The normal, average weight of humans has always been about the target weight. The 'norm'. You could be too fat or too skinny, but most people had a normal BMI, the word says it all. You can see it in old beach photos: fat people were exceptions. That is no longer the case. Nowadays, most people are overweight: overweight has become 'normal'. The 'normal' weight of that time (ca. 1970?) is still the target weight today, despite the fact that more than half of the people are now overweight (CBS). 'Normal' has not been elevated to 'norm'.
Attempts are made by society to romanticize obesity with well-filled happy ladies: "accept your body as it is" and "be proud of how you are". Chubby fashion models make it feel like it's OK to be overweight. Excess weight should be as acceptable and even desirable as a six-pack. After all, all people are equal.
However, science points out that being overweight is unhealthy and is associated with significant physical and psychological complaints and diseases. A study in The Lancet, with nearly 4 million participants across four continents, found that being overweight or obese increases the risk of premature death. People who are moderately overweight lose about three years of their life expectancy. Research from the University of Oxford found that too, plus severe obesity (BMI of 40 to 50) shortens life expectancy by about 10 years.
Science therefore does not include developments in average body weight in the definition of "overweight". An important and hard argument is that a higher body weight leads to higher mortality rates. Hence the term "target weight", the weight considered healthy that is significantly lower than the expected average weight of 2024.
This is also part of the tasks of public health guards: indicating areas for improvement. Increased mortality is a merciless, rock-solid criterion.
Excess mortality as the norm
While the mortality rate is a heavy argument to emphasize the seriousness of the topic of "overweight," it works very differently with mortality rates themselves. Here, too, average life expectancy has always been the norm. In the event of a sudden change in the age of death, health scientists should bounce back: what is going on here, how is this possible? And in the event of a deterioration: how do we stop it? Where should we go back to, what is a good reference? However, that does not happen. To everyone's surprise, the average is elevated to the norm.
"Yes, of course," says everyone with the brain of an oil nut, "the baseline has been determined for years on the basis of the mortality of recent years."
We see that in the excess mortality years since 2021, the age of mortality has been brought forward considerably. In 2023, a 75-year-old has the same mortality risk as an 80-year-old in 2020.
If we simply accept that, the norm will be raised to the higher level of mortality. What we used to call excess mortality in 2020 is now called "expected mortality".
Higher mortality is normalized with no causal explanation. The trend is apparently irreversible and there is no need to find out if we can't go back to 2020 or earlier levels. We do not have a 'target mortality', just as we have created a 'target weight'. The ongoing trend is simply followed and "expected". Excess mortality evaporates. Why would anyone want that?
Excess mortality: fine, as long as it's not so hot
It is common to write off excess mortality as soon as we understand the cause. A heat wave, for example, is a fact of life that we will have to accept. But it is also an undesirable incident: reason to keep a close eye on it. Heat waves are therefore not included in the mortality forecast. In this way, we keep the baseline tight and incidental increases remain more visible.
As long as we keep the 'excess mortality' visible since 2021, it would indicate to us that the cause for this extraordinary increase in mortality is missing: we do not know what kills us.
The sore point here is that the increase started at the same time as the corona vaccinations, almost worldwide. This gives the impression that these vaccinations have been the biggest medical mistake ever. That means quite a lot: the industry would then have steered purely for profit, delegated responsibilities to governments that pretend to know nothing, van der Leyen has simultaneously siphoned off vaccine billions via text messages, regulators have proven to be totally useless, experts have turned out to be incompetent, journalists have been bought or simpletons (or both), science magazines turn out to be money laundering flyerers, tower blocks with civil servants have absolutely NOTHING but zero point zero means, doctors... etc., I'm not going to rehash the whole mess of the -in that case- deeply corrupted system.
In any case, the vaccine industry will have to be thoroughly vetted – perhaps the entire medical-pharmaceutical complex – to justify blind acceptance of vaccines. Intensive supervision needs to be overhauled. The government can no longer be trusted. The expertise of the government needs to be organised differently. In short: it has quite a few implications. But the government wouldn't be the government if the all-important implication wasn't the "willingness to vaccinate." Because the health of the population comes first, it comes first! Do you understand?
