Trends in Excess Deaths

Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Philip Davies

Friday 20th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Reclaim)]

We have experienced more excess deaths since July 2021 than in the whole of 2020. Unlike during the pandemic, however, those deaths are not disproportionately of the old. In other words, the excess deaths are striking down people in the prime of life, but no one seems to care. I fear that history will not judge this House kindly. Worse still, in a country supposedly committed to the free and frank exchange of views, it appears that no one cares that no one cares. Well, I care, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I credit those Members in attendance today, who also care. I thank the hon. Member for Lincoln (Karl MᶜCartney) for his support, and I am sorry that he could not attend the debate.

It has taken a lot of effort, and more than 20 rejections, to be allowed to raise this topic, but at last we are here to discuss the number of people dying. Nothing could be more serious. Numerous countries are currently gripped in a period of unexpected mortality, and no one wants to talk about it. It is quite normal for death numbers to fluctuate up and down by chance alone, but what we are seeing here is a pattern repeated across countries, and the rise has not let up.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Member for the tenacious way in which he has battled on this issue; I admire him for that. I wonder where he found the media were in all this. During the covid pandemic, every day the media—particularly the BBC—could not wait to tell us how many people had died on that particular day, without any context for those figures whatsoever, but they seem to have gone strangely quiet over excess deaths now.

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is absolutely right: the media have let the British public down badly. There will be a full press pack going out to all media outlets following my speech, with all the evidence to back up all the claims I will make, but I do not doubt that there will be no mention of it in the mainstream media.

One might think that a debate about excess deaths would be full of numbers, but this speech does not contain many numbers, because most of the important numbers are being kept hidden. Other data has been oddly presented in a distorted way, and concerned people seeking to highlight important findings and ask questions have found themselves inexplicably under attack.

Before debating excess deaths, it is important to understand how excess deaths are determined. To understand whether there is an excess, by definition, we need to estimate how many deaths would have been expected. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development uses 2015 to 2019 as a baseline, and the Government’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities uses a 2015 to 2019 baseline, modelled to allow for ageing. I have used that data here. Unforgivably, the Office for National Statistics has included deaths in 2021 as part of its baseline calculation for expected deaths, as if there was anything normal about the deaths in 2021. By exaggerating the number of deaths expected, the number of excess deaths can be minimised. Why would the ONS want to do that?

There is just too much that we do not know, and it is not good enough. The ONS publishes promptly each week the number of deaths registered. While that is commendable, it is not the data point that really matters. There is a total failure to collect, never mind publish, data on deaths that are referred for investigation to the coroner. Why does that matter? A referral means that it can be many months—or, given the backlog, many years—before a death is formally registered. Needing to investigate the cause of a death is fair enough, but failing to record when the death happened is not.

Because of that problem, we have no idea how many people died in 2021, even now. The problem is greatest for the younger age groups, where a higher proportion of deaths are investigated. This data failure is unacceptable and must change. There is nothing in a coroner’s report that can bring anyone back from the dead, and those deaths should be reported. The youngest age groups are important not only because they should have their whole lives ahead of them. If there is a new cause of excess mortality across the board, it would not be noticed so much in the older cohorts, because the extra deaths would be drowned out among the expected deaths. However, in the youngest cohorts, that is not the case.

There were nearly two extra deaths a day in the second half of 2021 among 15 to 19-year-old males, but potentially even more if those referred to the coroner were fully included. In a judicial review of the decision to vaccinate yet younger children, the ONS refused in court to give anonymised details about those deaths. It admitted that the data it was withholding was statistically significant. It said:

“the ONS recognises that more work could be undertaken to examine the mortality rates of young people in 2021, and intends to do so once more reliable data are available.”

How many more extra deaths in 15 to 19-year-olds will it take to trigger such work? Surely the ONS should be desperately keen to investigate deaths in young men. Why else do we have an independent body charged with examining mortality data? Surely the ONS has a responsibility to collect data from coroners to produce timely information.

