COVID-19
‘Highly improbable’: New study exposes flaws in Lancet paper claiming COVID vaccines saved millions of lives
From LifeSiteNews
A new study by all-cause mortality researchers Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., re-examined the mathematical model behind a paper published in The Lancet claiming the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives. The Lancet paper, cited more than 700 times, was partially funded by the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
When two University of Pennsylvania scientists earlier this month won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in developing “effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” the Nobel Committee and legacy media organizations celebrated the COVID-19 vaccines for saving “millions of lives.”
But a new study re-examining the mathematical model behind the life-saving claims – a model that was laid out in a study published in 2022 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases – concluded the model was deeply flawed and the resulting characterization of the COVID-19 vaccines “must be invalid.”
The Lancet paper, funded by the World Health Organization (WHO) Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, has been cited more than 700 times.
All-cause mortality researchers Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., calculated and graphed the mortality rates that would have occurred without the vaccines, as projected by Waston et al. in The Lancet study, and compared those projections to the actual all-cause mortality rates.
Rancourt and Hickey tested the assertions in The Lancet paper that the vaccines averted tens of millions of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths from all causes that exceeds the expected number of deaths under normal conditions.
If The Lancet paper model were accurate, Rancourt and Hickey wrote, without the vaccines the global mortality rates would have spiked to historically unprecedented and unimaginable levels suddenly, a year into the pandemic, at precisely the moment the vaccines rolled out.
And the vaccines would have nearly perfectly reduced those unimaginable levels of mortality back to baseline mortality rates.
They concluded that Watson et al.’s “results and the associated fantastic claims of millions of lives saved are highly improbable,” and that their theoretical claims have “no connection to actual mortality,” but instead are based on “wild” assumptions.
The findings raise questions about the serious failures of the peer review process in top journals, the Nobel award process and the media’s verification processes, according to the authors, who are both part of the Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest.
‘So improbable it should be qualified as impossible’
According to Rancourt and Hickey, given there is no known controlled randomized clinical trial showing the COVID-19 vaccines caused death to be averted, the primary basis for such claims comes from Watson et al., who concluded:
“[Findings] Based on official reported COVID-19 deaths, we estimated that vaccinations prevented 14·4 million (95% credible interval [Crl] 13·7–15·9) deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020, and Dec 8, 2021.
“This estimate rose to 19·8 million (95% Crl 19·1– 20·4) deaths from COVID-19 averted when we used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic …
“[Interpretation] COVID-19 vaccination has substantially altered the course of the pandemic, saving tens of millions of lives globally.”
To test the validity of the model’s projections, Rancourt and Hickey used Watson et al.’s data to calculate what the all-cause mortality would have been over time for 95 countries if the researchers’ claims were true and no COVID-19 vaccines were administered.
To compare the implications of those claims to actual all-cause mortality, they distributed the paper’s most conservative estimate of “14.4 million deaths averted” globally, calculating the number of deaths averted per country as a mathematical combination over time of vaccines administered and vaccine effectiveness.
They created graphs to show how Watson et al.’s theoretical all-cause mortality rates without the vaccine compared to actual all-cause mortality rates.
The graphs also show all-cause mortality rates prior to the pandemic and note the date the WHO declared the global pandemic and the date of the vaccine rollouts for each country.
In the U.S., for example (Figure 1), there were unprecedented peaks in all-cause mortality in 2020, 2021 and 2022 that the researchers have tied, in other papers, to pandemic measures such as the widespread use of ventilators, and to mortality associated with the vaccine itself.
Those peaks can be seen in the blue line on the graph, which shows the actual all-cause mortality. The projected scenario from Watson et al’.s paper is plotted in red.
Figure 1. United States (USA): (top panel) All-cause mortality by week, 2018-2022, measured (blue), calculated following Watson et al. (2022) (red-solid), continued (red-dashed); (bottom panel) same, expressed as excess all-cause mortalities, and with 1σ uncertainty (shaded blue). In both panels, cumulative COVID-19 vaccine administration (all-doses) (dark grey), March 11, 2020 date, (vertical grey line). Credit: Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D.
