Hold the Front Page! The World Wakes Up to What Sceptics Knew All Along

“It’s all coming out now!” – a friend greeted me with this exclamation recently. Then off he went. First up was Hunter Biden’s laptop. He then went into some detail about MEP Rob Roos and the Pfizer executive Janine Small’s revelation that the vaccine was never tested for transmissibility. A bit on the lab leak theory, “had I heard it?” For good measure, he finished up with chapter and verse on the Office for National Statistics’ response to Professor Norman Fenton’s FOI about Covid deaths of people without underlying health conditions.  All good stuff.

The odd thing about all this was that my friend, who is quadruple vaccinated, was supportive of the lockdowns and was an assiduous mask wearer. We’ve also had a few awkward moments over the past couple of years when I’ve expressed some scepticism of – well, scepticism of anything and everything. When I suggested that none of this was news, that all of this information had been readily available for years, he looked at me slightly askance and said: “No, it’s all new, just wait, it’s all coming out now!”

My friend’s not the only person to have noticed these ‘new revelations’. They’re beginning to creep into the mainstream media (except the BBC) and since Elon Musk bought Twitter there seems to be growing visibility of some of these issues on social media.

The point of this article is really threefold. Firstly, to join all my fellow readers of the Daily Sceptic in saying “I told you so!” Don’t tell me there isn’t a slight pleasure in that? Secondly, to remind you where some of this information has been hiding in ‘plain sight’ over the past few years. And thirdly, to make a point about informed consent. My friend is in his 50s, in good health with children of school age and at university. They’ve all submitted to multiple vaccines. All had Covid more than once, some before and some post vaccine with no noticeable difference between the severity of symptoms. Between them all they’ve had various mild adverse experiences from the vaccines but nothing very serious. He’s now beginning to ask questions. If he’d known last autumn that only three healthy kids under 20 had died of Covid (as disclosed by the ONS data), or that the vaccines would not reduce the likelihood of infection and transmission, would he have been so keen on ushering his kids to the front of the queue or supporting vaccine passport controls?

In case you weren’t aware of it, Professor Norman Fenton recently extracted an interesting response from the Office for National Statistics. His request and the response can be seen here. It covers the number of Covid deaths, where only Covid was mentioned on the death certificate, from the start of the pandemic to the end of December 2021.  The answer was just under 3.5% of the total. To many this has been a revelation.

Here are the ONS data as a chart with the number of deaths by age and sex in the data table below the chart.

If you’re the parent of a healthy child who found yourself persuaded or coerced into getting your child vaccinated against the risk of dying from Covid you may be interested to know that there were only three deaths in children and young people under 20 who didn’t have an underlying health condition, throughout this period.  A week or so ago, three under 20s were stabbed to death in London on a single day. Tragic for the victims but it puts in perspective how small the risk to healthy young people Covid has been.

Of the 7,244,015 people in England aged 20-29, only 20 without a comorbidity died of Covid up to the end of 2021. About one twentieth (5%) of those killed on the roads. Indeed, the data show that of the 177,547 Covid deaths of all ages that had occurred to the end of December 2021, only 6,183 or 3.5% of them were people without a comorbidity.

Surprising as it may be but this information has been readily available since at least May 2020: here’s a link to NHS data with weekly and monthly spreadsheets showing how many people were dying of Covid, their age, pre-condition, ethnicity and location. Figure 2 is a sample of the data; I’ve lifted it from the report dated December 31st 2020. I could have chosen any of the reports as they all tell a similar story, but this date is one of the last that precludes any possible vaccine effect.  The data in this report cover a period 12 months shorter than that covered in the ONS FOI response but the point I’m trying to make is that all this information was already known and in the public domain since almost day one of the pandemic.

To be clear, these data differentiate deaths by age group between those with and those without a pre-existing condition. We can see that total deaths in English hospitals up to Dec 30th 2020 was 50,248. Of these, only 2,068 or 4.1% had no pre-condition, of whom only six were under 20.

We can also see the skew towards the elderly. Children and young people under 20 made up 0.05% of the deaths.

In Table 3 I’ve added some population data so you can see the likelihood of someone in the various age cohorts succumbing to Covid in the period covered by the report. A healthy under 20 year-old had a 1 in 2,221,726 chance of dying of Covid while an under 20 with a pre-condition had a 1 in 493,717.

