Fighting the Flawed Science and Statistics of the Covid Event
Fighting the Flawed Science and Statistics of the Covid Event
Professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil take an in-depth look back at the Covid crisis in their new book “Fighting Goliath: Exposing the flawed science and statistics behind the COVID-19 event”.
It is somewhat ironic that although Fenton and Neil are mathematicians, their new book quickly reached the top of the Amazon sales charts in the 'Immunology' and 'Physician and Patient Medical Ethics' categories. Less surprisingly, the same happened in the 'Science and Maths Ethics' chart.
Fenton is Professor Emeritus of Risk, while Neil is Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Queen Mary University of London. They began to analyse the Covid issues at the very beginning of the crisis in 2020 and published their findings consistently on their Substack publication Where Are The Numbers? as well as in other publications that would publish them – at one point, due to widespread censorship in mainstream science journals and other media, recognised scientists were no longer welcome. As they quickly came to understand that the virus was being portrayed as being dozens of times more dangerous than it actually was, and they also criticised the Covid vaccines – especially their efficacy but also harms related to them – they have understandably had to endure everything that scientists and other activists who opposed the governments' mindless Covid coercion and who represented the voice of reason in those hysterical times had to endure – censorship, cancelling, smear campaigns, government spying after them, etc. We have written extensively about Neil and Fenton's work before here and here.
An unfair struggle
The unfair struggle that they and others like them had to fight deserves to go unchallenged in the biblical parallel drawn in the title of Neil and Fenton's recent book, of David struggling with Goliath. However, as we well know, in his unequal battle, David killed the giant Philistine warrior Goliath with a single well aimed stone that struck his opponent on the forehead. While we can look at the Covid crisis from different angles now, it remains undeniable that this unemotional network of actors – the medical junta which can be represented by Goliath – that engaged in intimidation, abuse of power, vaccine coercion, spreading of lies, etc., was never really held accountable. It is difficult even to find people involved in spreading propaganda who would honestly admit to the mistakes that were made, let alone that the authorities as a whole would have drawn any meaningful conclusions. It is noteworthy that there have also been very few ex-post judgments from the courts in the world that really condemn the unreasonable and harmful path taken back then.
Professor Neil acknowledges this vital fact but also recalls that although David struck Goliath with the first stone, he had earlier picked five good stones from the riverbank. “So maybe we have more than one stone and we've used up a few. So hopefully we'll take down Goliath before we have to use our sling to throw five,” he says.
Neil and Fenton's book, based on a collection of their published articles, is undoubtedly at least part of these figurative stones. It is, among other things, a journey of two professors learning more and more about Covid themselves, while uncovering more and more flaws in the so-called official Covid narrative. “These articles deal a devastating blow to this official narrative. The whole story could be invalidated by one or two refutations, but Norman and Martin leave nothing standing,” writes Nick Hudson, a South African actuary and investor who has extensively researched Covid issues, in the foreword to the book. Hudson's word carries weight on these issues, as he too began to analyse Covid as soon as 2020 and exposed propaganda and lies around it, setting up the research group PANDA with the aim of providing fact-based information for everyone who wanted to understand the situation. You can read more about Hudson and his efforts here.
Hudson is, of course, not the only voice to express his support for Fenton and Neil's book. US politician and vaccine awareness activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedy family, has also expressed his appreciation. Others who have written testimonials to the book include Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as Steve Kirsch, a US entrepreneur who has highlighted much critical information on Covid vaccines, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist who has also highlighted the harms related to the Covid vaccines, and Dr. Clare Craig, a clinical pathologist who has worked on the same issue, et al. The support of these people in itself shows the depth of the work done by Fenton and Neil.
