Covid-19

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?

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 about as much, but as is often the case these days, the methodology is wrapped in a statistical miasma, making teasing out what was actually done a challenge. Undeterred, Dr No will take you on a journey that weaves through worm holes, and show why this paper isn’t even fit to make a contribution to a tramp’s bedding, let alone appear in a peer reviewed medical journal.

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. In SPI-B’s own words, this needs “hard-hitting emotional messaging” to be effective, and what could be more hard-hitting and emotional than official accounts of tens of thousands of deaths from the novel coronavirus? It is classical propaganda, “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view”, a shocking and lamentable abuse of power that has no place in a modern democracy. Yet, for the last eighteen months, this tissue of partial truths, lies and deceits has been relentlessly streamed day after day by the government, via a complicit mainstream media, to the British public. The vast majority of other countries have also fared no better.

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 ‘help the old folk on their way’. Dr No used ‘or worse’ because he is not fully persuaded this did (or for that matter did not) happen. There was a rise in aggregate midazolam prescribing — for example, see the striking April 2020 spike here — but there was also a rise in the numbers of deaths, so it becomes a chicken and the egg problem: did more deaths cause more midazolam prescriptions, or did more midazolam prescriptions cause more deaths? We don’t know. Perhaps it was a bit of both.

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. But referencetable­10052021114704.xlsx only covers part of the picture, specifically deaths in care homes, and furthermore, it has, as John Dee points out, been deliberately obfuckstrated by ONS, who have chosen to report cumulative totals rather than weekly numbers of deaths, which has the effect of disguising what John Dee rightly calls a “shocker of a hump” for non-covid deaths in the spring of 2020. Dr No’s chart for the de-obfuckstrated version of the data is shown above. The “shocker of a hump” is clearly visible in the red line representing non-covid care home deaths in April and May 2020.

Bad News Item of the Week was an Economist/Ipsos Mori poll revealing that around two thirds of Britons want a number of covid restrictions to remain in place until covid is ‘under control worldwide’, an uncertain end game with an elastic definition. Over a third want the restrictions, including masks in shops and on public transport, travel controls, compulsory check-ins for pubs and restaurants, and social distancing in theatres, pubs and sports grounds to remain in place for ever. Assuming the polling is accurate and representative, that means two thirds of fun loving Britons want Freedom Day postponed indefinitely, and a shocking one third want it postponed for ever. What on earth persuaded a once proud people, who stood ready only seventy years ago to fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets and hills, against the odious menace of tyranny, to become a nation of curtain twitching traffic wardens who want the suffocating embrace of authoritarianism?