Andrew Bridgen, former Conservative MP for North-West Leicestershire until his expulsion for questioning the official Covid narrative, now member of The Reclaim Party, finally gave this speech on 20 October on excess deaths since the Covid ‘vaccine’ rollout – after 20 rejections!
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. 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.
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. Noth-ing 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, Cons): 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.
I thank the Hon Gentleman for his intervention. He is absolutely right: the media have let the British public down badly. A full press pack will go out to all media outlets, with all the evidence to back up all the claims I 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 have been oddly presented in a distorted way and concerned people seeking to highlight important findings and ask questions have found themselves inexplicably under attack.
ONS bias and incompetence
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 (OECD) 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 those 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 were 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.
Deaths among the elderly
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.
Read the complete article in issue 110.