The True Mortality Cost of COVID and COVID Interventions
Life years lost 2016 - 2022, England & Wales
All deaths are equal, but some deaths are more equal than others.
Given that we are playing out the plot of George Orwell’s “1984”, I thought I would take the liberty of paraphrasing one of his other famous quotations. My apologies!
It is still a mystery to me that the public health and statistics authorities still publish analysis and research based on numbers of deaths.
So, it is with death, that in fact, all deaths are not equal at all. This is recognised in the death handbooks and why we have another metric called “life-years lost”. Typically, it also takes health into account as well which gives us “QALY” lost, i.e. “quality-adjusted life-years” lost.
As the name suggests, it rescales deaths in terms of how many years of life were lost as opposed to the simple count of deaths that occurred.
Just look here how good the analysis used to be in 2015, pre-COVID1, when our public health authorities did proper cost/benefit analyses.
I haven’t got time to prepare a thorough estimate of QALY losses for the last few years but I have a pretty good proxy of simple life years lost derived from the ONS life tables and weekly deaths by age for England & Wales.
Why is this important? Objectively because the deaths of younger people are considered to be more important than the deaths of older people. In extremis, this is pretty obvious.
So, let’s take a look at life-years lost in England & Wales since 2016 - Figure 1.
As we can see in Figure 1, the 4-weekly baseline of life-years lost in England & Wales was pretty consistent at around 500k. The seasonal patterns are also quite obvious, typically peaking between 600k and 650k.
I have marked “novel” or “epidemic” COVID as the period between the orange (13-Mar-20) and red (03-Jul-20) dots. The impact is also evident. Peaking at 900k monthly life-years lost, the COVID epidemic (and associated collateral deaths from interventions), was an event that deserved attention.
As it happens, buried deep in the archives, the ONS, together with SAGE and the DHSC did attempt an analysis2 based on QALY which they discussed on 23-Jul-20 and published on 07-Aug-20.
In this paper, they acknowledged that a substantial number of life-years would be lost due to the collateral harms of non-pharmaceutical interventions but dismissed these as being acceptable due to the greater number mitigated compared to the modelling of Neil Ferguson and his crew3, comprehensively debunked by a multitude of studies, summarised here4. See Figure 2.
It was, of course, apparent to some more diligent observers prior to August 2020 that Ferguson’s model was utter crap and government interventions didn’t save a single life5. Look how well that piece of research has aged! ;-)
Returning to Figure 1, I have also marked the start of the post-vaccination period that is inevitably not accounted for in the official analyses due to the fallacious a priori assumption that the vaccines would reduce mortality, not increase it.
On the basis of the evidence, the latter is apparent. The post-vaccination life-years lost peak is of the same magnitude as the epidemic, the summer low is substantially above the baseline and the 2020-21 mortality year is bigger than 2019-20, the year of epidemic COVID (Figure 3).
To include the 2021-22 season, we can take a look at the relevant periods from prior years, i.e. the first 28 weeks of the season (Figure 4).
We can clearly see from Figure 4 that the first 28 weeks of 2020-21 season are substantially worse than any prior year. This period includes the tail end of natural COVID and the first few months of the mass vaccination program, literally a deadly combination. You don’t need to be an immunologist to know you don’t mass vaccinate in the middle of an epidemic!
2021-22 is not substantially lower than the prior season. If the vaccine were effective at reducing COVID mortality and as safe as they claim, the net result has clearly not been a return to pre-pandemic levels. We should be asking why this should be. Shouldn’t we??
However, after so many analyses, we know that this is never the whole story. We should look at the data broken down by age cohorts to see the full picture.
In Figure 5, I have omitted the special case of under 1 year olds to save space but also because they follow the same pattern as the 1 to 14 year olds anyway. What we can see, as a result, is a table of life-years lost for various age cohorts determined by the data available from the ONS, showing relative levels of mortality from period to period.
We can observe that 2019-20, the year of COVID, had relatively the largest impact on the over 75s. This unassailable fact has been known since March 2020 at the latest.
Conversely, 2020-21, the year of the vaccine, has fared substantially worse for the 15 to 64 year olds in relative terms.
