Canadian researchers who analyzed detailed geographic and temporal all-cause mortality data from the U.S. and Europe concluded that the data are incompatible with existing models of pandemic viral spread. The findings suggest that pandemic control policies and flawed and dangerous medical treatments caused spikes in mortality in 2020.

Deaths during the first “peak” of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from medical and government interventions, not a circulating respiratory virus, Canadian researchers concluded in a paper posted Monday on Preprints.org.

Those interventions resulted in the deaths of primarily elderly and poor people, researchers with the Canadian nonprofit Correlation: Research in the Public Interest said.

Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Christian Linard, Ph.D., authors of groundbreaking all-cause mortality research since early in the pandemic, analyzed all-cause mortality data in several locations in the northern hemisphere during the “first” and “summer” pandemic peaks in March-May and June-September 2020.

In their 356-page paper, they analyzed data from much of Europe and key sites in the U.S. at different geographical scales — by states and counties in the U.S., and “national units of territorial statistics” in Europe, which are roughly similar to U.S. counties.

They compared the actual all-cause mortality rates in these places to the predicted all-cause mortality for a contagious pandemic virus as measured by standard epidemiological models. They found that even accounting for flaws in those models, the results were very different than what would have been expected.

They said their findings show “strong evidence” that the patterns of excess mortality can’t be explained by a “novel and virulent virus (SARS-CoV-2) that spreads by person-to-person contact,” as most analysts of early excess mortality spikes have assumed.

They wrote:

“This means that the paradigm that a spreading viral respiratory disease caused the excess mortality during Covid is false. The said paradigm is disproved by empirical observations of high-resolution geotemporal variations of age and frailty adjusted excess mortality … on two continents in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Instead, the excess mortality appears to be entirely iatrogenic and induced by the imposed so-called pandemic response.”

The authors hypothesized that a complex series of lockdown-related policies, which caused major biological stress, dangerous medical treatments applied in a state of panic, and the failure to properly treat pneumonia and respiratory disease drove excess mortality during the early all-cause mortality peaks during the pandemic, as they have also detailed in other research papers.

Adjacent jurisdictions should have had similar excess death rates — but they didn’t

Almost immediately after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, there were large peaks of excess mortality in some jurisdictions and not in others — even when the jurisdictions were adjacent to each other, had high population densities and significant numbers of people moving between them daily.

The researchers found “a high degree of geographic heterogeneity” in excess mortality during the first peak in early 2020, contrary to the standard epidemiological models’ prediction that similar adjacent places would have similar outcomes.

For example, they analyzed Germany’s western border with the Netherlands, France and Belgium. The regions have very similar population density, population profiles and a high degree of traffic moving between them, leading to the assumption that those regions would have similar excess mortality outcomes.

Yet, Germany had almost no excess mortality in the western border regions, while France, Belgium and the Netherlands had high excess mortality.

“The fact that there’s that big difference in mortality on either side of the border suggests that there’s something that is a matter of a policy or a measure that’s responsible for that big difference,” lead author Hickey told The Defender. “The virus would not stop at the border, because people are traveling across. And it’s very contagious, supposedly.”

The researchers also compared cities with similar population profiles, healthcare systems and large airports within countries — such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the U.S. and Milan and Rome in Italy — and found stark differences in excess mortality.

Standard large-scale spatial epidemiological models that account for people traveling to airport hubs around the world and spreading the virus would have predicted a more even spread of the virus in these different locations, Hickey said. That would be true even when accounting for the travel restrictions enacted almost immediately at the start of the pandemic.

However, the mortality data showed that some locations, like New York, had high spikes in excess mortality and others, like San Francisco, did not.

Timing of excess mortality peaks didn’t match expectations

The researchers also found that within countries, the peaks in excess mortality were very different — higher in some places and lower in others — but the peaks occurred at the same time. These findings also contradict the expectations for standard mortality models for COVID-19.

For example, their analysis of several jurisdictions in Italy found a wide variation in the rate of excess death — a 7-fold difference between northwest Italy and central Italy — even though the peaks in excess mortality occurred at the same time throughout the country. This trend was similar for all European countries that had a high excess mortality peak.

That means that instead of the virus spreading out from major urban centers with large airports to rural areas over time, as epidemiological models would predict, urban and rural centers experienced their peaks simultaneously.

Hickey said there are flaws in typical models, which don’t account for a lot of diversity in populations. However, if the models were adjusted to account for all of the regional and population differences found in the real world, the outcome would be more heterogeneity from one place to another. Instead, there was a high degree of synchronicity in the all-cause mortality peaks.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.