There is something rotten going on in the UK that is barely getting any media coverage and the general population seems almost oblivious to. In 2023, excess deaths in the UK are occurring at an alarming rate across all age groups. But what is causing the UK excess deaths?
In this article, I highlight the three main reasons I think this is occurring. Evidence is scant to say the least and for the most part we are relying on Office of National Statistics figures and intuition to get to the bottom of this tragedy.
Let’s explore what’s causing the UK excess deaths further.
Excess Deaths in the UK, What Do the Statistics Show?
According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) there has been a significant spike in excess deaths for the first 5 months of the year in 2023.
At a glance, the latest week’s statistics show:
- A 16.5% increase of people dying at home compared to the 5-year average,
- A 2.2% increase of people dying in care homes compared to the 5-year average,
- A 4.2% increase of people dying in other locations compared to the 5-year average.
Each week, the ONS releases these statistics, and the trend has been much the same for every week this year so far.
What Isn’t Causing Excess Deaths?
Before we dive into what might be causing these excess deaths, it is important to first rule out the most common assumption – COVID-19.
The total amount of deaths in the last week because of COVID-19 is 3.1%. This is statistically significant as a percentage, but it is also a tiny fraction of the all-cause mortality rate.
The leading cause of deaths including excess deaths is cardiovascular – so completely different to the respiratory virus that COVID-19 is.
What is Causing the UK Excess Deaths?
So far, we have established 2 main facts:
- Excess deaths are occurring in the UK for the first 5 months of 2023.
- Most of these excess deaths are cardiovascular related deaths.
Beyond that we have very little information, but we can make some fairly safe assumptions about what is causing the UK excess deaths.
The First Point of Contact with Healthcare
In the UK currently, if you want to seek healthcare you normally must contact your General Practitioner (GP) as your first point of contact.
GPs have long been failing in their duty of care to the point of negligence across the whole GP care sector. For example, if you want to book an appointment with a GP you will ordinarily have to wait a week. Compounding this issue, many GPs prefer not to see patients anymore, instead opting for telephone appointments.
Frankly, this is disgraceful lazy practice. During the COVID-19 pandemic, GPs opted for remote appointments citing safety concerns. Now the pandemic has all but ended, GPs have decided remote appointments suit them better and are not keen to return to traditional face-to-face appointments.
The truth is you will miss things on a telephone appointment you would not miss in a face-to-face consultation. With remote appointments a GP must rely on the information being provided and then diagnose according to that information. There is no skill in that, a patient would be just as well served completing a symptom checker online and getting a diagnosis.
GPs need to be able to examine patients, use insight from years of experience to understand what else might be going on and conduct tests where necessary. For example, listening to a heartbeat or a blood pressure check are vital tools for GPs in diagnosing cardiovascular issues, that can’t be done remotely.
NHS Crumbling Causing the Excess UK Deaths
If the GP problem wasn’t enough, the NHS as an institution is on its death bed.
For many, there will be a misconception the NHS is underfunded or needs more investment. The truth is the NHS is extremely well funded but is wholly unsustainable. Even if there was investment of epic proportions in the NHS, there current system would still decline and eventually collapse.
Public funded healthcare systems have no competition and therefore have no natural stimulus to provide better care or reduce costs.
As a result, we have a healthcare system that is bloated with costs and provides subpar care. Scarily amid the overall large increase in excess deaths, the ONS shows excess deaths in hospital has DECLINED, highlighting how many people are not getting the care they need from the NHS.
How Much Does the NHS Actually Cost You?
Across the UK the consensus is that the NHS being ‘free’ is a great thing. But it isn’t free and there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The NHS is paid for through (excessive) taxation and people pay a lot more than they expect toward healthcare each year without really being aware of it because tax is taken before your salary hits your account.
The average income tax bill in the UK according to statistics from Statista is £9350.70. Of which 22.8% is earmarked for health or an average of £2131.95. That doesn’t tell the whole story as other taxation also contributes to the NHS including National Insurance, Council Tax and even VAT.
In short, each year the average person pays a lot for the NHS. If you compare the cost of Private Health Insurance in the UK with an average annual premium of £1033 it is really difficult to justify such high expenditure on a public health service.
What Do You Get for Your Money?
What’s more, this bloated NHS investment is not a world leading healthcare service despite the cries of such from politicians. If you get cancer in the UK, you are less likely to survive than in the US, for example.