Interestingly, for the 65 to 74 year olds, 2019-20, the COVID year, was not much worse than the bad flu year of 2017-18. In fact, if we stripped out some of the 16,000 or so non-COVID excess deaths (admitted even by the ONS, SAGE and DHSC to be collateral deaths of interventions), which were mainly in this age group, COVID year would have been one of the lowest seasons since 2016. The case for the “dry tinder” hypothesis remains strong.
Even more interestingly is the juxtaposition of 1 to 14 year olds and 15 to 44 year olds. 2020-21, the year of the vaccine, was the lowest of this observed period for the former who were not vaccinated. It is by far the highest on record for the latter who were. Imagine that.
And how is 2021-22 shaping up?
Alas, according to Figure 6, the evidence remains consistently worrying. Are the ill-effects of vaccinating the youngest ages beginning to show through or is this just the “harvesting” effect of a low prior season?
The 15 to 44 year olds are exhibiting similar levels of life-years lost as the prior season, still substantially higher than pre-pandemic levels. The 45 to 64 year olds are not far behind. The over 65s are within expected ranges.
My allusions to the causal effect of the vaccine are probably clear, even to those who have not read the rest of my research supporting that assumption. But can we back it up with the life-years lost data?
Let’s take a look at the time series data broken down by age for a clue.
Again, using orange to red markers to highlight the COVID pandemic and green to mark the inception of the mass vaccination program, it is clear from Figure 7 that COVID per se had no impact on the 15 to 44 year olds in spring 2020 when it first emerged.
However, after a larger than usual period of mortality starting in the full season post-COVID, and after what appears to be a natural peak in Dec 2020, deaths in this age group really take off after the mass vaccination campaign. They remain elevated ever since, never coming close to baseline.
Using the same scale throughout, we can see in Figure 8 the relative magnitude of 45 to 64 year old life-years lost. We can also clearly see the impact of COVID on this age group in spring 2020 and moreover, the substantially larger impact of combined events since the start of the 2020 season, especially a few weeks post-mass vaccination.
For ages 65 to 74, 75 to 84 and 85+ (Figures 9 to 10 respectively), we can see how epidemic COVID was relatively worse the older you were but with little meaningful attenuation of mortality post-mass vaccination in spite of a much smaller susceptible population and the expectation of protection from community immunity.
This all begs the question - how on earth has there been so many more life-years lost since the end of the COVID epidemic than before it?
We know that interventions didn’t reduce any COVID mortality so all we’re left with is collateral harm? We might say it doesn’t matter what the specific cause is - denial of healthcare, increased stress, the vaccine - but that would mean we also didn’t care about fixing what we can.
Let’s return to the 15 to 44 year olds but this time on their own scale (Figure 12).
This is the one chart you need because it tells you everywhere you need to investigate:
On a macro level, COVID does not (did not) materially affect anyone under the age of 45. No intervention whatsoever could be merited for anyone under 45 on the basis of any cost/benefit analysis.
The impact of those interventions are already profound and show no sign of abating. In fact, they are currently increasing.
The most significant mortality event occurs a few weeks after the start of the mass vaccination campaign. This gun is not so much smoking as still burning as bright as a supernova.
In fact, if I was still in the 15 to 44 year old age bracket, what I’d really want to know is why aren’t the public health authorities looking out for me like they did the old folk? Where is my daily death tally? What confidence do I have that you actually have a clue what you’re doing when the data is so obvious?
Call To Action
If you know anyone under 45 who met with an untimely death since the start of 2021, you might want to consider putting a class action together against everyone in government who promoted, cajoled or even coerced them into taking the mRNA therapy if that is a possible cause of death. It’s the only way you’re going to get any truth or justice.
Thank you once again, Joel.
I'll allow myself one proofreader's note:
What was formerly known as "2015" is now referred to as "5 B.C."
Thank you for this data/information. What exactly is it going to take? If I hear one more person utter the “covid mantra” I may start screaming and never stop. Fatigue sets in, when anyone who just had covid announces “it would have been much worse if I had not had the vaccines”. I automatically remind them the current variant is mild, this is how nature works and the jabs didn’t make any difference. They look at me like I have two heads and am nuts. Sometimes I think I am for even bothering to say anything. 😂