“This thing seems to be completely forgotten”
Despite the seriousness of the issue and the fact that society still has to deal with the consequences of the senseless policies implemented by the authorities during the crisis, the reaction of many people when talking about Covid in retrospect is rather that it should be forgotten already. “I'm not a psychotherapist or a sociologist, but nevertheless, it seems that that response is either perhaps a functional trauma that they don't want to revisit, or it might be a shame that they behaved in ways or certainly agreed with the propaganda and responded to it,” Neil says. Indeed, there were many people who supported harmful lockdown policies, which hit the most vulnerable – the elderly and children – hardest. There were so many who supported sacking people who did not want to be injected with ineffective and untested Covid vaccines which had safety issues. Many called for unvaccinated people to be deprived of medical care or put in concentration camps, not to mention mocking them in public. “They don't want to visit too closely a conversation around what actually happened and how they behaved. You know, after four years, this thing seems to be completely forgotten,” Neil admits.
He also notes that some people have told him and Fenton that their book came out too late. “But we've been fine with that, because we were warning the public about the Covid-19 event continously during the time and the lack of real strong evidence for lots of the presumed narrative,” he says. “Since March 2020, we've carefully documented all that, almost like journalists or historians,” Neil adds.
The book paints a picture of what issues were in focus at a particular point in time throughout the crisis for Neil and Fenton, and indeed for the whole society. This also means that the book is quite voluminous, with Fenton and Neil discussing, among other things, the origins of the virus and the excess mortality caused by the virus, which was presented to be many times higher than really was, causing public fear. They also outline why PCR testing statistics cannot be considered reliable, show that the lockdown policy and masking were useless in stopping the spread of the virus, and so on. For example, they have written at length on the topic of the disappearance of the flu in 2020 and point out the obvious – in all likelihood it looks like the flu cases were simply diagnosed as Covid.
Statistical tricks with Covid deaths
Neil says that while the book contains a few articles that are humorous, it is still broadly an academic work, with nearly 1,000 relevant references to official statistics, as well as to academic papers and analyses by themselves and other authors.
As noted, one of the important issues they address in the book is the mortality associated with Covid disease. Using the UK as an example, they argue that all cases where a person died within 28 days of a positive Covid test were recorded as caused by Covid. This is understandably a very biased way of collecting statistics. In addition, there were many cases where a patient who arrived at the hospital was diagnosed with Covid, but in reality, it had nothing to do with the cause of their subsequent death. Nevertheless, it was recorded as caused by Covid. “So people were dying with Covid-19 rather than of Covid-19,” he says.
“And in the UK, the vast majority of people who were dying supposedly of Covid-19 already had significant comorbidities. So they were very unhealthy, very vulnerable,” Neil explains. “They were subject to PCR testing on a regular basis. So inevitably, if everyone in the hospital or in an old people's home are subject to PCR testing, when they do die, they're going to have a PCR positive of a large proportion of them, right? So this is systematic biasing of the data and then this propagandizing of the risk was all a statistical trick,” Neil adds.
Neil says that of course excess mortality could also have been seen in the pre-vaccine period, but together with Fenton, they have come to the conclusion that it may have been caused by a variety of reasons. The medical response or simply put the treatments used could have also played a role. In general, if a respiratory virus develops into pneumonia, it should be treated with antibiotics, but it was not the case this time. “What we found is that the amount of antibiotics that were being prescribed actually dropped. And we saw this in the UK and Germany, we saw it in the USA. So rather than giving people antibiotics when there's a respiratory virus pandemic, they were actually giving less,” Neil says.
He also points out that there were restrictions on resuscitation for Covid-patients. “So if someone had a heart attack, they would not resuscitate them and then they would attribute that death to Covid-19,” Neil cites examples that can seem almost unbelievable.
Perhaps the most shocking thing that was done to many Covid patients in the UK and elsewhere, according to Neil, was to prescribe palliative care. Palliative care is treatment designed to ease the serious pain of a patient when there is not much else left to do. For example, in the case of terminal cancer patients, the patient is given strong sedatives and painkillers. “You see a spike in the prescription patterns over time which correlates very tightly with the increase in deaths in old people's homes and hospitals where they gave more midazolam and more fentanyl to patients,” Neil says.