If their numbers are correct, the graph shows, a “massive and more-than-unprecedented” national excess mortality would have occurred if the COVID-19 vaccines had not been rolled out, and that spike would have coincidentally happened at precisely the moment when the rollout happened to occur, but not before.
“This would be a remarkable coincidence,” Rancourt and Hickey wrote, especially given this spike would have happened suddenly after several waves of infection and one year after the pandemic was declared.
It is also notable, they said, that the vaccines supposedly lowered all-cause mortality rates to precisely the pre-pandemic numbers, rather than to some intermediary number.
A similar phenomenon would have happened, they said, in Canada according to Watson et al.’s calculations. Unlike the U.S., Canada had very minimal changes in all-cause mortality through the entire pandemic period.
However, the calculations by Watson et al. predict that Canada would have seen a tripling in all-cause mortality by week for approximately a year if the vaccines had not been rolled out, the authors wrote.
Figure 2. Canada (CAN): (top panel) All-cause mortality by week, 2018-2022, measured (blue), calculated following Watson et al. (2022) (red-solid), continued (red-dashed); (bottom panel) same, expressed as excess all-cause mortalities, and with 1σ uncertainty (shaded blue). In both panels, cumulative COVID-19 vaccine administration (all-doses) (dark grey), March 11, 2020, date (vertical grey line). Credit: Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D.
In Canada, there is also “no visible decrease in actual all-cause mortality” temporally associated with the roll-outs, which one might expect if the roll-outs affected mortality. Rather, they wrote, “the opposite is apparent, with excess mortality proportionately accompanying rollouts.”
They also presented data from 31 European countries, whose situation was analogous to the U.S. “This extraordinary coincidence” they wrote, “essentially occurs in most of 95 countries [they analyzed].”
“In fact, the said coincidence is palpably so improbable that it should, without hesitation, be qualified as impossible,” Rancourt and Hickey wrote. “A single such example in a single country is sufficient to invalidate the exercise of Watson et al. (2022), and the example is repeated for 95 countries.”
‘The opposite of good science’
Rancourt, former physics professor and lead scientist for 23 years at the University of Ottawa, told Children’s Health Defense Staff Scientist J. Jay Couey, Ph.D., on a recent episode of Couey’s Gigaohm Biological livestream, that the Nobel Prize is a powerful political instrument.
Although there are some exceptions where Nobel has recognized authentically important scientific achievements, he said, “Generally speaking the Nobel Prize is an instrument of the establishment for propaganda, to convince people of what things they need to consider to be absolutely true, absolute advancements of human knowledge.”
“It impacts not only the general public but also scientists themselves,” in terms of what they believe and what they research, Rancourt said.
When the 2023 Nobel Prizes were announced, and the legacy media universally made claims about tens of millions of lives saved, Rancourt and Hickey decided to investigate the publication behind the claims: the Waston 2022 paper.
He said they found the paper was “the opposite of good science.”
That was not, Rancourt noted, because the mathematical calculations were wrong, but because the authors made no attempt to examine whether the assumptions behind their model inputs were logical, or whether their predictions were “reasonable and realistic,” meaning they could occur in the real world.
Rancourt told Couey after doing their analysis, he and his colleagues found the claims in the paper were so “stunning” it led them to question:
How did this get through peer review? … Who were these reviewers? How could they be so blind and incompetent and unquestioning of what some authors are doing, which is completely novel and completely fabricated? … Are they not able to see it?
And on the other hand, what about the editors? How do the editors pick these reviewers? Did the editors go with only the reviewers that thought it was okay and ignore the reviewers that were critical of it? Are they themselves so scientifically illiterate [they cannot] do a theoretical calculation?
Scientists, he said, particularly when one is doing theoretical projections, must constantly critically interrogate their own results.
“They have to be critical of their own ideas, not just rub their hands because they get something that Gates will like,” he said.
