I doubt, therefore I am… a conspiracy theorist!

General mortality data in Belgium for the first three quarters of 2021 are available. This includes all deaths from all causes, including covid. Over the past five years and for the first three quarters of the year, total deaths are lowest in 2021 (see chart below), despite a growing and aging population.

Therefore, why introduce a health pass (« covid safe ticket ») at the end of 2021, maintain the constraint measures (mask, etc.) and in fact organize a vaccination obligation that does not say its name? Obviously, I ask this question because I am a conspiracy theorist!

What did we die of in Belgium in the year of the covid? 

Let’s put it into perspective: in 2020, for the whole year, there were 127,000 deaths in Belgium, of which about 16,000 were from covid and not 23,000 as overcounted by the Belgian authorities (an overcount of about 44% — read « What are the Belgians dying of? »⁽¹⁾). Even so, this may seem like a lot, but there are several explanations not directly related to the virus itself.

For the previous two years, 2018 and 2019, the seasonal flu was mild. Mild years are always followed by a catch-up year. This is the « harvest » effect: more elderly people, more elderly people on probation and finally more deaths as soon as a slightly more virulent virus appears, influenza or covid.

According to the WHO, for Belgium in 2016, non-communicable diseases (cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, etc.) were responsible for 86% of all deaths (over 95,000 out of 111,000). We know that these diseases are strongly linked to well-known risk factors that can be acted upon. With 16,000 deaths in 2020, covid cannot be the biggest cause of death in Belgium by far. Tobacco alone killed three times as many people as covid (in 2020, worldwide). The record of industrial food and its promotion with the consent and support of our authorities is even worse.

An individual’s risk of dying is largely related to social determinants and well-known risk factors, including for covid. Can we count on RTBF and the media to redress the balance? No, and certainly not since the beginning of the covid crisis.

In Belgium, the Wilmès and De Croo governments have implemented a particularly disastrous management of the covid epidemic, resulting in many avoidable deaths: the sidelining of primary care medicine and thus the abandonment of many patients, in particular in old people’s homes where the most fragile population is located, the prohibition of prescribing certain inexpensive drugs in favor of newly marketed drugs that are necessarily very expensive (and generally ineffective, or even dangerous, such as Remdesivir), a unique strategy based on experimental and expensive vaccines by creating a climate of fear that is particularly damaging to the immune system of the Belgians, etc.

Francis Leboutte, http://liege.mpOC.be