfortunately not. If we look at the 207,049 deaths in hospital over the same period, there were 13,692 excess; but 54,688 of these deaths were attributed to COVID-19. That leaves a total of 152,361 deaths attributed to causes other than COVID-19, which is 40,996 fewer than the 5-year average. Finally, 33,694 deaths occurred in ‘other’ places than in hospital, at home or in care homes over the same period, of which 1,687 were attributed to COVID-19. That leaves 32,007 deaths from causes other than COVID-19, which is 2,028 fewer than the 5-year average of 34,035. In total, therefore, between 7 March, 2020 and 1 January, 2021, there were 43,024 fewer deaths not attributed to COVID-19 in hospitals and places other than private homes or care homes. That’s only 1,163 more than the 41,861 excess deaths at home and in care homes not attributed to COVID-19.

The picture these figures paint is of slightly fewer people dying outside, as one would expect in a nation under lockdown, and a hugely reduced number of people dying in hospitals, which is also consistent with the withdrawal and reduction of hospital care and the fear of attending hospital created by the Government and media. But according to these statistics, roughly the same number of people appear to have died in 2020 from causes other than COVID-19, but they did so at home, primarily, and in slightly fewer numbers in care homes.

However, this conclusion relies on a number of suppositions. The first is that the 41,861 people above the 5-year average who died outside of hospital from something other than COVID-19, which is almost equalled by the 40,996 fewer deaths inside hospital, would not have lived had they had hospital treatment. However, it’s reasonable to assume that the huge increase in the deaths at home and in care homes from causes other than COVID-19 wouldn’t have been anywhere near as high if the deceased had had access to hospital care, and not all of them would have simply died in hospital anyway, and in doing so neatly increased the number of hospital deaths to the 5-year average. If not, we might wonder what the purpose of hospital treatment is other than palliative care. The figures quoted by the Institute of Cancer Research indicate the contrary, that early diagnosis and treatment make a huge difference to the survival rates of patients; and one would expect similar reduction in the number of deaths for those suffering from heart disease, dementia and other life-threatening disease who died at home if they could have accessed hospital care.

The second supposition, of course, is the accuracy of the diagnoses of COVID-19 as the cause of death, the protocol for designating COVID-19 as the ‘underlying cause’ on death certificates, and the criteria for recording a ‘COVID-19 death’ on the ONS records. In particular, in April 2020, the Care Quality Commission, the regulator of health and social care in England, introduced what it called a ‘new way’ to understand whether COVID-19 was ‘involved in the death’ of someone in a care home. This merely requires a statement from the care home provider that COVID-19 was ‘suspected’ as the cause of death, and which ‘may or may not’ correspond to a medical diagnosis, a positive RT-PCR test result for SARs-CoV-2, or even be reflected in the death certificate. It’s by this criteria that 20,574 deaths in care homes were attributed to COVID-19 in 2020.

Given the deliberately distorted and systemically flawed procedures through which these figures have been compiled, they remain, overall, inconclusive in supporting the thesis that lockdown has caused tens of thousands of deaths from causes other than COVID-19. Nonetheless, they do suggest — although without providing the proof — that the increases in deaths from cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes and the other main causes of death in the UK predicted by the various monitoring bodies have been misattributed to COVID-19. But given that the deceased are now gone, and their falsified death certificates are all we have left of the causes of their deaths, how can we find evidence for the manufacture of tens of thousands of ‘COVID-19 deaths’ from their cremated and buried bodies? This is the task of reparation and remembrance with which any true account of 2020 must begin if it is to recover the truth about their deaths from the lies in which they have been shrouded.

5. Overall Mortality in the ‘Epidemic’

On 12 January, the Head of Mortality Analysis at the Office for National Statistics revealed that mortality rate in the UK in 2020, during a civilisation-threatening pandemic necessitating our transition into a biosecurity state, had been the worst since . . . 2008. This is based on what the ONS calls its ‘age-standardised mortality rates’, which take account of both increases in population numbers and the ageing of the population, both of which increase the actual number of deaths. Just as we can’t compare the number of deaths in the UK to those in Germany or the USA to get an accurate comparison of their mortality rates, so we have to adjust to increases in the UK population. In 2008, when the population of England and Wales was 54.84 million, there were 509,090 deaths, compared with 608,002 deaths in 2020, nearly 100,000 more, when the population is 59.83 million, 5 million more. But the overall ageing of the UK population also means that more people can be expected to die in any given year. Between 2009 and 2019, the number of people in the UK aged 65 years and over increased by 22.9 per cent to 12.4 million; the number of people aged 70 years and over increased by 24.7 per cent to 9 million; and the number of people aged 85 years and over increased by 23 per cent to 1.6 million. Taking both these increases into the calculation produces a far more accurate comparison of overall mortality rates between different years.

