Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

How the Office of National Statistics Lied About COVID Vaccine Safety

On the Where Are The Numbers? Substack Norman Fenton and colleagues have just released an important article illustrating just one key example of how official institutions used false statistics to lie to us during COVID. It’s an article that I urge others to read (We were right! The UK ONS now admit that deaths in the vaccinated were categorised as unvaccinated in 2021). I suspect though that few people will set out clearly what the article really shows us, including its excellent authors.

So I’m going to add a bit of brash Juppness to the mix.

This is how the Where are the Numbers? article begins:

“In 2021 when the UK ONS (Office for National statistics) started releasing its vaccine by mortality status reports we exposed that there were large spikes in the non-covid death rates in the 'unvaccinated'. These spikes in mortality coincided with the first main vaccine rollout and did so for each age group (see this report, for example).”

Professor Fenton is a scientist, an expert on risk management and statistical data analysis, and throughout the ‘pandemic’ provided such a high quality of consistent, statistical evidence questioning the COVID policies followed by most governments that he was treated to the concerted smear campaign and silencing efforts we saw emerge as the standard response to the most articulate critiques of these policies. He refers back to some of this evidence in his current piece, showing the graphs which illustrate a spike in deaths immediately after the first vaccine rollouts.

At the time of this happening, Fenton and others noted the spike in deaths following vaccine rollout number 1. The Office of National Statistics, as the main UK authority on statistical evidence and as the mainstream arbiter of the accuracy of statistics provided by government and official bodies, was in an awkward position. If this spike in deaths was accurate and could be causally linked to the vaccines, then that would strongly illustrate that these vaccines were not ‘safe and effective’.

What a spike in deaths immediately after their use indicates is the exact opposite, that these vaccines are extremely dangerous. Obviously that’s not entirely confirmed until you prove a causal link, but the sensible response to such an immediate correlation is to stop what you are doing and look to see whether its the cause. The British government did not do this, nor did any government that had initiated COVID vaccine rollouts (so far as I know).

So with no intention of doing the sensible, rational and SAFE thing of looking at that spike in deaths and determining whether it was caused by the vaccines, some means of accommodating that spike data was required to continue to justify the use of the vaccines. The new Fenton article goes on to explain both the objections they raised in 2021 and the official responses of the ONS to the spike data, which was essentially to cite an alternative cause and insist that the methodology by which they were assessing the mortality rates emerging showed that these had nothing to do with the vaccine:

“We asserted that these obvious anomalies were a result of the standard ONS procedure of categorising anyone within 20 days of their first dose as ‘unvaccinated’. However, in our own discussions with the ONS they maintained that, although that method was used for their efficacy calculations, it was not used when it came to mortality. They clearly said that a person dying any time after vaccination was correctly categorised, as a vaccinated death, in the mortality data they regularly released to the public and which formed the basis of a massive public communication campaign encouraging vaccination.

To ‘explain’ the spikes the ONS pushed the implicit assumption that there was a phenomenon called the 'healthy vaccinee' effect, whereby they claimed that people ‘close to death’ were not vaccinated. And they made this bold claim without any data to support it whatsoever.”

The ‘healthy vaccinee effect’ was the phenomenon that supposedly explained the rise in deaths following the vaccine launch, but this was a claim based solely on assumption. Like other explanations that have since been offered for excess mortality in populations with very high vaccine takeup (some of which enter the realms of pure absurdity, like articles telling us all of a sudden that an hour of sunshine in the open air is likely to cause a massive increase in heart conditions and strokes) what the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’ explanation really represents is an officialdom desperately grasping onto any explanation except the most logical and likely one, all because it refused to question the efficacy and safety of a treatment it had already authorized.

Professor Fenton and his colleagues did invaluable work in 2020 and 2021 by questioning the authorities on the basis of close statistical evidence and scholarly, academic familiarity with the best practices both of scientific research and risk analysis. It is on this basis and with these skills that they could both discern the spike in deaths and know enough to question the ONS on how that data was being assessed, particularly on whether within 20 days vaccinated deaths were being counted as unvaccinated deaths. At the time, the ONS insisted this was not the case.

