Why Gordon Duff’s Claim That Nobody Has Died From a Covid Vaccine Is Wrong
Mathew Crawford is a mathematician and statistician whose Rounding the Earth Substack is rapidly becoming a legend in its own time. In the first half hour of our conversation (transcribed below with links) he explains how hard data raises the strong possibility that the US has experienced more than 200,000 deaths from COVID vaccines (as opposed to the “zero vaccine deaths” asserted recently by Gordon Duff). The second half hour touches on history and geopolitics; psychopaths in general and the Western bankster elite in particular; and how and when the pathocracy may finally collapse.
Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad audio-visual, the radio and now video show that goes everywhere where brave people are thinking outside the box and telling truths that the mainstream doesn’t want you to hear. Today, I’m honored to bring on a new Truth Jihad Radio guest, Matthew Crawford. He’s a mathematician, a statistician and a real visionary. He puts out the Rounding the Earth newsletter, which is highly recommended, some of the most provocative writing on the internet today. So, hey, welcome, Matthew. Good to have you.
Mathew Crawford: Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for inviting me.
Kevin Barrett: I really enjoy your work. It covers a whole bunch of bases that aren’t always covered in one place. In fact, I think you’re covering probably 80 to 90 percent of the issues that I’ve been covering for the last 15 or 20 years—with one exception, which of course is that I’ve been focused heavily on 9/11 truth. That’s what pushed me into this alternative info world, and I know you haven’t done a huge amount on that. But other than that, especially in the COVID era, we’re definitely barking up similar trees. And I appreciate you bringing math, science and humanities together, which is something that I’ve always wanted to see more of ever since I was a humanities teacher. So where do we start? Your COVID statistical work challenges orthodoxy. I just had a rabid defender of orthodoxy on the show, Gordon Duff. He’s “more Catholic than the pope.” Gordon insists that the real fatality rates for COVID are higher than the mainstream tells us, and he insists that nobody has ever died from a vaccine. So let’s start by explaining why he’s wrong.
Mathew Crawford: Oh, gosh.
Kevin Barrett: Where do you start?
Mathew Crawford: There’s a lot of ground to cover right there. One thing to say is it’s actually a weird statement to talk about what somebody died of. And I find less trustworthy a conversation that makes very firm claims than one that is more exploratory. And what I mean by that is when a person dies, it’s most often very difficult to give one reason for why they died. Even a person shot with a gun, do you say they died from the gunshot or they died from, you know, losing too much blood or hypoxia?
Kevin Barrett: Or having an FBI asset smother them with a pillow, which is what happened to Martin Luther King Jr., according to William Pepper’s investigation.
Mathew Crawford: I don’t know that story. That’s an interesting one. But even on a very ordinary level, a person may be suffering from cancer in a hospital bed and get COVID. And it may be that if they hadn’t gotten COVID, they would have died a month later. But because they have COVID their body is now stressed; they die a little bit sooner. And so how do you write that death down? Do you write that down as a cancer death, as a COVID death? And I think that vaccine deaths may be the same thing, when it comes to language that can be easily manipulated.
It allows people who want to frame and establish their own truth to do so with language and just stand there like a rock and say, “I’m not going to have any conversation about this.” And that’s difficult. It becomes almost a philosophical issue, and it becomes an issue of wanting to control perception.
Kevin Barrett: And so would you agree with me, as I wrote in an American Free Press article a year or more ago, that all-cause mortality statistics are probably more useful than COVID mortality statistics, for the reason you mentioned. And if there’s been a huge jump in all-cause mortality statistics, which it looks like there has been, then that suggests something is going on. And when we start eliminating various things, we find that probably COVID has played a large role in a large number of deaths, possibly as many as a million or more in the United States. Is that right or not?
Mathew Crawford: What was the last part that you said?
Kevin Barrett: So if the all-cause mortality statistics are right…
Mathew Crawford: Let’s start there. I do like looking at the all-cause mortality statistics. It gives you a picture of whether or not the system has changed. And if the system…It’s possible that you have two different variables that are acting opposite each other in a system and you have no change in the overall system, but you do in certain aspects of the system. But most of the time, if something comes along that you see is substantial, that you need to be paying attention to, you should see some sort of change in the system. But most of all, what I want to warn about is you should look at the boundaries. You should look at what happens immediately when that variable comes along. Not not just further out, because maybe something decreases deaths, but then if you wind up with more suicides or more people who die because they don’t get medical treatment or something like that, suddenly all-cause mortality could rise again. So you really want to look at when you have established variables that have an impact in the system.
