Quote from https://www.city-journal.org/article/unscientific-american (add. May 2024)
In recent weeks, the offices of virusvaria have been dominated by the creation of sterftemonitor.nl. A logical addition to virus varia, where in 2021 we started a discussion with the very first unexplained (excess) mortality graphs. Over time, the subject became commonplace. When the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) decided to phase out the unexplained excess mortality, there was a gap in the provision of information. I told Herman Steigstra of my intention to create sterftemonitor.nl and he immediately took action with data and other content. A joint project was born. With donate button.
The Donate Button
“... followers who find the donate button above completely normal 🤷â€â™€ï¸ "
Not only does Chantal Rovers not understand it, the Emka's (Marion Koopmans and Maarten Keulemans) also regularly aim for donation buttons. She has since deleted a recent derogatory tweet from Marion towards Maurice on X. There, too, the donate button was an argument. The underlying view is clear: "Look at that donation button, a revenue model, so not credible". One rather predictably falls back on it in the absence of arguments. While it is a sign of independence. There is more scientifically free thinking behind donation buttons than in legacy and/or government-subsidized media.
I've decided to put one on sterftemonitor.nl as well, if only to tease a bit. And yes:
This is from a criticism on LinkedIn, by Anne Laning. If you don't have LinkedIn, you can click on "Review of sterftemonitor.nl" below.
Review of sterftemonitor.nl
Excess mortality monitor in the Netherlands
Now that the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) has indicated that it will no longer be hashtag#overmortality (https://lnkd.in/e4YhCjjC), a new initiative has been born: the Excess Mortality Monitor Netherlands. Excess mortality is the difference between actual mortality and expected mortality. CBS continues to publish actual mortality on a weekly basis, so that is not where the challenge lies. In essence, it is therefore about the calculation of the expected mortality.
But why would you want to calculate the expected mortality when there has simply been an institute for decades that has a solid track record in the field of calculating the expected mortality? That's it Royal Dutch Actuarial Association. Publish every two years a hashtag#forecasttable which shows the mortality probabilities per age, per sex, per future year. With an internationally calibrated methodology, developed by a committee of wise people who have studied for it. The 2020 projection table https://lnkd.in/exUn3FcM was still without the influence of corona (see extract in picture (for men)), the CBS expected mortality was almost the same. Although this does not yet include a seasonal pattern, it is easy to determine a seasonal pattern for mortality per age group based on CBS figures for 2015-2019. This expected mortality is used by all kinds of parties.
So why would a group that didn't study for this think they can do better? In fact, they don't even refer to this.
Red flags with this website are: the names of the initiators are not listed, and there is a donate button on the first and last line. This casts doubt on the intentions.
There are also substantive inaccuracies:
– One of the graphs shows CBS mortality due to corona up to and including October 2023. That is not possible, because CBS has only published until August.
– RIVM National Institute for Public Health and the Environment Figures on corona mortality are unusable for statistical purposes, because they depend on voluntary reports after an official corona test and have proven to be incomplete. Besides, who gets tested these days? The fact that this line is therefore virtually zero is therefore meaningless.
– The statement "Isn't the current excess mortality simply due to corona? No, that's virtually impossible" is blatantly contradictory to the data that excess mortality is in sync with the prevalence of corona as shown by the sewage values: https://lnkd.in/eW4dkuEh.
– The message from Herman Steigstra https://lnkd.in/e8Gx224U suggests that CBS calculates the expected mortality based on figures for 2015-2019, which is incorrect, it takes into account a larger history of trends in mortality probabilities, including trends from abroad. They only use 2015-2019 for the seasonal pattern.
My conclusion: not really confidence-inspiring. Won't you take it from me? Read a selection of reactions to the launch in the second image.
[Following some screenshots with reactions]
Mr Laning had already touched on a single point at Researchgate. Below is my answer to his LinkedIn piece.
Dear Mr. Laning,
Thank you for your rather extensive review of the website sterftemonitor.nl. Now I like to leave numerical fitties to my companion Herman Steigstra who is statistically much better than me. In your LinkedIn post, however, you mainly expose issues that have little to do with our methods, figures or statistics. I would also like to reply to you because I see that this is a matter of concern to you; As someone who takes the trouble, I want to appreciate that, without wanting to set precedent.
I'm commenting on that here on my blog because LinkedIn has removed my content before. I will post a link to this article as a comment on LinkedIn.
In response to your questions.
“Why would you want to calculate the expected mortality when there has simply been an institute for decades that has a solid track record in the field of calculating the expected mortality?"
That's for several reasons. Firstly, because we are questioning the RIVM expectation of mortality. A cross-check of our own figures is the least you do. Can you plausibly replicate outcomes based on the available sources? It turned out that CBS's figures correspond well with ours. You note that this also applies to the Actuarial Society's forecasts. This confirms the quality of our method.
