Bureaubabble
and apparently temporal correlation is relevant in 2022 but it was spurious in 2021!
I recently saw a short video put up by Senator Rennick of an interaction he had with health bureaucrats at an Australian Senate Estimates hearings in March 2024. It’s a 5-minute video.
There is a gotcha moment in the video that has made me think a bit more about how to convey concepts related to the excess mortality, especially with the work we are doing now for the Excess Mortality Inquiry. So bear with me. I’ll give a blow-by-blow description of the interaction. Then we’ll look further at the numbers that come up in the interaction.
To finish off the article I will post a link to an interview I did with another of our great politicians, Russell Broadbent, that he uploaded this week.
The bureaucrat answering questions from Senator Rennick is a Phillip Gould, grandly titled “First Assistant Secretary for Health Economics and Research”. From his government bio:
“One of the themes to emerge in the Department since the bushfire and COVID crises is our dual responsibility to protect and use data in the public interest. This view of the world will guide our decisions over the coming years, as the Department seeks to safely share its data with state and territory governments, as well as the research community.”
Great - he should be the right person for the job.
But despite his expert background, he appears to be befuddled by questions Senator Rennick puts to him. The Senator starts by stating he wants to ask about the excess mortality in 2021. He notes there were 172,000 deaths in Australian in 2021, 10,000 higher than 2020. Senator Rennick points out the excess occurred after the rollout of the vaccines and he points out the strong temporal correlation. There were:
reported vaccine injuries;
no population growth;
no autopsies with tissues samples done to prove people didn’t die of vaccine injuries.
The Senator notes the health department didn’t initially acknowledge myocarditis and points out a paper regarding the long-term health risks of myocarditis, such as heart failure. So, the question he poses is:
“Had the Health Department looked into the excess in 2021?”
From 1:30 our bureaucrat starts babbling.
He claims there are spurious temporal correlations. The Chair of the committee then seems to run cover for the bureaucrat by interrupting Senator Rennick.
Our bureaucrat has to begrudgingly agree that there is a temporal correlation but tells us that we have to be careful about “associating” increased deaths with the introduction of the vaccines.
Apparently, the Health Department has commissioned research looking at the mortality rate of people who have received vaccines and those who haven’t. He condescendingly says to the Senator that what you need is this “detailed study” to draw the conclusions that Senator Rennick is looking to draw. Apparently 10,000 people extra dead in a year by itself isn’t enough to be concerned. We need detailed studies. He says these detailed studies show that there is no link with vaccination.
Hmm interesting. All the unvaccinated people are supposed to be the ones dying. But there is no link!
Then Senator Rennick stops him and asks if tissues samples were taken? Bureaucrat’s answer is no, not for this study (and probably not for any other study, but of course he doesn’t have to admit that). He doesn’t agree that we don’t know what caused the deaths because tissue samples weren’t taken. Then there is a bit of semantics about counterfactuals.
Senator Rennick goes back to the original question.
“Then what is the cause?”
Our bureaucrat teaches us that we have to take into account “natural variations in mortality statistics”. Senator Rennick is quick off the mark with “it’s three standard deviations from the mean of the last three years”.
This is the bit I have been pondering over. How do we clearly express what is the magnitude of this excess, in a true technical sense?
Then the chair of the session quickly tags in, to try to defend the bureaucrat from having to deal with statistics before Senator Rennick finishes his point. We don’t want the top data guy in Health to have to deal with standard deviations and statistical stuff. She tells Senator Rennick the Health Department representatives are “learned people”.
It’s becoming a joke at this point.
Our bureaucrat doesn’t know about the three standard deviation statistic, but he will look into it. He seems confused and thinks it’s higher than what he expected.
Our bureaucrat then points out that deaths went up in 2022 compared to 2021 and that was temporally correlated with COVID transmission in the community. Then comes the gotcha. Senator Rennick is quick off the mark with:
“OK its temporally correlated when it’s COVID but not when it’s the vaccine?”
BOOM!
Our bureaucrat desperately goes for the fallback position of our Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). He says the ABS states that the majority of the excess mortality during that period was caused by COVID. If the ABS said it, it must be right. I note that COVID associated deaths are actually about half of the total excess mortality, but I suppose even 0.51 is a “majority”.
Senator Rennick has nailed it and he moves on to another question.
OK thanks for bearing with me up to this point. I found it useful to go through this interaction in detail. This is our top, top data guy from government health. God help us. But to be fair you can see that the guy doesn’t believe what he is saying. He is following the party line. He has a nice title and important job.