Let us move on to old people. Most deaths in the old are registered promptly, and we have a better feel for how many older people are dying. Deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s show what we ought to expect: there was a period of high mortality coinciding with covid and lockdowns, but ever since, there have been fewer deaths than expected. After a period of high mortality, we expect and historically have seen a period of low mortality, because those who have sadly died cannot die again.

Those whose deaths were slightly premature because of covid and lockdowns died earlier than they otherwise would have. That principle should hold true for every cause of death and every age group, but that is not what we are seeing. Even for the over-85-year-olds, according to the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, there were 8,000 excess deaths—4% above the expected levels—for the 12 months starting in July 2020. That includes all of the autumn 2020 wave of covid when we had tiering and the second lockdown and all of the first covid winter. However, for the year starting July 2022, there were more than 18,000 excess deaths in this age group—9% above expected levels. That is more than twice as many in a period when there should have been a deficit and when deaths from diseases previously associated with old age were fewer than expected. I have raised my concerns about NG163 and the use of midazolam and morphine, which may have caused—and may still be causing—premature deaths in the vulnerable, but that is, sadly, a debate for another day.

There were just over 14,000 excess deaths in the under 65-year-olds before vaccination from April 2020 to the end of March 2021. However, since that time, there have been more than 21,000 excess deaths, ignoring the registration delay problem, and the majority of those deaths—58% of them—were not attributed to covid. We turned society upside down before vaccination for fear of excess deaths from covid, but today we have substantially more excess deaths, and in younger people, and there is a complete eerie silence. The evidence is unequivocal. There was a clear stepwise increase in mortality following the vaccine roll-out. There was a reprieve in the winter of 2021-22 because there were fewer than expected respiratory deaths, but otherwise the excess has been incessantly at this high level.

Ambulance data for England provides another clue. Ambulance calls for life- threatening emergencies were running at a steady 2,000 calls a day until the vaccine roll-out. From then, they rose to 2,500 daily, and calls have stayed at that level since. The surveillance systems designed to spot a safety problem have all flashed red, but no one is looking. Claims for personal independence payments from people who have developed a disability and cannot work rocketed with the vaccine roll-out and have continued to rise ever since. The same was seen in the US, which also started with the vaccine roll-out, not with covid. A study to determine the vaccination status of a sample of such claimants would be relatively quick and inexpensive to perform, yet nobody seems interested in ascertaining this vital information. Officials have chosen to turn a blind eye to this disturbing, irrefutable and frightening data, much like Nelson did—and for far less honourable reasons. He would be ashamed of us.

Furthermore, data that has been used to sing the praises of the vaccine is deeply flawed. Only one covid-related death was prevented in each of the initial major trials that led to authorisation of the vaccines, and that is taking the data entirely at face value, whereas a growing number of inconsistencies and anomalies suggest that we ought not to do this. Extrapolating from that means that between 15,000 and 20,000 people had to be injected to prevent a single death from covid. To prevent a single covid hospitalisation, more than 1,500 people needed to be injected. The trial data showed that one in 800 injected people had a serious, adverse event, meaning that they were hospitalised or had a life-threatening or life-changing condition. The risk of this was twice as high as the chance of preventing a covid hospitalisation. We are harming one in 800 people to supposedly save one in 20,000. That is madness.

The strongest claims have too often been based on modelling carried out on the basis of flawed assumptions. Where observational studies have been carried out, researchers will correct for age and comorbidities to make the vaccines look better. However, they never correct for socioeconomic or ethnic differences as that would make vaccines look worse. That matters. For example, claims of higher mortality in less vaccinated regions of the United States took no account of the fact that this was the case before the vaccines were rolled out. That is why studies that claim to show that the vaccines prevented covid deaths also showed a marked effect of them preventing non-covid deaths. The prevention of non-covid deaths was always a statistical illusion and claims of preventing covid deaths should not be assumed when that illusion has not been corrected for. When it is corrected for, the claims of efficacy for the vaccines vanish with it.