Vaccines and excess mortality
As for vaccines, Fenton and Neil initially looked at the overall statistical picture, and again, the officially reported information did not match the reality. For one thing, according to Neil, the clinical trials on vaccines themselves showed nothing to suggest that these substances were actually effective and safe. When the vaccines came on the market, the health authorities tried to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of the vaccines with statistics. However, Neil and Fenton discovered huge gaps when they examined these statistics. One of the claims used to make the case for vaccine efficacy was actually quite a sleight of hand, according to Neil. Probably many people remember that when vaccines first came out, it was explained that they would only be effective against the virus 21 days after the end of the vaccine course. In terms of statistics, it distorted the actual numbers quite a bit. If a person tested positive for Covid-19 in less than 21 days after the vaccine course, the case was recorded as that of an unvaccinated patient. “So all of the statistics that we were then producing were biased by this cheap trick,” Neil says.
He adds that it also had a major impact on the vaccine-related mortality statistics, which in reality should have given an early and powerful signal about the serious risks associated with Covid vaccines. “If you give someone a vaccine, and the vaccine has a safety signal that causes them to die early, then they'll claim they were unvaccinated,” Neil notes. “So it became a sort of perpetual sales machine for vaccines, where they could hand in hand make these statistical claims that it was effective and safe. But it was all a trick. So we exposed that,” Neil says. Today, the safety problems with these vaccines are fairly widely known.
Asked whether the excess mortality associated with these vaccines can also be proven, Neil says it is difficult. On the one hand, if you analyse the excess mortality data, you can indeed see that it increased in 2021 after the vaccine campaigns started, so there is a strong correlation. “More people are dying after the supposedly miraculous vaccine response than before. Whether that's all due to vaccination or due to the effects of lockdowns, the stress, social isolation, mental health of kids, it's a very complex picture now. Maybe intentionally so. So it's very difficult to identify what's causing these signals,” Neil explains. “Our view at the moment is based on what we have seen, that adverse events from the vaccine is probably as high as 1 in 800 doses,” he adds, pointing out that this frequency is unprecedentedly high and that these products should have been withdrawn from the market already at much lower risk levels.
Did we have a pandemic at all?
Fenton and Neil do not refer to the Covid crisis as a pandemic in their book, but say it was a 'Covid-19 event'. Of course, this is a deliberate use of words. Indeed, they state bluntly that the data they have examined does not show that there was any all-encompassing pandemic. At least not the kind of a pandemic that we imagine. “Yes, there was a virus and there was excess mortality, but not like it was presented,” he explains. “We had significant excess mortality, but only locally, not globally. Even within an individual country, we would see a spike in excess mortality locally in some areas, for example in London, in March and April of 2020, but nowhere else – nothing in Northern Ireland, nothing in Scotland. No sign of anything unusual going on,” Neil says. Similar examples can be drawn from the data in Italy, Germany, France, the United States, etc. “That doesn't make any sense,” Neil says, explaining that with a general virus ravaging the world in the way the news showed us, excess mortality should have been more evenly distributed. But it can't be the case that there are 30,000 cases of excess deaths in New York and nothing happens 100 miles away. “So this idea of a global spread that had a unique footprint that was completely unusual and it was different from any other respiratory disease... No, there's no evidence of that at all,” Neil says. He adds that there may have been other reasons for the rise in excess mortality, some of which he already discussed above.
All in all, one of the reasons why Fenton and Neil published their long-standing work as a book was the hope that it would become an evidence base for the investigation into the Covid crisis at some point, whether as an input to parliamentary committees of inquiry or in criminal proceedings. Indeed, some of their work has already been used in certain investigations, but, as stated at the outset, society at large is no longer – or not yet – willing to deal with the issue of this virus. “But the evidence is still there and there has to be the will of the people to push it through. Because I don't think that those who are responsible for what happened and are still in place are going to be, you know, 'Turkeys voting for Christmas',” Neil points out.
Many of those still in power are the same people who accused Neil, Fenton and their like of spreading misinformation, when in fact it was the other way round. “The main source of misinformation throughout Covid-19 did come from the governments. It was systemic, it was by design. They all accused their critics of misinformation in the same way, at the same time, with some degree of coordination and synchronicity. They were all pushing the same misinformation, so you couldn't readily attribute it to error,” Neil says.