Worse, he said, “the Nobel Prize Committee itself had to be clueless, had to be unscientific, had to be unquestioning, had to look for something, a prize they wanted to give, and not bother thinking for themselves about whether or not this made any sense. And then they repeated this ‘millions of lives saved’ thing, which is nonsense.”
As a result, a “horrendous product that should never have been injected into people’s bodies, is now something that we’re going to celebrate. It’s going to be an achievement of human science, of the science created by humans.”
“There is no scientific basis for saying that whatsoever,” Rancourt said. “No clinical trials have ever demonstrated that. And it’s based on a garbage simulation funded by the industry, where the authors didn’t even double check if their results made any kind of sense.”
“This is the absurdity that we are now experiencing,” he said.
This article was originally published by The Defender – Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
COVID-19
17-year-old died after taking COVID shot, but Ontario judge denies his family’s liability claim
From LifeSiteNews
Ontario Superior Court Justice Sandra Antoniani ruled that the Department of Health had no ‘duty of care’ to individual members of the public in its pandemic response.
An Ontario judge dismissed a liability claim from a family of a high schooler who died weeks after taking the COVID shot.
According to a published report on March 26 by Blacklock’s Reporter, Ontario Superior Court Justice Sandra Antoniani ruled that the Department of Health had no “duty of care” to a Canadian teenager who died after receiving a COVID vaccine.
“The plaintiff’s tragedy is real, but there is no private law duty of care made out,” Antoniani said.
“There is no private law duty of care to individual members of the public injured by government core policy decisions in the handling of health emergencies which impact the general population,” she continued.
In September 2021, 17-year-old Sean Hartman of Beeton, Ontario, passed away just three weeks after receiving a Pfizer-BioNtech COVID shot.
After his death, his family questioned if health officials had warned Canadians “that a possible side effect of receiving a Covid-19 vaccine was death.” The family took this petition to court but has been denied a hearing.
Antoniani alleged that “the defendants’ actions were aimed at mitigating the health impact of a global pandemic on the Canadian public. The defendants deemed that urgent action was necessary.”
“Imposition of a private duty of care would have a negative impact on the ability of the defendants to prioritize the interests of the entire public, with the distraction of fear over the possibility of harm to individual members of the public, and the risk of litigation and unlimited liability,” she ruled.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, Dan Hartman, Sean’s father, filed a $35.6 million lawsuit against Pfizer after his son’s death.
Hartman’s family is not alone in their pursuit of justice after being injured by the COVID shot. Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) was launched in December 2020 after the Canadian government gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding COVID-19 jab-related injuries.
However, only 103 claims of 1,859 have been approved to date, “where it has been determined by the Medical Review Board that there is a probable link between the injury and the vaccine, and that the injury is serious and permanent.”
Thus far, VISP has paid over $6 million to those injured by COVID injections, with some 2,000 claims remaining to be settled.
According to studies, post-vaccination heart conditions such as myocarditis are well documented in those, especially young males who have received the Pfizer jab.
Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots as well as boosters.
Measles, Fauci, Politics and Public Education. This is a fascinating read
#10 – ‘Measles Death’ of 6-Year-Old Girl Exposed as a Media HOAX
The media claimed a 6-year-old girl died of measles, but “she did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination,” Dr. Pierre Kory says.
“In fact, she died of pneumonia. But it gets worse than that because she didn’t really die of pneumonia. She died of a MEDICAL ERROR.”
Let that sink in.
What happened was a complete breakdown in basic medical care. The hospital failed to give her the appropriate antibiotic regimen to treat her pneumonia. By the time they corrected their mistake, it was too late, and the girl died “catastrophically.”
“I mean, this is like medicine 101. You put them on two antibiotics to cover all the possibilities. It’s a grievous error, and it’s an error which led to her death,” Dr. Kory attested.
Not only did Covenant Children’s Hospital fail to provide the appropriate antibiotic, but when they noticed their error, they dragged their feet and took another 10 hours to administer it.
