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COVID-19

‘Highly improbable’: New study exposes flaws in Lancet paper claiming COVID vaccines saved millions of lives

Published

2 years ago

14 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.,

A new study by all-cause mortality researchers Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., re-examined the mathematical model behind a paper published in The Lancet claiming the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives. The Lancet paper, cited more than 700 times, was partially funded by the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

When two University of Pennsylvania scientists earlier this month won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in developing “effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” the Nobel Committee and legacy media organizations celebrated the COVID-19 vaccines for saving “millions of lives.”

But a new study re-examining the mathematical model behind the life-saving claims – a model that was laid out in a study published in 2022 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases – concluded the model was deeply flawed and the resulting characterization of the COVID-19 vaccines “must be invalid.”

The Lancet paper, funded by the World Health Organization (WHO) Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, has been cited more than 700 times.

All-cause mortality researchers Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., calculated and graphed the mortality rates that would have occurred without the vaccines, as projected by Waston et al. in The Lancet study, and compared those projections to the actual all-cause mortality rates.

Rancourt and Hickey tested the assertions in The Lancet paper that the vaccines averted tens of millions of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths from all causes that exceeds the expected number of deaths under normal conditions.

If The Lancet paper model were accurate, Rancourt and Hickey wrote, without the vaccines the global mortality rates would have spiked to historically unprecedented and unimaginable levels suddenly, a year into the pandemic, at precisely the moment the vaccines rolled out.

And the vaccines would have nearly perfectly reduced those unimaginable levels of mortality back to baseline mortality rates.

They concluded that Watson et al.’s “results and the associated fantastic claims of millions of lives saved are highly improbable,” and that their theoretical claims have “no connection to actual mortality,” but instead are based on “wild” assumptions.

‘So improbable it should be qualified as impossible’

According to Rancourt and Hickey, given there is no known controlled randomized clinical trial showing the COVID-19 vaccines caused death to be averted, the primary basis for such claims comes from Watson et al., who concluded:

“[Findings] Based on official reported COVID-19 deaths, we estimated that vaccinations prevented 14·4 million (95% credible interval [Crl] 13·7–15·9) deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020, and Dec 8, 2021.

“This estimate rose to 19·8 million (95% Crl 19·1– 20·4) deaths from COVID-19 averted when we used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic …

“[Interpretation] COVID-19 vaccination has substantially altered the course of the pandemic, saving tens of millions of lives globally.”

To test the validity of the model’s projections, Rancourt and Hickey used Watson et al.’s data to calculate what the all-cause mortality would have been over time for 95 countries if the researchers’ claims were true and no COVID-19 vaccines were administered.

To compare the implications of those claims to actual all-cause mortality, they distributed the paper’s most conservative estimate of “14.4 million deaths averted” globally, calculating the number of deaths averted per country as a mathematical combination over time of vaccines administered and vaccine effectiveness.

They created graphs to show how Watson et al.’s theoretical all-cause mortality rates without the vaccine compared to actual all-cause mortality rates.

The graphs also show all-cause mortality rates prior to the pandemic and note the date the WHO declared the global pandemic and the date of the vaccine rollouts for each country.

In the U.S., for example (Figure 1), there were unprecedented peaks in all-cause mortality in 2020, 2021 and 2022 that the researchers have tied, in other papers, to pandemic measures such as the widespread use of ventilators, and to mortality associated with the vaccine itself.

Those peaks can be seen in the blue line on the graph, which shows the actual all-cause mortality. The projected scenario from Watson et al’.s paper is plotted in red.

Figure 1. United States (USA): (top panel) All-cause mortality by week, 2018-2022, measured (blue), calculated following Watson et al. (2022) (red-solid), continued (red-dashed); (bottom panel) same, expressed as excess all-cause mortalities, and with 1σ uncertainty (shaded blue). In both panels, cumulative COVID-19 vaccine administration (all-doses) (dark grey), March 11, 2020 date, (vertical grey line). Credit: Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D.

If their numbers are correct, the graph shows, a “massive and more-than-unprecedented” national excess mortality would have occurred if the COVID-19 vaccines had not been rolled out, and that spike would have coincidentally happened at precisely the moment when the rollout happened to occur, but not before.

“This would be a remarkable coincidence,” Rancourt and Hickey wrote, especially given this spike would have happened suddenly after several waves of infection and one year after the pandemic was declared.

It is also notable, they said, that the vaccines supposedly lowered all-cause mortality rates to precisely the pre-pandemic numbers, rather than to some intermediary number.

A similar phenomenon would have happened, they said, in Canada according to Watson et al.’s calculations. Unlike the U.S., Canada had very minimal changes in all-cause mortality through the entire pandemic period.

