Rav Arora of
recently hosted a recorded debate (3 hours) between Denis Rancourt and Tracy Beth Hoeg. Tracy had criticized a paper by Denis and others which tracked all-cause death and COVID shot uptake in many nations in the Southern Hemisphere — with booster rollouts when death was low (Summer).Tracy said NCAA cardiac deaths, a self-controlled case series, and the death experience in Sweden were all at variance with the study Denis published, arguing that about 25,000 excess deaths would be seen in Sweden if extrapolation held true. She mentioned no change in the trend of Sweden’s crude death rate. Here is a graph:
The downward trend ever since 1990 could be indicative of the relative freedom that people have in Sweden, allowing them to have the resources to pursue and afford high quality environments and medicinal substances. Prior to 1990, when death was rising, Sweden was socialist — failing to take care of its own people, as would be expected.
Today, by many accounts, Sweden is even more free than the USA.
The 2021 year (last year in the graph), after equal-and-opposite oscillation in the prior two years, has returned to be precisely in line with the previous trend. But as Denis showed, when looking past 2021 — after the COVID variant (Omicron) had become even less lethal than flu — the excess death rises and continues to accrue:
The top panel is the count of deaths over time, the middle is the excess over time, and the bottom is the accumulation of excess over time. I found other (larger) graphs with better visual resolution to estimate the situation in Sweden:
The very high peak of excess mortality in the right half of this time series is for the week of 8 Jan 2023. The black line shows the seasonal expectation. Even the most recent data show continued excess death in Sweden, corroborating a point made by Denis.
Here is an even higher resolution using the percentage excess by week:
That peak from before shows 30% weekly excess death, a value which is a “3-sigma violator” — indicating that a special cause is operating, rather than the random play of chance. Weekly “percentage excess death” estimates are good for international comparisons (not likely to produce biases), though using raw rates can lead to bias.
Getting back to Tracy’s claim that, if Denis was right, then there’d be 25,000 excess deaths in Sweden by now, an estimate by The Economist corroborates the work of Denis Rancourt:
Most of the accumulation of excess death in Sweden — when carried into the 2024 year — came after the date mark of 24 Feb 2021. The value that was estimated in the first week of 2024 is 96.4% of that 25,000 figure:
The weight of evidence suggests that Denis Rancourt has found a very strong safety signal, and that he and his cohorts have very likely done a great service for humanity.