Australia’s Excess Mortality Inquiry
We are in the process of putting together submissions for the Excess Mortality Inquiry in Australia. Fortunately, Senator Babet and his team were able to secure an extension to the ridiculous initial deadline. The deadline is now 17 May which is 5 weeks away from today. The extension came about because they didn't publish the terms of reference in a timely fashion with Easter in between. One side of politics here doesn't want the inquiry. The other side can see the benefit because the inquiry will make the current government look bad. It's a handful of independents that swayed the vote. The terms of reference are found here.
If you have got this far it means you are interested in data. So let’s look at the data being discussed. It is helpful to start with simple models to understand the overall picture before we delve into “detailed studies”. BTW the study I did for the AMPS Too Many Dead book was of a detailed type.
If the detailed studies are consistent with the top level analysis then we have some confidence in our analysis. We can understand and explain our models. Let’s look at deaths for all ages in Australia.
You can see the increase of 10,000 in 2021. Australia basically kept out the virus till the end of the year in 2021 when vaccinated travellers were allowed in and brought COVID into Australia. Now we need to adjust for population. Here’s the population.
We age adjust mortality according to the population. I reference to the 2023 population.
We see up to 2020 the trend was decreasing. This is what we expect. People were living longer. Australian Institute of Heath Welfare data shows us this.
We fit a linear trendline for the period up to 2020. You can see that the numbers are consistent with the trend. In other words we have a reasonable expectation that future values should be close to this line in the absence of any external effects. 2017 was a bit high because of a bad flu season. Bad years are typically followed by a reduction the following year.
We then remove the trend to find the difference from trend.
There we go. The increase of 10,000 in 2021 is clear. What is it in terms of standard deviations? It’s actually 4.3 standard deviations. How to quantify this jump needs more explanation but we’ll leave that for another time.
I note that COVID was not spreading widely in the community in Australia in 2021. There were approximately 1,000 COVID deaths in 2021.
We know it can be inaccurate to look at aggregated data, such as for all ages. We can see too that population of Australia stagnated in 2021 when there was no travel allowed. We kept everyone out, even our own citizens who wanted to return. However, this stagnation was mainly due to younger people not coming to Australia to work or study and we know the deaths mainly occur in older ages. We need to look at individual age bands. With the ABS public data we have some age band data available. Let’s look at one of the older ages 75-84. The band brackets the median ages of death for men and women.
The population for this age band:
Now adjust the mortality data for population:
We see the trend of people living longer. It’s a gentle slope. Population adjusted, less of our elderly people die each year. The funeral industry still stays in business due to the population growth. Since 2021 the stocks are up. Remove the trend to see the increase in 2021.
In 2021 about 2,500 of the 10,000 extra deaths were of age 75-84. This is 3.6 sigma, but again we need other ways which we need to express the magnitude of this increase.
But remember temporal correlation, in 2021 is not relevant, but temporal correlation with COVID in 2022 is relevant.
That’s enough for now.
If you have any suggestions for points to tease out in the excess mortality inquiry please put them in a comment. It all helps me think these things through.
To finish off the here is the full interview (44 min) that Clare Pain and I did with Australian Member of Parliament Russell Broadbent.
and a short 4 minute clip of my discussion on my analysis of Queensland data here:
It’s infuriating watching bureaucrats disrespectfully slip, slide and squirm so as not to directly answer questions! Has our ‘system’ lost so much integrity, that telling the truth has become a radical practice. And what’s more important than the truth is to maintain fanciful narratives while people suffer. My question is; why all the deception and deceit by these bureaucrats?
So this particular obfuscation tactic is:
1. Listen to question noting temporal correlation between jab rollout and excess deaths and whether this has been investigated to be sure of causation.
2. Respond slowly to take up time, and gape earnestly if perceiving the opportunity. This may prompt the Senator to interrupt to hurry things up, and further interjections from the Chair against the interruptions.
3. Comment that the deaths have already been discussed, hinting that there is 'no news here' and that the Senator is a nuisance.
4. Remark extremely slowly that these things need to be studied rather than just making an assumption on the basis of temporal correlations, making it seem like that's not what the Senator just asked about.
5. Add that one of the aspects being studied is deaths amongst the vaccinated vs unvaccinated, and assert that this research has enabled them to discount the vaccines as a cause of death, without giving any reasoning for this conclusion, and refusing to say what the causes of death were, apart from covid infection.
Is that about it? The other obvious point of concern is that interviews in the USA with healthcare workers and loved ones of those who with recorded hospital covid deaths strongly suggest that many people, including the unvaccinated, received treatment regimes with a problematic risk-benefit ratio, including dangerous anti-virals. Some felt that those known to be unvaccinated received more careless treatment. This highly significant increase in death rates requires us to investigate all of this, as a narrow 'vaccine vs no vaccine' framing may easily allow it to escape under the radar. Possibly that is why the top bureaucrat here went that way and didn't want to specifically discuss mortality causation.