Kevin Barrett: That makes sense. And so can we apply that then to the debate over all-cause mortality. The claims range from “It has been exaggerated” to “No, it’s actually showing something like a 30 percent excess mortality since COVID began at the beginning of 2020.”
Mathew Crawford: I saw the discussion of insurance in Indiana. In ages 10 to 15 nine, there was something like a 40 percent increase in 2021 in all cause mortality relative to the previous five years, or something like that. I may have the exact details wrong. And that becomes a tough discussion to break down now. My thought is OK, 2021: the vaccines were the major variable change.Though I saw somebody pointing out, “well, there’s been an increase in suicides.” And then that becomes a difficult issue philosophically. Do we even know how many of those suicides were perhaps the result of policy changes that made people more depressed, or were there are a lot of people who were vaccine-injured and then just did not want to handle it? And somebody should be looking into that. Somebody should be looking into the insurance data and telling us what the correlations are with that. But I think that everyone’s scared to really open up the data books right now.
Kevin Barrett: One person that I interview regularly who definitely isn’t scared to look at these kinds of issues is Ron Unz, the publisher of the Unz Review. He recently made a point that is interesting to try to rebut: He addresses the claims that there have been a very large number of vaccine deaths—we’ve heard them from people like Steve Kirsch, who thinks that they’re in the low hundreds of thousands and maybe the middle hundreds of thousands. And Ron went and looked at deaths from heart disease. And what he found was that those heart related deaths went up in 2020, and then they went down back to kind of normal in 2021. So he said, how could these vaccines be killing so many people if the main method of killing people is through heart-related circulatory type issues? And yet that’s not showing up. So therefore, he says there really can’t be this large number of vaccine deaths. So why is he wrong?
Mathew Crawford: I’d have to see the data specifically to talk about that. When I’ve seen 2021 cardiac data, things looked worse. So this would be more interesting if I had prepared.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, sorry, I should have sent you Ron’s article.
Mathew Crawford: That’s OK. I’ve barely had time to to look beyond my own work lately. But two things: One is even in the Pfizer Moderna reports, they reported zero point seven percent serious adverse events. When you’re giving out four hundred million doses, we’re talking about three million serious adverse events. What are the effects of those events? Strangely, people in places of authority don’t even seem particularly interested in studying what’s going on with those people. Mm hmm. Right. And strangely, there seems to be a wall put up at the ordinary streams of information. Attorney Thomas Rentz was in the capital the other day with a lot of the doctors and nurses and scientists who have worked on COVID-19 who believe that the vaccines are harmful and that even if they’re not particularly harmful, that early treatment really works well. Why not use antivirals? Isn’t that what we always did before with viral outbreaks? But he pointed out that the DOD had been sending the Salus report to the CDC, showing, in 2021, 10 times as many neurological issues,four times as many miscarriages, four times as much cancer, at least among the demographic that that report covered. And you know that the numbers were very large; for the neurological issues it was eight hundred something thousand versus like eighty two thousand. And these are alarming numbers, right? It does not feel at all to me like we’re getting the whole story.
As I said earlier, I like to look at boundaries for data. I’ll tell you what I did to help Steve Kirsch come up with the numbers that he came up with. I met Steve in a clubhouse chat room. It was either April or early May of 2021. And we got on the discussion of vaccine deaths. And he was debating the number 50,000: “You know, this is this is really bad. There are clearly a lot of deaths out there and we’re not paying attention to them. We have 5000 deaths in VAERS.” And I said, “This is concerning to me. I think that there there are deaths.” But I hadn’t really done a deep dive. I said, “I don’t know if I believe the number is that high.” And he had some blog posts for somebody who had done a little work. But I said, “I don’t find that work convincing.” And it turned out that the blog post had a flaw in that analysis. And so we were debating back and forth. And and maybe it was early June, sometime in June, I read I think it was a UK researcher who had looked into various reports. He looked at two hundred and fifty of them, and all of them had been classified as COVID deaths. So the researcher’s namedScott McLachlan. So I was thinking, OK, wait, somebody’s systematically classifying all these post-vaccine deaths as COVID deaths. I’d like to know how many of them might be vaccine deaths. And Scott McLachlan’s paper looked at some of the reports and said, “This small percentage was certainly COVID, but (it’s) only 4.4 percent.” Only 11 of the 250 patients had COVID positive tests. So there couldn’t have been a whole lot of COVID deaths in there.
So I started looking for evidence that vaccine deaths were counted as COVID deaths. And here’s what I found. I looked through the entire Our World in Data set for every nation in Europe because I had seen somebody say, “Oh look. The case fatality rate in the UK went up right after the vaccination roll-out.”
