On 17 Feb 2023, The Daily Sceptic published an article by Will Jones entitled, "Covid-19 and Excess Deaths: A Defence of the Virus theory." The central thesis advanced in the article is that "the main thing driving excess deaths over the last three years... is the new SARS-like virus....".
Sorry, we are absolutely snowed under. People are sending us the data for most of the world covering every conceivable situation. We have zero budget, no staff and other commitments that involve paying the bills.
Three years into this and there is no coherent, disciplined, alternative research infrastructure with the kinds of funding streams needed to the kinds of quality research we want, and everyone deserves.
A lot of energy and money in the movement goes into PR and messaging or gets channelled to the big substacks. Those doing the leg work get little to no recognition and ironically, this situation is somewhat similar to the mainstream.
Apologies for being negative but that's just the reality on the ground.
Mar 2, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Norman Fenton
The real divide in the world at present is not between left and right but between the adherents of Scientism and everyone else. The dispute in this article illustrates this divide well.
From the Scientism perspective, the world is an inherently dangerous place. The Experts, with their Science and Technology, could save us all if we would just let them. Unfortunately, the Luddites, the science deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the Trumpers, the Brexiteers, the selfish individualists, etc., like insolent children, keep thwarting their plans to protect us. Therefore, The Experts, guided by The Science, must seize all levers of power (to the extent they haven’t already) and impose their wisdom and benevolence on us all for our own collective good, through any means necessary.
From the other side, comprised of an odd mixture of Enlightenment liberals, religious conservatives, libertarians, heterodox intellectuals, etc., the world is immensely complex and the current state of science, expertise, and technology is woefully inadequate to manage these complex systems in a top-down fashion without causing all kinds of foreseeable and unforeseeable negative externalities. Moreover, these Experts and their hubris often cause the problems they claim to be protecting us from. The Church of Scientism also opens up myriad opportunities to acquire wealth and power, thereby heavily distorting The Experts’ favored analyses, policies, interventions, and technologies. Their hubris, greed, lust for power, and disregard or contempt for individual autonomy poses an existential threat to freedom and to humanity itself. They must be resisted.
I don't think microcosmic crowdfunding efforts will cut it I'm afraid. Its part and parcel of the bigger picture issue - how do we build parallel institutions or rescue the existing ones?
To attract high calibre staff, it would have to look kosher and have some longevity. A few quid here and there won't work for that.
No one has access to the data. One thing that researchers would need to do is gather our own data.
Thank you for posting this. I was very disappointed with the articles from Will Jones, with whom I usually agree.
Even before evidence that covid was in the community in 2019, the spikes observed in a few locations in March 2020, but not elsewhere looked extremely suspicious at the time. Considering that information, it is almost certain that these were mostly due to the collapse of the healthcare systems in these places that was a direct consequence of bad policy decisions taken there, that were not implemented in other places.
Nothing in the above paragraph means that covid does not exist. It only points to the fact that when you adopt health protocols that are not adequate, people die.
I am just reading "Plagues and Peoples" by William McNeill (1976), and today passed by footnote 56 to Ch. 3:
"In recent times when such a familiar disease as measles penetrated a previously unaffected community, initial die-off of up to 25 per cent has been observed, due largely to a breakdown of elementary nursing services. The classic example of this sort of disaster was recorded by William Squire, “On Measles in Fiji,” Epidemiological Society of London, Transactions, 4 (1877), 72–74. [...]"
That short paper is fascinating, and can be accessed here:
An investigation that begins with the premise that the natural work of a virus named SARS-CoV-2 caused NO excess deaths is far more likely to get us to the truth than one that begins with the assumption that SARS-CoV-2 caused all or most of those deaths.
Covid Is Not An Epidemiological Story; Covid Is A Crime Story. "Covid-19" is not a disease, it's a business plan.
They've been using this same pandemic investment strategy for over 30 years now- it's lucrative. Even most of the "top tier" Covid dissenters fell for this crap and parroted the pandemic lie.
