am now satisfied that ONS did not tinker with the mortality data. That’s a relief.

Yesterday I wrote about the latest correspondence with ONS. The latest explanation from Anne suggests we were talking about different sheets. In her own words:

Good afternoon, Dr Schestowitz

Thank you for your response.

I have utilised the previous versions tab of the Deaths Registered weekly set to look through this enquiry.

As I explained in the previous email, the undercount affected death occurrences not registrations. Death registrations use the date of death registrations, whereas occurrences use date of death.

This is a screen shot of sheet 1 (Weekly provisional death registrations in England and Wales) published for week 49. Sheet 2 (weekly provisional death registrations by sex and age in England and Wales) also uses death registrations.

On the previous versions tab this is week 49 when you download the excel spreadsheet published 20^th December. I have used an arrow to denote the publishing week at the top of the screenshot.

There is no week 50 dataset due to the festive period, therefore week 51 contains both week 50 and week 51 data.

This version of Sheet 1 (registrations) was superseded with week 50 and 51 data on 5^th January 2023. As you rightly point out there is no change to the registration data for week 49, this is because the undercount did not affect death registrations.

However, on Sheet 11 which uses death occurrences (date of death) we published 10,565 death occurrences in week 49 on the 20^th December with a note explaining the undercount was due to a processing error.

With the next publication on 5^th January, publishing week 50 and 51 data we corrected the undercount and published 12,109 death occurrences for week 49.

The majority of worksheets within weekly death publication use Registration data, which is why the update in week 51 may not have been overtly visible.

I hope this answers your question and please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Kind regards

Anne

“Thank you, Anne,” I said. “That’s a very detailed and satisfactory explanation. I will use it to relay a clarification on what happened and why there’s no reason to doubt the accuracy of this data. PS – the work you do is very important at this time.”

New video:

Description:

US, Weekly Cumulative All-Cause Excess Deaths

https://www.usmortality.com

https://www.usmortality.com/deaths/excess-cumulative/united-states

Excess deaths 2022 (Up to December 1st) 242,224

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2021028-eng.htm

https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3233

Australian Bureau of Statistics

Provisional Mortality Statistics

Reference period, Jan – Sep 2022

144,650 deaths that occurred by 30 September

19,986 (16.0%) more than the historical average.

Deaths attributed to covid, 8,160

October covid deaths, 232

Australia, September 2022

13,675 deaths (doctor certified)

1,814 were coroner referred.

UK, ONS

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/infections

UK Prevalence

2.61% in England (1 in 40 people)

3.94% in Wales (1 in 25 people)

4.22% in Northern Ireland (1 in 25 people)

3.26% in Scotland (1 in 30 people)

Deaths and excess deaths (W/E week 13th January 2023)

A total of 19,916 deaths were registered in the UK

20.4% above the five-year average.

Covid UK deaths

1,059 deaths involving COVID-19 registered

(up 842 on the week)

Deaths involving COVID-19 accounted for 5.3% of all deaths

UK, Office for Health Improvement

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/excess-mortality-in-england-and-english-regions

Excess deaths in all age groups, (0 to 24 years)
UK, Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

https://actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2023/jan/17-january-23-cmi-says-2022-had-the-worst-second-half-for-mortality-since-2010/

Mortality rates in 2022 compare to 2019 at different ages

2022, mortality, 7.8% higher for ages 20-44

In the UK, the second half of 2022

26,300 excess deaths,

compared to 4,700 in the first half of 2022

Europe, EuroMOMO, Bulletin week 2 2023

https://www.euromomo.eu

Pooled EuroMOMO, all-cause mortalit

Elevated level of excess mortality,

overall and in all age groups.

