10,000 mysterious excess deaths in Australia that no one wants to talk about

You’d think it would be big news? Deaths in Australia are running a lot higher than expected. After ticking like a metronome for years, they’ve suddenly jumped 12% or even higher. This is above and beyond normal deaths and deaths listed as “Covid”. Something mysterious or new has killed around 10,000 Australians in the first half of this year last twelve months*. This is eight times worse than the national road toll, yet this phenomenon has barely rated a mention in our news reports.

When a car crash kills three people, we hear about it on the six o’clock news. But when 10,000 lose their lives… crickets.

Total media interest on this mystery killer amounts to three tangential mentions out of 100 media outlets. One, in the Australian Financial Review called it a “marked” change and “helpfully” said it wasn’t due to suicide. The Guardian, meanwhile wondered if Covid was really killing more people than we realize. The third, NewsGP for doctors was the only serious discussion, yet even it was all questions and no answers. The word vaccine was only mentioned so that we knew that unnamed analysts believe “the probable influence of vaccine-related deaths … is ‘negligible’. Not that they had any reasons.

Actuaries Australia estimate the increase in deaths in the first five months of the year was 12% higher than expected. They are the most conservative. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) though calculates that so far in the first half of 2022 there were some 13,500 deaths more than the historical average. If they are correct that would be 17% above normal.

Of the excess deaths, 5,292 were Covid positive deaths, many in the peak of the first major wave of widespread Covid in Australia in January 2022. But sometime around September last year there was a large rise in unexpected deaths that are not officially due to Covid. This group (marked in yellow) was far above the normal range expected and stayed higher ever since.

*UPDATE: To clarify, of the 10,300 excess deaths from Jan to June about 5,300 were due to Covid. So there were 5,000 unexplained mystery deaths, which is 830 Australians dying each month (in the most conservative actuaries estimate, and more in the ABS numbers). In the last twelve months that works out to be 10,000 people. Obviously numbers can’t be confirmed for a few more months.

Peak vaccine doses in Australia occurred from August to October in 2021. The lack of deaths in winter 2021 was largely because the borders were closed and there was no influenza.

Figures for 2022 are extraordinary

Below, Actuaries Australia plot the deaths recorded so far in 2022 compared to previous years.

The grey line is what they would have expected to happen in 2022. The blue line is what the ABS estimates deaths should have been in 2022. The ABS is averaging from a five year baseline before the pandemic started. The Actuaries are including some figures from during the pandemic and allowing for our population to be growing a bit older which would make deaths rise slightly each year.

The actuaries explain the reasons their estimate of excess deaths was lower than the ABS:

We have made allowance in our estimate for late registered deaths whereas the ABS does not. This acts to understate the ‘actual’ number of deaths used by the ABS, thus understating the measure of excess deaths by around 2%.

However, the more significant difference is in the determination of the baseline, where the ABS uses a simple average of the number of deaths from 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021, with no allowance for mortality trends or demographic changes. In our view, this understates the baseline and therefore overstates the measure of excess deaths by around 6%.

These two impacts work in opposing directions, resulting in a difference in the estimates of excess deaths of around 4%.

The causes of the excess deaths:

Actuaries Australia essentially declares that most of the excess deaths are probably due to longer ongoing risks after a Covid infection. Some of the excess may be a “bounce” from the reduction in deaths caused in 2020 when influenza was gone. (But why did that “bounce” wait until Sept 2021 to start?) Some of the excess could be because doctors and hospitals and emergency wards were overwhelmed, and people didn’t get check ups.  But it definitely wasn’t due to vaccines because, wait for it, Australia has a good vaccine approval process. (Yes, we sign secret contracts, and use secret data. How could anyone disagree?)

Amazingly they even quote the Australian vaccine safety report which includes 931 deaths reported after vaccination. This is nearly 10% of the mystery deaths tally, and if it were under-reported 10 to 1 (as is the case in the UK — see Ref 39/40 in the Malhotra paper) then the true tally could easily be nearly all the mystery deaths. Instead, the actuaries are comfortable ignoring 918 of those 931 reported deaths. Only 13 deaths were found “to be caused” by a vaccine. Amazing the power of faceless bureaucrats to delete all those people. Cancelled, even after death.

For the sake of the record, here’s part of the Actuaries discussion:

What could be causing Covid Deaths?

1. Post-COVID-19 sequelae or interactions with other causes of death: Possible impact in Australia: High

An earlier COVID-19 illness could be causing later illness and death, and/or COVID-19 could have worsened other diseases which ultimately caused death. Studies have shown that COVID-19 is associated with higher subsequent mortality risk from heart disease and other causes. To some extent, this shows on death certificates in the 999 deaths in the first four months of 2022 where COVID-19 is listed as a contributory cause, and a further 77 deaths were identified as from Long COVID. However, we understand that medical science has not yet established a causative link that would allow, say, a heart attack several months after a COVID-19 infection to be attributed back to COVID-19. As such, it seems likely that there would be more of these deaths than identified.

2. Delayed deaths from other causes:  Moderate

3. Delay in emergency care:  Low to Moderate

4. Delay in routine care:  Low to Moderate

5. Pandemic-influenced lifestyle changes:   Low

6. Vaccine-related deaths:

While there have been deaths in Australia caused by the administration of COVID-19 vaccines, the number of such deaths has been small. Australia has a very good vaccine approval and safety monitoring processes, administered by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. The latest vaccine safety report (to 25 August) shows 136,000 adverse events have been reported from 63 million vaccines administered (a rate of 0.2% per vaccine administered). Of those adverse events, 931 were reports of death following vaccination. Of those deaths, 13 were found to have been caused by the administration of the vaccine, and all were following a first dose of AstraZeneca which is now in limited use in Australia.

Possible impact in Australia: Negligible

7. Undiagnosed COVID-19: Possible impact in Australia: Negligible

If the actuaries were really interested in whether vaccines or late Covid sequelae were the problem, they could dissect the state level data. There was an ideal experiment in Australia where at least one state (WA) had virtually no covid cases for all of 2021, but vaccinations were rolling out. Surely there we could compare the excess mysterious deaths with say, NSW, and see whether it was the virus or the vaccines…

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*The 10,000 deaths in the headline starts with the conservative 8,500 estimate of the actuaries from January to May and multiplies it by 6/5 to make it a six month estimate. The UPDATE in the middle of the post clarifies that half those deaths were Covid related so the 10,000 mystery deaths applies to the last 12 months. (2am WST Oct 6.)

Our World in Data:” Births and Deaths in Australia

Aseem Malhotra, (2022) Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine – Part 1, Journal of Insulin Resistance, ISSN: (Online) 2519-7533, (Print) 2412-2785