The UK has one of the lowest MRI scanner availabilities in Europe with countries like Slovenia and Greece having far more. It was third bottom compared to 18 other developed countries for the rate of death where death was preventable. The NHS also has much higher rates of infant mortality compared to other developed countries.
To summarise, in the UK the taxpayer is duped into believing they have free healthcare that they pay a lot of money for. And when that healthcare is needed, people are dying at greater rates when compared to other developed nations.
Is that a worthwhile trade off? Is it okay for your loved ones to die years earlier so we can have a public health system? Would you rather pay a health insurance premium and have world leading treatment for your family?
Is the NHS really the envy of the world?
The Vaccination – is it Causing UK Excess Deaths?
Finally, we get to the elephant in the room. The COVID-19 vaccination.
The media have been very quiet about excess deaths because they heavily promoted people be vaccinated against COVID-19 with a vaccine that, let’s be frank, was very much untested.
You see, for any medicine to be tested fully, it needs longitudinal studies that span several years. Something that proponents of the vaccine will say was a luxury we could not afford.
That means the vaccine was rolled out with limited studies into long term affects at best. At worst, it was rolled out without much knowledge at all about any repercussions beyond the obvious acute benefit it seemed to provide in combatting COVID-19.
The efficacy however has now been cast into doubt and every month the effects of the vaccine are being called into question. Claims made at the time about the vaccine are fast being debunked as more whistle-blowers emerging to say pharmaceutical companies lied on a wholesale basis about the data they were presenting.
The Pfizer Vaccine has especially been criticised and the company will almost definitely be facing legal issues in the coming years because of their dishonesty.
Regardless of efficacy – no one really knows much about how the vaccine affects people over the long term. Early indications highlighted isolated pockets of cardiovascular problems such as myocarditis. Beyond that, we really don’t know, and I am not about to be drawn down a conspiracy rabbit hole.
There is, however, a chance that the excess deaths in the UK are caused by the vaccine. It is something the government should really be investigating to ascertain whether they advised people to take something that caused harm.
What I Think is Causing the UK Excess Deaths?
I think there is some evidence that a minority of excess deaths we are now seeing are because of the vaccine. By minority I mean an extreme minority of all heart related deaths. This doesn’t forgive the big pharmaceutical companies or the government because those who have been vaccinated will likely be at higher risk of death for many years to come – if not decades.
We know the vaccine has negative interactions with the heart and cardiovascular system in general, but I don’t think the bulk of excess deaths can be attributed to the vaccine. Sorry to burst the anti-vaxxer bubble, but there just isn’t enough evidence currently to come anywhere close to drawing that conclusion.
However, with that said, I do think the ONS should be transparent and provide vaccination status alongside death statistics so we can actually see if there is a correlation. Absent of this, there is always going to be the idea that the vaccine is killing people.
The NHS is to Blame
In my opinion, the NHS is mostly to blame for excess deaths. Doctors and nurses are being paid to do a job they simply aren’t doing. Half the time they are striking trying to get even more money for the job they are not doing.
The counterargument will be how underfunded the NHS is and lack of staffing available. But this is simply untrue. The NHS is very well funded compared to other healthcare systems and staffing accounts for over 60% of the total NHS expenditure.
There seems to be a complete lack of a care driven outcomes in the NHS and everything seems to be about money.
I have said it before and I will say it again, the NHS is a failed experiment. Now though, people are dying because of this socialist utopia (which seems to happen with any socialist experiment, eventually lots of people die).
It should be privatised. People should get value for money with health insurance premiums and doctors that do their job the best will be rewarded by the best private healthcare providers. Doctors who are lazy or have bad outcomes will be put out to pasture.
It is an uncomfortable fact that the NHS is much like any other organisation; a small group of people who work exceptionally hard and carry the dead weight of others who coast. The difference is in private organisations they actively seek to remove bad practitioners whereas the NHS accommodates them.
With a private organisation, if they allow the dead weight to permeate, they go bankrupt. The NHS has a blank cheque to continue as it is. The NHS is now completely exposed for the rotten institution it is and we need to ask ourselves how many more people need to die needlessly before we wake up and put the NHS out of its misery once and for all.
A health service that is now killing people en masse unnecessarily is not a health service anymore.