O/T Covid Vaccine mRNA

[KerrAvon]

So they take off the people from the list that they’re expecting to die and don’t include them in the actual number of people that died?

How far have they converted the figures for?.


Give over with your ravit hole insults.

How did you think excess deaths could be calculated other than by comparing the actual death rate with the expected death rate? That's what ‘excess deaths’ means.

If the average age of the population being assessed increases, the expected death rate increases - that's life. That then has to be taken into account if the figures are to be accurate. The actual adjustment will be determined by the use of actuarial methods.

A negative excess death rate means that fewer people died in the year under consideration than in the reference year.

Apologies for using the expression rabbit hole. I had not realised that it would affect you. It's a reference to Alice in Wonderland rather than having a head down a rabbit hole.

You list several bodies that you seem not to trust to provide accurate data and yet the excess deaths that you have talked about are based on data from such organisations. Is it the position that you will trust their data when it suits you, but not when it doesn’t?

[frogmiller]

From the Telegraph

Something’s fishy about the ONS’s excess death figures
There was a clear need to improve the estimates at the height of the pandemic. Why only do it now?
CARL HENEGHAN
TOM JEFFERSON
21 February 2024 • 7:43pm

NHS signage promoting "Stay Home, Save Lives" on a bus shelter in Chinatown, central London
The Office for National Statistics has revised its estimate of the number of excess deaths in the UK last year. At 10,994, the new number is two-thirds lower than the previous figure of 31,442. Excess deaths in the first year of the pandemic have also been revised down, from 84,064 to 76,412.

The revised method accounts for population size and ageing trends as opposed to the previous method, which used a five-year average to estimate the number of expected deaths in a year.

This new approach is fine and long overdue. Indeed, in the pandemic we were concerned with the use of historical averages in estimating excess deaths, particularly as it tended to underestimate how many deaths should be expected in a particular year.

The ONS’s estimates of excess deaths at the height of the pandemic were therefore likely to have been higher than they should have been, helping to drive the fear and panic that led to the UK being plunged into a series of deeply restrictive lockdowns.

So it is clearly good that the ONS has acted to improve the quality of its data. But there are signs that further improvements could still be made. While the difference in the total number of recorded deaths between 2020 and 2023 is 27,629, for example, the difference in excess deaths between these years is more than double at 65,418, suggesting that something is amiss with the new estimates.

Meanwhile, the ONS reports that the differences between the old figures and those generated by the new methodology have “generally” been accounted for by trends in population size, ageing and mortality rates. But that isn’t true for all years. In 2022 and 2023, by far the biggest contributors to the changed figures are lumped together under the category of “other changes”. Quite what’s in this bucket of changes isn’t totally clear, although some of it is to do with the treatment of 2020 data.

Perhaps the most pressing question, however, is why we are only now seeing a serious attempt made to better understand excess deaths. In 2020, these figures were one of the main drivers of lockdown. Where was the urgent need to fix the data then?

We don’t pretend to understand the ONS’s overview of the change to its methods. Given what we know of the problems in Government decision-making, the British public is entitled to a better explanation for the change in methods and its impact. Only a clear explanation will exorcise the ghost of misgovernment.


Well written so you can tell it’s cut and pasted.

[KerrAvon]

Isn’t the Daily Telegraph a leading member of the MSM? Their coverage of Covid has always been from a very ‘British exceptionalism’ stance – ‘all that lockdown stuff is for Johnny Foreigner – we’ll beat it with our union flags, stiff upper lip and Vicks Vapour rub’ (other decongestants are available). There is a whiff of ‘See! We told you so’ about the tone of this article.

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Carl Heneghan, although I think he made bad calls during covid in relation to his scepticism towards lockdown in particular.

I completely agree that the revision to the method of calculating excess deaths is long overdue and a good thing. My suspicion is that it was never seen as a priority for ONS and was not deemed worthy of much attention until it became the a darling of the antivax movement and of interest in Parliament.

I am sceptical about the notion that the revisions could have been made at the height of the pandemic. Government was a bit busy at that time (working as well as partying) and probably didn’t have the bandwidth to undertake a major revision of government statistics. In addition, political realities would have made it rather difficult for the government to appear to suddenly be revising excess deaths downwards at that time, as it would have resulted in allegations of the type that you are making now of an attempt to fudge the figures.

For me, it will take far more than a revision of government statistics to exorcise the ghost of misgovernment by Johnson and Co.

[frogmiller]

This legislation went through last week.

https://x.com/bgatesisapyscho/status...lcvxGrPcIOixGQ

[KerrAvon]

This legislation went through last week.

https://x.com/bgatesisapyscho/status...lcvxGrPcIOixGQ

Is this actually true? These people think it isn't:

https://www.techarp.com/facts/france...rna-law/?amp=1

I can't read French and so can't check the French legislation myself, but I checked similar claims made in the UK about the Online Safety Act 2023 and found them to be complete cobblers.

I'll leave it you to decide why people who claim to be committed to 'the truth' are so fond of making stuff up.

[Eternal Optimist]

Is this actually true? These people think it isn't:

https://www.techarp.com/facts/france...rna-law/?amp=1

I can't read French and so can't check the French legislation myself, but I checked similar claims made in the UK about the Online Safety Act 2023 and found them to be complete cobblers.

I'll leave it you to decide why people who claim to be committed to 'the truth' are so fond of making stuff up.

Not sure what exactly influences how you get your information, but techarp.com is an online business owned by the grand total of... one bloke in Malaysia.

https://crunchbase.com/organization/...ech-arp/people

Unfortunately the link can neither confirm nor deny that Aiden Wong is working from his Mum's spare bedroom.

[frogmiller]

Under the new law, an emergency procedure can be used to stop the dissemination, during election campaigns, of “inaccurate or misleading allegations or statements likely to affect the sincerity of the vote” when they are “disseminated on a massive scale in a deliberate, artificial or automated manner via an online ...

[KerrAvon]

Under the new law, an emergency procedure can be used to stop the dissemination, during election campaigns, of “inaccurate or misleading allegations or statements likely to affect the sincerity of the vote” when they are “disseminated on a massive scale in a deliberate, artificial or automated manner via an online ...

So it's a law that can be used to stop online misinformation campaigns being used to manipulate elections?

I can see the value in that, but how it would work in practice isn't clear given the speed that misinformation can be spread online and the difficulty in stopping it.

A law like that might have come in handy in the UK prior to the Brexit referendum. I'm not sure what it has to do with vaccines though.