Postcards From The Hedge

"Excess deaths" are all over Contrariworld at the moment. Some want to use them to undermine vaccines, others (with overlap to the first group) to undermine lockdowns.  The Daily Telegraph has had the latter in a told-you-so frenzy with a truly awful headline (find the piece yourself!):  " Lockdown feared to be killing more people than Covid" The Twitter version appends 'effects' to 'lockdown', while the piece itself moves rapidly away from lockdown itself to issues related to the effects of the pandemic on healthcare. These would happen, probably more so, in the absence of mitigations, so attributing them to lockdowns is dubious. An inversion of reality, one might say.  The core evidence of a concern is a snippet of the graph of excess deaths - the deaths over and above those expected based upon an average of equivalent recent periods. In this period, the deaths directly attributed to Covid don't account for the whole of the excess. So what is

I wrote recently about the old-new topic of virus denial from a molecular biological perspective. My main thesis there was that the purported non-existence of viruses makes no sense in light of the fact that viruses contributed extensively to the subject of molecular biology. If they did not work in the way 'orthodoxy' would have it, infecting cells from all domains of life and having them copy their genomes and synthesise their proteins, then a great number of landmark experiments would be built on sand. The deep, serially-constructed understanding of molecular biology gained through those experiments would be an extraordinary coincidence, getting the right answers for completely the wrong reasons. Virus denial is a subset of germ theory denial, the strongest form of which would have it that there are no microbial pathogens at all - no viruses, no bacteriophages, no bacteria, no fungi or protists. Even adherents of that view might be forced to concede that the organisms exist