John Bye Profile picture
Dec 4, 2021 15 tweets 7 min read Read on X
Anti-vaxxers have been going wild over this paper from several HART members. But it misses a blindingly obvious explanation for the odd looking ONS data, ignores the data definitions, then manipulates the data to falsely claim the vaccines cause a (non-existent) spike in deaths!
The data oddity that caught their eyes is a bump in deaths per 100,000 in unvaccinated people in each age group, soon after that group starts being vaccinated.

But as the overall mortality rates show, there is NO spike in deaths during the vaccine rollout.

So what's going on?
The paper's authors wrongly believe the vaccines are killing us, so they present the data like this.

I replicated this graph from the raw ONS data, and it is correct. BUT it has an obvious explanation that doesn't involve claiming the ONS is deliberately miscategorising deaths!
Let's plot that graph another way. Instead of looking at the % of people in the 60-69 age group who were vaccinated each week, let's look at the % of them who are still in the unvaccinated group at the end of each week.

Here it is for 1st doses. Can you see what's going on yet?
It's even clearer for 2nd doses.

When death rates in each age group peak, the population that's taking place in is small.

Death rates in unvaccinated 60-69 year olds peaked when only 8.3% of people in that age group were unvaccinated.

For single dosed people it's 2.5% or less!
This is a relatively small and unrepresentative group, which will be biased towards people who were too ill to get vaccinated at the time.

Which probably explains why their death rates appear higher. Just 180 "extra" deaths a week produces that huge bump in death rates.
Of course, HART instead assume the data is faulty, and (having failed to read the data definitions, as usual) conclude that the vaccination status of people who die is systematically miscategorised.

In fact, the definitions show the categories do exactly what it says on the tin:
HART then go a step further though. This has Joel Smalley’s grubby fingerprints all over it, as it creates a completely artificial baseline that assumes people die at a constant rate all year (!), and arbitrarily assigns every "excess" death in the unvaccinated to the vaccinated!
This produces an alarming looking graph that claims there's a HUGE spike in non-covid death rates immediately after vaccination.

Which is, of course, complete and utter nonsense. Absolutely nothing in the ONS data they're using supports this false claim.
In fact, using the method described in the paper, I can't replicate this graph. If I conveniently ignore any negative "excess" deaths it generates, I get a close match up to about week 12, but after that they do something else to the data that isn't described in the paper. 🤔
Regardless, if you look at the REAL overall non-covid death rate for all people in this age group (the black line in my graph below), you can see there are NO spikes, even though the individual subpopulations (due to selection bias) go up and down dramatically.

No excess deaths.
Once again, Joel Smalley has conjured up non-existent excess deaths by creating a fake baseline and then manipulating the data to give the answer he wants.

This is far from the first time he's done this. Why do @MartinNeil9 & @profnfenton work with him?

Having missed an obvious explanation for a data oddity and fabricated data to fit their anti-vax narrative, the authors then accuse the ONS of systematically miscategorising deaths based on vaccination status, possibly "as a matter of policy"!

It's real tin foil hat level stuff.
It's a puzzle that @qmul continue to ignore @MartinNeil9 and @profnfenton's increasingly blatant anti-vax output and links to cranks and conspiracy nuts.

At this point they're either deliberately misleading people or just plain incompetent.

Neither is a good look for academics.
PS: they also claim the ONS's population data is wrong.

But as the paper says, "populations move between age groups as people have birthdays".

They forgot that this includes people who turned 10, who are then added to the data.

This process ends 10 years after the 2011 census:

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More from @_johnbye

Feb 17
This week sees the second "ARC Forum" in London, a right wing talking shop with overtones of Islamophobia, transphobia and climate change denial, funded by Paul Marshall and Legatum, who are also behind GB News.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of familiar faces there... 🧵 Image
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Alan Miller from anti-lockdown turned anti-everything group Together is on a panel.

He was interviewed at ARC Forum by right wing channel Newsmax Australia, and was apparently "shocked to learn" that, according to them, Australia has no free speech and supports trans people. 🤷‍♂️ Image
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Toby Young founded Daily Sceptic, which like Together started out as anti-lockdown but then branched out into culture war outrage farming and omni-contrarianism.

It's still edited by a member of anti-vax misinformation group HART, who laundered their work through the site. Image
Read 8 tweets
Feb 6
Struggling to get papers published? Why not start your own scientific journal? 🤷‍♂️ That's what the Great Barrington Declaration's authors have done.

Martin Kulldorff is editor-in-chief, and Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta are on the editorial board. But wait, there's more. 🧵 Image
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The editorial board of the GBD's journal also includes their Collateral Global colleagues David Livermore (ex-HART), Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson (whose recent work includes dumpster diving "studies" misrepresenting responses to FOI requests from random members of the public). Image
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Other familiar names include Scott Atlas (former Trump advisor, and co-founder with Kulldorff and Bhattacharya of the "Academy for Science and Freedom"), John Ioannidis (who, like Gupta, underestimated covid's fatality rate) and Marty Makary (Trump's nominee to head the FDA). Image
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Read 4 tweets
Jan 25
BREAKING: None of this is true.
The father was 18 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, and living in Uganda.
He's also a Tutsi - the victims of the genocide, not its perpetrators.
And Keir Starmer didn't represent him. Image
Needless to say, former Brexit Party MEP turned conspiracy theorist Jim Ferguson gives absolutely no evidence to support these claims, which seem to be based on social media rumours that have been circulating for months.

But he has form in this area...
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Read 4 tweets
Jan 22
Conspiracy X's meltdown over Trump backing mRNA cancer vaccines is a thing of beauty. 😆

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Apparently the mRNA cancer vaccines are "all part of the depopulation agenda".

Conspiracy X went from "Make America Healthy Again" to "oh my God, Trump's trying to kill us all" so fast they'll get whiplash. 😆 Image
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And if you thought "the depopulation agenda" was wild, how about mRNA cancer vaccines as a CIA assassination tool to off people chosen for termination by AI, or to "shut off people's connection to God"? 🤯 Image
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Read 9 tweets
Jan 9
As wildfires continue to burn in LA, Naomi Wolf has falsely claimed they were fueled by cloud seeding, and shared stories linking them to anything from 15 minute cities and a supposed "globalist deindustrialization plan" to the 2028 Olympics and space lasers. 🤨 Image
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Whenever there's a fire, conspiracy theorists always blame "directed energy weapons". Although often the videos they share show a far more plausible cause. In this case, it's a sparking power line banging against a tree amidst high winds... Image
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One of the weirder conspiracy theories I've come across in the past is that there's a vast network of tunnels under LA used to traffick children to the stars, linked to the Getty Museum. 🤷‍♂️

Unsurprisingly QAnon types are linking the nearby Palisades fire to this bizarre story... Image
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Read 5 tweets
Dec 21, 2024
After the horrific attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, all the people you'd expect immediately blamed Islam and called for Muslims to be deported en masse for one man's crime. Just one problem... Apparently the suspect isn't a Muslim. 🧵 Image
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The apparent suspect in the attack on the Magdeburg market is a Saudi refugee who denounced Islam, accuses Germany of a "secret project to Islamize Europe", and regularly shared posts by far right accounts using similar language to the people who assumed he was an Islamist. Image
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Even after the suspect's identity and beliefs were reported, racists and bigots on X were still blaming Islamists for the attack, or even claiming it was an attempt to "gaslight us" and "we all know why the terrorist carried out the attack".

Obviously we *don't* know why yet. Image
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Read 5 tweets

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