Covid-19, the disease, is nothing more than a disease of ATTRIBUTION.
Covid-19, the media event, was the Trojan Horse constructed to usher in a complete transformation of our society.
Covid-19, the operation, was never an epidemiological event, it is a business model meant to increase the portfolios of the super-wealthy.
There is no such thing as “Covid 19” except as a criminal conspiracy.
It was an epidemic of violent government and medical assault against people, false attribution of death, and intense propaganda using fraudulent tests and bogus studies.
People were killed iatrogenically which gave the impression that there was a virus circulating.
There was no pandemic ever- there is no 'lab leak'- there is no unique viral pathogen- there is no "China Virus"- there is no "There" there. It is all fraud piled on top of fraud.
Even many "in the know" are still trapped in some version of the "Covid" merry-go-round. The official narrative of "Covid" is a fiction- all of it.
There was no pandemic- EVER.
Covid-19 is the biggest money laundering scheme in the history of the world.
"The Virus®" is the new Al Qaeda.
If this is not highlighted and understood one will always hit a dead end in their analysis and functional response.
Thank you. I correspond with Will Jones often and the Daily Sceptic has published several of my "early spread" articles, but I also disagree with Will's main conclusions.
I think copious evidence shows that the virus had spread "widely" across the globe by November 2019 and this spread must have started even before this - in October or September or even sooner. I also find the argument that the earlier variations of the virus produced "low level" spread to be unconvincing. The virus was just as contagious - and making just as many people sick - in early December 2019 as in early March 2020.
Apr 21, 2023·edited Apr 21, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Martin Neil
It is widely acknowledged that fear has a huge impact on disease and mortality. Just some examples:
“In the 60 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, there was a 49 per cent increase in heart attack patients admitted to New York hospitals, compared with the 60 days before the attacks.”
“[2011 Fukushima earthquake caused] a 70 percent rise in cardiac arrests, particularly among people age 75 and older, according to a new study. Those heart-related repercussions echoed through the population for more than a month, researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine."
“[Australian Heart Foundation:] In certain settings, humanitarian emergencies are associated with increased cardiac morbidity and mortality that may persist for years following the event. Humanitarian aid organizations should consider morbidity from non-communicable disease when planning relief and recuperation projects.
“Acute emotional arousal can trigger life-threatening arrhythmias and the mechanisms of that risk have been recognized.These sudden phenomena can be the result of the endogenous response to external risk of acute emotional stress. Sudden death without antecedent angina, suggesting cardiac arrhythmia, as well as deaths preceded by chest pain, suggesting coronary occlusion were observed in many studies that have led to estimates that between 20 and 40 percent of sudden cardiac deaths are precipitated by acute emotional stressors."
I apologise for losing the links. I had been sharing these back in March and April 2020.
It is clear to me that fear could have been a very important, if not the main driver of mortality.
When you see that masked person today walking at the park, just think about the kind of fear induced trauma to which that human being was submitted to. And the physiological effects such levels of fear would cause in millions of frail people.
Mar 3, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler, Norman Fenton
Good work gentlemen. I (we) understand about your situation regarding your "cancellation." Best wishes. Will follow and recommend your work, videos, Substacks, etc. Why, I might even buy a book or two!
Mar 2, 2023·edited Mar 4, 2023Liked by Jonathan Engler
This is an excellent analysis. And I agree that iatrogenesis, NEGLECT (dereliction of duty?) and other pandemic policies were in large part responsible for the highly disproportionate spike in death rates in Lombardy and New York seen in spring 2020.
However, with regard to the contention that a virus cannot spread widely unnoticed or suddenly effect an outbreak after being prevalent in the population for some time I am remain more circumspect. Viral seasonality is poorly understood and there are different theories to explain the natural rise and fall of seasonal viral epidemics.
