I’m not offering a source, but I’ve seen those claims made repeatedly, with no real rebuttal.
At this stage, I’m willing to take the claims at face value.
Even if the letter of the guidance was honest and impartial, I’m absolutely certain second order effects would come to bear.
If I recall right, there was even an attempt to have /all/ deaths during lockdown attributed to COVID on the misguided assumption that the only possible response was tight lockdown, and so any collateral was attributable to the cause of that lockdown, i.e., COVID. (Lots of groupthink there…) So even though we didn’t get that written into the guidance, I’m sure there would have been a strong bias to being very conservative when attributing cause to anything other than COVID.
Point is that I don’t think we even need to go as far as malicious intent to render the figures highly questionable. But then if you want to also layer nefariousness on top, the numbers become almost unbearably meaningless.
At this stage, I’m willing to take the claims at face value.
Even if the letter of the guidance was honest and impartial, I’m absolutely certain second order effects would come to bear.
If I recall right, there was even an attempt to have /all/ deaths during lockdown attributed to COVID on the misguided assumption that the only possible response was tight lockdown, and so any collateral was attributable to the cause of that lockdown, i.e., COVID. (Lots of groupthink there…) So even though we didn’t get that written into the guidance, I’m sure there would have been a strong bias to being very conservative when attributing cause to anything other than COVID.
Point is that I don’t think we even need to go as far as malicious intent to render the figures highly questionable. But then if you want to also layer nefariousness on top, the numbers become almost unbearably meaningless.