(The Defender) A study released today of excess mortality in 125 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic found the major causes of death globally stemmed from public health establishment’s response, including mandates and lockdowns that caused severe stress, harmful medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We conclude that nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon,” the authors of the study wrote.
Researchers from the Canadian nonprofit Correlation Research in the Public Interest and the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières analyzed excess all-cause mortality data prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning with the March 11, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic declaration and ending on May 5, 2023, when the WHO declared the pandemic over.
The results, presented in a detailed 521-page analysis, establish baseline all-cause mortality rates across 125 countries and use those to determine the variations in excess deaths during the pandemic.
The researchers also used the baseline rates to investigate how the individual country variations in excess death rates correlated to different pandemic-related interventions, including vaccination and booster campaigns.
Not all of the results on a country-by-country basis were the same. For example, in some countries, mortality spikes occurred before the vaccines were rolled out, while in other places, the mortality spikes tracked closely with vaccine or booster campaigns.
In some places, excess mortality rates returned to baseline or close to baseline in 2022, while in others, the rates persisted well into 2023. Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., lead author of the study, told The Defender the disparities result from the complex nature of pandemic measures — and the data — in different areas.
Once Rancourt’s team was able to establish the baseline and excess mortality data for each place, they clustered and examined the data through different filters to interpret it, and drew several conclusions.
Data ‘incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death’
The researchers established that there was significant excess mortality worldwide between March 11, 2020, and May 5, 2023.
Overall excess mortality during the three years in the 93 countries with sufficient data to make an estimate is approximately 0.392% of the 2021 population — or approximately 30.9 million excess deaths from all causes.
The conventional explanation for the excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rancourt said, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus caused virtually all deaths — and there would have been even more deaths if there hadn’t been a vaccine.
The variations in excess all-cause mortality rates across space and time, the authors wrote, “allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020-2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death.”
They said the theory that the virus caused the deaths is propped up by mass virus-testing campaigns that should be abandoned.
‘Idea that vaccines saved lives is ridiculous’
Rancourt and his team cited several factors they believe disprove the theory that the virus caused a spike in all-cause mortality.
For example, they wrote that excess mortality surged almost simultaneously across several continents when a pandemic was declared, while there were no comparable surges in areas that had not yet declared a pandemic.
This suggests that pandemic interventions like lockdowns, which were implemented synchronously across many countries, likely caused the surges.
The researchers also pointed out the significant variation in mortality rates during the pandemic in all time periods, even across different political jurisdictions directly adjacent to each other. If the virus caused the deaths, it would follow that the infection fatality rate would be the same, or at least similar across political boundaries.
The researchers also found a lot of variability in death rates within countries over time, which also would not be an expected outcome if those deaths were caused by a pathogen.
Rancourt said they found “the idea that the vaccine saved lives is ridiculous,” and based on flawed modeling as he and colleagues also showed in a previous paper.
Here again, they found no systematic or statistically significant trends showing that vaccination campaigns in 2020 and 2021 reduced all-cause mortality.
Instead, they found that in many places, there was no excess mortality until the vaccines were rolled out, and most countries showed temporal associations between vaccine rollouts and increases in all-cause mortality.