Australia's Excess Deaths (A Case Study)

Data analysis is like learning jujitsu. Until you find the correct "position" to really get a "grip" on the data... it will either elude you or mislead you.

Mathew Crawford has recently produced three outstanding educational articles on how to wrestle with and properly understand and interpret data:

• A Mechanistic Explanation of the Vaccine Efficacy Illusion

• Reanalysis of the Society of Actuaries Group Life COVID-19 Mortality Survey Report Destroys Vaccine Efficacy Narrative

• A Lesson in Understanding Scatter Plots Over Time

A section from “A Mechanistic Explanation of the Vaccine Efficacy Illusion” is worth repeating here. It should be read several times and then pondered some more:

Important: Judgment of causation never rises above opinion in science and inferential statistics, but the more we study (anything) phenomena—and most particularly if we test them and make "bets" over them—the better sense we get of which images are most valuable for that judgment. People who study science and statistics more learn a few hundred…let's call them "jujitsu positions" in science and data that "beat us" (fool us or lead us honestly astray) until we learn how to handle them.

The Guardian published an article on September the 4th 2022, titled: “Covid pandemic may be causing more deaths than Australia’s daily numbers suggest”.

With a nice little gaslighting preamble:

“More than 80% of the country’s Covid deaths occurred in 2022, likely in part due to success of early control measures but questions remain.”

Excuse me… that’s 80% of the country’s Covid deaths that occurred AFTER the vaccination campaign. Did I miss the memo? I thought the vaccines were meant to prevent Covid deaths?

If this is how we define “success”… I would hate to imagine what “failure” looks like… lol.

(Truth be told, any objective reader will clearly grasp the vaccination campaign was a complete and utter failure, no matter how they try and dress it up.)

Anyway, the purpose of this article is due to the following image which is found in the Guardian’s article. It grabbed my attention. Especially the “expected deaths” region, which is highlighted in blue:

The “expected death” region is seriously misleading. We will unravel why in the following figures.

Here are the plots for total number of deaths in Australia from 2015 to 2022, derived from the official data (click on the images to enlarge, and read the annotations):

These plots can be divided into 5 time periods:

• 2015, 2016 and 2018

• 2017

• 2019

• 2020

• 2021-2022

The plots for each period of time look like this:

We will use these three years as our baseline.

Next we will look at 2017:

We know 2017 was an abnormal year and it makes no sense to include it in the baseline.

NOTE: Even though there were many excess deaths in 2017, due to a bad flu season, the media did not unleash mass-hysteria on the public.

Removed 2017 and added 2019

Removed 2019 and added 2020:

Removed 2020 and added 2021 and 2022:

Nearly every week in 2021 had more deaths than the 2015, 2016 and 2018 baseline. That is nearly a full 52 week straight.

Remember Australia was in hard lock down during this period with very little reported Covid cases.

The vaccination campaign started in earnest in March 2021, which also corresponds to an uptick in excess deaths.

From the 45th week of 2020 to the 13th week of 2021, there were still many excess deaths, and yet the vaccination campaign had NOT yet started.

What are these excess deaths due to?

Here is the image from the Guardian again:

Do you see the problem with the “expected deaths” region, highlighted in blue?

Not only can data mislead and confuse the most meticulous and honest of inquirers, it readily lends itself to being doctored in order to mislead the public.

The reality is, the data has far more important questions, which require thoughtful answers, than officials would like to admit.

I know these illustrations are not the theoretical “approved” approach for analysing excess deaths, but in my defence, this is real world data that needs to be wrestled with in different ways to uncover new questions, which in turn demand open and honest discussions take place, in the pursuit of truthful answers.

Observations

• 2017 was an abnormal year. It should be recognized as such, especially the excess deaths during the “flu” season. There are two points that are important to make:

  1. These excess deaths were acknowledged at the time. In fact similar excess deaths were noticed all around the world, however it did not result in “mass hysteria”.

  2. These excess deaths should be recognized as abnormal. Instead they are conveniently used to provide “cover” for the excess deaths in 2021 and 2022. This is unacceptable.

