Monthly Archives: August 2021

Apples and Oranges

Another day, and another tractor production is up paper from the University of AstraZeneca sitting at Oxford. The headline finding reported is that the covid vaccines do cause rare serious complications, but at a lesser rate than covid–19 itself causes the same complications. The mainstream media, including Twiddle and Tweedle on the Today programme, predictably reported the story uncritically, creating what the Chinese call a “trustworthy and glorious public opinion atmosphere“. In reality, the paper has more holes in it than a tramp’s trousers, and stinks … 

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The Roots of the New Normal

For some, the odious new normal is yet another malign child of the pandemic. It is the dustpan where the armies of the new normal faithful are swept into obedience, each faithful soldier but a speck of dust swirling in the maelstrom, carried along by the madness of crowds. Each one wears the badge of compliance, a mask: some gaily embroidered and tightly fitted, like a wired brassiere, others black, as if to signal ask not for whom the bell tolls, and yet more the ragged remains of a soiled and stained surgical mask, left dangling from ear or wrist. At the other end of town, covid marshals scan smart phones as visitors to the exhibition centre show their digital covid papers to confirm a recent negative lateral … 

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Muppetry

Muppetry, n. the fanatical desire to promote and implement minimum unit pricing for alcohol as the solution to the world’s alcohol problems.

There has been a rise in muppetry in the UK in recent years. Two of our nations have introduced minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol, first Scotland, in 2018, and then Wales, in 2020. All eyes are on the data, to see whether muppetry works. The muppets of course want to show that it does, while the more sceptical, including Dr No, are inclined to be, well, more sceptical. Almost a decade ago, when muppetry was all the rage, but had yet to be introduced, Dr No published a number of posts pointing out that … 

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Nefarious Coviddery and Death Inflation*

At long last, Dr No has found a way of estimating official covid death inflation. By official covid death inflation, he means the extent to which the authorities have deliberately inflated the number of covid deaths to increase, in SPI-B’s infamous words, “the perceived level of personal threat…among those who are complacent”. Let us be absolutely clear: this is the government, and its agencies, deliberately massaging official statistics, to scare the population witless, into submission and compliance. … 

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Hot Vaccine Bias

Dr No’s last post showed there were substantial humps in non-covid–19 mortality in care homes and private homes in the first wave of the pandemic, and that these humps cannot by fully explained by a displacement of what would have been hospital deaths to care and private home deaths. Something else must be at work, which Dr No rather  loosely suggested might be ‘neglect, or worse’, in the absence of other obvious explanations. The ‘or worse’ is to cover the ‘midazolam thing’ — the excess use of midazolam last year, and by implication, excessive, and inappropriate, use of end-of-life care to … 

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Murder By Decree

For a while, Dr No has bumbled on about having to wait a while to get data on non-covid–19 deaths caused by the panicdemic, that is, the collateral damage done not by the virus, but by our response to the virus. It now turns out that the data has been hiding in plain sight all along, in one of ONS’s cryptically named data files. The trail starts with referencetable10052021114704.xlsx, which was recently uncovered and dissected by the excellent John Dee, and which can still be downloaded from ONS’s own website here. … 

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