Dr Campbell and Covid Death
Since last I discussed Dr John Campbell, back in October, his subscriber count has gone well over 2 million. Unfortunately, due diligence seems to have continued its march in the opposite direction.
Dr Campbell is a nurse with a PhD in nursing education. He is undoubtedly expert in some areas; in others, he's just a bloke chuntering to the internet from his office - much like myself, with a far lesser reach! But his confident manner and background give disproportionate weight to his words among some.
The most recent video I watched by him - a rare occasion these days - details a Freedom of Information request to the Office for National Statistics (FOI/2021/3240) for 'deaths from Covid-19 with no other underlying causes'. There are perfectly good debunking videos here, here and here, and textual arguments such as this; I am simply adding my own tiny voice to the counterargument.
Campbell's video has gone viral - shared by, among others, Piers Corbyn and Covid-sceptic MP David Davis. That alone would give me cause to pause! Widespread belief, backed up by Dr Campbell's authority, that these figures represent total Covid deaths.
He himself is nominally pro-vaccine, but judging by comments on his videos, his supporters are overwhelmingly from the
vaccine-sceptical, Covid-minimising, ivermectin-enthusiast communities
(substantial overlap between those groups of course). There is
inevitably a bias in who chooses to comment, and a significant biasing
factor may be the swarms of wasps that surround anyone who goes against
those positions. Dr Campbell must be aware of this, but his content increasingly plays to that fraternity and their own biases, rather than moderating clear nonsense. He has no journalistic oversight, no peer review, and little evidence of self-correction.
There are two parts to a death certificate: Part l lists a ladder of direct causes, Part ll has other contributory conditions. The FOI request he gee-whizzes over in his video shows c17,000 deaths with no other conditions mentioned on the death certificate - presumably, those where Part ll is blank. This is by contrast with 152,872 for deaths within 28 days of a positive test, or 174,233 where Covid was mentioned somewhere on the death certificate. These FOI requests are rife, and quite clearly emanate from the Covid-sceptic community. The information was already freely available, but 'truthers' have been egging each other on for months to ask these kinds of question, or others quibbling about the conduct of PCR tests.
What we'd hope for from Dr Campbell, with presumed clinical experience of end-of-life care for patients with comorbidities, is a corrective to this naive notion, that deaths are 'usually' uncomplicated, and interaction between conditions is the exception. But instead, he buys into it hook, line and sinker.
The kinds of additional condition - 'comorbidity' - that appear on those other death certificates are by no means all inevitably life shortening. We're talking asthma, arrhythmias (that's me, occasionally), high BMI, lupus, ME, and so on. They don't generally cause the kinds of difficulty associated with serious Covid, on their own. They may increase the risk, however.
Consider just one comorbidity: diabetes. It doesn't typically cause death directly, but is the commonest comorbidity in a Covid death in younger cohorts. This may be due to a biochemical association, or it may be due to another correlate such as obesity. Imagine you are a doctor, presented with a diabetic patient having low oxygen, difficulty breathing, cough, fever, blood markers indicating an immune response to a pathogen, a positive PCR test. Classical Covid, in other words. You've seen dozens, maybe hundreds of patients like this since the pandemic hit. Are you seriously expecting the doctor to say "Why, that's the worst case of diabetes I've ever seen!".
Alternatively, consider a hypothetical FOI request for "diabetes as the only cause". Because neither stands alone, we would count that patient as neither Covid nor diabetes, by this logic ... so what in hell did they die of? This is the level of ridiculousness we are dealing with here; you could do this for any condition, and thereby minimise them all. But what, we might ask, is causing a sudden spike in diabetes deaths, or cancer, or people with broken legs? Why are they all struggling for air?
He goes on to highlight the high median age of Covid death. But that applies equally to cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on. It does not make them trivial, nor not worth reducing.
Most people who die are older.
Most people who are older have comorbidities.
Many comorbidities increase the likelihood of failing to survive Covid, at any age.
That's all it is.
Without Covid, most of these discounted people would be alive, irrespective of whether you say 'of' or 'with'. This vexatious (vaxatious?) FOI has clearly done its job, with considerable assistance from Dr Campbell. Whatever his intent, its effect is clear: as snapshotted above, commenters from the contrarian community are falling over themselves to misinterpret; to say that "only 17,000 people died of Covid". Some damage limitation might be in order.
It's all sooo confusing. Back in 2020 the same people were telling us that the doctors were getting paid lots of money if they described the death as due to Covid. Why would those doctors confuse matters by adding comorbidities?
ReplyDeleteYes, pretty bizarre. I was prompted by someone making much of the emergency dispensation for doctors to just write 'Covid'. So I thought I'd check the extent of that, and this second FOI popped up. Rather than being anything remotely like a guide to 'true' Covid deaths, it's the number of occasions doctors have availed themselves of that specific freedom.
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