Why did influenza largely disappear (worldwide!?) with the appearance of SARS-CoV-2? (I do NOT subscribe to the explanation influenza was misdiagnosed as SARS-CoV-2)
What explains such viral interference whereby normally only one virus dominates at any particular time eg. Influenza A vs Rhinovirus?
Why did influenza suddenly reappear in early 2022 when SARS-CoV-2 was in decline?
Remember many individuals DO suffer influenza infections outside of the typical flu season but somehow it does not snowball into an out-of-season epidemic.
We really don't fully understand where viruses "go" when they are out of season only to reappear in a seasonal pattern. For this reason I would be cautious about arguing Corona could not possibly have been out in the wild spreading but not causing an outbreak until spring 2020. Perhaps the conditions for an outbreak were not 'ripe' until then??
I've written a substack post about the an apparent shifting of the typical influenza season in northern Europe following the first two pandemic years. It includes some links to more thorough discussions of viral interference and Hope Simpson's theory.
Seasonality Shifts? - Why winter excess death rates may be premature
Given the fear and hysteria witnessed in 'spring' (northern hemisphere - it occurred in the southern hemispheres autumn too), it is reasonable to hypothesise many care dependent people suffered greatly due to a dramatic decrease in the quality of care afforded.
In fear stricken areas, many frail people - loosely defined as a person for whom a week of diminished care could lead to their demise - were thrust to that very outcome by care providers crippled by fear, and the accompanying imposed 'safe guards'.
That is, people died because they were neglected by their carers. The carers neglected them through fear of contagion.
This is the more benign aspect. The less so, is the proactive mistreatment of the sick. This took those nowhere near death's door, and sat them in death's living room with a toxic cup of tea.
If there's one thing I've learned over the past three years, it is to be very wary of 'sceptics' admonishing other sceptics on the basis of 'reputation loss'. The argument appears to be: question the official narrative but not in a manner which deviates from the officially sanctioned sceptic narrative, because you risk making us all look like conspiracy theorists.
What Will Jones think of next? Yes, of course, there is something unique about SARS-CoV-2 in relation to other coronaviruses. It shows definite evidence of having been created artificially. In certain vulnerable persons, infection can progress to severe disease, causing a unique, perhaps even unprecedented pathology most likely connected with the pathogenicity of the spike protein itself, even in isolation from the virus. But that doesn't change the fact that the overall IFR of SARS-CoV-2, even in its ancestral Wuhan form, was and is similar to seasonal 'flu; thus we would not expect huge waves of excess deaths associated with infection. It's fairly certain that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating globally prior to its identification in Wuhan in December 2019, but there were no waves of excess deaths recorded during summer or autumn 2019. Why is that? The excess deaths coincided with medical and non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to 'keep us all safe' and 'protect health services' in Spring 2020. In the UK, for instance, why were old people in 'care' homes 70% more likely to die between March and June 2020, not just from Covid, but from ALL causes? Couldn't have had anything to do with a certain Matt Hancock could it, as opposed to a sneaky little GOF virus?
Last week I presented our Ban the Jab resolution to the Lee County Florida Republican Party and it passed with 80-90% of the vote. Although, the Lee County GOP has thus far been unable to issue a press release because the wire services are claiming it goes against CDC standards and it incites fear. That’s right, after three years of media hysterics and fear mongering, a press release exposing the C19 injections as bioweapons is inciting fear.
You have probably already seen these, but two new preprints point to the impact of pandemic policies on excess deaths:
1. Preprint assessing the impacts of pandemic containment strategies found that countries with the most pandemic policy interventions also experienced the highest rates of Covid deaths per capita (covered already by Joel on his Substack)
Sorry, we are absolutely snowed under. People are sending us the data for most of the world covering every conceivable situation. We have zero budget, no staff and other commitments that involve paying the bills.
Three years into this and there is no coherent, disciplined, alternative research infrastructure with the kinds of funding streams needed to the kinds of quality research we want, and everyone deserves.