“By that time, she was already on a ventilator. And approximately 24 hours later—actually, less than 24 hours later—she died,” Dr. Kory explained.
And she did not pass away peacefully. According to Dr. Kory, “She died rather catastrophically.”
And while her family grieved, the media hijacked her death to stir fear and push the vaccine narrative. Just another “measles death” used as a political weapon.
This is a case Dr. Pierre Kory calls “absolutely enraging.”
And it is. Just another example of how the media will shamelessly twist the story of a grieving family’s loss to push Big Pharma’s agenda. That’s not just dishonest. That’s evil, plain and simple.
Follow @ChildrensHD for the full interview and more details on this enraging story.
(See 9 More Revealing Stories Below)
#9 – Bill Maher guest calls out Fauci’s ridiculous pardon, saying, “There’s a reason he was given a pardon back to 2014.”
“There is something very wrong going on here.”
“Everyone knew it [gain-of-function research] was dangerous a long time ago. You go back to 2015, you will find a big meeting in London where they say there’s one lab in the world most likely to have a problem with this—Wuhan. Do you know who was the biggest supporter of gain of function research for the last 30 years? Anthony Fauci.”
It turns out that in 2014, 300 scientists warned Anthony Fauci would start a global pandemic.
RFK Jr. previously explained that following the high-profile escape of three bugs from U.S. labs, these 300 scientists sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to shut down Anthony Fauci’s gain-of-function research.
Obama issued a moratorium and shut down 18 of the worst projects by Anthony Fauci. In the end, he really didn’t shut them down. Instead, Obama moved the research offshore to places like Ukraine, the former Soviet State of Georgia, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
Now, it is widely accepted that COVID-19 originated from that very lab in Wuhan, China. The 300 scientists were right when they said Anthony Fauci would start a global pandemic.
#8 – Kevin O’Leary delivers a harsh reality check to people burning Teslas: You’re going to “rot in hell in prison.”
“And frankly, as far as I’m concerned, that’s okay,” he said.
O’Leary left no room for debate, making it clear that there’s zero justification for the destruction:
“When you set a car on fire, you should go to jail. You’re a criminal. And I don’t think we have to talk about it in any other context.”
He also had a blunt message for those thinking they’ll get away with it:
“And all those cars have cameras in them, and those dealerships have cameras. You’re beyond being stupid when you do that… You’re going to spend five to 20 years in prison. If they get them on terrorism—which I think is a stretch—there will be no parole, no shortened sentence. They’ll rot in hell in prison for 20 years. And frankly, as far as I’m concerned, that’s okay.”
#7- Stephen A. Smith Rips his OWN STAFF while recording his show.
Smith grilled his staff’s loyalty to the Democratic Party after pitching this common-sense idea to Democrats: “Rather than telling us what we should vote against, maybe you should present us with options of what to vote for.”
“I mean, my God. Are you okay, Michael, with me suggesting that? Are you okay with me, Sherry, suggesting that?” Smith asked.
“Rashawn Galen and all of a bunch of leftists that’s under my umbrella trying to act like they’re independents when they’re full of it! I’m talking about my own damn staff,” he clarified.
“I’m a centrist. I think my man, Rashawn, is a centrist. The rest of these damn people working for me. I mean, what left-wing party are you associated with? I mean, you gotta believe this stuff.”
“Pay for performance. That’s what businesses do. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be running our public schools in the same way.”
Vivek announced that he plans for Ohio to become the first state in the nation to adopt merit-based pay for every teacher, principal, and administrator.
He says that performance reviews should go beyond standardized testing, incorporating peer reviews, parent feedback, and student outcomes—with a clear goal of rewarding the best educators.
“The best teachers in the country right now, sadly, are underpaid. We need to fix that—but fix it through meritocracy,” Vivek said. “Thanks to President Trump’s bold actions today, we can lead the way.”
While you’re here, don’t forget to follow me (@VigilantFox) for more weekly news roundups.