Fortunately, vaccine damage is extremely, extremely rare, especially according to Lareb. A laundry list of side effects, from neurological to cardiological to respiratory, paralysis, spinal cord inflammation, organ inflammation, cancer, you name it, but they have one thing in common: one side effect is much rarer than the other, seriously. So you never don't get it. And look: only 600 deaths reported to Lareb! That's not even two MH17s. (And that's almost only during the jab campaigns.)
Lareb does a good job, they put those complaints in category cover-ups and keep them a bit sub rosa. They act like a rented call center to keep the customers at a distance. But yes, that doesn't detract from that whining about that damned excess mortality... How do we get rid of it?
The fact that more people are dying since the vaccination campaigns should just be considered 'normal'. Then it doesn't help if we keep talking about 'excess mortality'. It is reminiscent of the problems with 'repopulation': that our population is changing in composition, that traditions are disappearing, that the national character is being multiculturally immigrated, that is not the point of discussion. The point is that we don't name it anymore. What you don't talk about, doesn't exist.
Without target mortality there is no excess mortality and without excess mortality there is really nothing wrong, not even with the vaccines. No one really notices, only the funeral industry. If we just expect the increased mortality, there won't even be excess mortality. Trust in the government and therefore especially the willingness to vaccinate will remain intact.
The mission seems clear: "Do not omit anything to prevent the willingness to vaccinate from declining." Are we seeing more signs of that? Sure. Below I list a few of them. All these points have in common that they keep vaccinations out of the wind, with a focus on evaporating excess mortality:
- Denying immunity
- Tempering excess mortality in accounting
- Recalculate margins
- Definition nudging
- Lie
- Corrupted data (communication)
- Tweaking historical figures: falsification of history
None of this has anything to do with science or public health. But the seriousness of the offences shows that there are important interests involved.
Bias towards vaccination readiness
Recent examples, a selection from last month's harvest.
Vaccination is still necessary
To make the overall bias explicit: at the beginning of July, RIVM removed the sentence marked in yellow, which truthfully states that those who have had a corona infection normally no longer need a vaccination. We don't know why that sentence was there for about a month (it was added in May), but we don't know anymore. In any case, one of the effects is that people who do not need a jab are not deterred from getting one. These are substantial extra points for the willingness to vaccinate in the Netherlands.
The prick-oriented approach is explicitly professed and shouted from the rooftops.
Excess mortality is tempered from an accounting point of view
In the past few weeks I have had a lot of contact with Herman Steigstra in connection with a piece on Researchgate about the increased expectation with associated bandwidth. A higher baseline results in less excess mortality.
This graph shows what happens if our desired mortality level is tacitly adjusted to the average of 2021-2024 (seasonal years).
In those years, the steepest parts of each line fall earlier, which is now also reflected in the expectation of the RIVM. Those steep sections lead to more mortality as early as January than in any of the entire 2015-2019 season years.
Something irreversible took place in 2021, according to the expectations of the RIVM.
Previously, anomalies (abnormalities) in regular mortality were not included in expectations. In this way, they remained detectable.
However, RIVM has now chosen to include the anomaly in the mortality change, the trend break in 2021, in the forecast. Due to the higher expectation, considerably more deaths are needed to be able to identify excess mortality.
In recent years, the years 2015-2019 have been used as the baseline, 'target mortality'. That has now been abandoned. We can only guess at the reason for this change. In any case, a side effect is that there is no reason to suspect vaccines of causing serious persistent excess mortality. It disappears. After all, such a suspicion would not help with vaccination readiness.
More lenient margins
Apart from that, the bandwidth has also been broadened. Compared to the standard bandwidth, the bandwidth is 40% larger than it was in 2020 as of 1 July.
As a result, the bandwidth has become considerably wider than the increase in the baseline can justify. Even if the deviations have become so much larger in the last 4 years, should that become the new norm?
In this way, some extra money is nibbled off the excess mortality. Again something that has not been left behind.
In short: statistical choices evaporate official excess mortality.
Definition nudging
Traditionally, when average life expectancy could still be the norm for a healthy life, excess mortality was always a temporary phenomenon. In the Netherlands, this involved heat waves lasting a week or two or epidemics that lasted two to four months. It is striking that this observation is now being pushed in the direction of a definition.
In the Joint Final Report on 2020-2021 CBS and RIVM write emphatically, in a paragraph between two blank lines: "Excess mortality is the difference between the observed number of deaths and an expected number of deaths in the same period."