A lot of energy and money in the movement goes into PR and messaging or gets channelled to the big substacks. Those doing the leg work get little to no recognition and ironically, this situation is somewhat similar to the mainstream.
Apologies for being negative but that's just the reality on the ground.
The real divide in the world at present is not between left and right but between the adherents of Scientism and everyone else. The dispute in this article illustrates this divide well.
From the Scientism perspective, the world is an inherently dangerous place. The Experts, with their Science and Technology, could save us all if we would just let them. Unfortunately, the Luddites, the science deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the Trumpers, the Brexiteers, the selfish individualists, etc., like insolent children, keep thwarting their plans to protect us. Therefore, The Experts, guided by The Science, must seize all levers of power (to the extent they haven’t already) and impose their wisdom and benevolence on us all for our own collective good, through any means necessary.
From the other side, comprised of an odd mixture of Enlightenment liberals, religious conservatives, libertarians, heterodox intellectuals, etc., the world is immensely complex and the current state of science, expertise, and technology is woefully inadequate to manage these complex systems in a top-down fashion without causing all kinds of foreseeable and unforeseeable negative externalities. Moreover, these Experts and their hubris often cause the problems they claim to be protecting us from. The Church of Scientism also opens up myriad opportunities to acquire wealth and power, thereby heavily distorting The Experts’ favored analyses, policies, interventions, and technologies. Their hubris, greed, lust for power, and disregard or contempt for individual autonomy poses an existential threat to freedom and to humanity itself. They must be resisted.
Which world do you think we’re living in?
Hi Abir
I don't think microcosmic crowdfunding efforts will cut it I'm afraid. Its part and parcel of the bigger picture issue - how do we build parallel institutions or rescue the existing ones?
To attract high calibre staff, it would have to look kosher and have some longevity. A few quid here and there won't work for that.
No one has access to the data. One thing that researchers would need to do is gather our own data.
Thank you for posting this. I was very disappointed with the articles from Will Jones, with whom I usually agree.
Even before evidence that covid was in the community in 2019, the spikes observed in a few locations in March 2020, but not elsewhere looked extremely suspicious at the time. Considering that information, it is almost certain that these were mostly due to the collapse of the healthcare systems in these places that was a direct consequence of bad policy decisions taken there, that were not implemented in other places.
Nothing in the above paragraph means that covid does not exist. It only points to the fact that when you adopt health protocols that are not adequate, people die.
I am just reading "Plagues and Peoples" by William McNeill (1976), and today passed by footnote 56 to Ch. 3:
"In recent times when such a familiar disease as measles penetrated a previously unaffected community, initial die-off of up to 25 per cent has been observed, due largely to a breakdown of elementary nursing services. The classic example of this sort of disaster was recorded by William Squire, “On Measles in Fiji,” Epidemiological Society of London, Transactions, 4 (1877), 72–74. [...]"
That short paper is fascinating, and can be accessed here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5526369/?page=1
Well done.
In my view, for NYC, we need to start with a full, independent review of hospital patient charts. They are an outlier in every way.
Two examples follow:
https://twitter.com/EWoodhouse7/status/1630954737527844866?s=20
https://twitter.com/EWoodhouse7/status/1630762735364460544?s=20
An investigation that begins with the premise that the natural work of a virus named SARS-CoV-2 caused NO excess deaths is far more likely to get us to the truth than one that begins with the assumption that SARS-CoV-2 caused all or most of those deaths.
Covid Is Not An Epidemiological Story; Covid Is A Crime Story. "Covid-19" is not a disease, it's a business plan.
They've been using this same pandemic investment strategy for over 30 years now- it's lucrative. Even most of the "top tier" Covid dissenters fell for this crap and parroted the pandemic lie.
Covid-19, the disease, is nothing more than a disease of ATTRIBUTION.
Covid-19, the media event, was the Trojan Horse constructed to usher in a complete transformation of our society.
