TCW | 2 Nov 2021
IN A more rational period of history Professor Fenton, not Professor Lockdown, would be the household name.
Norman Fenton has been Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary London University since 2000 and reasoning (a skill of which this government seems particularly bereft) could be his second name. As well as a string of credentials which you can check out here, it’s important to note that this is no ‘abstract theories alone’ man. Unlike Neil Ferguson he has put his powers of reasoning (as opposed to computer modelling) to the test in the law and forensics as an expert witness in major criminal and civil cases as well as in medicine, security, software reliability, transport safety and reliability, finance and football prediction.
Most recently he’s been applying his skills to ONS mortality statistics with the aim of determining the overall risk benefit of the Covid-19 vaccines. In a recently published paper entitled Probability and Risk (also published here) he explains that in order to determine the overall risk-benefit of Covid-19 vaccines it is crucial to be able to compare the all-cause mortality rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated in each age category.
Publicly available UK Government statistics do not allow for this. They do not include raw data on mortality by age or vaccination status, and this leaves the analyst unable to make the necessary comparisons. Not to be defeated by this lack of transparency, Professor Fenton decided to ‘reverse engineer’ estimates of mortality by age category and vaccination status from the various relevant public Government datasets.
And guess what? He found numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies which indicate that the ONS reports on vaccine effectiveness are grossly underestimating the number of unvaccinated people.
He discovered the non-trivial fact that more than 10million people are missing from the PHE/ONS analysis; 1,236 deaths that occurred during week 26 are also missing and the vaccination status of this group is unknown. His calculations lead him to believe there is the possibility that in week 26 as many as 22million people were unvaccinated rather than the 9.5million reported.
He says then with some confidence: ‘Our analysis clearly suggests that, when compared to ONS death figures from week 26, all-cause mortality (UMR) for vaccinated people, compared to unvaccinated people, is certainly higher in single dosed individuals and slightly higher in those who are double dosed.’
That official statistics may well be underestimating the mortality rates for vaccinated people in each age category has profound implications for the future of an increasingly risky vaccination programme, as reported by Neville Hodgkinson in these pages yesterday.
For a clear and detailed presentation of the ONS data that led Professor Fenton to his conclusions, you can watch his interview here with Thinking Slow.
