Happy New Year

- with Front Page Misinformation from the Irish Department of Health!

The Irish Department of Health launched its new year (mis)communications with a successful media blitz capturing front page headlines of just about every mainstream national newspaper and media organisation across the island. Its Orwellian new year message puzzlingly contradicted previous wall-to-wall established media coverage during and immediately after the core pandemic years.

The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison.

- from 1984, by George Orwell

Following my December 30th post highly critical of the Minister and his department, in an act of new year’s parody, the department has doubled down on their misleading communications strategy from 2023 around the fraught topic of excess mortality.

Dear Minister

Having progressed from scarifying the public with daily dashboards of death totals through 2020 and 2021, government spokespersons began claiming in 2022 that Ireland had actually seen much less excess deaths in comparison with other European nations and that its citizenry should be proud of its healthcare institutions and public health expertocracy. Now, in 2024, let the new and improved message ring out:

New OECD research shows that Ireland had no excess deaths during the core pandemic years of 2020-2022!

Note the publication times of the articles from the Irish Examiner (upper left) and Irish independent (upper right). It can be assumed RTÉ and the Irish Times had similarly early publication times but updates now hide the original times.

That’s right folks, the great media wurlitzer is now cranking out a new tune and it is in glorious midnight harmony. Although the government press release was published in the early hours (~01:00) of January 2nd, trusted news organisations such as the Irish Independent, and Irish Examiner, also ran their obviously pre-prepared stories in near synchrony with the Department of Health’s good tidings. Journalists engaged their keenest stenography skills and faithfully “reported” both the headlined assertions of the government press release and Minister Stephen Donnelly’s comments:

"I am very pleased to be able to report that Ireland’s excess mortality during the core pandemic years was the fourth lowest among OECD countries.”

Witzbold’s verdict: False/Misleading! The “working paper” (similar to a pre-print, i.e. not having been submitted for formal review) from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development does not show this because in comparison to the other nations studied it used a different data reporting basis to make its provisional estimates of Irish mortality rates, i.e. it is like comparing apples with oranges (see below).

Boilerplate statesman-speak follows:

“Ireland asked a lot of its population during this time and the restrictions that were put in place had a profound impact on us all.”

Witzbold’s verdict: Shameful Rhetorical Politicking! The minister elides the true nature of the power structure involved: the Government demanded and enforced a lot of the Governed. And the minister similarly omits the disproportionate impact of the restrictions, i.e. they had a much more profound impact on the less fortunate (not he), ultimately having a deleterious effect on health, well-being and overall mortality rates (which have yet to recover!)

"These figures point to the success of Ireland’s public health measures, and to the strong uptake of our COVID-19 vaccination programme."

Witzbold’s verdict: Overstatement/Exaggeration! The OECD “working paper” does no such thing. It does not analyse correlations between Covid-19 vaccination uptake and excess mortality in OECD member countries preferring to make some generalised statements about vaccinations or referring to other publications in this regard. From the paper:

The main objective of the paper is to highlight that many of the conclusions made around the increases in mortality during the pandemic based on simply comparing the number of reported deaths during a period (week, month or year) against a baseline average of the same period in the years prior to the pandemic neglect to take changes in population size and structure into consideration.

Fact-checking, anyone?

Evidently most media organisations conducted not even the slightest due diligence¹ to actually read the working paper and check its footnotes and sources (or alternatively to contact someone capable of doing so - I was available ;), in order to verify if the Department of Health’s new claims were justified. It’s not that long (39 pages, all told), and it’s not that difficult to read.

This Witzbold has now completed a quick reading and it appears the OECD has not even used actual death totals to calculate Ireland’s mortality rates, choosing instead to content itself with quarterly death registrations (by date of registration) - the resulting deaths totals are off by thousands. My back-of-the-envelope math shows OECD figures are ~2000 below currently recorded deaths for 2020-2022 and by the time all actual deaths for the period have been officially recorded it will be easily over ~4500. Remember Ireland’s annual death totals have been 33 to 37 (we’ll see?) thousand for the period, so we are talking significantly substantial under-counting in the order of ~4%. Well done bean counters at the OECD!