#5 – Tim Walz absurdly claims that Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education could take America back to an era of racial segregation.
“And then it’s about the Civil Rights Department at the Department of Education that makes sure that we don’t have a situation where a Ruby Bridges is escorted to school with police. And so we’re back in an area where we can segregate,” Walz said.
Somehow, giving control back to the states means we’re suddenly back in 1960. This is why no one takes Democrats seriously anymore. All they do is cry wolf.
#4 – Bill Maher believes JFK wasn’t killed by a lone gunman—says a lot of people wanted Kennedy dead.
QUESTION: “Is it time to move on from this conspiracy theory?”
MAHER: “Well, I mean, do you think it’s a conspiracy theory? Plainly, there was not a single gunman, right?… But the magic bullet. There could not have been a bullet that went through a guy, went around him, came back, went through the other guy, got lunch at the diner, came back, shot him in the back of the head. I mean, it’s just. Come on, everybody heard a shot from the grassy knoll.”
“The idea that the CIA is going to now suddenly go, ‘You’re right, we had something to do with it.’ I’m not saying they did, but a lot of people wanted him [JFK] dead.”
“So you may think that the government computers all talk to each other. They synchronize, they add up what funds are going somewhere, and it’s coherent that the numbers, for example, that you’re presented as a senator, are actually the real numbers. They’re not,” Musk explained.
“They’re not totally wrong,” he continued. “They’re probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases. So I call it Magic Money Computer. Any computer which can just make money out of thin air. That’s Magic Money.”
“So how does that work?” Ted Cruz asked.
“It just issues payments,” Musk answered. “I think we found now 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing.”
This raises a critical question: If the government’s books are off by 5% to 10% in some cases, leaving up to hundreds of billions of dollars unaccounted for, where is all that money actually going?
#2 – The New York Times finally ADMITS the “conspiracy theorists” were right about COVID and that Fauci and the “experts” misled the public.
“Perhaps we were misled on purpose.”
I can’t believe they actually printed this. Here’s what they’re finally admitting:
• Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar coordinated a media strategy to discredit lab leak discussions. Emails show they worked behind the scenes to smear and silence anyone who questioned the official narrative.
• The Biden administration and intelligence agencies pressured social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak discussions and label them as “misinformation.”
• Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and other scientists knew the truth but covered it up. Behind closed doors, they admitted a lab escape was likely. In public, they dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.”
• WHO’s Jeremy Farrar got a burner phone to secretly coordinate meetings with Fauci, Collins, and top scientists, ensuring their discussions stayed off the record.
• Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and Eddie Holmes strategized how to mislead New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr., making sure he didn’t dig too deep into the lab leak theory.
• The infamous Proximal Origin paper, authored by Andersen, Garry, Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, and W. Ian Lipkin, was a coordinated effort to mislead the public. Private Slack messages revealed they believed a lab escape was not only possible but likely—yet they publicly denied it.
• Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance helped cover for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite knowing their risky gain-of-function research could have caused the outbreak.
• The Wuhan lab, run by Shi Zhengli (“Bat Woman”), had horrifyingly lax safety protocols—yet they expected the public to believe a leak was impossible.
And now, after years of smearing and slandering the “conspiracy theorists,” The New York Times is quietly admitting the so-called “conspiracy theorists” were right all along.
#1 – RFK Jr. Sounds the Alarm on Bird Flu Vaccines
The USDA plans to inject millions of chickens to stop the bird flu outbreak, but RFK Jr. says “leaky vaccines” could make things worse.
He breaks it down here. This is the must-read thread of the week:
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Originals
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RFK Jr. Issues Grave Vaccination Warning |
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The USDA wants to vaccinate millions of chickens to stop the bird flu. They claim it’s the ultimate solution, but not everyone’s convinced. RFK Jr., for one, is sounding the alarm.
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While you’re here, don’t forget to follow me (@VigilantFox) for more weekly news roundups.
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