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Brownstone Institute

The Veil of Silence over Excess Deaths

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Sonia ElijahSONIA ELIJAH  

Around the world, there has been a deafening silence over excess deaths from governments and the mainstream media, who not so long ago were quite fixated on the daily death toll for Covid.

On October 20th, a 30-minute adjourned debate (20 rejections later) on excess deaths in the UK House of Commons was finally secured by Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire and member of the Reclaim Party.

Bridgen began his speech to the sound of erupting cheers from the full, upper public gallery, in stark contrast to the almost empty chamber below.

Where were the hundreds of MPs who would normally sit shoulder to shoulder in the chamber? It appears, an increase in deaths of their constituents was not a pressing issue for them on that Friday afternoon.

We’ve experienced more excess deaths since July 2021 than in the whole of 2020, unlike the pandemic, however, these 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 history will not judge this house kindly.

Strikingly, excess deaths have been seen across all age groups, which Bridgen pointed out during his speech.

The graph below shows the pooled weekly total number of deaths for all ages, from 27 participating countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Germany (Berlin), Germany (Hesse), Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK (England), UK (Northern Ireland), UK (Scotland), and UK (Wales).

Source: EUROMOMO

According to the British Medical Journal, ‘Excess deaths are calculated as the difference between current numbers of deaths and those in a baseline year, and the excess can differ depending on the baseline and methodology used.’ 

This important point on how excess can differ depending on the baseline used, was raised by Bridgen.

ONS Manipulating the Data, Again

Bridgen explained:

‘To understand if there is an ‘excess’ by definition, you need to estimate how many deaths would have been expected. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) used 2015-2019 as a baseline…Unforgivably, the UK ONS (Office for National Statistics) have included deaths in 2021, as part of their 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 minimized. 

Why would the ONS want do that?

My early 2022 interview with Norman Fenton, professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary, University of London, revealed how the ONS had also been manipulating the data on deaths involving Covid-19 by vaccination status.

Fenton coauthored a paper analysing the ONS report: ‘Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England: deaths occurring between 2 January and 24 September 2021.

The paper concluded that the ONS was guilty of ‘systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status’ and that the COVID-19 vaccines did not reduce all-cause mortality, but rather produced genuine spikes in all-cause mortality shortly after vaccination.

The Backlog of Unregistered Deaths

Bridgen went on to highlight a critical failure in how data on deaths are being collected.

‘There is a total failure to collect (never mind publish) data on deaths that are referred for investigation to the coroner. Why does this matter? A referral means that it can be many months and given the backlog, many years, before a death is formally registered. Needing to investigate a cause of death is fair enough. Failing to record when the death happened, is not. Because of this problem, we actually 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 investigatedThis data failure is unacceptable.’

Excess Deaths in the Younger Age Groups

My investigative report into child deaths following Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine revealed there was an increase in deaths in the 0-14 age group, around the time the mRNA vaccine was authorised in children, 12-15 years of age.

Source: EUROMOMO

Bridgen drew attention to the fact that in a judicial review on a decision to vaccinate younger children, the ONS shockingly refused in court to give anonymised details (which they admitted was statistically significant) on the increase in excess deaths observed in the second half of 2021, for young adolescent males. Bridgen made the point that potentially even more excess deaths would have been observed, if those referred to the coroner had been included.

Excess Deaths Observed in Heavily Vaccinated Countries

In August 2023, fifteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were observed in Ireland (21.1 percent), Malta (16.9 percent), Portugal (12.7 percent) and the Netherlands (9.4 percent), according to Eurostat. It should be noted that, as of January 2023, Portugal had the highest COVID-19 vaccination rate in Europe having administered 272.78 doses per 100 people in the country, while Malta had administered 258.49 doses per 100.

Increase in Cardiac Arrests

Bridgen, brought attention to the fact that Dr Clare Craig, diagnostic pathologist and co-chair of HART, was the first to highlight the increase in cardiac arrest calls after the vaccine rollout in May 2021.

Bridgen stated:

‘Ambulance data for England provides another clue. Ambulance calls for life-threatening emergencies were running at a steady 2,000 calls per day until the vaccine rollout. From then they rose to 2,500 daily, and  calls have stayed at that level since.’

Source: NHS Key statistics: England, July 2023

Category 1: An immediate response to a life-threatening condition, such as cardiac or respiratory arrest. 

The Anomalies of the Pfizer Clinical Trial

Bridgen shared the fact that:

Four participants in the vaccine group of the Pfizer trial died from cardiac arrest compared to only one in the placebo group. Overall there were 21 deaths in the vaccine group up to March 2021, compared to 17 in the placebo group. There were serious anomalies about the reporting of deaths in this trial, with the deaths in the vaccine group taking much longer to report than those in the placebo group. That is highly suggestive of a significant bias in what was supposed to be a blinded trial.