The second reason is that we now have granular data so that we can also perform analyses other than just the output data from CBS.
Take a look at the Actuarial Society: they have also recalculated everything and that was also well in line with the CBS forecasts. I'm sure they also wanted to look at something more than just the output of CBS.
So I don't quite follow the argument: you sing the praises of the AG, but if someone else does the same, you will sound a different note.
"So why would a group that didn't study for this think they can do better? In fact, they don't even refer to it."
You fill in a number of things for us here. For example, it would be a group that did not study for this. That's not too bad. I myself did a few blocks of Statistics and Methodology - albeit as a minor - during my studies at the University of Amsterdam and then further developed my practical skills in analyzing, interpreting and presenting data (market research, later marketing). Entirely in line with that, I was the first to see in summer 2021 (!*) that excess mortality was not going well. Later, I was the one who saw that the bandwidth of RIVM graphs was no longer correct, which the RIVM corrected. After all, new, additional or corrective insights do not come exclusively from the centre of a field.
I can be brief about Herman Steigstra: an experienced statistician with a specialization in medical research and healthcare statistics. He played a key role in the national quality control of hospital laboratories. He also studied at the University of Amsterdam and elsewhere.
* I put an exclamation mark after 'first' above because the excess mortality phenomenon should have been identified by our institutes as early as the autumn of 2021. On behalf of the government, we have apartment buildings full of calculators so that we do not miss just such a signal. Let alone ignore it when it is pointed out to them. Not a single healthcare institute, civil servant or regulator sounded the alarm. Keeping signals and suggestions from other disciplines out is unscientific. A concrete example is the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), which kept the KNMI's knowledge of aerosols out of its gates. (There were no epidemiologists at the KNMI either, so they didn't know that the droplet theory is an important basic principle to keep virological research affordable. An undesirable discussion in medical circles.)
You then suggest that we should have referred to the actuarial society. That could have been done, and I understand from you that their data matches ours. If that had not been the case, we would have had to investigate where those differences came from. It now appears to be a validation of our method, for which I am grateful. We could have mentioned it, it would not have been out of place. Incidentally, there will be more organizations that have started working with these figures themselves. We cannot provide an exhaustive list of these.
Red flags with this website are: the names of the initiators are not listed, and there is a donate button on the first and last line. This casts doubt on the intentions.
The red flags. At the bottom of the 'bottom bar' are the credits with references to contact options (via twitter and my aforementioned virusvaria website). You have overlooked it. Or is it? Because you describe us as "a group that didn't study for this". We have already made the bottom bar a little more visible and we are considering adding short bios. But it's all about the numbers. methodology and transparency. Who exactly is behind this is less important in our view.
Then the donate buttons.
A donate button makes you doubt the intentions. Coincidentally, I was just writing a blog about that because I am well aware of that. That has now been transformed into this article. The original idea summarized: Higher-ups who themselves work for governments, institutes or large organizations look at such a donation button very differently than the people on the shop floor. It is going too far to elaborate on that here, it should be a new article. But take a look at other initiatives with a donate button: Médecins Sans Frontières, Eyes on Animals, Warchild, The Human Dimension Foundation – websites with more prominent red flags than the modest light blue buttons on sterftemonitor.nl. Is that doubt really because of the donate button?
It is questionable that citizens' initiatives such as ours are needed to establish truth and transparency, especially in light of the political preparations to classify substantiated dissent as 'disinformation'. This is also evident from the direction in which the noses of the Heads of Government are currently being set, in Davos.
– One of the graphs shows CBS mortality due to corona up to and including October 2023. That is not possible, because CBS has only published until August.
That's right. Of the more than 40 months depicted, the last two are indeed derived, namely from the admission figures of NICE. Since that number is virtually nil, it has no further relevance. We will either add this in the accompanying text or make the flat line a little shorter. It is a detail that makes no difference to the line of the argument. But it has to be right of course, so thanks for this feedback.
... This is contrary to the data that excess mortality is synchronized with the prevalence of corona, such as that from the sewage values.
The sewer values are indeed fascinating. There may very well be a link between mortality and sewage values somewhere. The relationship between them is becoming increasingly difficult to interpret: as immunity increases, we see less effect of high sewage values. Although they are in sync with the number of hospital admissions, compared to the number of deaths from corona, the sewage figures have now become 1000 times higher than at the beginning of the epidemic.