Despite what Michael Gove said, we weren’t all ‘equally at risk’. If you were young, or weren’t suffering from some life threatening or shortening condition, your risk was negligible. But even for the healthy over-80s, if they didn’t have a pre-condition there were long odd on them dying, 1 in 3,487 – 33 times better odds than someone with a pre-condition.

In Figure 4 I’ve added three columns to the right of the NHS table. The first one (in blue) shows the ONS data (from the FOI response to Professor Fenton) for deaths without pre-condition to the end of Dec 2021. The next two columns (in red) show the percentage of deaths without pre-condition by age for the NHS data at the end of Dec 2020 and for the ONS data to the end of Dec 2021.

The figures are surprisingly consistent. Overall, back in December 2020 we knew that 95.9% of Covid fatalities were of people with a pre-existing condition. The ONS figures for the cumulative total to the end of 2021 show 96.5% have a pre-existing condition.

The NHS data that have been hanging around for two and a half years also give us quite a lot of information about these ‘pre-conditions’. If you didn’t suffer from one of these conditions your risk was massively reduced no matter what age you were.

If you add up all these ‘pre-conditions’ you get 108,220. Divide that between the 48,180 deaths of people with a pre-condition then you can see that on average each fatality had more than two pre-conditions.

Scan the list. If you don’t suffer from diabetes (26% of fatalities did), if you don’t have a chronic kidney disorder (17% of fatalities did), if you don’t have dementia (17%) or chronic pulmonary disease (16%), then the risk of Covid to you was always very low.

We knew this. The information was hidden in plain sight. In making a decision about whether I wish to take an experimental vaccine, approved only under emergency use authorisation (EUA), then this information should surely have been made more readily available to those being asked to give informed consent.

Let’s now turn to the ‘revelation’ in the European Parliament that Pfizer hadn’t tested its vaccine against transmissibility. This seemed to come as news to many. It’s a measure of how effective the suppression of information has been that this was a surprise to anyone.

On September 23rd 2020, Forbes magazine published an article written by William A. Haseltine titled: “COVID-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed.” The article caused a bit of a stir at the time but soon the ripples subsided and it was forgotten. However, it’s well worth a read. William A. Haseltine had done what precious few journalists do: he’d read the small print. He discovered that:

• “Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines.”
• “We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols – Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca – do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease, only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.”
• “The greatest fear people have is dying from this disease. A vaccine must significantly or entirely reduce deaths from COVID-19. Over two hundred thousand people have died in the United States and nearly a million worldwide. None list mortality as a critical endpoint.”

The test protocols never required the vaccines to either prevent transmission or prevent death, merely prevent mild (or ‘moderate’) symptoms. 

Just for the record, it’s worth mentioning that William A. Haseltine would appear not to be some tin-foil hat wearing, extreme libertarian anti-vaxxer. His preferred solution was a Chinese style lockdown! But hey, take your allies where you find them.

Back in September 2020, when I read the Forbes article, my assumption was that governments around the world were intending to use the vaccines to get them out of a pickle of their own making. Lockdowns hadn’t worked, they couldn’t be afforded, and people were getting fed up with them. But governments couldn’t just say: “Oops, sorry, lockdowns were a total waste of time, loads of you have now got natural immunity from prior infection, let’s all go back to Plan A and live with the virus.” They needed a ladder to climb down, and vaccines, whether they worked or not would be that ladder. And, largely, that’s exactly what happened. It didn’t really matter whether vaccines worked or not. We did have loads of natural immunity. The Omicron variant wasn’t as virulent as earlier versions. Convince the public that vaccines had saved the day and everyone will go back to the ‘new normal’.

There you have it. The New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop from October 2020 has become a scoop in December 2022. The ‘lab leak’ theory, widely known back in January and February 2020, is only now getting real traction. Despite the fact that the test protocols for the vaccine trials back in 2020 didn’t require them to be sterilising, it’s now regarded as a scoop that they’re not sterilising. And finally, even though the data were published weekly since May 2020 by ‘our NHS’ showing that children and young people were at effectively zero risk from Covid, only now, 30 months later, people are starting to notice.

Hold the front page! We’ve got some two year-old news we need to publish.