However, the calculations by Watson et al. predict that Canada would have seen a tripling in all-cause mortality by week for approximately a year if the vaccines had not been rolled out, the authors wrote.

Figure 2. Canada (CAN): (top panel) All-cause mortality by week, 2018-2022, measured (blue), calculated following Watson et al. (2022) (red-solid), continued (red-dashed); (bottom panel) same, expressed as excess all-cause mortalities, and with 1σ uncertainty (shaded blue). In both panels, cumulative COVID-19 vaccine administration (all-doses) (dark grey), March 11, 2020, date (vertical grey line). Credit: Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D.

In Canada, there is also “no visible decrease in actual all-cause mortality” temporally associated with the roll-outs, which one might expect if the roll-outs affected mortality. Rather, they wrote, “the opposite is apparent, with excess mortality proportionately accompanying rollouts.”

They also presented data from 31 European countries, whose situation was analogous to the U.S. “This extraordinary coincidence” they wrote, “essentially occurs in most of 95 countries [they analyzed].”

“In fact, the said coincidence is palpably so improbable that it should, without hesitation, be qualified as impossible,” Rancourt and Hickey wrote. “A single such example in a single country is sufficient to invalidate the exercise of Watson et al. (2022), and the example is repeated for 95 countries.”

‘The opposite of good science’

Rancourt, former physics professor and lead scientist for 23 years at the University of Ottawa, told Children’s Health Defense Staff Scientist J. Jay Couey, Ph.D., on a recent episode of Couey’s Gigaohm Biological livestream, that the Nobel Prize is a powerful political instrument.

Although there are some exceptions where Nobel has recognized authentically important scientific achievements, he said, “Generally speaking the Nobel Prize is an instrument of the establishment for propaganda, to convince people of what things they need to consider to be absolutely true, absolute advancements of human knowledge.”

“It impacts not only the general public but also scientists themselves,” in terms of what they believe and what they research, Rancourt said.

When the 2023 Nobel Prizes were announced, and the legacy media universally made claims about tens of millions of lives saved, Rancourt and Hickey decided to investigate the publication behind the claims: the Waston 2022 paper.

He said they found the paper was “the opposite of good science.”

That was not, Rancourt noted, because the mathematical calculations were wrong, but because the authors made no attempt to examine whether the assumptions behind their model inputs were logical, or whether their predictions were “reasonable and realistic,” meaning they could occur in the real world.

Rancourt told Couey after doing their analysis, he and his colleagues found the claims in the paper were so “stunning” it led them to question:

How did this get through peer review? … Who were these reviewers? How could they be so blind and incompetent and unquestioning of what some authors are doing, which is completely novel and completely fabricated? … Are they not able to see it?

And on the other hand, what about the editors? How do the editors pick these reviewers? Did the editors go with only the reviewers that thought it was okay and ignore the reviewers that were critical of it? Are they themselves so scientifically illiterate [they cannot] do a theoretical calculation?

Scientists, he said, particularly when one is doing theoretical projections, must constantly critically interrogate their own results.

“They have to be critical of their own ideas, not just rub their hands because they get something that Gates will like,” he said.

Worse, he said, “the Nobel Prize Committee itself had to be clueless, had to be unscientific, had to be unquestioning, had to look for something, a prize they wanted to give, and not bother thinking for themselves about whether or not this made any sense. And then they repeated this ‘millions of lives saved’ thing, which is nonsense.”

As a result, a “horrendous product that should never have been injected into people’s bodies, is now something that we’re going to celebrate. It’s going to be an achievement of human science, of the science created by humans.”

“There is no scientific basis for saying that whatsoever,” Rancourt said. “No clinical trials have ever demonstrated that. And it’s based on a garbage simulation funded by the industry, where the authors didn’t even double check if their results made any kind of sense.”

“This is the absurdity that we are now experiencing,” he said.

This article was originally published by The Defender – Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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COVID-19

The Trials of Liberty: What the Truckers Taught Canada About Power and Protest

Published on October 13, 2025

By

Half the country still believes the convoy was a menace; the other half thinks it was a mirror that showed how fragile our freedoms had become.

This Thanksgiving I am grateful for many things. The truckers who stood up to injustice are among them.

When the first rigs rolled toward Ottawa in January 2022, the air was sharp, but not as sharp as the mood of the men and women behind the wheels. They were not radicals. Seeing a CBC a campaign of disinformation about them begin as soon as their trek started, even when Ottawa political operatives hadn’t yet heard, I started following several of them on their social media.

They were truckers, small business owners, independent contractors, and working Canadians who had spent two years hauling the essentials that kept a paralyzed nation alive. They were the same people politicians, including Prime Minister Trudeau, had called “heroes” in 2020. By 2022, they had become “threats.”

