Excess Death Trends Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLuke Evans
Main Page: Luke Evans (Conservative - Hinckley and Bosworth)Department Debates - View all Luke Evans's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
(11 months ago)
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Of course we should be using the most accurate figures that we have. Later in the speech, I will talk about the data we really want, which would settle this matter once and for all beyond reasonable doubt.
I thank the public for their pressure and interest in these statistics, the people who have attended in person today and the thousands who will be watching on television or online.
There is a burning question at the heart of this debate. After excess deaths, there should be a deficit: where is it? When will we have it? Worse, why is the deficit being not just filled but significantly exceeded? Why are the institutions, whose job it is to notice, record, publicise and call attention to such matters, apparently asleep at the wheel?
A second burning question is why no one is listening to those raising the alarm. The research and analysis done by two of Britain’s most trusted doctors provide us with alarming clarity. Only this week, Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, reviewed the causes of excess deaths and concluded that they are predominantly related to cardiovascular disease. He told the Sunday Express newspaper that this cannot be explained by covid, population growth or an ageing population. Yesterday, consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, who is a world-leading expert in the causes of heart disease, told TNT Radio that even though cardiovascular disease is multifactorial, top of the list in the hierarchy of causes behind excess cardiac-related deaths has to be the experimental covid mRNA vaccine until proven otherwise. This is not speculative.
No—let me finish the point and I will then give way.
Dr Malhotra’s point is not speculative but based on the highest level of data that combines plausible biological mechanism, randomised control trials, high-quality observational data, pharmacovigilance data, autopsy data and clinical data. Those who choose not to acknowledge these cold, hard facts are either unaware of the evidence, wilfully blind or lacking in conscience.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for shining a spotlight on the important issue of excess deaths, but I am keen to understand the difference between correlation and causation. There is a correlation between eating ice cream and sunburn, but we do not necessarily assume the two go together; they could be caused by sunny weather. The same goes in this case. Is the cause to do with lockdown, late presentation or access to the NHS? Understanding causation and correlation are key to understanding why the numbers are so high.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is a medical doctor, so he clearly has some knowledge. Correlation is not causation, but it is an alarm bell. Alarm bells are going off all over the building, but no one wants to open the door to see whether there is a fire.
Future generations will ridicule us for what we have done in response to a seasonal airborne virus. We have apparently lost our collective minds. We have imposed a brand-new type of quarantine on a healthy population, in breach of all previous public health advice and our own carefully crafted expert pandemic plan, and in flagrant breach of the sensible and experienced advice of many professionals.
The noble dissenters are inevitably being vindicated, one by one, as the suppressed, shaming, real-world evidence finally emerges. I will not mention those who harass, discredit and ridicule the dissenters; they loudly parade their egotistical virtue on social media, in the press and on television. I know exactly how harassment feels.
We inflicted social distancing, masking and school closures on healthy children who were at no risk from the virus. We did that to protect adults, at the expense of our children’s social and mental health. People raised the alarm, but nobody listened. A society that consciously and knowingly sacrifices perfectly healthy children for adults is sick. This time will not be looked on well by future generations. That will be our legacy, and I call on this House and those in authority to right that grievous wrong quickly. With unbearable cruelty, we isolated even those who would gladly have made the individual choice to see their grandchildren.
Worst of all, we bypassed the procedures, protocols and science to inflict on a healthy population a brand new and untested product that had never before been used outside clinical trials, never mind approved. There was no long-term safety data. The safety analysis in the trials was eight weeks, and then the control group was vaccinated. There was no age stratification for recipients of an experimental medication for an illness with an average mortality age of 82. There was no liability under any circumstances for the manufacturers of those experimental treatments. Furthermore, there were good reasons, based on the science known at the time, for thinking that those products might be harmful. Rather than ridicule us, future generations may come to loathe us. We will forever be the poster boys and girls of a society that collectively lost its mind and its moral compass. They will hang that millstone around our necks for eternity.
What is the flaw in human nature that latches on to things and destroys all before it? It has been dubbed by some as the madness of crowds or a kind of mass formation psychosis. It is the sort of thing that allowed China to commit population Armageddon with the one-child policy for decades. It is the sort of thing that allowed us to slaughter millions of cattle during the apparent foot and mouth outbreak, when we were persuaded not by the science but by the plausible patter of provable idiots such as Professor Neil Ferguson—yes, the very same. His advice led to the bankruptcy, immiseration and utter despair of countless farmers who were forced to destroy their livelihoods in a futile attempt to prevent the spread of an airborne virus, which had already managed to pass in the air all the way from France to the Isle of Wight. How many times must the so-called experts be caught with their pants down as their models fail yet again? How long must we be subjected to debunked drivel dumped in our political discourse? How long must decision makers deal with discredited modelling and moribund and captured institutions? Why will no one listen to reason when they have been proved wrong so many times?
There are many other examples in medicine, from bloodletting with leeches to pointless lobotomies to not washing hands between the mortuary and the labour ward. Doctors and scientists are far from immune from groupthink, and the current batch are living proof.