Covid-19, the operation, was never an epidemiological event, it is a business model meant to increase the portfolios of the super-wealthy.
There is no such thing as “Covid 19” except as a criminal conspiracy.
It was an epidemic of violent government and medical assault against people, false attribution of death, and intense propaganda using fraudulent tests and bogus studies.
People were killed iatrogenically which gave the impression that there was a virus circulating.
There was no pandemic ever- there is no 'lab leak'- there is no unique viral pathogen- there is no "China Virus"- there is no "There" there. It is all fraud piled on top of fraud.
Even many "in the know" are still trapped in some version of the "Covid" merry-go-round. The official narrative of "Covid" is a fiction- all of it.
There was no pandemic- EVER.
Covid-19 is the biggest money laundering scheme in the history of the world.
"The Virus®" is the new Al Qaeda.
If this is not highlighted and understood one will always hit a dead end in their analysis and functional response.
Thank you. I correspond with Will Jones often and the Daily Sceptic has published several of my "early spread" articles, but I also disagree with Will's main conclusions.
I think copious evidence shows that the virus had spread "widely" across the globe by November 2019 and this spread must have started even before this - in October or September or even sooner. I also find the argument that the earlier variations of the virus produced "low level" spread to be unconvincing. The virus was just as contagious - and making just as many people sick - in early December 2019 as in early March 2020.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/others-are-now-writing-about-early
It is widely acknowledged that fear has a huge impact on disease and mortality. Just some examples:
“In the 60 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, there was a 49 per cent increase in heart attack patients admitted to New York hospitals, compared with the 60 days before the attacks.”
“[2011 Fukushima earthquake caused] a 70 percent rise in cardiac arrests, particularly among people age 75 and older, according to a new study. Those heart-related repercussions echoed through the population for more than a month, researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine."
“[Australian Heart Foundation:] In certain settings, humanitarian emergencies are associated with increased cardiac morbidity and mortality that may persist for years following the event. Humanitarian aid organizations should consider morbidity from non-communicable disease when planning relief and recuperation projects.
“Acute emotional arousal can trigger life-threatening arrhythmias and the mechanisms of that risk have been recognized.These sudden phenomena can be the result of the endogenous response to external risk of acute emotional stress. Sudden death without antecedent angina, suggesting cardiac arrhythmia, as well as deaths preceded by chest pain, suggesting coronary occlusion were observed in many studies that have led to estimates that between 20 and 40 percent of sudden cardiac deaths are precipitated by acute emotional stressors."
I apologise for losing the links. I had been sharing these back in March and April 2020.
It is clear to me that fear could have been a very important, if not the main driver of mortality.
Even the CDC acknowledges that anxiety and fear related disorders were the second highest risk factors: https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/pdf/21_0123.pdf
When you see that masked person today walking at the park, just think about the kind of fear induced trauma to which that human being was submitted to. And the physiological effects such levels of fear would cause in millions of frail people.
Psychological warfare.
Thanks for the excellent article.
Good work gentlemen. I (we) understand about your situation regarding your "cancellation." Best wishes. Will follow and recommend your work, videos, Substacks, etc. Why, I might even buy a book or two!
This is an excellent analysis. And I agree that iatrogenesis, NEGLECT (dereliction of duty?) and other pandemic policies were in large part responsible for the highly disproportionate spike in death rates in Lombardy and New York seen in spring 2020.
However, with regard to the contention that a virus cannot spread widely unnoticed or suddenly effect an outbreak after being prevalent in the population for some time I am remain more circumspect. Viral seasonality is poorly understood and there are different theories to explain the natural rise and fall of seasonal viral epidemics.
Why did influenza largely disappear (worldwide!?) with the appearance of SARS-CoV-2? (I do NOT subscribe to the explanation influenza was misdiagnosed as SARS-CoV-2)
What explains such viral interference whereby normally only one virus dominates at any particular time eg. Influenza A vs Rhinovirus?
