The first to raise the alarm were those with experience in noticing trends in data in the financial world. Within medicine, great emphasis is placed on statistically significant (i.e. at the 95% level) deviations, a high bar which means that early signals, noticed as a change in direction, get ignored.
Since November 2020, the Twitter account ‘Ethical Skeptic’ has shared data from the USA showing a rise in cancer. The methodology used has included modelling to account for cancer deaths that occurred earlier than otherwise because of covid and covid policy. He/she also includes adjustments for cancer deaths being mislabelled as covid deaths. Rather than engage with the merits or otherwise of this methodology his critics dismissed his claims using a series of methodological trickery which he lists HERE.
The first person to put his name and face to the claims of a problem was Ed Dowd who spent a career on Wall Street ending up as a portfolio manager for BlackRock. He worked with analysts from the insurance industry to show 61,000 excess deaths of 25 to 44-year-olds in the US which he described in October 2022 as “a Vietnam war in the second half of 2021.” That number alone was being explained away as being due to covid, and worse, as evidence the vaccines were working well among older age groups. By mid-July 2023 he started reporting on surges in disability claims in the UK – Personal Independence Payments or PIP. These revealed a staggering increase in certain claim groups from early 2021 with the vaccine rollout. Ed Dowd has also highlighted a shocking increase in cancer mortality among younger age groups.
Here is where the conflicts arise. First of all, comparing the whole population, the pattern for cancer deaths does show a rise but of only 1%; which is within what might be expected for year-to-year variation. The flaw with this approach is that older age groups have had fewer deaths after a period of high mortality in 2020 and 2021. They can only die once. The trajectory for the old is most clearly seen by looking at dementia and Alzheimer’s deaths where the numbers of deaths have been below baseline since 2021. A lack of cancer deaths in the old would drown out a rise in younger age groups when looking at the whole population. The UK’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (“OHID”) has published separately by age but the data only goes up to July 2022 despite the last publication being released on October 2023. Cancer deaths were at expected levels – but the data has not been updated....<<<Read More>>>...
