

Discover more from Where are the numbers? by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil
What really caused the surge in covid deaths in early 2020?
Challenging the challenge to the iatrogenesis hypothesis
Will Jones has published an interesting article in the Daily Skeptic that strongly challenges the iatrogenesis hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that deadly health policies were a major factor in the wave of deaths attributed to covid in the Spring of 2020, which Jonathan Engler has provided evidence for and which we recently described in this article.
Will’s article provides some interesting data. I personally believe Will is correct that there is something special about SARS-CoV-2 and that there is no evidence that non pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like lockdowns and contact tracing had any significant impact on death rates. However, contrary to what he asserts, neither of these invalidates the iatrogenesis hypothesis, and nor does his argument that Germany and Sweden (who he says had similar health policies to the UK, USA and Italy) did not get excess deaths at the same time. The case for the iatrogenesis hypothesis in the UK (and probably USA and Italy as well) is not just the incorrect use of ventilators (which was indeed common across all these countries) but specifically the inappropriate use of life-ending drugs and denial of potentially life-saving antibiotics, as well as “softer” issues such as denial of social care, relative visits and the social network which acts as the life-support system for the frail elderly.
Also, note that “lockdown stringency” does not necessarily reflect the level of dystopia within the health and social care system, specifically of the elderly; in terms of the early deaths, and hence the imputed case fatality rates, it is to this demographic we must look. Whether schools closed in March/April 2020 or whether football matches were banned and so on, has little to no bearing on elderly care.
Critically, Will also presents a set of graphs that he believes destroys Engler’s arguments. But, contrary to his assertions, these graphs may support the iatrogenesis hypothesis. Specifically, Will presents a set of graphs (covid hospitalisations, deaths etc) that he claims all follow the same pattern:
He includes in this set of graphs the excess deaths (as reported from the Our World in Data website):
And he concludes:
“The close correspondence between these graphs is I’m sure obvious to anyone. The significance of that correspondence is that these are all showing different aspects of the same phenomenon, namely a viral outbreak that is causing a closely correlated rise in symptoms, PCR positives, LFT positives, variant genome detection, hospitalisations, ICU admissions, antibodies and deaths. No other cause for this multifactorial phenomenon is plausible. Thus we must conclude that excess deaths during the pandemic are to a large extent explained by the effects of the virus that is causing all these things.”
But there are two obvious problems with this conclusion. The first is that the excess mortality graph is not like the others. There is clearly a much higher (and, because of its extreme and vertical nature, a very unnatural) peak at the start of the pandemic than appears in the other graphs. This peak supports Jonathan Engler’s hypothesis. The second problem (which is one I have pointed out many times) is that the data showing covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths etc from the Government ‘s covid dashboard is completely inconsistent with the NHS dashboard of covid emergency triage calls:
From: https://digital.nhs.uk/dashboards/nhs-pathways (this dashboard was withdrawn in July 2022)
Finally it is also worth looking at Joel Smalley’s article which provides empirical support for the the iatrogenesis hypothesis.
What really caused the surge in covid deaths in early 2020?
As an MD, I’ve treated hundreds of covid patients since the beginning of this madness. In Brazil we were struck by the deadly Gama(P1) subvariant in the begging of 2021. At that time I could see that, without early treatment one would invariably end on a hospital bed if got by covid. I had lots of dark moments in which I had to “fight” colleagues to make them admit young patients to the hospital. Doctors in Brazil had this evil behavior of not admitting patients that were being early treated, almost hopping to seeing them getting worse just to prove there was no treatment available other than ventilators. But they were wrong. Those patients that had been taking early treatment survived with the help of intravenous corticosteroids. I had to see a lot of relatives of my patients dying because they refused being treated with “useless drugs”.
All that being said, I have no doubt that mistreating has been the major cause of high death rates in the first 20 months of these pandemic.
Professor Fenton, thanks for bringing light, good thoughts, truth and cleverness to this discussion.
I agree Norman, for me those graphs suggest "something" swept through the population in Spring 2020, causing a sudden tsamani of 999 calls from those probably unable to breath properly at home, they were taken into hospital where the befuddled Doctors had no idea how to treat them. For want of something else to try they put people on ventilators and many deteriorated and died. This is apart from the horrific idea that many older people, possibly with co-morbidities, were put on a lethal cocktail of Midazolam/Morphine (as directed by health chiefs!) simply to ease their passing rather than in an attempt to help cure them. Could Doctors have done better if they'd been left to their own devices, such as prescribing antibiotics against what they called "Covid pneumonia"? Almost certainly ... I doubt they could have done much worse but sadly it seems their hands were tied