The Rivm describes excess mortality on its website now (July 2024) as follows: "Excess mortality is a temporary, extraordinary increase in the number of people dying in the Netherlands."
- Note that the "temporarily" element has been added.
CBS has yet to finalise the further narrowed: "Excess mortality is a temporary, special increase in the number of deaths that coincides with a special event, such as a flu epidemic, heat wave or corona epidemic."
- According to Statistics Netherlands, there is only excess mortality if it coincides with a special event. An experimental vaccination campaign seems to me to be a pretty special event. But if you don't see the causal link with that event, then the increase in mortality is not special and therefore not excess mortality?
- Correlation is causation according to CBS, but that's beside the point.
That "temporary" must be natural in both definitions"generally temporary'. They now make the temporary nature sound like a necessary condition. Persistent, i.e. non-temporary, excess mortality is then an impossibility.
Formally, you could only speak of excess mortality when it has turned out to be temporary, i.e. it has passed. Nonsense, of course.
That choice for "temporary" was not made in the interest of public health. Suppose the air and drinking water are polluted by a disaster. Think of a meteorite, a nuclear war, whatever. Even then, a public health institute would have to monitor for years how the average mortality deviates from the desired mortality level. But perhaps, if the new NATO secretary has pressed the red button, we will also let the future negative effects evaporate in the averages of the increased mortality.
Our plea is that a distinction should be made between the expected level of mortality and the desirable level of mortality. ("Desired mortality" sounds a bit silly.) But then you run the risk that the vaccinations will be suspected again. And of course, not everyone wants that. In the interest of public health.
White Lies
The former director of the American National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), CDC director Robert Redfield, confirms wholeheartedly that there should have been no lying about vaccine side effects in favor of vaccination readiness.
(see the video here or click on the X post)
Dutch media: "Shhh, that could be at the expense of vaccination readiness!"
Corrupted data communication
They do not hesitate to provide mutilated data in WOO requests. The judge is satisfied with this openness.
De Biomedische Rekenkamer had een WOO-verzoek ingediend waarbij het ging om vaccinatiedata, leeftijdscategorie (op 5 jaar nauwkeurig) en datum van overlijden. Eerst bleken die data er niet te zijn (wat aantoonbaar onjuist was) en toen waren ze er ineens toch. Het verzoek werd afgewezen en afgelopen week, twee jaar na de aanvraag, toch goedgekeurd in deze rechterlijke uitspraak. De data staan online here. There are 6161 pages with 64 people per page. The State Secretary notes in the cover letter that it is a very large file. Indeed. It's over 1 GB of digital junk.
It starts with the fact that they are PDFs of bitmapped (ah, moderately photocopied) pages. The quality is too poor to make figures out of it in an easy way, automated. See, for example, the omitted minus sign in the middle line. 
Zou deze rechter het ook goed vinden als we onze boetes gaan betalen met een wazige foto van het gepaste bedrag in contanten?
Er ging al eerder een bestand rond op sociale media met, naar nu blijkt, exact dezelfde data (dat wist niemand zeker). Dat was een bescheiden 18 MB Excel file with readable data. Of course, the Secretary of State knew nothing about that.
De data zijn daarin opzettelijk dusdanig verarmd dat ze betekenisloos zijn geworden. Iemand legt het uit op X. Omdat hij zowat iedereen heeft geblokt die ik ken, staat het screenshot hiernaast. Een rechter heeft het desondanks ‘geschikt voor publicatie’ bevonden dus de overheid heeft aan de WOO-verplichting voldaan.
Thanks again, justice! Chapeau to the judiciary. (rule of law, anyone?)
But perhaps the judge also had in the back of his D66 mind that it actually makes no sense to discredit vaccinations again. After all, things that have been done do not take a turn and it would only harm the willingness to vaccinate. That doesn't sound very polite, but that's how you start thinking.
Hans Verwaart had in April already wrote a Substack about that data (now also a July update). In the end, he was able to make something of it on a quarterly level. After the disappearance of healthy vaccinee effects, vaccinated people continued to die more often in the course of 2022-2023 compared to the expected number.
This is not encouraging for the willingness to vaccinate, but that analysis is otherwise without danger: are Substack doesn't get much further than a limited readership – who wouldn't get vaccinated anyway.