Academic Stamp of Approval

Before you think this was just the Minister of Health and his Press Office exceeding their competence, someone with accredited academic chops, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Breda Smyth also gets in on the act and is dutifully, unquestioningly quoted by the press:

"The OECD Working Paper highlights some of the important caveats associated with previously published estimates on excess mortality during the core pandemic years.”

Sigh, after reading the caveats - which I fully agree with regarding demographic trends - did she not even bother to check the basis of the estimations for Ireland which anyone with familiarity of Irish mortality rates can recognise as woefully undercounted?

"The population in Ireland demonstrated a strong adherence to public health measures during this time, and Ireland’s COVID-19 vaccination programme has been one of the most successful in the world, with 96% of the adult population receiving their primary vaccinations.”

The OECD paper does not concern itself with this claim - this is a Chief Medical Officer in unabashed pharmaceutical propaganda mode.

"We know that vaccines save lives, as well as preventing serious illness and hospitalisations.”

Ho hum, of course they do. Breda curiously neglects to comment on one of the OECD paper’s key counter-intuitive findings, namely:

55. Most countries that were heavily impacted by the pandemic saw a notable rise in mortality rates in 2020 and/or 2021 and therefore may have expected sharp falls in 2022 to return to pre-pandemic levels. Instead, in 4 out of 5 OECD countries, mortality rates in 2022 remained higher than the average of the five years prior to the onset of the pandemic. Against the general decreasing trend in mortality in many countries pre-pandemic, only Luxembourg had a mortality rate in 2022 lower than that observed in 2019. On average, mortality rates in 2022 remained 6% higher than in 2019, and in seven OECD countries it was more than 10% higher.

This is what the headlines should have been about and what piqued my own interest in late 2021 - just where is the expected reversion to trend? And why did consistently elevated mortality levels started in summer 2021 on both sides of the Irish sea?

By the way, contrary to the unfounded claims of the Minister and his Chief Medical Officer, the OECD authors did not conclude public health measures and vaccinations were the key to success but rather the entirely obvious:

Misinformaton or Disinformation?

The OECD Health Working Paper entitled “Examining recent mortality trends – the impact of demographic change” is neither new (dated 17^th November 2023 - suggesting the Department of health has been sitting on the story for some time), nor does the research show what the Department of Health purports. Note, I do not blame the OECD for the Irish Department of Health’s distortion of its contents. While I may consider the authors’ choice of dataset for their estimations of Ireland’s mortality rates to be shoddy, the authors at least list their sources in the Annex (albeit with the wrong source for their population totals!?) No, it is the Department of Health, its Press Office, and its Minister of Health most deserving of contempt for this transparent narrative manipulation.

Misinformation is the term commonly applied to the spreading of false information regardless of any intent to mislead or not, while disinformation involves intent, i.e. deliberate manipulation. So, I’m going to call a spade a spade, here: the Irish Department of Health has been sitting on this working paper for some time (OECD online library lists it under 21 November 2023). That was plenty of time to find the Annex and read Table 1. “Key all-cause mortality and population data sources” and know the OECD was significantly under-counting Irish deaths for the period 2020-2022.

They knew, again - mistakes were not made! This paper must have been vetted by the Chief Medical Officer’s office before the coordinated media campaign was planned for January 2nd, a slow news day ushering in the new work year. Ironically, an unintended consequence of the new-found denial by the Irish authorities around excess mortality during the pandemic has been to feed the narrative of Covid-19 denial!

Vaccination, Vaccination, Roll Up and Get your Vaccination!

Finally, let’s also note, this paper was (mis)used yesterday by the Irish Department of Health not only in an effort to dishonestly burnish Ireland’s overall deaths record during the pandemic but it was also used to once again push and promote more Covid-19 vaccination by the following individuals: Stephen Donnelly (Minister for Health), Breda Smyth (Chief Medical Officer), Kingston Mills (Professor of Experimental Immunology)²

At a loss for words, I turn to Solzhenitsyn:

“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1. Admittedly, Newstalk FM interviewed Anthony Staines, Professor of Health Systems to comment, but he failed to note the significantly undercounted death totals used by the OECD in their estimates of Ireland’s mortality rates.

2. Quoted by state broadcaster, RTÉ: https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2024/0102/1424384-ireland-covid/