You refer to other posts by Herman so I take the liberty to also respond to a comment of yours, in which you state that the correlation between sewage values and mortality rates disappears because no one tests for corona anymore. But the whole point is that there is a correlation between hospitalizations and sewage levels. So while testing is done there and not at home, GPs don't do that either – only hospital doctors. It follows that there must be large numbers of untested corona deaths that do not make it to the hospital. If they don't get sick, if they die suddenly, what about that? We would like to have a clear picture of these unexplained phenomena.
We would not dare to say that the corona figures are incorrect, as you suggest, because there is no more testing. Doctors can still make diagnoses – at least I don't know that they do it any worse now than before. To simply dismiss the minimum numbers of corona deaths as 'not properly measured' is going a bit far for us. We'll have to make do with those numbers because it's the best we have. Substantiated plausibility can certainly lead to interesting insights, but these remain speculations and hypotheses that the need for disappears when there is no more additional mortality. Here, too, research offers a solution.
Then follows the criticism that Herman Steigstra "suggests that CBS calculates the expected mortality based on figures for 2015-2019" and then you say "They only use 2015-2019 for the seasonal pattern." Herman does not give an exhaustive methodological description, because the exact calculation is indeed not known and has not been published. 2015-2019 definitely plays a role and is corrected for the following years on the basis of demographic trends, a plausible compromise. That said, the resulting CBS values are pretty much in line with the trend line that follows from 2015-2019. So here too, this brief description does not detract from the figures shown or the line of argument.
I hope that this has cleared up some of your doubts.
Sincerely,
Anton Theunissen (editor virusvaria.nl)
Oh well, people who are turned off by a donate button don't really have anything to do on such a site anyway. They categorize this among "wappie sites" that have set themselves the goal of getting rich from donations: disinformation as a revenue model. They think that's very different from a paywall. Friends of mine, avid NRC and Volkskrant readers, have also looked at me in dismay after I referred them to a useful website. "Yes, but it has a donate button on it". Both work in healthcare.
Sigh.
Very correct answer!
I'm going to find the donate button now
Thanks, Anton and Herman
Haha, very good, good search!
Found it and donated!
Addendum to Mr. Laning:
At a time when trust in government information and in its institutions is undeniably declining (and rightly so in several institutions), critical citizenship is becoming increasingly important, especially if it comes from well-versed individuals and groups.
A donate button for their work is a signal to a growing group of people that they are not financially dependent on the government and its institutions, which is considered a recommendation by this group.
For Anton and Herman:
Compliments for the decent handling of criticism of the critics. Criticism of the critics is also useful, provided that it is equally decent and substantive. It only makes you sharper.
I'm in favor of you briefly describing your credentials on the websites. Especially important for newcomers to the sites. Even though education and scholarship are not the be-all and end-all for skill (of which we unfortunately see examples up to the very highest levels of government), it is at least an indication of the substantive right to speak in relevant areas.
Hiding mortality, who could have ever imagined that it would be considered the most normal thing in the world. Thank you so much for the mortality monitor! Your time alone is priceless. I've been following you for years and I'm happy to finally be able to donate something. The fact that people with salaries for paid nonsense are paying attention to this means that you have hit the mark.
Hmm, I don't think the mortality is glossed over. Not by CBS, not by RIVM. In fact, both institutes are transparent about it. What RIVM has done is to adjust (read: increase) the bandwidths within which mortality is considered 'normal'. You can think all kinds of things about that, but not that the mortality is covered up. Moreover, the bandwidths will be increased more often in the coming decades, given the increasingly ageing population.
1) The baseline is indeed going up and 2) no one is claiming that mortality is being covered up, not even that 3) CBS is doing something wrong. 4) Ageing does have an impact on the baseline.
In short, I can't make soup out of this. First read at least the explanation of the mortality monitor or be a bit more specific in what you write, maybe I have misunderstood everything.
By "concealment of mortality" I also mean the reactions of the people around a deceased person. People come up with assumptions and possible diagnoses or remain silent instead of sadness, but above all you have to be convinced that the corona jabs can certainly not be a possible cause that we see each other again at a funeral (or at a sickbed or condition), which was many times less common before 2021. This is something that can be said for sure without proper research. We don't know for sure. I feel supported with hard figures. Also because we are looking for possible solutions and help with all this damage for those it happens to. We could also think "it's your own fault big bump"...
My compliments for the mortality monitor.
I think it is very wise to keep a critical eye on CBS and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM).
Zo kwam ik het volgende tegen bij statline van het CBS. Je verwacht dat de som van de weken gelijk is aan de jaartotalen. Dat is niet het geval voor veel van de jaren. Waarschijnlijk wordt de eerste gebroken week van het jaar niet apart vermeld in de tabel van de weken.
