“And when you reach the scene of crime — Macavity’s not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air —
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!”— T. S. Eliot, “Macavity: The Mystery Cat”, Old Possum’s Book of Practical CatsPerhaps the greatest problem facing modern science isn’t the corrupting influence of power and money, but an even deeper one of incomprehensibility. Dr No has touched before on how increasing super-specialisation means that increasingly scientists from one discipline are unable to make sense of another discipline, because the language and theory in each discipline have become so dense as to be impenetrable to all but initiates in that discipline. It is as if science has become a broad church spreading its wings over a vast array of cults and sects, each one swearing allegiance to the Greater God of Science, but each with its own rules and creeds, an impenetrable vista of numberless caverns of knowledge meaningless to man.

With the barrage of political and mainstream media talk of rising covid cases, new scariants and the urgency of vaccinating all, and then some — soon there will be talk of syringe drivers, pumping in covid vaccine in 24/7 — and not to mention Tuesday’s nodding through, not so much on a song and a prayer as on a laugh and a wink, by the blind horses in Westminter, of another six month extension of the Coronavirus Act, there can be little doubt that government is limbering up to implement Plan B. No doubt there is already a Plan C in draft, and so on, to pile Pelion on Ossa, forever and ever, world without end. But how are we really faring with covid these days?

Byzantine formulas unfathomable by man, stretching out beyond five miles of fetid ground, and down to a sunless sea — all very well, but sometimes the simpler analysis better does our pleasure guarantee. The human brain is smarter at spotting a trend in a chart than in a table, and the chart at the top of this post tracks the weekly all cause mortality over the summer, expressed as a percentage difference compared to the average mortality over 2015 to 2019 for the same week, with an added trend line, using ONS data. Anything above the 0% line is excess mortality, and we can see at a glance things are not going well. In fact, we shall all likely be dead pretty soon, if the trend in recent weeks continues. What on earth is going on?

Dr No had high hopes that, given recent data published by ONS, PHE and NHS England, on deaths by covid vaccination status and vaccination rates, he would be able to get something of an answer to the vexed question of whether the covid vaccines increase or decrease overall mortality. Fat chance. He quickly found himself wandering on a tundra of statistical quicksand. Key data was missing, and the numbers that were available simply didn’t add up. He spent far more time than he should have done peering up ONS drainpipes and down PHE rabbit holes getting nowhere. It was yet another landscape of cavernous numbers meaningless to man. Nearing desperation, he was about to give up, when it occurred to him that he could make a simple adjustment, and get an answer. This post describes the calculations, including the adjustment — which is not without it problems — and comes to two important conclusions: firstly that covid vaccines may well increase mortality in the short term, and secondly, being unvaccinated does not appear to carry increased mortality risk. 

The PCR test is the petrol that keeps the covid pandemic running. It powers almost every aspect of the UK government’s coronavirus dashboard, and more often than not puts the tiger in ONS’s tank. A positive covid PCR result defines covid cases, covid admissions, and, more often than not, covid deaths. Without the PCR test, the pandemic would be like a car that has run out of petrol: stalled, and not going anywhere. Without the PCR test, the mainstream media too would be stalled, having precious little to report. It is, in truth, no exaggeration to say the PCR test is the pandemic, and the pandemic is the PCR test. If there was no PCR test, there would be no pandemic. How curious it is, then, that so very little attention is paid to the reliability of this mysterious fuel that powers the pandemic.

In its efforts to create a troubling and gruesome public opinion atmosphere over covid, the government of People’s Republic of Great Britain have never felt in the least bit shy about inflating the numbers to serve its purposes. Dr No, and a good many other observers, have consistently pointed out the artifice of relying meaningless positive PCR tests to define cases, and of allowing covid to trump the natural underlying cause of death on death certificates. Both conveniently inflate the numbers, such that we might observe that the authorities look at a covid number in the same way that a party organiser looks at a balloon, as something to be inflated. Given flagrant inflation of two of the three main covid numbers, cases and deaths, might it also be the case that the third number, hospitalisations, is also inflated?