Covid disproportionately killed people from ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic groups during the pandemic. In 2020, deaths among the most deprived were up by 23% compared with 17% for the least deprived. However, since 2022 the pattern has reversed, with 5% excess mortality among the most deprived compared with 7% among the least deprived. These deaths are being caused by something different.

In 2020, the excess was highest in the oldest cohorts, and there were fewer than expected deaths among younger age groups. However, since 2022, the 50 to 64-year-old cohort has had the highest excess mortality. Even the youngest age groups are now seeing a substantial excess, with a 9% excess in the under-50s since 2022 compared with 5% in the over-75 group.

Despite London being a younger region, the excess in London is only 3%, whereas it is higher in every more heavily vaccinated region of the UK. It should be noted that London is famously the least vaccinated region in the UK by some margin. Studies comparing regions on a larger scale show the same thing. Studies from the Netherlands, Germany and the whole world each show that the highest mortality after vaccination was seen in the most heavily vaccinated regions.

So we need to ask: what are people dying of? Since 2022, there has been an 11% excess in ischemic heart disease deaths and a 16% excess in heart failure deaths. In the meantime, cancer deaths are only 1% above expected levels, which is further evidence that this is not simply some other factor that affects deaths across the board, such as failing to account for an ageing population or a failing NHS. In fact, the excess itself has a seasonality, with a peak in the winter months. The fact that it returns to baseline levels in summer is a further indication that this is not due to some statistical error or an ageing population alone.

Dr Clare Craig from HART—the Health Advisory & Recovery Team—first highlighted a stepwise increase in cardiac arrest calls after the vaccine roll-out in May 2021. HART has repeatedly raised concerns about the increase in cardiac deaths, and it has every reason to be concerned. Four participants in the vaccine group of the Pfizer trial died from cardiac arrest compared with only one in the placebo group. Overall, there were 21 deaths in the vaccine group up to March 2021, compared with 17 in the placebo group. There are serious anomalies about the reporting of deaths in this trial, with the deaths in the vaccine group taking much longer to report than those in the placebo group. That is highly suggestive of a significant bias in what was supposed to be a blinded trial.

An Israeli study clearly showed that an increase in cardiac hospital attendances among 18 to 39-year-olds correlated with vaccination, not with covid. There have now been several post-mortem studies demonstrating a causal link between vaccination and coronary artery disease leading to death up to four months after the last dose. We need to remember that the safety trial was cut short to only two months, so there is no evidence of any vaccine safety beyond that point. The decision to unblind the trials after two months and vaccinate the placebo group is nothing less than a public health scandal. Everyone involved failed in their duty to the truth, but no one cares.

The one place that can help us understand exactly what has caused this is Australia, which had almost no covid when vaccines were first introduced, making it the perfect control group. The state of South Australia had only 1,000 cases of covid across its whole population by December 2021, before omicron arrived. What was the impact of vaccination there? For 15 to 44-year-olds, there were historically 1,300 emergency cardiac presentations a month. With the vaccine roll-out to the under-50s, this rocketed to over 2,172 cases in November 2021 in this age group alone, which was 67% more than usual. Overall, 17,900 South Australians had a cardiac emergency in 2021 compared with only 13,250 in 2018, which is a 35% increase. The vaccine must clearly be the No. 1 suspect for this, and it cannot be dismissed as a coincidence. Australian mortality overall has increased from early 2021, and that increase is due to cardiac deaths.

These excess deaths are not due to an ageing population, because there are fewer deaths from the diseases of old age. These deaths are not an effect of covid, because they have happened in places that covid had not reached. They are not due to low statin prescriptions or undertreated hypertension, as Chris Whitty would suggest, because prescriptions did not change, and any effect would have taken many years and been very small. The prime suspect must be something that was introduced to the population as a whole, something novel. The prime hypothesis must be the experimental covid-19 vaccines.

