Garbage in, rigorous analysis, pretty charts, garbage out

More men than women died "of" Covid. More wealthy than poor died "of" Covid. Explanation follows.

John Campbell, a Ph. D. in Nursing and a much watched Covid analyst (2.32 million subscribers), knows a lot about medical research yet, as he freely admits, he does not know much about the guts of data and data analysis, and he seems too easily impressed by pretty, interactive, voluminous charts, tables, figures and counts. Citing the "best available data" as a cover for frightening numbers is bad science. In one respect he reminds me of Hans Rosling, only Rosling constructed the analyses once he found reliable data whereas Campbell seems mush too easily impressed by the big numbers and interactive charts, while trusting the 'experts' at the lowest level of WHO to be uncompressed and unbiased in their data collection while he also admits that the senior leadership of WHO has come under significant criticism for the entire handling of public policy recommendations coming from a global yet suspect organization.

The CDC is at it again. Publishing shockingly large numbers. Let's look at one of the simpler graphs of the 'raw data,' i.e., the number of 'cases' and 'deaths' attributed solely to Covid. Note that the definition of 'cases' has been a fluid one, from population infection estimates, to positive tests, to positive tests with symptoms, to post mortem estimates as to the presence and, therefore, cause of death FROM Covid. For most of the pandemic, there has been significant and appropriate criticism of the method for "counting up the dead bodies attributed to Covid." Given the subjective nature of estimating the cause of death, the multiple co-morbidities (including natural causes which attributes 'age' as a co-morbidity), the financial incentives to "count" a death as "from" Covid, the political and bureaucratic biases of the public health 'experts' and officials to spread panic and to increase their public esteem and egos, the raw counts have to be taken with a huge grain of salt, or at least a very large standard error.

Before we dig deeper, let's stick to the surface and ask: Why does the pattern of cases have nothing to do with explaining the number of deaths? Really? Wouldn't you expect some pattern to emerge? And even with the problematic and ineffective vaccines, there is no noteworthy decline on the death pattern after their widespread use.

"Excess deaths" is bandied about by the fear mongers as if it is a precise count. Separate from the problem of assigning the causes of deaths, which makes the 'counts' problematic is the fiction of "expected deaths," which is not only an estimate -- meaning there is a wide range of error in its determination -- it's also a projections, which can be based on an arbitrary baseline and short-term trajectory in choosing a specific number of expected deaths needed to put forth a precise excess deaths count, i.e., excess deaths = actual deaths - expected deaths. So the two numbers used to calculate the dreaded and frightening "excess deaths" are both estimates with wide error ranges, especially when the counts are collected from over a hundred different countries, each with their own error. The implicit assumption that all the errors cancel out, i.e., the undercounts balance the overcounts, is a foolhardy and inappropriate assumption. The error are additive, not cross-cancelling. Want more concern? Using a five-year average as the estimate for 'expected deaths,' at a time when the mortality rate is climbing steadily (as it has been for ten years in the USA, with tens of millions of Baby Boomers dying out), is fraud, not fact.

So while the CDC claims an "excess deaths estimate of 14.9 million, that estimate has an error, buried in the text and generally ignored by the fawning press. And this is a two-year figure, in a global population of over 7.5 billion (and growing) people, where the annual deaths are roughly one percent of the population, which is .01 x 7,500,000,000, or 75,000,000 (six zeroes rather than eight) annually, or 150,000,000 in two years, producing a percent change in deaths of 15,000,000/150,000,000, making excess deaths about ten percent above the expected deaths and with 6.24 million deaths attributed to being FROM Covid, that makes the two-year Covid global mortality rate as 6,240,000/7,500,000,000 or .000832 (or 0.083%) which needs to be divided by two to show an annual mortality rate FROM people WITH Covid as 0.0412%. Six million looks like a very small number once placed in perspective.

But the real pubic policy damage is in the deaths "associated with Covid pandemic (policies), number greater than those deaths DIRECTLY attributed to Covid. This again is a wild-ass guesstimate, because it includes just about everything one can imagine, including dying of starvation due to supply-chain problems, failing to receive hospital treatment, failing to seek hospital treatment, people dying at home alone of undetermined but suspiciously Covid-like causes, fentanyl deaths, suicides, and more. And the key word is the left out of the headline is "policies," meaning those public health mandates, e.g., masks, lockdowns, quarantines, and extremely disturbing pronouncements from Fauci are the much bigger problem than the virus itself. Worse, the long-term effects on mental health, lost educational progress and more are already present, mnot well measured, and likely to be with us for a long time. Conversely, perhaps millions of these "excess deaths" in the past two years will lead to a negative excess deaths in the future, especially with the average age of Covid fatalities being around 80. Yes, there were some deaths averted with pandemic policies (not by Covid, of course), but those numbers are even more problematic.

Back to the excess deaths of "rich men" cited in the first line. Simple answer: Men are under more stress and have a higher excess BMI than women and, especially for those over age 80, men carry more co-morbidities than do women.

Never forget the adage about the misuse of statistics: Using these statistics are more like how a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than for illumination.

A final note on the incredible mess created by Fauci's unwillingness to "follow the science" while supporting the very unscientific ineffectiveness of vaccines as THE solution to dealing with viruses. To wit, from Robert w. Malone (email, May 7, 2022):

The data for the use of Vitamin D3 is extremely strong; there are now even randomized clinical trials supporting its use for the treatment of COVID (6), as well as many retrospective clinical trials showing its efficacy. The title of a major meta-analysis study published in October, 2021 is “COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status, and a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3: Results of a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” and that title pretty much says it all (7).

References

(6) Villasis-Keever MA, Lopez-Alarcon MG, Miranda-Novales G, Zurita-Cruz JN, Barrada-Vazquez AS, Gonzalez-Ibarra J, et al. Efficacy and Safety of Vitamin D Supplementation to Prevent COVID-19 in Frontline Healthcare Workers. A Randomized Clinical Trial. Arch Med Res. 2022.

(7) Borsche L, Glauner B, von Mendel J. COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status, and a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3: Results of a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients. 2021;13(10).