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Feb 21, 2023
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I haven't bothered that much up until now but today I had a few spare hours (still in my dressing gown!). There are others who'll go over this with a fine tooth comb and do a great job, so I thought I'd try a different angle.

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Couple of notes - you mean "ASMR", not "AMSR"? And why should there be a change in the releases between July 2022 and Feb 2023 for the period up to May 2022?

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Bugger - a typo! Good question. I wasn't expecting a change, maybe some small adjustments so the differences quite took me by surprise and I wondered just how they were going about doing this. I fiddled a bit more and decided to throw the tray bake out for comment.

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Tray bake? That is a disgusting confession of creeping Americana: you, better than all of us, surely realised that this was the Day of The Great British Pancake?

If you didn't, well shame on you... LOL

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My mum still rings me every year to remind me it's pancake day, bless her!

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...or is all of the ONS data one giant lump of irreconcilable fudge?

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More like a box of chocolates maybe: "you never know what you are gonna get'.

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Lime barrels for me. Those were the days...

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Isn't that how mass-murderers dispose of bodies, LOL?

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Now that made me giggle!

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Just triple checked cell reference ranges in case of a major whoopsy and they all check out. So where did all these new deaths come from? Off to soak my head...

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They said they have used different population numbers which will screw all the ASMRs but shouldn't affect the raw death numbers?

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Yep, it was the deaths that had me swearing and fiddling. These should have been carved in stone over the period Apr 2021 - May 2022. Right now I can't believe anything I am seeing!

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It is consistent with my preliminary analysis. https://metatron.substack.com/p/england-deaths-by-vaccination-status. Apparent COVID benefit more than offset by detriment overall in all ages.

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I've been waiting for you to confirm that - I whizzed through your fab article a bit too quickly! I knew you'd nail this real good so fancied coming in with a different angle. It was in an idle moment of fiddling that I stumbled across the differences between files and got curious.

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The way I read the letter the statistics head sent Norman Fenton, he agreed that the ONS data was not fit for purpose. As Joel pointed out earlier, they probably fixed the population count, as that was the big problem with the earlier data. It is probably worthwhile asking them what they changed in their methodology for this release and whether this change would obsolete the previous releases (because they released incorrect data).

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Quite. What a mess, eh? We might expect population estimates to muck things up (and therefore ASMR) but getting the death tally completely wrong is an error too far! For certain a group of us will be chasing this down.

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OK: I can see you are excited, and I think I know why, but please take 24 hours to engage gears, and send us the 'idiots guide'?

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I'm sleeping on it. In a nutshell I found a pattern in revisions to the dataset that reveal a brief period of vaccine benefit swimming in a sea of greater harm when there should not be any such pattern. This, in turn, points a finger at the ONS.

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