OPINION
We have arrived at a point in an election year when our votes matter, so expect some surprising replies to our emails and even some answers to our questions, but, if today was anything to go by, it won’t be without fireworks.
Yesterday, I fact checked David Seymour, who, in his Reality Check Radio interview, had asserted very strongly that New Zealand has had no excess deaths. I used the statistical graphical interface from the Human Mortality Database run by the University of California and the Max Planck Institute in Germany to generate charts to illustrate Seymour’s misunderstanding. This interface queried the same official data as Our World in Data referred to by David Seymour. These charts illustrated very clearly that New Zealand has had rising excess deaths since 2021.
Clinging to Total Lunacy
However, Rachel Beauchamp, executive assistant to David Seymour wrote to a correspondent at 11 am this morning (12 May) rejecting the information I posted. She asserted that David’s assessment that deaths in New Zealand were below historical averages was “factual”. In fact, a little bit more than that, Rachel said that anyone who clings to the idea that mRNA vaccines killed anyone is, in her words, “clinging to total lunacy” (???)
Low and behold, the New Zealand Herald, that bastion of mainstream Covid orthodoxy, published an article at 4.45 pm (12 May) this afternoon entitled “New Zealand records biggest increase in registered deaths in 100 years”. The Herald article referred to just released 2022 mortality figures.
From the headline, it won’t have escaped your notice that the excess deaths have become so large that even the Herald can’t ignore them any longer, but politicians apparently can. So who are the lunatics now?
The Herald article did its best to downplay the significance of so many people dying:
It began its statistical sleight of hand by comparing 2022 to 2021 rather than the historical average of deaths.
Then mentioned that 2020 had very low deaths because border controls and lockdowns kept seasonal flu and respiratory illness at very low levels. That is true, but it forgot to mention that the same controls and no flu conditions applied to most of 2021 as well.
A Lot of People Are Dying
Was it just unfortunate timing that Rachel Beauchamp did not know that the Herald was about to publish the official record of elevated excess deaths? Should we have expected the Ministry of Health to alert politicians that a lot of people were dying? Or have they been keeping quiet to protect themselves for other unspecified reasons? Is it all going very wrong for the Covid vaccination lobby? Are they panicking? What do you think?
No worries though, the Herald called in that well-worn epidemiologist Michael Baker, who for the first time seemed to admit that something might be going wrong. Rather than claiming, as he has previously, that New Zealand has no excess deaths, he started reminiscing about the great success in the initial years of the pandemic, (presumably 2020 when we had no Covid, no vaccines, no flu and very few doubts about Michael Baker).
In her email, Rachel unveiled the basis of David Seymour’s assertion that New Zealand has negative excess deaths (less than expected from historical trends). The fundamental of this assertion is that if you average the very low death totals from 2020 with subsequent years, you can make the excess deaths in 2021, 2022, and 2023 look a lot less concerning.
This cumulative averaging of deaths used by Michael Baker, tends to hide what is really going on. In fact, New Zealand’s excess deaths are getting larger year by year since 2020. It also avoids facing the fact that hospital admissions are also getting larger year by year and disproportionately affecting the vaccinated. Like the rise in deaths, hospital admissions began to rise in 2021, before we had Covid, but after we had the vaccine rollout.
2023 EXCESS DEATHS ARE RUNNING AT ALMOST TWICE THOSE OF 2022
We have reached a point now where the elephant in the corner of the room is becoming too large to ignore. 2023 excess deaths are running at almost twice those of 2022 which, as we have seen, were already at record breaking levels.
Have we entered the phase of political disbelief, when it becomes clear that something has gone terribly wrong, but no one wants to accept responsibility? In which misdirection and finger pointing become routine responses.
Rachel Beauchamp wants us to doubt our sanity. Public health should not be a political football, it is a matter of life and death. Right now, while death is getting the upper hand, no one in authority wants to accept responsibility or do anything about it.
New Zealand is not alone. Overnight the UK Mirror published an article “Brits are dying in their tens of thousands – and we don’t really have any idea why”. It continued:
“Tens of thousands more Brits died than usual from May to December 2022, excluding Covid as a cause of death, raising serious questions as to why so many died.”
It described the figures as “shocking”.
Professor David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography at Oxford University, told the Mirror:
“a lot of Brits are dying, but not necessarily of a specific cause”.
After talking to the experts and considering everything from hot summers to obesity to dementia to flu to old age to demographic changes, the Mirror concludes:
“This still leaves tens of thousands of dead Brits, with no clear explanation as to quite how they died.”
NZ Excess Deaths 18 Per Cent Above the Five-Year Average
Just as in New Zealand, the level of excess deaths in the UK is accelerating. The week ending April 21 2023, the Office of National Statistics reported excess deaths were 21 per cent above the five-year average. That is 2540 excess deaths in one week alone. Currently, in New Zealand, 2023 excess deaths are running at 18 per cent above the five year average, a very comparable figure.
For two years, we have been writing about published scientific research containing evidence of increased illness related to Covid vaccination – cancers, heart disease, myocarditis, kidney disease, strokes, neurological illness, etc. These are all conditions with long term implications for health and longevity. We seem to be facing these consequences now, but the government and the health authorities are looking the other way.
Please continue to speak up. The more sane voices we can raise, the greater the chance of someone finally taking these excess deaths seriously.