Jaar som weekcijfers jaartotalen
2009 134235 134235
2010 134879 136058
2011 134917 135741
2012 140402 140813
2013 141245 141245
2014 139223 139223
2015 147134 147134
2016 147735 148997
2017 149745 150214
2018 153363 153363
2019 151885 151885
2020 168678 168678
2021 169231 170972
2022 169159 170112
2023 168815 169331
Of course, I could go and see how the correlation is with the length of the first and last week. If only I had nothing else to do... There are also sometimes differences if you add Men and Women, for example. I have no idea how they sync that internally with each other.
This difference is mainly due to the 52 weeks and 11/4 days that the year has. Where the 1/4 once every 4 years yields a "leap year". Which in turn results in a 53rd week every 5 to 6 years.
This is indeed sometimes a bit more difficult to compare. But normally doesn't detract from the trends.
Nice initiative again.
I keep coming back to the question of why so few people see how we are being fooled by dubious statistics and government disinformation. As Anton also pointed out on Maurice's site: the burden of proof is piling up, but it has no effect on the masses who believe in the government narrative. I'm trying to get to the bottom of that. If you understand what keeps these people shackled in their opinions, it might be possible to reach them. It seems that the skeptics are still a minority.
A thought experiment: suppose the narrative is correct: So: our governments have made the right decisions, have informed us correctly, have rightly influenced the media to protect us from a terrible evil. The vaccines have saved millions of lives, and mass vaccination has brought the terrible pandemic to an end. That's how the believers see it, I think.
Then, on the other side of the coin, I see a virus that was no more extreme than the Hong Kong flu in 1968/1969. The Hong Kong flu has also claimed deaths like any flu wave, but after a few months it was over, with a brief peak in the following autumn. Without lockdowns, without mass injections, without border closures, without discriminatory CTB and all those other measures. We, skeptics, see no evidence that any of the draconian measures taken around Covid-19 have had any effect. In fact, the cure is worse than the disease. Evidence is readily available. I'm not going to go through them all here, but the damage done is enormous, and it's still going on.
These positions are so far apart that one of the 2 parties must be wrong. I'm open to being convinced. Maybe I'm completely wrong. Personally, I think my opinion is based on facts. To the extent that they are available. But perhaps the proponents of the narrative also have facts that indicate that the whole operation saved millions of lives. I would like to hear them.
Or maybe it's not about the facts? We can make the pile of evidence even higher, but if the narrative followers have based their 'opinion' not on facts but on belief, it is not going to change them. Or maybe it's fear, they unconsciously push reality away. After all, if any of the undisputed facts (e.g., that the "vaccines" are safe and effective) turn out to be false, then they must acknowledge that they have been cheated. And then the next domino in government confidence falls. As a result, their worldview shifts, and it turns out that almost all information that they have always seen as reliable has been manipulated. Not necessarily wrong, but it is an interpretation of media that interpret a certain narrative.
I've gone through that process myself. Right from the start, and gradually coming to see more and more how we are being manipulated. Then you have just changed from a law-abiding taxpayer to a conspiracy theorist.
Is that behind it? Or are we skeptics completely wrong? Which genius is going to convince us, based on facts, that an mRNA jab is a good idea? That the uncontrolled production of (spike) proteins is less bad than a severe flu? That the lockdowns have made any sense at all? That it was right that an entire population group was discriminated against in order to force them to get a jab? I could go on and on. How do we get this discussion on a broader platform than on dissident sites like this one?
Anton, have you seen this research by John Beaudoin?
https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/new-data-reveals-tsunami-of-covid-19-vaccine-deaths/
Unbelievable that they hand over all death certificates within a few days.
Some of the numbers he shows are very, very low!
Massachusetts has a population of 7 million
Translation to the whole of USA= factor 50
Book
https://therealcdc.com/
Het is inderdaad geen goed idee om de voorlichting van het grote publiek over sterftecijfers aan een branche-vereniging van actuarissen over te laten, zoals de heer Laning voorstelt.
Hoewel actuarissen waarschijnlijk goed de sterfte in beeld zouden kunnen brengen, hebben ze namelijk ook een heel sterke neiging om dit juist niet te doen. Verzekeraars bestaan immers van de verschillen tussen werkelijke en denkbeeldige risico’s.
Voor de winstgevendheid van levensverzekeraars in het bijzonder, is het noodzakelijk dat het publiek een veel te hoge inschatting van de risico’s van sterfte heeft. In feite hebben levensverzekeraars dus een existentieel belang om sterfte risico’s zwaar te overdrijven.
Het zou even dwaas zijn, om een branchevereniging van casino-houders voorlichting te laten geven over de werkelijke kansen van gokspelen.
LOL, I've been looking for numbers for a while and compare with RIVM & CBS etc.
Nice, so found and contrarian as I am, so I used the payment button! 😉
€15 is 3 coffees these days... So oh well.