So I looked and I said, OK, do we see that in all nations around Europe or in the West? And the first test I ran was all of Europe. And what I found was that case fatality rates went up during the first 18 days after vaccination. (I’ll tell you how I define that in a moment.) During the first 18-20 days they went up 30 percent. Mm hmm. With the introduction of one new variable. And that’s where I say, look at the boundaries, look at the introduction of the variable. 30 percent is huge. And this is during the pandemic. I don’t know if you watched case fatality rates (CFR). Early on some countries had like 20, 30 percent. For all Europe it was seven, eight percent. But it was falling, falling, falling, falling, as we found out how many people were really testing positive. And of course we can debate the definition of cases, but that’s another issue. But the point is it (the CFR) was falling, falling, falling, falling, falling. And then it started to kind of level out. And then suddenly vaccines were introduced and boom! It shoots up 30 percent. And that’s substantial.
So I said, what if that 30 percent represents excess deaths amongst the vaccinated? We talked earlier about excess deaths, all-cause mortality. But we could also cut out a subset amongst the COVID cases: That 30 percent would would represent excess deaths amongst the subset of people with COVID. I think it’s very possible that as people were sort of de facto defined as COVID, post-mortem, possibly not even getting tests—like like MacLachlan said, in the various reports, only 4.4 percent were COVID positive—so I took that 30 percent and I said, “Well, what would this mean in terms of deaths per million doses?” And of course they were vaccinating the elderly and high risk groups earlier, mostly the elderly during those first 18 to 20 days.
And it was a little over a thousand deaths per one million doses. And then I looked at the various reports and said, OK, according to a demographic curve, if I correct for that, how many deaths per million doses do I get? And I allowed the range to be broad and said, “It looks like 200 to 500 deaths per million doses.” So we applied that to the U.S. population at the time. And we said, “Oh, goodness, it may be over 100,000 deaths at this point.” And we kept looking at the numbers later. I updated a little bit. I think that the number might be on the order of 150,000 to 250,000.
Kevin Barrett: Well, when they attempt to debunk things like this, they say, among other things, that this apparent rise of people dying shortly after vaccination is simply because these countries all happened to whip out their vaccination campaigns right at the moment that (COVID cases and deaths) were about to peak. So they claim it’s all just a coincidence, that (deaths) were just about to peak anyway. But they do admit that the vaccines don’t seem to be very effective during that first month. In reality, they seem to be negatively effective. So they don’t count those people as vaccinated. If you just got the vaccine, you’re still counted as unvaccinated for the first month.
Mathew Crawford: So let’s start with this argument about the peak. Here’s the way that I define case fatality rate to correct for that. I define a case fatality rate as the ratio of deaths divided by cases lagged from 18 days earlier. And I did smooth both deaths and cases by a seven day moving average. But I had this lag. And what this means is if there is a peak in cases, that doesn’t matter. We’re just asking what proportion of those cases resulted in mortality. So it doesn’t matter where you are on the up and down infection curve, you should get similar numbers so long as there’s no change in the clinical state of what that means. And I don’t see these rises in case fatality rates during other peaks.
Kevin Barrett: Interesting. Have you tried to to see if the fact checkers, who are out in force, have responded to your analysis?
Mathew Crawford: For the most part, they’ve just dodged it. I’ve been open for conversation for a long time. And Steve Kirsch in particular has put a million dollar bounty on the conversation. He put several different million dollar bounties on it. One of them might have been to “disprove this.” Another might have been for just academics to come to the table and have the conversation.
I think there’s been a little bit of nitpicking. I saw an anonymous critique on Medium.com. And it wasn’t even worth responding to for the most part, because their critique really didn’t have much to do with what I was talking about. They just misunderstood, either accidentally or intentionally. So there was no interaction. And when somebody is anonymous and there’s no interaction between their argument and yours, where do you go with that?
Kevin Barrett: Well, part of the problem might be that, as I recall, the go-to article that Steve Kirsch put out in his Substack about this relied pretty heavily on VAERS data and how you get the right multiplier for VAERS data. And it strikes me that that is kind of a loose category. There are all sorts of estimates for what the underestimate is in the VAERS data, what the multiplier should be to get real numbers. You have right now over 20,000 reports of COVID vaccine deaths in VAERS. Then people argue about, well, how underrepresented is that? Or maybe it’s exaggerated? People like Gordon Duff say there’s never been a vaccine death and these are all just coincidental deaths. So I think maybe part of the problem was that what you just explained to us didn’t really jump out of Steve Kirsch’s article. The VAERS argument seemed to dominate it. Would you agree?
