In the first three months of 2021, the Covid 19 pandemic in Ireland was at its greatest extent. People will remember the narrative at the time: It was when the Government foolishly “opened up for Christmas” and, according to received wisdom, unleashed a torrential hellspike of Covid cases. We were all glued, if you recall, to the nightly news, waiting for Richard and Zara and Gavan to announce “the numbers” to us on the Virgin Media news. It was also the last quarter in Ireland which includes a substantial period where nobody in Ireland was vaccinated against Covid.
The deaths in those three months – January through March, 2021 – were, according to the CSO, 9,654.
A year later, the Covid wave had largely receded. Indeed, it was in Quarter One of 2022 when the Government finally felt things were safe enough to end all Covid restrictions altogether. Everybody who wished to be vaccinated was vaccinated.
The deaths in those first three months of this year – January through March, 2022, were, according to the CSO, 9,535.
There is a difference in the two figures of just 119 deaths, or 1.2%. What’s more, both years saw significantly more deaths – by a thousand or more – than the two or three years before Covid, over the same period.
This data could lead a person to a range of potential conclusions. The most obvious conclusion is that the vaccination campaign in Ireland had no overall impact on mortality whatsoever. It neither saved countless lives, nor, if these figures are to be believed, cost countless lives.
There is, however, a change in the causes of death: In Q1 2021, Covid 19 accounted, officially, for 19.3% of all deaths. In Q1 2022, Covid 19 accounted for just 6.3% of all deaths.
Deaths from respiratory ailments, malignant cancers, and circulatory (read heart) problems all rose, however.
However, these deaths all rose in older groups, not younger groups, per the data:
The leading cause of death in quarter 1 2022 varied widely by age-group. For those aged from 15 to 34 years, external causes of death including accidents, suicide and other ranked first (43 deaths). Among individuals aged 35-74, malignant neoplasms (cancer) was the leading cause (1,263), while for those aged 75 and older, it was diseases of the circulatory system (1,983 deaths). See table 14.
This would all, I think, tend to back up the slowly emerging thesis in the United Kingdom that the impact of lockdown on health screening services is slowly beginning to be felt: In locking down to avoid covid, the health service also avoided in many cases early detection of cancer and heart problems which is leading to more deaths now. This was a strong argument made by lockdown critics at the beginning of the pandemic, though it sadly got very little traction.
There is, I’m afraid, little in this data to support the killer jab narrative about the vaccines often seen online, and about which this writer gets regular emails urging me to expose. The claims made about the vaccine online are generally that it has led to a sharp increase in dangerous cardiac incidents amongst young people, but there is nothing in this data – or any other data that this writer has reviewed – to support the conclusion that there even is an increase in cardiac incidents in the young, let alone data that can be convincingly tied to any vaccine.
More importantly, however, there’s simply no evidence in these figures that all that the country suffered through – lockdowns, unemployment, loneliness, depression, and so on – made even the slightest bit of difference in terms of saving lives. We may need to confront head on the idea that lockdown cost this country as many lives as it saved.
That prospect is, I think, terrifying for people. We gave up weddings, and funerals, and family events. We lived abnormally, and in constant fear. And all of it was to “save lives”.
The problem is this: There is no real evidence, anywhere in the world, that lockdowns saved lives. There is mounting evidence that they may have cost lives.
There’s a reason, dear reader, that NPHET has gone away, and that there is no prospect of lockdown returning. And that reason is not that Covid is over. It is that in the halls of power, it is already accepted that lockdown was an error. They are simply terrified that the public may yet, cop to that.
I wouldn’t worry, though, if I were them. The consequences of that realisation are so huge that most people, I think, will avoid ever reaching it.