Fortunately, following a freedom of information request, on 12 January the Office for National Statistics published a report on ‘Annual number of deaths, crude and age-standardised  mortality rates, deaths registered in England and Wales, 1838 to 2019 (final) and 2020 (provisional)’. This shows that the age-standardised mortality rate in 2020 of 1,043.5 deaths per 100,000 of the population was surpassed not only in 2008 (with 1,091.9 deaths per 100,000), but also in 2007 (1,091.8), in 2006 (1,104.3), in 2005 (1,043.8), 2004 (1,163.0), 2003 (1,232.1), 2002 (1,231.3), 2001 (1,236.2) and 2000 (1,266.4). Unfortunately, the calculation of age-standardised mortality rates for England and Wales only goes back to 1942; but every year between then and 2008 had a higher mortality rate than 2020. Even by the measure of the ‘crude mortality rate’ not adjusted for an ageing population, no year before 2004 had a lower mortality rate than 2020. In fact, over the last 79 years, 2020 has the 12th lowest mortality rate.

It’s no surprise that mortality rates throughout 2020 have been consistently compared to the average over the last five years, when those years, as the ONS states, have seen ‘historically low mortality rates’, with 2019 having the lowest rate ever recorded. 2020 has been a moderately worse-than-usual year compared to mortality rates over the last decade, but it is by no definition of the term ‘unprecedented’, as we are constantly told by the Government, its medical spokesmen and the media. In reality — rather than in the media — when compared to the history of the UK, at least since the Second World War, the bar-chart we’ve made from the ONS figures shows that the year 2020 had a historically low mortality rate.

6. What Happened to the Excess Deaths?

So where does that leave the COVID-19 ‘epidemic’? The calculation of 2020’s historically low mortality rate was based on the statistics published by the Office for National Statistics this month on the ‘Provisional leading causes of death for 2020’. In the accompanying datasets for the ‘Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales’, Table 11a shows the age-standardised mortality rate for selected leading causes of death in England between 1 January and 31 December 2020, compared to the 5-year average between 2015 and 2019.

Unsurprisingly, in a year in which 25,000 patients were evicted from NHS hospitals into care homes in which 70 per cent of residents suffer from dementia or severe memory problems, and where the Alzheimer’s Society reported they were denied medical care and family visits under lockdown restrictions, deaths from these diseases in England in 2020 were 4,132 above the five-year average of 61,928 deaths.

Yet, incredibly, in a year in which cancer screening was cancelled for 3.2 million people in the 6 months up to September 2020, and surgery for 94,912 patients was postponed or cancelled, deaths from lung and throat cancer were down 1,537 from the 5-year average of 28,108 deaths.

Just as incredibly, although the British Heart Foundation reported that, between March and September 2020, deaths at home from heart disease were up 25.9 per cent in England due to lockdown restrictions, deaths from heart disease in 2020 were 1,450 below the 5-year average of 53,429 deaths.

More incredibly, deaths from chronic lower respiratory diseases were down by 2,764 from the 5-year average of 29,681, a 9 per cent reduction.

And even more incredibly, deaths from cerebrovascular diseases, which cause strokes, aneurysms and haemorrhages, were down by 2,263 deaths from the 5-year average of 29,943, a fall of 13.2 per cent.

Most incredibly of all, there were 7,313 fewer deaths from influenza and pneumonia in 2020 than the 5-year average of 25,969 deaths, a 28 per cent reduction.