The Freedom Convoy was born from exhaustion with naked hypocrisy. The federal government that praised them for risking exposure on the road now barred the unvaccinated from crossing borders or even earning a living. Many in provincial governments cheered Ottawa on. The same officials who flew to foreign conferences maskless or sat in private terraces to dine, let’s recall, still forced toddlers to wear masks in daycare. Public servants worked from home while police fined citizens for walking in parks.

These contradictions were not trivial; they were models of tyrannical rule. They told ordinary people that rules were for the ruled, not for rulers.

By late 2021, Canada’s pandemic response had hardened into a hysterical moral regime. Compliance became a measure of virtue, not prudence. Citizens who questioned the mandates were mocked as conspiracy theorists. Those who questioned vaccine efficacy were treated as fools; those who refused vaccination were treated as contagious heretics. Even science was no longer scientific. When data showed that vaccines did not prevent transmission, officials changed definitions instead of policies. The regime confused authority with truth. One former provincial premier just this week was still hailing the miracle of “life-saving” COVID vaccines.

For truckers, the breaking point came with the federal vaccine mandate for cross-border transport. Many had already complied with provincial rules and workplace testing. Others had recovered from COVID and had natural immunity that the government refused to recognize. To them, the new rule was not about safety; it was about humiliation. It said, “Obey, or you are unfit to work.”

So they drove.

Donna Laframboise, one of the rare journalists who works for citizens instead of sponsors, described the convoy in her book Thank You, Truckers! with gratitude and awe. She saw not a mob but a moral statement. She showcased for us Canadians who refused to live by lies. Their horns announced what polite society whispered: the emergency had become a creepy habit, and the habit had become a tool of control.

When the convoy reached Ottawa, it was messy, loud, and human. There was singing, prayer, laughter, dancing and some foolishness, but also remarkable discipline. For three weeks, amid frigid temperatures and rising tension, there were no riots, no arsons, no looting. In a country that once prized civility, that should have earned respect.

Instead, it attracted the media’s and government’s contempt.

The Trudeau government, rattled by its own public failures, sprung to portray the protest as a national security threat. Ministers invoked language fit for wartime. The Prime Minister, who had initially fled the city claiming to have tested positive, returned to declare that Canadians were under siege by “racists” and “misogynists.” The accusations were as reckless as they were false. The government’s real grievance was not chaos but defiance.

Then came the Emergencies Act. Designed for war, invasion, or insurrection, it was now deployed against citizens with flags and thermoses. Bank accounts were frozen without charge or trial. Insurance policies were suspended. Police weilding clubs were unleashed against unarmed citizens. The federal government did not enforce the law; it improvised it.

A faltering government declared itself the victim of its citizens. The Emergency declaration was not a reaction to danger; it was a confession of political insecurity. It exposed a leadership that could not tolerate dissent and recast obedience for peace.

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The convoy’s organizers, who kept the protest largely peaceful, were arrested and prosecuted as though they had plotted sedition. They were charged for holding the line, not for breaking it. The state’s behaviour was vindictive, not judicial. Prosecutors went along with it, and so did courts.

In a healthy democracy, such political trials would have shaken Parliament to its core. Legislators would have demanded justification for the use of emergency powers. The press would have asked precisely which law had been broken. Citizens would have debated the limits of government in times of fear, times which seem to continue just under the radar.

Not much of that happened.

Canada’s institutions have grown timid. The press is subsidized and more subservient. The courts happily defer to the administrative state. Law enforcement has learned to follow politics before principle. Academics have been lost for about generation. Under such conditions, how can citizens object to unscientific and coercive policies? What options remain when every channel of dissent—media, science, judiciary, and law enforcement—is captured or cowed?

The convoy’s protest, let’s remember, was not the first major disruption in the Trudeau years. A year earlier, Indigenous activists blocked rail lines and highways in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposed to a pipeline. The blockades cost the economy millions. They were called “a national conversation.” Few arrests, no frozen accounts, no moral panic.

In 2020, Black Lives Matter marches were cheered by politicians and news anchors. Some protests were peaceful, others destructive. Yet they were treated as expressions of justice, not extremism.

Even today, pro-Hamas Palestinian demonstrations that include violence and intimidation of Jewish citizens are tolerated with a shrug. The police stand back, bring them coffee, citing “the right to protest.”

Why, then, was the Freedom Convoy treated as a crisis of state?

In a liberal democracy, protest is not rebellion. It is a civic instrument, a reminder that authority is contingent. When a government punishes peaceful protest because it disapproves of the message, it turns democracy into décor.

The trials of the convoy organizers are therefore not about law but about legitimacy. Each conviction signals that protest is permitted only when it pleases the powerful. This is the logic of every soft tyranny: it criminalizes opposition while decorating itself with the vocabulary of rights. I see this daily in Nicaragua, my native land.

