A new study by a team of Canadian researchers into excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic found 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.
‘Biological stress’ caused by ‘political measures’ the ‘big cause’ of deaths
According to Hickey, he and his co-authors employed a methodology known as the “P-score” to calculate excess deaths, taking into account factors such as the age structure and health status of a given country.
This analysis found that “the main correlation between excess mortality and a socioeconomic variable is with poverty.”
“Over the whole COVID period … there’s more excess mortality in that adjusted P-score measure when there’s more poverty,” Hickey said.
According to Hickey, people in more precarious positions were more likely to be adversely affected by restrictive measures such as lockdowns.
“It’s really more frail populations … that would be more affected by things like shutting down the economy, the informal economy,” Hickey said. “Having measures that restrict people to remain in their residences, obviously that has a much larger impact on poorer people than richer people in terms of their lifestyle, their ability to do exercise, receive goods by delivery and so on.”
Hickey said that such measures helped cause “biological stress,” which disproportionately hurt the poorer strata of society in most countries.
“The data simply does not support the hypothesis of a particularly virulent pathogen that is novel and that is spreading,” he said. “Instead, it has to be attributed to various health measures. And those include things like the early lockdowns, the isolation of vulnerable people in care homes and so on from receiving visitors and seeing their families.”
Hickey said treatments such as hospitals placing mildly sick people on “ventilators and the associated medications that are used with those,” the “very significant” stress caused by “curfews and removing opportunities for work [and] leaving one’s home,” created a “large” amount of stress that is “medically very significant.”
“Biological stress that comes from political measures are really the big cause here … creating excess mortality,” he said. “What it does is it makes your immune system less capable to defend you from pathogens” because of a “time-varying and unpredictable stress that is being applied to you in a significant way.”
‘No apparent benefit’ from COVID vaccines
Hickey said his team’s study also identified the COVID-19 vaccines as a significant contributor to excess deaths.
“The vaccine rollouts involve a direct injection of product into your body that can be toxic,” Hickey said, noting that this may be due to several potential factors. He said:
“If there is immunosuppression that’s due to the vaccines, is it due to the actual vaccine product and how it interacts with the body, or is it due to something more simple like … some clearly toxic components like the cationic lipid membranes that, when they’re injected, result in your body having to deal with a toxic substance?
“Or is it more a more complicated immune system response to receiving the spike antigen and the detailed immune response that goes with that? There’s lots of questions following that hypothesis, and that needs to be studied very carefully going forward.”
Hickey said the vaccine-related impacts may also have affected unvaccinated people and may have interacted with pandemic-related restrictions.
“It’s also possible that if vaccines have an immune-suppressing effect, people who get vaccinated are then more likely to get infected with run-of-the-mill pathogens or omnipresent pathogens,” Hickey said. “Once they’re infected, they could then infect … unvaccinated people who also might be subjected to some immunosuppression based on the measures and the stress that accompanies the vaccine rollouts.”
Peaks in excess deaths across the countries studied “correlate very closely” with peaks in vaccination in those same countries, Hickey said.
“Australia is a really striking example where in January of 2022 — which is the summer in Australia, when there’s normally a trough in all-cause mortality — at exactly that time, there was a booster rollout, the first booster, and there is a very abnormal peak in mortality at the exact same time.”
His analysis also found “no apparent benefit of the [COVID-19] vaccines,” noting that “the countries that were most vaccinated, that had the highest vaccine uptake, end up having persistent excess mortality into … 2023.”
“At the end of the day, the excess mortality is caused by political interventions, by … public health measures that should not have been applied,” Hickey said. “And that includes the vaccine rollouts, because there’s very clearly no evidence that the vaccines prevented excess death or caused any benefit.”
‘All we can do is try to seek the truth’
Hickey said Correlation is working on more “great, interesting research,” including a “comprehensive study of what happened in the spring of 2020 in … subnational jurisdictions,” noting that his team has already identified “some very interesting results with that.”
“In our next few papers coming out, we’re going to be zooming into more specific jurisdictions and they’re going to be large papers again, and we’re working very hard on those with our team at Correlation,” Hickey said.
“We are not funded by any governments, any corporations. Any funding we get is from individual donations,” Hickey said. “All we can do is try to seek the truth … We’re doing the best we can to illuminate as much as we can.”
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