I use the word ‘incredible’ in its proper sense to describe these figures, which are not credible as accurate records of the effects of withdrawing and reducing healthcare to nearly 60 million people for 10 months. Given the deliberate inaccuracy of the criteria for attributing a death to COVID-19, largely dependent upon a positive test using an RT-PCR test at thresholds where it can identify so-called ‘cases’ of COVID-19 from fragments of dead coronavirus, it is almost impossible that these thousands of ‘lost’ deaths, and the thousands more caused by lockdown, have not been misdiagnosed and/or incorrectly recorded as ‘COVID-deaths’. But how do we corroborate this thesis with facts?

On 14 January, Public Health England published its analysis of ONS figures on deaths over a shorter timeframe, between 21 March, 2020 and 1 January, 2021, the period under which England has been under various degrees of lockdown restrictions. These show that, even with the WHO’s instructions to medical practitioners that COVID-19 must always be listed as the ‘underlying cause’ of death, a total of 7,511 excess deaths in which other health conditions were listed as such were recorded as ‘COVID-19 deaths’.

As can be seen, deaths from heart diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, other circulatory diseases, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, urinary diseases, liver diseases, and from causes other than COVID-19, numbered 11,013 over the 5-year average; yet 5,057 of these were listed as ‘COVID-deaths’. Even when deaths from the underlying cause were below the 5-year average, as they were for cancer, acute respiratory infections, chronic lower respiratory diseases, other respiratory diseases and Parkinson’s disease, 2,454 deaths were still registered as ‘COVID-19 deaths’.

Nearly 75 per cent of excess deaths in which dementia and Alzheimer’s disease were listed as the underlying cause were still recorded as ‘COVID-19 deaths’; over 41 per cent of excess deaths from urinary diseases; nearly 40 per cent of excess deaths from cerebrovascular diseases; 41 per cent of excess deaths disease from other circulatory diseases; 33 per cent of excess deaths from heart diseases; and 31 per cent of excess deaths from liver diseases. While over 50 per cent of excess deaths from all other causes other than COVID-19 were still recorded as COVID-19 deaths.

We should remember that, if COVID-19 had been listed as the ‘underlying cause’ on any of these death certificates, they would all have been recorded as ‘COVID-19 deaths’ by the Office for National Statistics; yet for all these other underlying causes their appearance on the death certificate wasn’t enough to overcome the changes to the ONS criteria for compiling statistics on mortality in the UK. If not quite proof, this is further evidence of a deliberate and very successful attempt to falsify the official tally of ‘COVID-19’ deaths.

What these figures don’t show, unfortunately, is how many of the deaths from these diseases and illnesses not in excess of the 5-year average were also recorded as COVID-19. But until this information is published, which is unlikely to happen soon if ever, the analysis by Public Health England has additionally revealed that, between 21 March, 2020 and 1 January, 2021, there were 18,851 excess deaths in England in which diabetes was mentioned on the death certificate, of which 15,589 were recorded as COVID-19 deaths, nearly 83 per cent of the total.

There were also 22,081 excess deaths attributed to COVID-19 in which dementia and Alzheimer’s disease were also mentioned on the death certificate. That’s slightly more than the 20,574 deaths in care homes that were attributed to COVID-19 on nothing more than the suspicion of the care home providers who locked the elderly and confused residents in their rooms and denied them human contact and medical care.

Finally, there were an astonishing 35,133 excess deaths attributed to COVID-19 in which acute respiratory infections, including influenza and pneumonia, were mentioned on the death certificate. If you’re wondering, as many people have been, where all the deaths from flu disappeared to last year, here’s your answer.

Indeed, the 76,065 excess deaths in which one or more of these 3 categories of health conditions appear on the death certificate equal nearly all of the 76,553 deaths in England attributed to COVID-19 in 2020. So why, given the fatality of these causes in other years, was COVID-19 recorded as the underlying cause of death on so many of them in 2020?

The most logical answer to that question is the changes to disease taxonomy, protocol on completing death certificates, criteria for attributing a death to COVID-19, the false positives produced by the RT-PCR testing programme, and the equation of such a positives with symptoms of COVID-19. To this end, the guidelines for death certification from the World Health Organisation about what defines a COVID-19 death are decisive: ‘A death due to COVID-19 may not be attributed to another disease (e.g. cancer)’. Given these changes — which unlike the deaths from COVID-19 truly can be called ‘unprecedented’ — we’ll never know how many people actually died of the disease; but these figures give us some indication of the percentage of deaths misdiagnosed as such. What we do know is that, throughout 2020 and into 2021, the British Heart Foundation, the Institute of Cancer Research, the Alzheimer’s Society, the British Medical Journal and other organisations monitoring the nation’s medical treatment, health and mortality have all recorded and predicted huge increases in deaths from the withdrawal and reduction of medical care under lockdown restrictions.

