This paper by several HART members misses an obvious explanation for some odd looking ONS data, ignores the ONS' data definitions, then manipulates that 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 it's taking place in is very small.
Death rates in unvaccinated 60-69 year olds peaked when only 8.3% in that age group were unvaccinated.
For single dosed people it's 2.5% or less!
This is a small and unrepresentative group, likely to include a significant proportion of 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.
In case there's any doubt about this, the Covid Pass has an exemption for people who aren't vaccinated because they're receiving end of life care or have short term medical issues.
This includes cases like Captain Tom, who wasn't vaccinated as he was being treated for pneumonia.
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.
The paper actually cuts off the top of its graphs to hide how ridiculous the spikes in death rates they claim at the start of the year look.
This is what they're NOT showing you, after I reproduced their data by arbitrarily reassigning every above average death, like they did:
In fact, even ignoring all the other issues with their methodology (if you can call it that), simply using a more representative baseline that varies slightly over the year in line with previous years completely reverses its output:
And if you look at the REAL overall non-covid death rate in 2021 for all people in this age group (the black line in my graph below), there are NO spikes, even though individual subpopulations (due to selection biases over time) go up and down dramatically.
Once again, Joel Smalley has conjured up non-existent excess deaths by creating a false 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 effectively fabricated data to fit their narrative, the authors 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.
They also claim the ONS' population data is wrong.
But as the paper says, "populations move between age groups as people have birthdays".
They forgot this includes people being added to the data as they turned 10!
This ends 10 years after the March 2011 census used by the ONS:
I pointed these issues out to Martin Neil (as did better qualified people, including an epidemiologist), but he dismissed our explanation for the rise in death rates in the dwindling number of unvaccinated people and simply ignored all the other problems.
The responsible thing to do would be to properly address the issues I and others have raised, or to retract the paper if they can't. Instead they're ignoring all criticism.
In the meantime the paper seems to be wildly mistaken, deliberately misleading, or quite possibly both.
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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... 🧵
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. 🤷♂️
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.
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. 🧵
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).
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).
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.
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.
Conspiracy X's meltdown over Trump backing mRNA cancer vaccines is a thing of beauty. 😆
🧵
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. 😆
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"? 🤯
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. 🤨
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...
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...
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. 🧵
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.
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".