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I can’t emphasise enough my Third Law of the Media: “Always assume a ‘fact-checker’ is trying to bullshit you”. Seriously, always start from this baseline assumption, and you’ll rarely go wrong.
Most importantly: Never, ever take a “fact-checker” at their word.
Read the whole “fact-check” with your bullshit filters turned right up to 11. Spot the weasel words, the straw men and the shifting goalposts.
Take this for, example: The ABC
Have COVID-19 vaccines caused a 1,000 per cent surge in excess deaths of children?
The only problem is that the blog post they’re attacking never made that claim. This is a classic straw-man argument.
What the blog post actually said is:
“In children aged 0-14 there has been a horrifying 542 per cent INCREASE in excess death this year compared with last year in Europe,” he tweeted, sharing a link to his longer (paywalled) article.
Soon after, he revised that figure upwards: to 1,101 per cent.
As the ABC later quietly admits, that is 100% correct.
The blogger referred to “excess deaths”, which are any deaths in addition to what would normally be expected given past trends, including those directly and indirectly related to COVID-19.
His underlying figures were sourced from EuroMOMO, a database operated by a government research institute in Denmark which collates excess mortality data for 22 European countries (plus Israel).
According to the dataset, there have been 841 excess deaths among children aged 0-14 so far in 2022, compared with 70 over the same period in 2021.
That works out to be an increase of 1,101 per cent, although the actual number of additional deaths (771) is far smaller. By comparison, there were an extra 17,772 excess deaths (8.4 per cent) in 2022 across all age groups.
But our fearless “fact-checkers” will never, ever just straight-up admit that anyone not officially approved by The Science™ and the Podiums of Truth is actually right.
So, they go slithering around and shift the goalposts.
While the blogger did not explicitly link the spike to COVID-19 vaccines, many joined the dots.
So what? He doesn’t control what anyone else makes of his work.
Now come the “experts” to weasel their way out of admitting that he’s right.
Dmitri Jdanov, who heads the Laboratory of Demographic Data at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, told CheckMate via email that the “impressive” percentage change was just an effect of “mortality in this age group [being] relatively low”.
That’s true-ish, but so what? I mean, if one extra child normally dropped dead in a year, but by a fluke, two did, that would be a 200% increase. Which would sound worse than it is. But an increase from 70 to 841 is far more alarming.
In addition, Mr Jdanov said the 0-14 age range was “very broad” and that this, coupled with a lack of detailed data, could skew the results due to higher rates of infant mortality.
Which still begs the question: why?
Nevertheless, both experts agreed that deaths were currently higher than would typically be expected, and not all due to COVID-19.
Dr Adair suggested that the post-lockdown resurgence of respiratory infections such as influenza and pneumonia could be playing a role in younger groups.
Meanwhile, Mr Jdanov said the increase might be explained by the “long-term consequences of the pandemic”, such as overloaded public health systems, postponed treatments and screenings and the consequences of lockdowns.
Some of those same factors may also be pushing up infant mortality, he said.
ABC Australia
Which in itself is a horrifying indictment of Covid policies — and vindication of we “deniers” who warned that the effects of lockdowns would be worse than Covid itself.
But why listen to us: if you didn’t hear it from Jacinda Ardern, then it’s not true. Because Jacinda said so, and it’s true if Jacinda said so.
If that looks like circular logic to you, you just stop thinking for yourself. That’s extremist misinformation, that is.