Mathematically, it’s not possible for the deaths consequent upon these changes to the National Health Service throughout 2020 not to show up on the records of overall mortality. Yet, if we deduct the 81,653 deaths attributed to COVID-19 from the 608,002 deaths in England and Wales last year, we are left with 526,349 deaths from all other causes. That’s 12,734 fewer than the previous 5-year average of 539,083 deaths, when, as we have seen, mortality rates have been at historically low levels. Even with the nearly 5 million fewer diagnoses for cancer, the withdrawn medical care and treatment, the delayed and cancelled operations, the 8,000 fewer hospital beds for general and acute care available due to social distancing in hospitals, the medical staff quarantined on the basis of false positives on RT-PCR tests, the 7 million people too terrorised by the media to attend hospital, the more than 1 million people who didn’t receive emergency care, and the unrelenting assault on the physical and mental health of the population by medically baseless lockdown restrictions and a media campaign of terror, the number of deaths this year, other than those attributed to COVID-19, are lower than they have been since 2016. So the question we have to ask ourselves is: where have all those excess deaths gone?

Again, the most logical answer to that question — and the only one that makes sense of these otherwise inexplicable figures — is that they have been misdiagnosed or inaccurately recorded as ‘COVID-19 deaths’, and that the only epidemic we’re suffering, as our historically low mortality rate in 2020 indicates, is an epidemic of tests. How many have been misdiagnosed? Between 21 March, 2020 and 1 January, 2021 there were 376,668 deaths in England attributed to causes other than COVID-19. If even 20 per cent of them were misdiagnosed as COVID-19, the 76,553 deaths in England officially attributed to COVID-19 last year would vanish. No doubt that’s going too far, but given the percentages of excess deaths from underlying causes other than COVID-19 falsely recorded as ‘COVID-deaths’, it’s possible to get a picture of how easy it has been to manufacture this crisis.

7. Conclusions

The rise in excess deaths in April and May, even over the historically low mortality rates of the last five years, strongly suggests the presence of a disease that, at the least, pushed the already vulnerable to a death that might otherwise have come over the influenza seasons of the last five years when deaths were, again, very low; or at some other time during 2020, or even in the near future. But because of the medical profile of the deceased and the age at which they died, this period of concentrated mortality did not contribute, as we would expect of an epidemic, to an overall rate of mortality different from those over the past 20 years. In 2004, for example, the rate of mortality (1,163.0 per 100,000 of the population) was as high above what it was in 2020 (1,043.5) as last year was above 2019 (925.0), which had the lowest rate ever. The year before that, 2003, it was even higher (1,232.1). So the exaggerated claims of an unprecedented rise in mortality rate from 2019 to 2020 is not borne out by the facts. What was different was how, after a period of sustained fall, this rise on overall mortality was explained to a public previously unaware of mortality rates, and what this suddenly increased awareness of our mortality has been used to justify.

84 per cent of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020, over 68,000 deceased, were of people aged 70 years and over. 61 per cent were aged 80 years and over, the average life expectancy in the UK. Around 90 per cent had at least one pre-existing health condition, with most having two. To put these figures into context, in 2020 there were 9,189,000 people aged 70 years and over in the UK, and 412,408 of them, 4.48 per cent, died of causes not attributed to COVID-19. 0.7 per cent of them officially died of COVID-19. It wouldn’t take much to push a population of such elderly and frail people into a life-threatening situation. Lock them up for months on end. Deny them human contact on pain of arrest and fines they couldn’t hope to pay. Withdraw medical treatment. Quarantine their carers. Terrorise them with propaganda about a civilisation-ending disease. Order them to stay at home and avoid the contact of other people like the plague. Tell them hospitals standing empty are on the verge of being overwhelmed. Turn medical centres into places to fear, the breeding grounds of a deadly new disease. That should be more than enough. It has been more than enough. Then, change the medical protocol and criteria for identifying and recording the cause of their deaths, and against all the evidence against its fitness for such use, employ a medically meaningless test to turn traces of a virus that presents no threat to 80 per cent of the population into proof of infection and cause of death. This is how a crisis has been manufactured. This is how a virus is being used to justify the programmes and regulations of the UK biosecurity state.