The ONS published a dataset of deaths by vaccinated and unvaccinated. At first glance, it appears to show that the vaccines are safe and effective. However, there were several huge problems with how it presented that data. One was that for the first three-week period after injection, the ONS claimed that there were only a tiny number of deaths—the number the ONS would normally predict to occur in a single week. Where were the deaths from the usual causes? When that was raised, the ONS claimed that the sickest people did not get vaccinated and therefore the people who were vaccinated were self-selecting for those least likely to die. Not only was that not the case in the real world, with even hospices heavily vaccinating their residents, but the ONS’s own data show that the proportion of sickest people was equal in the vaccinated and the unvaccinated groups. That inevitably raises serious questions about the ONS’s data presentation. There were so many problems with the methodology used by the ONS that the statistics regulator agreed that the ONS data could not be used to assess vaccine efficacy or safety. That tells us something about the ONS.

Consequently, HART asked the UK Health Security Agency to provide the data it had on people who had died and therefore needed to be removed from its vaccination dataset. That request has been repeatedly refused, with excuses given including the false claim that anonymising the data would be the equivalent of creating it even though there is case law that anonymisation is not considered the creation of new data. I believe that if this data was released, it would be damning.

Some claim that so many lives have been saved by mass vaccination that any amount of harm, suffering and death caused by the vaccines is a price worth paying. They are delusional. The claim of 20 million lives saved is based on now discredited models which assume that covid waves do not peak without intervention. There have been numerous waves globally now that demonstrate that is not the case. It was also based on there having been more than half a million lives saved in the UK. That is more than the worst-case scenario predicted at the beginning of the pandemic. For the claim to have been true, the rate at which covid killed people would have had to take off dramatically at the beginning of 2021 in the absence of vaccination. That is ludicrous and it bears no relation to the truth.

In the real world, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea had a mortality rate of 400 deaths per million up to summer 2022 after they were first hit with omicron. How does that compare? With the Wuhan strain, France and Europe as a whole had a mortality rate of under 400 deaths per million up to summer 2020. Australia, New Zealand and South Korea were all heavily vaccinated before infection, so tell me: where was the benefit? The UK had just over 800 deaths per million up to summer 2020, so twice as much, but we know omicron is half as deadly as the Wuhan variant. The death rates per million are the same before and after vaccination, so where were the benefits of vaccination?

The regulators have failed in their duty to protect the public. They allowed these novel products to skip crucial safety testing by letting them be described as vaccines. They failed to insist on safety testing being done in the years since the first temporary emergency authorisation. Even now, no one can tell us how much spike protein is produced on vaccination and for how long—yet another example of where there is no data for me to share with the House.

When it comes to properly recording deaths due to vaccination, the system is broken. Not a single doctor registered a death from a rare brain clot before doctors in Scandinavia forced the issue and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency acknowledged the problem. Only then did these deaths start to be certified by doctors in the UK. It turns out the doctors were waiting for permission from the regulator and the regulator was waiting to be alerted by the doctors. This is a lethal circularity. Furthermore, coroners have written regulation 28 reports highlighting deaths from vaccination to prevent further deaths, yet the MHRA said in response to a freedom of information request that it had not received any of them. The systems we have in place are clearly not functioning to protect the public.

The regulators also missed the fact that in the Pfizer trial, the vaccine was made for the trial participants in a highly controlled environment, in stark contrast to the manufacturing process used for the public roll-out, which was based on a completely different technology. Just over 200 participants were given the same product that was given to the public, but not only was the data from these people never compared to those in the trial for efficacy and safety but the MHRA has admitted that it dropped the requirement to provide the data. That means that there was never a trial on the Pfizer product that was actually rolled out to the public, and that product has never been compared with the product that was actually trialled.

