From [HERE] A new study by a team of Canadian researchers into excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemicfound that patterns of excess death globally could not be explained by the virus, including long COVID.

The study, by researchers with Correlation Research in the Public Interest, examined excess mortality in 125 countries during the pandemic. It found that mortality patterns correlate closely with the imposition of restrictions such as lockdowns and with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

The investigation determined that pandemic-related restrictions resulted in 30 million deaths globally and that 17 million deaths can be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccines.

The researchers concluded that “nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon.”

Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., one of the paper’s co-authors and president of Correlation, joined “The Defender In-Depth” this week to discuss the study’s findings and analyze the likely causes contributing to increases in excess deaths and overall mortality.

Excess death data ‘not compatible’ with ‘particularly virulent special pathogen’

Hickey explained that “all-cause mortality” refers to “the number of deaths without filtering by the cause of death” during a given period, while “excess deaths” refers to “how many deaths occurred that are above and beyond what would have been predicted” for a certain period.

Hickey and the study’s co-authors analyzed pre-pandemic raw data from 2015 to 2019, and data collected between 2020 and 2023. Hickey said the data, collected from 125 countries, found “a large amount of excess deaths.”

“We calculate that over the COVID period … about 0.39% of the global population died in excess. That compares to about 0.97%” during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.

Hickey said this was “the largest non-war mortality event in 100 years” globally.

The study also found patterns of excess mortality across the world were “very heterogeneous,” as they varied “significantly from country to country,” across regions within the same country and across age groups. Hickey said:

“There are some countries that immediately following the declaration of the pandemic in March of 2020 had an enormous spike in … excess mortality that is very sharp, very fast and very narrow. But that does not occur in all countries.

“There are neighboring countries that don’t have that at all. There are countries that do not have any excess mortality throughout all of 2020, and it’s only in 2021 when the vaccines are rolled out, that they suddenly have excess. And that excess can be a sharp spike, or it can be a raised and sustained plateau.”

Noting that none of the countries had any excess deaths before the declaration of the pandemic, Hickey said this finding does not match the spread of a deadly virus.

“If you take the model of a new very deadly pathogen that is spreading around the world, you should not see this very high degree of heterogeneity … it’s simply not compatible with the hypothesis of a particularly virulent special pathogen,” he said.

“If there was a specifically virulent and dangerous pathogen that was spreading around the world, it would not wait for a political declaration of a pandemic to start causing excess mortality,” Hickey added.

Instead, “a much simpler, much more elegant explanation is that it’s differences in national policies, national measures of one kind or another that are responsible for these very different outcomes in excess mortality,” Hickey said. [MORE]