Even if lockdown restrictions had been shown to do anything to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 — and dozens of scientific and medical studies from around the world show that it does not — there is nothing in these figures to justify their imposition and enforcement, or our compliance with them when and where they are. On the contrary, what these figures strongly suggest is that it is precisely these restrictions that are responsible for a large proportion of the excess deaths that have pushed the mortality rate higher than it has been for a dozen years. In my opinion, there is strong evidence to indicate that, at a conservative estimate, at least half the 80,000-plus deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020 were caused by lockdown restrictions. The nearly 42,000 excess deaths over the 5-year average not attributed to COVID-19 at home and in care homes point towards that figure; as do the more than 43,000 excess deaths estimated to be caused by lockdown by the Office for National Statistics; and the increasingly concerned reports from our various medical bodies about the lack of hospital admissions for the primary causes of death in the UK. But that’s a conservative estimate. The scandal of more than 20,000 excess deaths in care homes swept under the COVID-19 carpet points towards a far higher number. But even at 40,000 people dying at the average life expectancy for the UK, that puts SARS-CoV-2 within the fatality rate of seasonal influenza — as numerous doctors, scientists and modellers not working for the Government or pharmaceutical companies said throughout 2020 — but without the threat influenza presents to the young.

But if the European epicentre of a global ‘pandemic’ is a country suffering its 12th lowest mortality rate in 8 decades, what have been its effects in other countries around the world? All the statistics presented in this article apply to the UK, which, if we don’t have the highest rate of deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 in the world, is certainly hovering around the winner’s podium. Yet the lockdown restrictions imposed upon us and the biosecurity programmes implemented in response to this manufactured crisis are not unique to the British Isles. The same restrictions and worse are being implemented in countries where this so-called ‘pandemic’ can have made no more than a ripple in their mortality rates.

In Germany, where 50,385 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 out of a population of 83.9 million, the Government has made medically meaningless face masks mandatory when leaving the home and announced that those refusing to remain under house arrest on the strength of an unfit-for-purpose RT-PCR test will be put in ‘detention centres’. In Canada, with a population of 37.92 million, 18,462 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19, about a third the number that die from heart disease every year, and less than a quarter that die from cancer, although without banning smoking or requiring exercise by law, or imposing fines on producers and closing down retailers of fatty foods. While in Australia, whose Government has enforced some of the most punitive biosecurity measures in the world, a mere 909 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 out of a population of 26.66 million, three-quarters the number that died in motor-vehicle accidents in 2019, which neither then nor in any previous year occasioned a ban on cars, the closing of roads until accidents dropped to an arbitrary number or ownership of a bicycle as a condition of travel. It is only for COVID-19 that governments have imposed a ban on the death of their citizens, and in doing so have killed at least as much again. If there has been mass compliance to the programmes and regulations of the biosecurity state in these comparatively unaffected countries, what hope is there that here, in the UK, the evidence contradicting claims of an ‘epidemic’ will do anything either to enlighten the terrorised population or to encourage civil disobedience to our subjugation?

Very little, it would appear. While compiling and analysing this data I presented some of it to someone who has appointed himself to inform his 21,500 followers on Twitter with a ‘daily COVID update’ of the data. In response to everything I showed him, he dutifully repeated Government propaganda about the efficacy of lockdown, a dangerously overwhelmed NHS, dismissed the huge increase in deaths at home in 2020 as those who would have died in hospital anyway, and attributed the reduction in deaths not attributed to COVID-19 over the 5-year average to a sudden improvement of healthcare that for some reason only came into effect last year. When I rebutted these assertions with further evidence and rational arguments he was unmoved. He was civil, which made his replies stand out from the abuse and threats I received from others on the thread, but utterly inseparable from the propaganda he had adopted as his own, and which no data contradicting it could alter. It is a long time since the reactions of the terrorised UK public were based on anything other than the lies of the Government and the manipulations of the media; but it is on the data presented in this article and other facts inconvenient to its exponents that resistance to this lie can and must be built by the undeceived.

