There’s a great moment in James Cameron’s underrated classic, The Abyss, where Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is trying to convince the rest of the undersea drilling crew that she’s not some crazy paranoid seeing imaginary aliens. Crew member Alan “Hippy” Carnes (Todd Graff) chimes in his support, jabbering about alien abductions and “hot rods of the gods”.
“Hippy, would you do me a favour?” interrupts an exasperated Lindsay. “Stay off my side.”
Reading and listening to some of the stuff the Freedom crowd gibber, I know just how she feels.
It’s hard enough trying to convince those still in its thrall that the legacy media and political class has lied and been wrong about nearly everything Covid-related, without having some nutcase chiming in about how Bill Gates is an alien using the Covid vaccines to stick a 5G microchip up everyone’s arse.
Or that entire legions of people are being mown down by some mysteriously “died suddenly” cause (you know the one they mean).
The facts are that, yes, an awful lot more people died in Australia in 2022 than usual — and slightly less than half can be attributed to the big, bad ‘rona.
But that doesn’t mean your conspiracy theory is true.
First, let’s look at the data.
On February 24th, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) updated its provisional excess death statistic for 2022 from 16% to 15.1% […]
“In 2022, there were 174,717 deaths that occurred by 30 November and were registered by 31 January 2023, which is 22,886 (15.1%) more than the historical average.”
“Excess mortality” is defined by the WHO as the death rate “above what would be expected based on the non-crisis mortality rate in the population”. After all, people die every day of old age, car accidents, etc. But sometimes there are spikes in mortality (wars, natural disasters, disease outbreaks).
Is it unusual to have 15.1% more deaths than average?
Unfortunately, the data only goes back to 1955, so it doesn’t include calamities like World Wars I and II, or the Spanish Flu, but it does show that 2022 exceeded anything seen in the last 70 years.
What about the ‘rona? Even allowing for the perhaps over-generous attribution of “with Covid”, the virus accounts for less than half of the spike.
By 30th November 2022, according to the ABS, 9,115 of the deaths were recorded as being due to covid. So, taking these figures at face value, that means only 6.0% of the 15.1% excess deaths were due to the virus. In other words three fifths of the excess deaths were caused by something else.
What does “15.1%” look like? An extra 63 people died every day. 25 were Covid deaths, 38 were not. To put it into perspective, an average 406 people die in Australia every day in a normal year — which is why the excess has mostly gone unnoticed.
But there are excess deaths and excess deaths, as far as the media and political class were concerned.
In 2020, any death from Covid was headline news.
In that entire year, 906 people were reported as dying of the disease. But now our latest statistical information suggests that more than that number of Australians may be dying every three weeks, without proper explanation.
Where is the headline news on that?
Um, well… here. And here. And here, here, and here.
Australians deserve answers.
Indeed, they do.
But they’re not going to get rational answers from this sort of stuff:
Of course, we must scrutinise the cause of these 9,115 covid deaths. Remembering the, perhaps overly bold, claim that the covid injections would protect us from severe illness and death. Surely, it is remiss of the ABS not to report how many of the people who died ‘due to covid’ had received the injections?
And here we’re descending into 5G-gave-my-goldfish-AIDS territory.
Remember: the vaccinations and boosters were prioritised to the very old and very sick — the very people most likely to die from Covid. So it’s no real surprise if the majority of deaths were vaccinated. It’s like saying that the majority of people who died in car crashes were wearing seat belts.
Why did these people die? This question needs to be answered urgently […]
But the cause(s) have not yet been examined.
Clarity on Health
This is flat-out untrue. The Actuaries Institute published this table:
As we can see, almost exactly what was predicted by some doctors and independent media in 2020-21 is coming to pass: the delays in checkups and treatment caused by ridiculous lockdown policies have led to a spike in deaths from otherwise treatable conditions. Heart disease and diabetes are the big Grim Reapers. Cancer has only increased slightly — but as a disease that often takes years to kill when left untreated, the small spike in cancer deaths will undoubtedly climb over the next five years.
The politicians, public health bureaucrats and legacy media can’t say they weren’t warned. But will they ever be held to account?