The latest study to come out of Imperial College isn't the work of Neil Ferguson. But its conclusions have the just same ring of implausibility. Published in Lancet: Infectious Diseases, the study estimates that - from December 8th 2020 to December 8th 2021 - the vaccines averted 19 million deaths, including 500,000 in the U.K.
While both these figures are implausible, I want to focus on the latter - just because there are so many more unknowns when dealing with global-level Covid statistics.
The authors' conclusion is based on a mathematical model, which was applied to national data on excess deaths. I'm not going to pretend I've taken the time to understand the details of their model. But I don't have to. The 500,000 number is just too implausible, and I'll explain why.
Before doing so, how many actual excess deaths were there in the UK during the relevant time period? If we take the numbers for England and Wales, and ignore age-standardisation, there were about 60,000. Add 14% for the other UK nations, and we get to 68,000. So what the Imperial College researchers are saying is that, in the absence of vaccines, excess deaths would have been eight times higher.
There are several ways of showing this figure couldn't possibly be right, and the true number of deaths averted must be much lower....<<<Read More>>>...