On 5 January, 2021, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care made the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 3) and (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 into law. Without a draft being presented to, debated by or approved by Parliament, without evidence of its justification or proportionality, without an assessment of its impact having been made, and without the public having been consulted, this amendment unilaterally extended the current lockdown to 17 July, 2021. Under these restrictions, there will be tens of thousands more deaths, not only from the withdrawal of medical diagnosis, care and treatment, but also from the isolation of the old and frail, from the ongoing assault on the mental health of the young, from the recession of the economy, from the consequent reduction of public investment in an increasingly privatised National Health Service and other social services, and from the loss of millions of businesses and jobs.

Back in July 2020, the Office for National Statistics predicted a further 18,000 excess deaths occurring in the next 2-5 years due to increased heart disease and mental health problems; 12,500 excess deaths over the next 5 years from changes to elective care, with many non-urgent elective treatments continuing to be postponed or cancelled by the NHS; 15,000 excess deaths among young people just entering the labour market as a result of the lockdown-induced recession; and 17,000 excess deaths for every year that GDP remains low. And, of course, there are other costs, not least to the education and mental health of 11 million school children and students being inducted by our educational institutions into the programmes and technologies of the UK biosecurity state; and to the 30 million workers who, under the accelerated digitalisation of our economy and the threat of unemployment and redundancy, will be compelled to retrain to find new employment in the newly emerging markets of the Fourth Industrial Revolution monopolised by international corporations writing the laws of the countries from which their workforce is drawn. Finally, there are the costs to our politics and human rights, which have been thrown on the bonfire of freedoms ignited by the lies that have manufactured this crisis, and will not be returned in the future that awaits us by anything less than the overthrow of the constitutional dictatorship by which we are currently ruled.

The truth is that there was never a question of whether this Government would impose another lockdown on the UK in 2021. Lockdown isn’t a consequence of the failure of coronavirus-justified programmes and regulations: it’s the product of their success in implementing the UK biosecurity state. After a brief summer recess under the system of tiered restrictions, the following winter will see the lockdown of the UK imposed again under newly notifiable diseases from new viruses and new strains, new protocols for certification and new criteria for deaths, the new medical categorisation of new cases which, like the present ones, present little or no threat to public health, but which like it will be used to enforce new technologies, new programmes and new regulations. This is the ‘New Normal’ we were promised, and it’s being built on a foundation of lies, damned lies and statistics.

Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing

Further reading by the same author:

Our Default State: Compulsory Vaccination for COVID-19 and Human Rights Law

Bowling for Pfizer: Who’s Behind the BioNTech Vaccine?

Five Stories Under Lockdown

Bread and Circuses: Who’s Behind the Oxford Vaccine for COVID-19?

The Betrayal of the Clerks: UK Intellectuals in the Service of the Biosecurity State

Bonfire of the Freedoms: The Unlawful Exercise of Powers conferred by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984

When the House Burns: Giorgio Agamben on the Coronavirus Crisis

The Infection of Science by Politics: A Nobel Laureate and Biophysicist on the Coronavirus Crisis

The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 2. Normalising Fear)

The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 1. Programmes and Regulations)

The Science and Law of Refusing to Wear Masks: Texts and Arguments in Support of Civil Disobedience

Lockdown: Collateral Damage in the War on COVID-19

The State of Emergency as Paradigm of Government: Coronavirus Legislation, Implementation and Enforcement

Manufacturing Consensus: The Registering of COVID-19 Deaths in the UK

Giorgio Agamben and the Bio-Politics of COVID-19

Good Morning, Coronazombies! Diary of a Bio-political Crisis Event

Coronazombies! Infection and Denial in the United Kingdom

Language is a Virus: SARs-CoV-2 and the Science of Political Control

Sociology of a Disease: Age, Class and Mortality in the Coronavirus Pandemic

COVID-19 and Capitalism

Architects for Social Housing is a Community Interest Company (no. 10383452). Although we occasionally receive minimal fees for our design work, the majority of what we do is unpaid and we have no source of public funding. 

April 14, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, UK | Leave a comment