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. Quarters 1 to 4 are identified by the colours shown in the key. What do we see?

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 concept to understand, hot stiff bias is typically hard to quantify, but the latest ONS data does gives us a clue. It seems that as the weather warms up, covid hot stiff bias cools off.

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 in a recent post about a BMJ Rapid Response which suggested significant underreporting of covid vaccination side-effects. What can the Yellow Card Scheme tell us about adverse reactions to the covid vaccines? Is there any evidence for or against significant under-reporting of adverse reactions?

Modern life is full of vile words and phrases. Dr No is not taking about the more traditional terms of abuse aimed at race and sex, but of the new elitist terms of abuse aimed at proles, thickos and others who for whatever reason have failed to embrace the Establishment narrative. Take vaccine hesitancy, the catchall phrase for all who decline, as they are perfectly entitled to do, to have a vaccine. A picture is cast of a timid individual, perhaps like a child reluctant to enter a swimming pool, who will nonetheless get there in the end, after a little encouragement from the grown ups. The term is innately paternalistic, condescending and belittling, and made all the more sinister by the fact that the cure is invariably some form of political re-education, indoctrination or behavioural nudging. How curious then that one of the groups most likely to show vaccine hesitancy is the one group we might reasonably expect to be the most grown up about health care, health care workers themselves.

It is now almost a year since the British government decided we couldn’t be trusted to look after ourselves. Instead, we need an avalanche of draconian regulations to protect us from our selves, and such is the zeal with which the government has applied these regulations, that we now have hundreds, or thousands if you count the individual clauses, of these intrusive rules that interfere with our normal behaviour. The nation that only eighteen months ago sang Britons never never shall be slaves at the Last Night of the Proms rapidly and voluntarily enslaved itself to these draconian regulations. Even now, over 75% of people polled want social distancing measures, including masks and the two metre rule, to remain in place until at least Autumn 2021. In another poll, over 50% of those polled said they would miss some aspects of lockdown when it is over. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, almost half of those polled think they look as good as, or better, wearing a mask, than they look when not wearing one. In contrast, in Germany, a land once described as a nation of automatons led by a lunatic who looks like a clown, 60% of people polled think that their lockdown should be eased. Today, it is the Germans, and indeed many other European nations, who refuse to be slaves, while we have become the nation of automatons led by a lunatic who looks like a clown.