So an Excel file has been mutilated that has also been downgraded to blurry images before publication. This is unacceptable in a democratic state governed by the rule of law. The rule of law and the media should protect us from such government stratagems. There must be a lot at stake to bring about this behaviour, not only for the ministries, institutes and experts involved, but also for the journalists and judges.
Tweaking historical figures
A pre-made expectation remains the expectation of the past, you might say. Made at the time with the knowledge of the time. Adjusting or recalculating afterwards is remarkable, especially if you tacitly replace your new calculation with the old one and pretend that you already had the prediction you made afterwards.
In a contract, you don't change a few words afterwards, even if they are only spelling mistakes. Or you can specifically mention each change.
The difference of this recalculation on total mortality is negligible, but that is not the point. Why aren't those numbers just fixed? Why is an old prediction being recalculated at all, with all the chance of unnecessary errors?
In this graph you can see the differ between the RIVM file of the last week of June 2024 and that of the First week of July 2024. Both files give the same expectation again over the same period: that of the past twelve months.
In the unnecessary recalculation, it is also striking that there are only increases, no decreases. If they are rounding differences, they all fall in the same direction.
Once again, we are talking about only 28 deaths in 12 months, which is of course nothing at all in relation to the increases we had already seen. But do we remember? When Covid came knocking, every child had to be double vaccinated because otherwise it would kill grandpa and grandma (that was also made up) and the chance that a child would have something from Covid was astronomically small – but it will just be your own child! That one, that's what it's all about! But those 30 people more or less in a year, oh well... That's statistics.
The picture is clear
Partly due to the increasing (also medical) reports on vaccination damage and mortality (see e.g the last one by Denis Rancourt), confessions like Redfield's and all kinds of declassified documents, links are increasingly being made between the vaccinations and the unexplained excess mortality.
This is at the expense of the willingness to vaccinate, which has been central to the corona policy. Think of Hugo, the measures, the boas, the threats, the IC videos, the QR passes, videos of funeral processions etc etc. All culminating in the Vaccinations as the Only Way Out.
The Disinformation Think Tank had the task of distorting facts or presenting them in such a way that it would benefit the willingness to vaccinate. Dissent was forcefully dismantled, banned, ignored, censored, canceled, fired. Science journalists ridiculed it.
What is to be done with those people who did all that, with the minister at the time, with the controlling House of Representatives, etc. etc., as long as excess mortality remains in the picture and the excess mortality problem actually becomes more and more acute? Then (perhaps?) one day it will have to be acknowledged that the vaccinations have been an important driver of the whole misery, including those of next autumn. What are we to do with all those people who are so easily deceived? Forget and forgive? Trust...?
In the meantime, the government knows what is going on. They also understand the significance of the treason committed by the country and the people. This is evident in all the ways in which they prevent transparency: from excuses and lies to hard-nosed data fraud that manipulates, obfuscates, misplaces or otherwise does not make facts in communication available to independent researchers.
How difficult is it to deliver an Excel file without amputating crucial information, such as how many days after which jab someone died – exactly the data that was requested? And the judge thinks it's OK...
Such a judge would not have been able to judge for himself what was going on with that data. I happen to know a few judges and among them are NPO-watching NRC-reading owl chicks. You can't blame those people personally, they had to learn very hard to achieve something. They are products of and in a system in which the authority of government institutions is unquestionable, especially scientific ones, such as RIVM and CBS. If judges were to deny that authority, they would also be sawing at the feet under their own chair. That authority is not further substantiated and is not tested in the interim, other than by means of an occasional prize festival every now and then.
The most obvious motive for these behaviors is to erase traces that lead to the recognition of one of the greatest crimes in medical history, committed against its own population.
There is little choice but for the government agencies and the media to persevere. Just as long as they insisted that Biden was sharp.
And of course: collectively continue to pretend that foreign countries do not exist. Pretending that the vaccines are effective and safe. This includes opting for 'the new normal with more mortality' and wanting to stay far away from honest figures. This behavior works in favor of vaccination readiness and protects those who have continued to advocate for the mRNA vaccines against their better judgment.
But yes, even if it turns out abroad that the vaccines have caused enormous excess mortality, the Netherlands can at least point to the RIVM statistics: not with us, just look: no excess mortality, everything entirely according to expectations! And that in turn ends up in the newspaper and on TV.
