TOP LINE
In a new interview with Dr. John Campbell retired professor of risk Norman Fenton outlines the “anomalies,” “biases,” and “limitations” of the mortality data the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) has been publishing since the rollout of the COVID injections. Fenton and his colleagues, including diagnostic pathologist Dr. Clare Craig et al., say the ONS’ mortality data, which is categorized into “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated” deaths, has misplaced deaths that belong in the former category into the latter one, doesn’t properly represent the UK’s population as a whole, and is outright missing deaths. In an official response from the UK’s Statistics Authority, Ed Humpherson, the agency’s director, appears to confirm some of these criticisms.
Note: Any reference to “vaccination” here is a reference to “ever vaccinated.” That is, a person who has ever been “vaccinated” against COVID, whether that be with one shot, two shots, or some number of boosters.
A team of researchers has called out the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) for providing what they say are data that have been “biased” toward showing the COVID-19 “vaccines” as effective at mitigating mortality from the disease. Now, the UK’s Statistics Authority—a non-ministerial government department responsible for oversight of the ONS—has responded to the researchers’ complaints, and apparently agrees with the main thrust of their argument. Although the researchers are not hopeful this admission will lead to any meaningful change in the way the ONS data are used as a pro-“vaccine” cudgel.
In the interview above with former emergency room nurse and enormously popular YouTuber Dr. John Campbell one of the researchers involved in lodging the complaint against the ONS, retired Professor Emeritus of Risk at Queen Mary University of London Norman Fenton, outlines the “anomalies,” “biases,” and “limitations” of the ONS data—reiterating what he and diagnostic pathologist Dr. Clare Craig, Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Queen Mary Martin Neil, and Chief Executive at Central Coast Local Health District Scott McLachlan described in a paper posted to ResearchGate in November of 2022.
The way the ONS has been reporting mortality data, Fenton tells Campbell, is by releasing bi-monthly reports, which offer a breakdown in deaths by COVID “vaccination” status; something Fenton and his colleagues at first believed would help them to “really determine the cost-benefit of the vaccines.” Critically, he notes, the data would have allowed people to see the difference in all-cause mortality between the “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated.”
However, Fenton notes, right from the beginning “there were problems with the data.” As he, Craig, et al. outline in their paper, there is, for example, “strong evidence that the ONS underestimates the proportion of unvaccinated [people], which leads to inflated mortality rates for the unvaccinated relative to the vaccinated.”
Image: Norman Fenton via Dr. John Campbell
As the researchers outline in their paper, the ONS data include a subset of 39 million people out of England’s total population of about 56 million. Which, while nearly 70% of the total population, is heavily skewed as it only consists of UK citizens who 1.) registered in the 2011 census and 2.) registered with a general practitioner in 2019.
As Fenton highlights—and the UK’s Statistics Authority agrees—this sample population skews much older and more heavily “vaccinated” against COVID than those outside of the population. An important point, the researchers highlight, as this means the ONS’ denominator for calculating the mortality rate for the “unvaccinated” is far too small.
More specifically, the researchers calculate in their paper that, out of the ONS data’s missing eight million UK residents age 18 and older, somewhere between 69 and 99.6% are likely “unvaccinated.” In the sample data used by ONS, the executive office estimates only 8% of included people are “unvaccinated.” (Fenton et al. note that, overall, the UK Health Security Agency, or UKHSA, has estimated that approximately 20% of England’s population is not “vaccinated” against COVID.)
Another bizarre anomaly in the data arises from the way deaths have appeared over time in the “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated” groups. Namely, as Fenton highlights in his interview with Campbell, non-COVID deaths in the “unvaccinated” group exhibit a major spike after the rollout of the enormously dangerous and utterly ineffective COVID injections. They then taper back down over time, nearly dovetailing with the “vaccinated” deaths (per 100,000 person-years).
The death trends “should be the same,” Fenton points out, as the COVID “vaccines” shouldn’t have any effect on non-COVID deaths. Yet what the data show is “unvaccinated” mortality “really peaking… at the same time the vaccine rollout peaks.” He goes on to say, ironically, “the vaccine has some kind of… really miraculous properties. [Like] the miraculous property of... making people vaccinated [not] die from non-COVID illnesses. And it also has the miraculous property of somehow transferring, almost psychically somehow, the ability for unvaccinated people to suddenly start dying when the vaccinated are getting vaccinated at their peak.”
This is “strong evidence that many of those dying shortly after vaccination were being misclassified as unvaccinated,” Fenton tells Campbell. The retired professor also notes “This type of weird anomaly always and inevitably occurs when you are simply misclassifying those who die shortly after vaccination as unvaccinated.”
On top of the underestimation of the proportion of “vaccinated” citizens and the miscategorization of deaths, Fenton also describes deaths that are missing outright. In a separate paper posted to ResearchGate in March of 2022, authored by the same team, Fenton and his colleagues wrote that they found “the total deaths reported by ONS are significantly lower than we would expect compared to other government datasets, even allowing for the fact that the ONS use[s] only a subset of the population.” The authors went on to note that both COVID and non-COVID deaths had been “omitted” from the ONS dataset specifically during the two-week period post first COVID “vaccination.” (The authors likewise concluded in that paper that the ONS dataset is corrupted, possibly due to “miscategorization, reporting lags and data handling or transcription errors.”)
On the same note, Fenton et al.’s November, 2022 paper also shows how the mortality rates evinced in the ONS data do not align with historical mortality rates. Non-COVID mortality reported by the ONS data after the rollout of the COVID injections, for one, bounces between a low of 504 deaths and a high of 1,474 deaths, while the historical average between 2011 and 2020 was consistently between (approximately) 900 and 1,000 per 100,000 person-years. Fenton refers to this post-injection-rollout range as “ridiculous” and proof that the ONS data “cannot be relied on because of misclassification problems and missing deaths.”
In response to Fenton et al.’s complaints, which they submitted to the ONS, Ed Humpherson, the director general for regulation at the UK’s Statistics Authority, wrote an email response that Fenton and Neil say confirms the fact that “official ONS data are biased towards vaccines and must not be used.”
“While there are aspects of the response that we are unhappy with, the crucial point is that the Regulator has completely accepted our main recommendation because it says that the ‘Death by Vaccination Status publication does not provide information on vaccine effectiveness or vaccine safety, and should not be used in this way,'” Fenton and Neil wrote in a Daily Skeptic article. The authors added “It is also important to note that the Regulator agreed with our conclusions that the ONS population sample was biased—with those excluded much more likely to be unvaccinated.”
This is a key point of agreement, Fenton highlights, because researchers and news organizations are using the ONS mortality data “to make very strong claims about vaccine safety and efficacy.” Including, perhaps chief amongst those organizations, the BBC, which used the ONS’ “only 8% of the UK is unvaccinated” stat for its controversial documentary film, Unvaccinated.
As for whether or not various media and academic sources will retract any and all statements about the COVID “vaccines'” safety and efficacy based on the ONS data, Fenton says that he’s “pessimistic.” Although he does still want “a very strong apology” from the BBC for basing its documentary on these false data. Sadly, however, it seems like that won’t ever happen. Nor will we ever see a major peer-reviewed journal publish this research, as Fenton says he and his colleagues no longer bother to try thanks to overwhelming rejection, even on popular pre-print servers.
Feature image: Dr. John Campbell
Related News
