An urgent investigation is needed into why excess deaths are near pandemic levels, because the lack of an explanation is fuelling "wild and dangerous theories", experts warn. Government figures suggest the number of extra or "unnecessary" fatalities this year is higher than 2021 and 2022, and on a trajectory that could even surpass 2020. Of particular concern is the 15 to 44 age group, where cumulative deaths are tracking above all recent years, including 2020. The latest figures mean that since 2019 more deaths are being recorded each week than the five-year average. Only a small proportion of these are now being directly attributed to Covid. Dr Charles Levinson, Medical Director of private GP service Doctorcall, said the "silence" from Government was allowing conspiracy theories to flourish, including from anti-vaxxers. He said: "A refusal to openly discuss these statistics is an abdication of responsibility from parts of the scientific community, leading to an irreversible erosion of trust by parts of society. Experts call for urgent investigation as excess deaths spark ‘dangerous' theories (msn.com)
Prominent scientist ‘downplayed Covid lab leak theory to avoid upsetting China’ (msn.com) Private messages released by the US Oversight Committee, which is investigating the origins of Covid, show that in the weeks before publication the authors had acknowledged that a laboratory leak was a possibility but were concerned about upsetting the Chinese. Dozens of scientists have now signed an open letter to Nature Medicine calling for the paper to be retracted. One of the signatories, Prof Neil Harrison, professor of anaesthesiology, molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at Columbia University, said: “Virologists and their allies have produced a number of papers that purport to show that the virus was of natural origin and that the pandemic began at the Huanan seafood market. “In fact there is no evidence for either of these conclusions, and the email and Slack messages among the authors show that they knew at the time that this was the case.