Why did influenza suddenly reappear in early 2022 when SARS-CoV-2 was in decline?
Remember many individuals DO suffer influenza infections outside of the typical flu season but somehow it does not snowball into an out-of-season epidemic.
We really don't fully understand where viruses "go" when they are out of season only to reappear in a seasonal pattern. For this reason I would be cautious about arguing Corona could not possibly have been out in the wild spreading but not causing an outbreak until spring 2020. Perhaps the conditions for an outbreak were not 'ripe' until then??
I've written a substack post about the an apparent shifting of the typical influenza season in northern Europe following the first two pandemic years. It includes some links to more thorough discussions of viral interference and Hope Simpson's theory.
Seasonality Shifts? - Why winter excess death rates may be premature
https://lostintranslations.substack.com/p/seasonality-shifts
Given the fear and hysteria witnessed in 'spring' (northern hemisphere - it occurred in the southern hemispheres autumn too), it is reasonable to hypothesise many care dependent people suffered greatly due to a dramatic decrease in the quality of care afforded.
In fear stricken areas, many frail people - loosely defined as a person for whom a week of diminished care could lead to their demise - were thrust to that very outcome by care providers crippled by fear, and the accompanying imposed 'safe guards'.
That is, people died because they were neglected by their carers. The carers neglected them through fear of contagion.
This is the more benign aspect. The less so, is the proactive mistreatment of the sick. This took those nowhere near death's door, and sat them in death's living room with a toxic cup of tea.
If there's one thing I've learned over the past three years, it is to be very wary of 'sceptics' admonishing other sceptics on the basis of 'reputation loss'. The argument appears to be: question the official narrative but not in a manner which deviates from the officially sanctioned sceptic narrative, because you risk making us all look like conspiracy theorists.
What Will Jones think of next? Yes, of course, there is something unique about SARS-CoV-2 in relation to other coronaviruses. It shows definite evidence of having been created artificially. In certain vulnerable persons, infection can progress to severe disease, causing a unique, perhaps even unprecedented pathology most likely connected with the pathogenicity of the spike protein itself, even in isolation from the virus. But that doesn't change the fact that the overall IFR of SARS-CoV-2, even in its ancestral Wuhan form, was and is similar to seasonal 'flu; thus we would not expect huge waves of excess deaths associated with infection. It's fairly certain that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating globally prior to its identification in Wuhan in December 2019, but there were no waves of excess deaths recorded during summer or autumn 2019. Why is that? The excess deaths coincided with medical and non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to 'keep us all safe' and 'protect health services' in Spring 2020. In the UK, for instance, why were old people in 'care' homes 70% more likely to die between March and June 2020, not just from Covid, but from ALL causes? Couldn't have had anything to do with a certain Matt Hancock could it, as opposed to a sneaky little GOF virus?
https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/midazolam-matt-hancock-a-monopoly
Last week I presented our Ban the Jab resolution to the Lee County Florida Republican Party and it passed with 80-90% of the vote. Although, the Lee County GOP has thus far been unable to issue a press release because the wire services are claiming it goes against CDC standards and it incites fear. That’s right, after three years of media hysterics and fear mongering, a press release exposing the C19 injections as bioweapons is inciting fear.
https://josephsansone.substack.com/p/did-we-just-start-a-revolution
You have probably already seen these, but two new preprints point to the impact of pandemic policies on excess deaths:
1. Preprint assessing the impacts of pandemic containment strategies found that countries with the most pandemic policy interventions also experienced the highest rates of Covid deaths per capita (covered already by Joel on his Substack)
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202211.0480/v1
2. A Bradford Hill analysis of iatrogenic excess mortality in Australia
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368426122_Australian_COVID-19_pandemic_A_Bradford_Hill_analysis_of_iatrogenic_excess_mortality
Germ theory debunked ?
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/notes-from-yesteryear/germ-theory-versus-terrain-the-wrong-side-won-the-day/#gsc.tab=0