Monthly Archives: April 2021

What’s in a baseline? We now have all cause mortality data for the first quarter of 2021 for England and Wales, and so it is time to add this data to one of the many charts Dr No has squirreled away in his covid dossiers. This chart shows quarterly standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) from Q1 2000 to Q1 2021, the last two decades. They are calculated using the indirect method, using all 2000 mortality data as the standard. Each point represents that quarter’s SMR compared to all 2000 all cause mortality, adjusted for population size and age distribution, with values above 100 meaning observed mortality was higher than expected using the 2000 baseline, and values below 100 meaning it was less than expected. … 

Early on in the pandemic, Dr No coined the phrase hot stiff bias to describe the habit of doctors of the covid tendency to attribute any death that might, however vaguely,  be due to covid, as being definitely due to covid. It is a covid specific form of the more general hot stuff bias, in which doctors tend to attribute illness and deaths to ‘hot’ diseases, the ones that are currently ‘hot’ topics. It is a practical expression of there’s a lot of it about, the old medical standby for when one doesn’t have a clue, but wants to sound as if one does. An easy … 

Isn’t it curious how describing deaths brought forward by a short interval by covid as dry tinder garners disapproval, while the MHRA’s breezy description of Yellow Card deaths associated with covid vaccination as spontaneous combustion — most likely would have died anyway, dear boy — goes quite un-remarked. Be that as it may, Dr No has taken a look at the MHRA’s Yellow Card Scheme for reporting adverse drug reactions, after some discussion …