Great article again, Anton. I've been following you, Maurice de Hond and Herman Steigstra since 2020. It remains frustrating that most people don't want to reflect on what has happened in recent years. Blind faith in the government and
Medics, in the meantime it has mainly become cognitive dissonance, I suspect. We will continue the fight!
Thank you Marjan! Hang in there, there's no other way.
Nicely lined up, Anton.
Have you seen the report by Rancourt et al in the meantime?
https://correlation-canada.org/covid-excess-mortality-125-countries/
What will the bunkers think of this? The cause of 'the pandemic' is the declaration of a pandemic.
It's a bit of a read:-)
I think I've seen it on X, haven't read it yet, but I have read his earlier report on the southern hemisphere. (I couldn't find the link anymore, so I've added it to the article.)
What I keep seeing is that judges rely on external expertise, such as the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). You can argue with that, but then you have to come up with a very good story. As far as I can see, that didn't happen in the Netherlands, possibly because legal and medical heavyweights were afraid to go against the RIVM story.
There are plenty of good stories, but the big media are propagandists. Such a story has no chance.
Agree with implausibility official story and reprehensible that people try to sweep the dangerous desire to experiment under the table.
But don't fall into easy simplifications, such as the assumption that judges have so much medical knowledge that they can recognize the mistakes of RIVM et al.
Well, then I have not made it very clear that I do not think judges are capable of doing that. In fact, this judge approves unusable junk in response to a thorough WOO request. But then again, is that incompetence or malice?
Hi Anton,
Thank you for this powerful story, you give a good overview of the state of affairs here. And maybe there is still something to do with the PDF files? Especially together with the Excel files? Really painstaking work, but it could be divided among a dozen volunteers.
Furthermore, I agree with almost everything you write here, but that of the repeat vaccination from the RIVM does not seem illogical to me – I can imagine their reasoning.
They already start with "almost everyone has built up protection" and specifically acknowledge protection from infection. Only, as far as we know (unfortunately they forgot to explain that), defenses against coronaviruses are similar to those against flu, it becomes less effective with time – even natural defenses. This is partly expressed in the sentence "Nevertheless, people can still get very sick from the coronavirus". Some people who were sufficiently immune six months ago may not be sufficiently protected next autumn.
Incidentally, my view is different from the RIVM, I try to maintain my natural immunity by staying in contact with people a lot (continuous boosting). Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to work.
We will have to see to what extent the autumn vaccination will still be relevant in the future. So far, this is debatable, to say the least, given ACM's developments so far. A month ago, an infection was still protective, but now it is not. Still crazy.
By the way, you can't do anything with the Excel files. They were the source files for the PDFs.
Hi Anton, I tried to download the PDF files of minivws.nl, both as a subfile and also as a zip, and on two different machines. Everything failed. The zip always fails at 69 Mb. Do you happen to have the entire file?
sent by e-mail
By email? I don't see anything and how? Max. approx. 10Mb – that's 100x less than the zip file...
I've got you this link emailed, maybe ended up in the spam? I also added the link in the text above.
Thank you Anton, the link to the Excel file is good. And your answer here is only now dawning on me – so those PDFs that you can't download, on
https://open.minvws.nl/dossier/VWS-WOO/3455207-1038323-pdo
are worthless because they are just a bad copy of the mangled Excel file we already have.
Yes, indeed. Try something with it, you will see that Hans Verwaart has managed to squeeze out the most important things.
Update from Hans Verwaart
I assume that your material and interpretations/articles are kept well secured.
The government's criminalization of the spread of self-defined 'disinformation' is in full swing. Germany is leading the way in this. Usually, the Netherlands follows. The EU with Van der Leugen is also doing its utmost. See Thomas Fazi's recent article on Unherd https://unherd.com/2024/07/inside-the-eus-war-on-free-speech/
Standard security, nothing special.
Super article by the way, on Unherd!
A word about the Rancourt report. They've figured out things that I've actually been curious about for a long time. Countries compared, the measures per country, the composition of the population, geographical location, vaccination approach, etc. It has become a bulky piece of work. As a layman, I am impressed, but the debunkers will have something to say about it. According to the authors, the pattern in which 'the virus' has spread does not make any sense at all for a respiratory virus. The Netherlands is also mentioned as a country where excess mortality persists because they compare the numbers before 2020.