Mathew Crawford: I didn’t look at his writing closely enough to think about what dominated his article. I have a slightly different perspective, perhaps, on the various data than he does. The actual multiplier may not be the point. It becomes a complex discussion. Really and truly, by the rules of VAERS, anybody who died during 2021, who was vaccinated, whether it was incidental or not, should have been technically in a VAERS report. So we should actually know exactly what the underreporting factor is, right? Let’s say that 3.2 million people died in 2021 in the U.S. I don’t know what the actual number is, but that’s probably not far off. Let’s say that 2.3 million of those people were vaccinated. Then you should have 2.3 million people in VAERS. So ultimately we can get the actual underreporting factor. Here’s where the underreporting factor makes sense in terms of getting to a number that’s more causal: You would expect a VAERS report to be more likely linked to the vaccine than one that was not reported even if it should have been, technically, by the rules. And the reason is, let’s say for a doctor or a nurse who writes a VAERS report…If somebody leaves the hospital after getting a vaccine and gets hit by a car, it wouldn’t shock me if that is far less (likely to be reported)…
Kevin Barrett: Right. Unless the person regretted their choice and threw themselves in front of the bus, but that probably didn’t happen.
Mathew Crawford: …What is the probability that that death is reported to VAERS? And then let’s take a look at another case: Somebody gets a vaccine, and four hours later, they’re having a seizure. Maybe they have brain hemorrhage, or some sort of an immediate cardiac issue. And then that gets written up. What is what is the percentage chance that gets written up to VAERS? This probability is much higher than that probability. And that gives us kind of a ratio between what you might call the false positives and the true positives. Say there’s some proportion of true positives and false positives. Then how would that scale until you have exhausted the supply of true positives? There is some form of underreporting factor there that I think hasn’t been correctly described yet.
Kevin Barrett: Mm-hmm. Okay. It’s a very good point. And that leads us to the larger point of why is vaccine safety surveillance dependent on the VAERS system? There’s been a discussion about how there was actually a better system that was tried out a decade and a half or something ago, and it started to show too many vaccine problems. So they threw that out and brought out this kind of useless VAERS system. Now who would do that and why would they do that?
Mathew Crawford: They didn’t bring out the the VAERS system. The VAERS system was in place. It’s been around. It’s been in place for a while. I don’t know if it’s three decades or something. It’s a terrible system. It is an awful, terrible system. Most doctors and nurses have never used it and didn’t even know it existed. And this is a challenging issue, too, because we don’t even know what proportion of doctors and nurses knew that there was some sort of a mandate to enter data into this system, or whether there was anybody to hold their hand doing it. Even if you know what you’re doing, it already takes, let’s say, 15 minutes to enter a report. That’s if you know what you’re doing. If you are uncomfortable with computers and data entry, I guarantee you are extra uncomfortable with VAERS. It is this old, clunky—you know, imagine using computers back in the early 1990s…
Kevin Barrett: I’m old enough to remember that.
Mathew Crawford: Yeah, yeah, I am, too. Sometimes you had nice boxes of data entry and they worked just fine, but sometimes you had to open up some sort of a manual and read two pages before you could even really make sense of the system that you were using. It’s like that, except that it’s being put in front of doctors and nurses who are used to whizzy apps that just work and are intuitive and easy. So a lot of people just ignore it, really. I mean, that’s the matter of fact, right? Most doctors nurses didn’t know VAERS existed.
Here is an interesting conversation that Steve (Kirsch) brought me into. We had a Zoom meeting with an epidemiologist who’d written an article about VAERS. And we’re in the meeting with this guy, and he admits that he doesn’t know if he’s ever seen a VAERS report. And this is a guy with six or seven titles after his name. He had all these degrees and he was a person who had been asked to write a VAERS article on behalf of epidemiologists. It’s crazy. People don’t really understand this system. It’s a terrible system. And and yeah, like you said, there have been at least two attempts to redesign the system and replace it. And money’s been spent doing it. And it’s just been ignored. So you know why? Why would somebody want a terrible system in place? Well, that is an interesting question. You know, we can all have our opinions on that one, but look at where we are.
Kevin Barrett: Well, it does allow people like Gordon Duff to assert that there have been no vaccine deaths at all, and it makes it hard to prove that he’s wrong. But on the other hand, there are certainly a lot of interesting anecdotal reports, as well as the kind of statistical analysis that you described earlier.