The truckers’ protest revealed what the pandemic concealed. The COVID regime was unscientific and incoherent. It punished truckers who worked alone in their cabs while allowing politicians to mingle maskless at conferences. It barred unvaccinated Canadians from air travel but allowed infected citizens to cross borders with the proper paperwork. It closed playgrounds and churches while keeping liquor stores open.

These contradictions were not mistakes; they were instruments of obedience. Each absurd rule tested how much submission people would endure.

The truckers said, “Enough.” I am grateful that they did.

For that, Chris Barber (Big Red) and Tamara Lich 🇨🇦 are still being punished. Their trials have now concluded, save for possible appeals, yet their quiet defiance remains one of the few honest moments in recent Canadian history. It showed that courage is still possible, even the state seems to forbid reason.

The government’s response revealed the opposite: that fear, once politicized, is never surrendered willingly. The state that learned to rule through emergency will not soon unlearn it. They cling to its uses still.

Canada lives with the legacy of that winter today. The trials are finished, but the divisions persist. Half the country still believes the convoy was a menace; the other half thinks it was a mirror that showed how fragile our freedoms had become.

Trudeau’s government is no more, yet the spirit of his politics lingers. He did not create the divisions by accident. He cultivated them as a strategy of control. The country that left him behind is also less free, less trusting, and less united than it was before the horns sounded in Ottawa. Carney’s government is Trudeau’s heir.

The trials and sentencing measure the distance between the Canada we imagined and the one we inhabit.

The truckers’ convoy was imperfect, yet profoundly democratic. It stood for the right of citizens to say no to a government that had forgotten how to hear them. The echo of that refusal still moves down the Trans-Canada Highway. It is the sound of liberty idling in the cold, waiting for a green light that will not soon come.

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for the abounding love and understanding in my life. I am grateful for my spirited children and their children. I am grateful for my nonagenarian father and for my siblings. I’m grateful for the legion of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews on all sides of the family. I am grateful for loyal friendships and for my colleagues and coworkers who share the quest for a freer country. I’m grateful to my adoptive Alberta, and Albertans, also struggling to be strong and free.

I am grateful for the Truckers, wherever they came from, for their courage.

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COVID-19

Tamara Lich says she has no ‘remorse,’ no reason to apologize for leading Freedom Convoy

Published on October 10, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

‘To whom shall I apologize? Thousands of Canadians who stopped planning to take their own lives or were able to return to their jobs, kiss dying loved ones or have families over for Thanksgiving?’

Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich, reflecting on her recent house arrest verdict, said she has no “remorse” and will not “apologize” for leading a movement that demanded an end to all COVID mandates.

Lich revealed in an X post this week that in conversations with her lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, over the past few months, she told him, “I would not, and could not, express remorse as it would be dishonest and disingenuous.”

“To whom shall I apologize? The thousands of Canadians who stopped planning to take their own lives when the convoy started? To the thousands of Canadians who were able to return to their jobs? Or should I apologize to all the Canadians who can kiss their dying loved ones or have their families over for Thanksgiving?” she observed.

On October 7, Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey sentenced Lich and Chris Barber to 18 months’ house arrest after being convicted earlier in the year convicted of “mischief.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian government was hoping to put Lich in jail for no less than seven years and Barber for eight years for their roles in the 2022 protests against COVID mandates.

Interestingly, Perkins-McVey said about Lich and Barber during the sentencing, “They came with the noblest of intent and did not advocate for violence.”

In Lich’s X post, she noted that while she has “no doubt” some citizens of Ottawa “felt afraid, threatened and terrorized” by the protests, she blamed the Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“How could they not when their mayor and politicians were labeling us as an angry mob coming to overthrow the government before we even left Alberta?” she wrote.

“Do I feel bad for these people? Of course I do. I wish no ill will upon anyone. However, it was their very own leaders who lied to them and misled them. There are citizens in Ottawa genuinely afraid of working-class Canadians, who had never met a trucker or an oil patch worker.”

Specifically, Barber was handed an 18-month conditional sentence, with a concurrent three-month sentence for counseling disobedience of a court order that can be served in the community.

Lich was given 18 months less time already spent in custody, amounting to 15 1/2 months.

Both Lich and Barber must remain in their house for the first 12 months except for medical emergencies and certain appointments. They are allowed to work and can leave their house for certain permitted activities for up to five hours once a week. They were also given a curfew and 100 hours of community service.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Barber thanked Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis for “speaking up” in support of him and Canadians’ freedom rights after he and Lich were sentenced.

LifeSiteNews reported that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre offered his thoughts on the sentencing, wishing them a “peaceful” life while stopping short of blasting the sentence as his fellow MPs did.

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Trudeau’s government enacted the never-before-used Emergencies Act (EA) on February 14, 2022.

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