It is a very strange situation in which we find ourselves. Assume that other readers also occasionally feel like they're in the wrong movie. How can 'we' see so clearly what has (gone) wrong while others are convinced that there was a deadly virus circulating that was defeated by heroic virologists and sensible politicians by deploying a rapidly developed vaccine.
I recently had a few conversations with believers, and what surprised me is that they don't really know any details. Not from the severity of Covid, not from the effect of mRNA vaccines, not that there is serious excess mortality. Nor can they contradict my arguments. They have blind faith in the government and de Volkskrant. That's what their worldview is based on. They know that this gives them a limited view of the matter, but apparently they are fine with that. I tried to explain to them that I'm not just shouting something. But that my opinion is based on data. Only I don't get it from Volkskrant or NRC. The framing in those magazines is also becoming clearer and clearer to me.
If there is anyone who can explain to me why mRNA vaccines against a relatively mild respiratory virus is a good idea, I would be happy to do so and maybe I will convert. On this site, that chance is small.
Haha, no you won't find that here anytime soon. If you're on Facebook, you might want to take a look at the open group Corona Middenweg. There are some active members there, Jans Velzing and Bernard de Boeck, who might be able to convince you. I wouldn't hold my breath for it.
No, never been on facebook. Has always disliked me. From day 1. I think 'social' media is one of the biggest problems of our time. In addition to being overweight, medication use. Has to do with each other.
Without social media, you would have missed out on all the information you read on sites like this.
Of course, if mRNA were bad, the government in the UK would never help build a megafactory of Moderna, endsarc.
The good thing about mRNA is that you can develop a new vaccine very quickly and cheaply in the event of mutations. That then no longer needs to be tested and no longer validated. So cheap and fast.
There is a "small" disadvantage to it: the working principle behind mRNA vaccines appears to have disastrous side effects. That was already somewhat known but seemed to be rare; but that relative "rarity" has only really manifested itself with the massive rollout of Corona vaccines.
Here are the pros and cons of mRNA vaccines in a nutshell.
Who knows, they might be able to set a timer on it and make it cell-specific. As long as that is not possible, you can also give everyone preventive chemotherapy. Irresponsible.
Professor Theo Schetters said, with Jorn Luka on the Trueman Show, that Bourla of Pfizer had said: After corona, cancer is the next moneymaker. Count your winnings!
But don't you understand that a.o. Billie and friends their mission is fully on track to protect humanity and the earth? There are far too many people and there is far too much prosperity, our planet cannot handle that so the mission is a few billion fewer people and we can get back to work. And to prevent things from going wrong again and people multiplying like rabbits again, you need a totalitarian power that can ensure that humanity continues to get its jabs to shorten life to an acceptable standard. It has become clear that poisoning food through the food industry alone is not going to work. The people are like cockroaches, impossible to exterminate. Prosperity is also being addressed, prosperity is not good for the world at all, through an energy transition it now appears to work well, those stupid people really fall for everything. Bill wants a world full of lazy, fat, stupid, slavish, poor people. For the elite, his friends, he has a different plan, which should be twice as old as it should be and as healthy as a... yes like that actually, because nothing is really healthy anymore.
You would almost believe that there are Aliens who want to take over the world. The fact is that a lot of history also refers to this if you want to believe the videos on YouTube. But then again, what is another explanation for this super-successful mass hypnosis that has fanatically convinced many millions of people that they are doing the wrong thing, while if they were awake they would declare themselves crazy.
I don't understand why you seriously believe these kinds of stories..... Go talk to "people like that". They really don't work like that.
The correct explanation is a combination of fear, stupidity, tunnel thinking, groupthink and especially Rule of Rescue (RoR) thinking instead of utilitarian thinking. And from the pharma point of view, of course, purely selfish action. These are all very rational explanations.
Unfortunately, you come across a lot of RoR thinking: climate, migration, energy transition.
All utopian thinking to quickly "save" something here and now, but with a multitude of negative side effects. Cool analytical reasoning and drawing logical conclusions has disappeared with all those highly educated alpha and gamma educated people who have the power. In the past, power was somewhat more occupied by science-educated people and rational decisions were made by governments a little more often (but certainly not always!).
I sum up all those traits with the umbrella term "incompetence".