Now, the ONS has finally admitted that they were. Just as the critics of the overall vaccine policy had suspected, vaccinated people were classified as unvaccinated. What’s the effect of that? Well, that removes deaths from the vaccinated column and puts them in the unvaccinated column, simultaneously making taking the vaccine look safer, and not taking the vaccine look more dangerous. And it means that you have manipulated the data and lied about the data, rendering any conclusion you share with people about the safety of the vaccines null and void.

And here is where my own blunter way of wording things may add something that Professor Fenton and his colleagues are too polite to put. These are very serious people who do not engage in polemics or the drawing of wider conclusions. But I’m content to be a little less cautious if it allows me to be a little more truthful.

The truth is that the ONS lie on this issue was only one of many lies, but it was a key one. It was a key piece of evidence that, if the system was functioning properly, should have resulted in the immediate halt of emergency authorization and vaccine delivery.

Imagine if the existence of that immediate spike in deaths following the 1st vaccine rollout was discussed honestly at the time. Imagine if news organisations had said to the general public “well, it looks like immediately after we have delivered these vaccines, more people died”. Imagine if they had said “when you take this vaccine, within 20 days it seems like more of you are dead than is normally the case.”

Do we think millions of people would have then lined up to receive an experimental treatment that might well be causing those additional deaths?

Dismissing that spike in deaths following the vaccine rollout without really investigating it was medical negligence on a vast scale, just as emergency use authorization was a reckless gamble and just as lying about your methodology for assessing who has died and why suggests a deliberate attempt to cover up the consequences of your negligence.

If I as an individual did something that correlated with an immediately following death, for example if I decided to exceed the speed limit and then crashed my car into somebody resulting in their death, what confirms my guilt more than lying about whether I was driving the car, whether the collision even happened, or the speed I was driving at? What confirms my guilt more than me being found to have lied about the entire incident and adjusted evidence by manipulation to suit my dishonest take on what happened?

I would expect that if these lies were discovered, my guilt would be confirmed and I would go to prison.

But this is what official lies like the ONS lie did. The government caused deaths from these speedily developed vaccines as surely as a speeding driver who hits somebody does.

And think too about the public perception issue, and the number of people who have suffered a whole range of adverse effects currently short of death. Not only does lying about the safety of the vaccine and distorting your evidence on who was and wasn’t vaccinated so that more people take the vaccine a thing that created more deaths, it also created many more injuries.

Told the truth at the time that there was a spike in deaths following the vaccines, AND that those dead people were vaccinated, more people would have taken the wise decision that the government itself refused to take and rejected the vaccines. Take-up even if the vaccines were still offered (instead of being withdrawn as a proven danger) would have been reduced if they told the truth.

Which is why they lied. They refused to look for proof of causation from vaccine rollout to a spike in deaths, because they didn’t want to prove causation. Not only that, they lied to conceal that very probable link, and they distorted and manipulated the existing evidence to do so. Knowing that this would be enough together with coercive propaganda breaking the Nuremberg Code on informed consent to get the kind of take-up levels they wanted.

It was decided that a COVID vaccine must be developed and that everyone must take it, more than it was ever decided that it must be safe and effective. The first two aims, which should only ever follow the third one, ended up obliterating the third consideration (safety from dangerous treatments) altogether. When deaths follow, if this process of risk taking and lying doesn’t count as murder, it should definitely count as manslaughter.

They took the greatest intuitive indicator of danger from the vaccines (people dropping dead within 20 days of taking it) and manipulated the data to make it another reason to get the vaccine. Everyone thinking those extra dead people were unvaccinated was being given a false reason, a lie, to think that taking the vaccine was safer than not taking it.

The thing that should have made them stop, was by this one ONS lie converted into a reason to keep going.

These are the additional conclusions that respectable statisticians won’t state outright, even if they are statisticians brave and honest enough to have questioned the policies at the time. But I think they are rational and logical ones. And I’ll go further than that, because they are things which require a moral response, a moral conclusion, too.

Lying like this to advance a policy that led to an as yet uncounted number of unnecessary deaths, deliberately distorting the evidence as it emerges and selling that distortion of evidence to the public who could be harmed by that distortion, was not an accident. It’s hard to directly lie, accidentally. You have to have seen what the evidence really says, before you then shift the evidence from the column of truth to the column of lies.

The only moral response is to know that the people who did this, at the ONS, in the medical profession, among the scientific advisors, at the pharmaceutical companies, at every level where they had seen the data and then lied about the data, have blood on their hands.