by Sonia Elijah

On October 20th, a 30-minute adjourned debate (20 rejections later) on excess deaths in the UK House of Commons was finally secured by Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire and member of the Reclaim Party. 

Bridgen began his speech to the sound of erupting cheers from the full, upper public gallery, in stark contrast to the almost empty chamber below. 

Where were the hundreds of MPs who would normally sit shoulder to shoulder in the chamber? It appears, an increase in deaths of their constituents was not a pressing issue for them on that Friday afternoon. 

We've experienced more excess deaths since July 2021 than in the whole of 2020, unlike the pandemic, however, these deaths are not disproportionately of the old, in other words, the excess deaths are striking down people in the prime of life but no-one seems to care. I fear history will not judge this house kindly. 

Strikingly, excess deaths have been seen across all age groups, which Bridgen pointed out during his speech.

The graph below shows the pooled weekly total number of deaths for all ages, from 27 participating countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Germany (Berlin), Germany (Hesse), Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK (England), UK (Northern Ireland), UK (Scotland), and UK (Wales).

According to the British Medical Journal, ‘Excess deaths are calculated as the difference between current numbers of deaths and those in a baseline year, and the excess can differ depending on the baseline and methodology used.’ 

This important point on how excess can differ depending on the baseline used, was raised by Bridgen.

ONS Manipulating the Data, Again

Bridgen explained:

‘To understand if there is an ‘excess’ by definition, you need to estimate how many deaths would have been expected. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) used 2015-2019 as a baseline…Unforgivably, the UK ONS (Office for National Statistics) have included deaths in 2021, as part of their baseline calculation for expected deaths- as if there was anything normal about the deaths in 2021- by exaggerating the number of deaths expected, the number of excess deaths can be minimized. 

Why would the ONS want do that?’