The vaccine mass production processes use vats of Escherichia coli and present a risk of contamination with DNA from the bacteria, as well as bacterial cell walls, which can cause dangerous reactions. This is not theoretical; this is now sound evidence that has been replicated by several labs across the world. The mRNA vaccines were contaminated by DNA, which far exceeded the usual permissible levels. Given that this DNA is enclosed in a lipid nanoparticle delivery system, it is arguable that even the permissible levels would have been far too high. These lipid nanoparticles are known to enter every organ of the body. As well as this potentially causing some of the acute adverse reactions that have been seen, there is a serious risk of this foreign bacterial DNA inserting itself into human DNA. Will anybody investigate? No, they won’t.

Bullying and Harassment: Cox Report

Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Philip Davies

Monday 5th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I know that my right hon. Friend has been outspoken on that particular issue, but she is certainly not at the forefront of my mind. [Laughter.] She has very considered opinions, and I appreciate that. I am not oblivious to it. My point is that whoever had happened to be the Speaker at the time when the report was written, the same issues would have been raised in it. I do not think that it constitutes a specific criticism of this individual Speaker. This is a much deeper and more widespread problem than that. Anyone who thinks that these issues have only arisen since the current Speaker took his position knows, deep down, that that really is not the case.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Given his argument, does my hon. Friend believe that the culture in this place can change if the current Speaker remains in position?

[Philip Davies]

Yes, I do. I have no reason to think otherwise in my dealings with the Speaker. People take others as they find them. I think that this goes much wider than the current incumbent. As my hon. Friend knows, I agree with him wholeheartedly on virtually every issue, but I am afraid that on this one we must part company. I do not think it helpful to make it into a personal vendetta against one individual in the House. The culture goes much deeper than that.

Let us use the report to do something positive. Let us get people in who can help, but let us not make this into a personal vendetta on the part of people who were never reconciled to the current incumbent of the Chair in the first place. That is not helpful, and, to be fair, in many respects it does not do justice to the people whom we actually need to help: people who work in the House of Commons, either as the staff of Members of Parliament or as other staff members. We can do this without needing to go for what I would consider to be the very nuclear option that my hon. Friend proposes, which I do not think would make a blind bit of difference in itself. The problem goes much deeper than that.

Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill

Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Philip Davies

Friday 22nd October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I tend to agree with my hon. Friend. As it happens, I am a fan of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington, who is a great parliamentarian. However, it was rather uncharacteristic of him to make it abundantly clear at the start of his speech that he did not want to take any interventions. My hon. Friend pointed out that he had not provided a definition of substantial compliance in the Bill, which made it all the more unfortunate that the hon. Gentleman started by saying that he did not want to take any interventions, and woe betide anyone who tried to intervene—that was the gist of his starting point—because otherwise we might have been able to ask him what he thought substantial compliance meant. That might have shed some light on the matter.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Is not the reason why the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) did not take any interventions in his opening statement that he did not have any answers to the interventions that were coming? As we have shown today, this Bill has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.

[Philip Davies]

There may be an element of truth in what my hon. Friend says. The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington tried to describe the Bill as a simple and non-contentious piece of legislation that, really, nobody could possibly quibble with, and it was helpful to him in presenting that case not to take any interventions, so that none of the flaws in the Bill could be exploited.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right, and we should guard against that. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman wants to exempt minor errors, which are already protected. He wants to exempt major errors from the scrutiny of the courts and we should be very wary of doing that.

In 12 locations, there were no operations staff and workers were clearly ineligible to vote—

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank my hon. Friend for being so generous in giving way in this most interesting debate. Does he agree that the Bill is not merely a Trojan horse but a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and an attempt to legitimise electoral errors—I am being generous in calling them “errors”—that would disgrace a banana republic?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. That is why I am so disappointed that the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington made it abundantly clear from the outset that he did not want to take interventions. He has left the impression—rightly or wrongly—that he was trying to portray a small change in the law to clear up a small anomaly, and that no one could argue with that because it was all common sense. However, when one gets to the nitty-gritty—