• People die all the time. In fact in Australia over 3,000 people die nearly every week. Shock horror!

  • <sarc>Why is no one talking about this? It should be all over the news. It is much worse than Covid! </sarc>

  • It also begs the question… with so many deaths that are naturally occurring in a given week…. do most people even notice? The real question is… how many deaths would there need to be in a given week for most people to even get an inkling that there is something wrong going on?

  • That is a dead serious question (pun intended). Please take the time to think about it.

    • If there were 1,000 extra deaths each week, would you even notice?

    • It’s happening now so I already know the answer. But I’m curious… let me know in the comments how many extra deaths a week (given a baseline of 3,000) would cause people to start asking questions?

• The most recent 2022 excess deaths are completely “OUT OF SEASON”. This should be extremely concerning to the “experts”.

• I hate to break it to people but everyone will die… eventually. It’s just a matter a time. All jokes aside, this observation is important when it comes to modelling death rates. “Excess deaths” is a misnomer and can be misleading because what we are really dealing with here is, people’s “life span” being shortened.

  • They key take away here is that people are dying before their “expected” time.

• If we change the lens with which we look at the data from “excess deaths” to “reduced life span”, we can reason with the data differently.

  • If people’s life span is being shortened, and if this is happening uniformly for the elderly, we should expect a decrease in excess deaths in future weeks and months. (Not only a decrease from the current high levels, but a decrease below the baseline.)

  • That is not happening. If fact we are seeing very high, sustained excess deaths in 2022, on top of already high excess deaths in 2021. This is very troubling.

  • It means that, the people dying are not people who were “expected” to die within the coming weeks or months (from the time they died.). i.e. their lifespans were not shortened by a few weeks or months, but years…. because we haven’t hit a lull yet.

  • The previous sentence should be bursting the ear drums of officials in charge of managing this pandemic. We are talking about a monumental disaster of epic proportion here.

  • The longer this sustained excess deaths last, the worse the implications get. To be totally clear we should NOT expect the death rates to go back to the baseline levels either. They should dip well below the baseline for the next few months to balance things out. If it does not dip, it simply means that more and more people are dying ahead of their “expected” time. (In other words, to keep these sustained high levels of death we are talking about a “compounding” phenomenon. I won’t belabour the point. I will just say… it’s bad. I don’t want to sound overly alarmist either, but based on the standards set by the media at the beginning of the pandemic, what is happening now is an order of magnitude worse. But no one in charge seems to care…)

• If the people dying are not the ones who had their lifespan shortened by a few weeks or months, but years…. who are they? and “why” is this happening?

  • I have some ideas but am more interested to hear about your opinion. Please let me know in the comments. (To be clear, I’m not looking for the obvious “vaccine deaths”, but rather, their predispositions. The vaccines are not affecting “the elderly” equally. There is more going on here than first meets the eye.)

Side Note

In a previous article “Using "guidelines" to deceive people is more powerful than manipulating data”, I discussed an observation that was first pointed out to me by Dr. Didier Raoult.

Many people tested positive for Covid within days of getting their first shot.

This was not the case in Australia.

In fact there were very few reported cases during this time, and even less reported deaths IN THE MEDIA. (i.e. the media completely ignored the excess deaths because it couldn’t sensationalize them.)

Curiously, the official data reveals many excess deaths during this period. But since they were not Covid related deaths, and “by definition” occurred in the unvaccinated, these excess deaths were never reported in the media.

(“By Definition”, we are referring to the fact that people were only “officially” vaccinated 2 weeks AFTER receiving their shot.)

I’m just leave the above image there for you to make your own conclusions.

References:

• Data can be downloaded from the bottom of this page: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release#timeliness-and-completeness-of-data

• Direct link: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/jan-may-2022/Deaths%20by%20week%20of%20occurrence%2C%202015-21.xlsx

• The Guardian article was inspired by the excess mortality article published by “Actuaries Digital”: https://www.actuaries.digital/2022/08/04/covid-19-excess-mortality-continues-for-april-2022/

• Excess mortality in children from 28 European countries

• Excess Mortality and Elevated Cancer Rates Likely to Get Worse