An Israeli study clearly showed an increase in cardiac hospital attendances among 18-39 year olds that correlated with vaccination not covid.

Australia, the Perfect Control Group

Bridgen explained that Australia had almost no covid when vaccines were introduced making it the perfect control group.

The state of South Australia had only had 1,000 cases of covid in total across the whole population by December 2021, before omicron arrived. What was the impact of vaccination there? For 15-44 year olds, there were historically around 1,300 emergency cardiac presentations a month. With the vaccine roll-out to the under 50s, this rocketed reaching 2,172 cases in November 2021 in this age group alone, which was 67% more than usual.

Overall there were 17,900 South Australians who had a cardiac emergency in 2021 compared to 13,250 in 2018, a 35% increase. The vaccine must clearly be the No.1 suspect in this, and it cannot be dismissed as a coincidence. Australian mortality has increased from early 2021 and that increase is due to cardiac deaths.

How the Regulators Have Failed

The regulators also missed the fact that in the Pfizer trial the vaccine was made for the trial participants in a highly controlled environment, in stark contrast to the manufacturing process used for the public – which was based on completely different technology. Just over 200 participants were given the same product that was given to the public, but not only was the data from these people never compared to those in the trial for efficacy and safety, but the MHRA has admitted that it dropped the requirement to provide this data. That means there was never a trial on the Pfizer product actually rolled out to the public, and that product has never even been compared to the product that was actually trialled.

The vaccine mass production processes use vats of Escherichia Coli and presents a risk of contamination with DNA from the bacteria, as well as bacterial cell walls, which can cause dangerous reactions. This is not theoretical; there is now sound evidence that has been replicated by several labs across the world that the mRNA vaccines were contaminated by significant amounts of DNA which far exceeded the usual permissible levels. Given that this DNA is enclosed in a lipid nanoparticle delivery system, it is arguable that even the permissible levels would have been too high. These lipid nanoparticles are known to enter every organ of the body. As well as this potentially causing some of the acute adverse reactions that have been seen, there is a serious risk of this foreign bacterial DNA inserting itself into human DNA. Will anyone investigate? No they won’t.

The BBC’s Role

How ironic that the BBC has chosen to remain utterly silent on the issue of excess deaths, despite its ardent daily coverage of the Covid death toll.

In regards to vaccine injuries, the BBC took a far more proactive role. The public broadcaster took it upon itself to collaborate with Facebook to take down the online pages of Covid-19 vaccine injury groups, by drawing attention to the fact that these groups used carrot emojis to circumvent Big Tech censors.

Many viewers of Bridgen’s speech took to social media to draw attention to the fact that the BBC also took it upon itself to plaster the debate with its own captions, in an attempt to contradict what the MP was saying.

One caption read: The NHS says COVID-19 vaccines used in the UK are safe and the best protection from getting seriously ill with the disease.

What is interesting is that Bridgen did not mention vaccines and autism during his debate but this did not stop the BBC from inserting the caption below.

‘NHS guidance states vaccines do not cause autism, there is no evidence of a link between MMR vaccine and autism.’

It must be noted that the BBC helms the Trusted News Initiative (an alliance of Big Tech and the mainstream media) set up in 2019 to combat ‘anti-vax misinformation’ in real-time. Therefore, its collaboration with Facebook to censor stories on vaccine harms; the lack of any coverage on excess deaths and the more recent captioning of Bridgen’s speech – shows just how effectively it has executed that role.

In Conclusion

Bridgen closed the debate by stating the following:

The experimental covid-19 vaccines are not safe and are not effective. Despite there being only limited interest in the Chamber from colleagues—I am very grateful to those who have attended—we can see from the Public Gallery that there is considerable public interest. I implore all Members of the House, those who are present and those who are not, to support calls for a three-hour debate on this important issue. Mr Deputy Speaker, this might be the first debate on excess deaths in our Parliament—indeed, it might be the first debate on excess deaths in the world—but, very sadly, I promise you it will not be the last.

Republshed from the author’s Substack

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  • Sonia Elijah

    Sonia Elijah has a background in Economics. She’s a former BBC researcher and now works as an investigative journalist.

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Brownstone Institute

If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker 

Who Controls the Administrative State?

President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.

It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.

The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.

How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.

All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.

The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.

Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.

This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.

The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.

The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.

The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.

A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.

There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.

Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.

Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.

After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?

So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.

What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.

We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.

All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.

What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.

For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.

That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.

That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.

There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.

First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.

That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.

Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.

In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.

Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?

Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.

Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.

If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.

The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?

Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.

Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute David Bell  

What War Means

My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.

Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.

It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.

People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.

Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.

I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.

The EU Reverses Its Focus

When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.

Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.

We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.

In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”

The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.

As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?

Europe’s Need for Outside Help

A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.

Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.

Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.

Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.

There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.

Author

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

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