There are three others, financial or career motives:
– self-interest (money, position)
– bribery sensitivity
– be blackmailable
The theme of the article is interesting, but it is desirable to place the explanation of the behaviour of RIVM (and CBS) and others in a broader (international) context.
1. The average level of mortality in EU countries in the period 2016-2019 is still a good basis for determining excess mortality in 2024 and analysing the differences between EU countries. See also the recent EUROSTAT Monthly Bulletin of July 2024:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=509982
2.View the monthly figures of percentage changes of the countries in May 2024 compared to the average mortality in May months in 2016-2019. These are neatly spread out around 1.6% for the EU average (first line, first table and third graph). And the average level is not that high at all. So there seems to be no need to change the basis of mortality in the EU.
3.If we look further back in time (first graph and last graph), we see that in the past, excess mortality has regularly been much higher, but that a significant decline started around January 2024, which will continue until June 2024. For the first time since 2020, the EU average excess mortality has been so low for a long time (almost half a year). Is this the end of the COVID crisis in the EU?
4. Perhaps, but not for the (few) countries where the level of excess mortality is still far above 10% compared to 2016-2019. The Netherlands belongs to this group of laggards (see the third graph and the first table). This is surprising, because our neighbouring countries are not one of them. From 2021 onwards, the development of excess mortality in Belgium and Germany seemed to be linked to that in the Netherlands (Belgium was somewhat more distant). Since the end of 2023 (Belgium) and the beginning of 2024 (Germany), the Netherlands seems to have been decoupled from its neighboring countries.
N.B. This can also be seen in the last figure of the EUROSTAT monthly bulletin (press legend; then select 'Belgium', 'Germany' and 'Netherlands', perhaps turn off 'European union').
5.Why is it that the decline in excess mortality in the Netherlands is apparently being slowed down? This can only be due to specific national factors in 2020-2024. So many possible causes, including the well-known drivers of pandemic mortality, are immediately excluded. Inhibiting factors should mainly be sought at a high level: for example, the reluctance of VWS bureaucrats to switch back from a system with central control to the old, pre-pandemic, decentralized system of 'regulated market forces'. Of course, such a return means budget and job losses. This is countered with all kinds of excuses: maintaining 'pandemic preparedness', for example. It is an old and well-known problem in public finances that a 'disaster' often results in structurally higher budgets in the relevant policy areas. Such a WHO pandemic treaty is also intended, among other things, to consolidate higher budgets for health care worldwide. Rabid, of course, given the catastrophic failure of that policy (global excess mortality 20-30 million)!
6. The motive for adjusting the definition of excess mortality is now clear: RIVM and CBS are tinkering with that definition because they do not behave like public institutions but like consultants or even alibi agencies. They have to keep their clients (VWS, politicians, etc.) out of the wind by changing definitions to hide the fact that excess mortality in 2024 has changed little in the Netherlands, but it has changed elsewhere in the EU.
7. Perhaps the adjustment of the excess mortality expectation is informative after all, albeit differently than intended: the increased expectation reflects the hidden price (in human lives) of pandemic preparedness!
I only see your comment now (malfunction in the email notifications), sorry. Sounds very plausible, but a few things are not clear to me. So where do these excess mortality differences with our neighbouring countries come from? Look at Germany, where it was exactly like here.
But I don't see those excess mortality differences decoupled on OWID either... That's crazy, isn't it?
The OWD chart does not go beyond December 2023!
In my response, I talked about the fact that since the end of 2023 (Belgium) and the beginning of 2024 (Germany), the increase in mortality compared to the average in 2016-2019 in our neighboring countries has clearly decreased compared to the consistently higher level in the Netherlands.
You can read the development per country in 2023 and in the first months in 2024 from the first table of EUROSTAT. As a rule in the Netherlands, percentages above 10% are stated for all months in the half year from December 2023 to May 2024 (except for March 2024: 7.9%). For Belgium, there are only percentages in the table far below 10%, and in the last months in 2024 even only negative percentages. Germany reached the last very high rate (above 10%) in January 2024, after which there has also been a clear decline.
It may be interesting to note that, apart from the Netherlands, only islands in Europe (Ireland, Malta and Iceland) structurally exceed 10% compared to the average level of 2016-2019
will be listed in the first 5 months of 2024!
I see it, very special. Very curious to see how that continues. Eurostat also shows that we have had higher excess mortality rates than Belgium since 2021 and the difference is increasing.