Data from 25 European countries or subnational regions

Average levels from pre 2020

https://www.health.govt.nz/nz-health-statistics/health-statistics-and-data-sets/mortality-data-and-stats

https://www.stats.govt.nz/topics/births-and-deaths

Year ended September 2021, total of 34,578 deaths

Year ended September 2022, total of 38,052 deaths

Video download link | md5sum 3fa713aa016effddd846715afa98523f
Sirius Abandoned Everything
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Staff with technical skills won’t stick around in companies that reject technical arguments and moreover move to proprietary software in a company that brands itself “Open Source”

DESPITE losing my best friend this week I am trying to keep active and to keep this series going. My friend helped inspire my activism and many other things. The video above explains some of the things that happened at work, based on practical examples (demonstrating that ISO certification changed nothing for the better). More people need to find the courage to confront their bosses and demand justice. Don’t just “play it safe”, try to actually fix things, from within if possible (taking this public is the very last resort).

The video above contains some of the backdrop to the collapse of Sirius ‘Open Source’. It comments on this post. The Gates Foundation was never mentioned in writing at Sirius, only once and strictly verbally in 2019. An NDA signed by Sirius Open Source (yes, that’s an actual sellout considering what the CEO used to believe in^*) changed things for the worse and resulted in the CEO being ‘in exile’. We’re talking about a fervent Microsoft critic, who [cref 168438 moved the company to Washington] for the “first US client” (yes, Gates) and weeks after it all happened not only myself but also my wife got falsely accused. We were acquitted only after months of humiliation. Nobody ever apologised for this.

Back then, as well as in 2017, I wanted to publish “Microsofters Contact My Employer to Get Both My Wife and I Sacked” (yes, it happened prior to 2019 as well). It’s truly quite maddening what Microsoft and its goons would do to silence me; they even pick on loved ones. This became a potential future topic way back in 2016.

More recently after I told a friend that Bill Gates, not Microsoft, was paying Sirius Open Source Inc. (with the actual timing being interesting; coincidence being improbable) a manager intentionally twisted/distorted what I said. What I said was factual, what they said I had said was not. Gates never needed British company to handle something thousands or American firms can easily handle (let alone ask this company to establish itself in another country, which is possibly what happened though the NDA hides it).
___
^* Here’s one old talk that covered “FUD (‘Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt’) as the nonsense that it is [...]”

New video:

Description: (for backup; Google censors his videos sometimes)

JCVI makes interim recommendations to government on the COVID-19 vaccination programme for 2023.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-advises-an-autumn-covid-19-vaccine-booster

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/covid-19-vaccination-programme

Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI)

has advised that plans should be made for those at higher risk of severe COVID-19 to be offered a booster vaccination this autumn (2023).

Professor Wei Shen Lim, Chair of COVID-19 vaccination on the JCVI

As the transition continues away from a pandemic emergency response towards pandemic recovery,

In England, the closure of the autumn booster campaign and the first booster offer will be on 12 February 2023.

(basically no more boosters for healthy under 50s)

Similarly, the JCVI is advising that the primary course COVID-19 vaccination should move,

over the course of 2023, towards a more targeted offer

Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavirus-vaccination/coronavirus-vaccine/

Everyone aged 5 (on or before 31 August 2022) and over can get a 1st and 2nd dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

https://www.sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against-COVID-19

we recommend vaccination of people aged 50 years and over as well as selected risk groups.

Regulator funding

https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1538

Industry money saturates the globe’s leading regulators.

Probably the final week of this series

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has failed to sell what it was actually good at; instead it hired unqualified people and outsourced almost everything

THIS is the part of this series where we focus on examples of Sirius failing on technical merits and compliance/conformance. Eventually we decided to show redacted E-mails on ISO along with my copied messages to management regarding bollocking and how it all started, me asking for an apology etc. Being accredited or recognised isn’t the same as being capable and potent. As I mentioned in the very first post in this series, when I joined the company it was different beyond recognition. The company had its own hosting (in its own premises). In 2022 we were suffering habitual outages as we don’t control our systems anymore (Slack, AWS downtimes were common; in prior years clients that relied on Clownflare also suffered outages due to Clownflare rather than their own hosting). To make matters worse, there were security breaches and the company ignored them. I kept bringing that to management’s attention, only to be ignored or rebuffed. Remember this hoax of Citation/Atlas was covered in Techrights years ago. Sirius does not teach its staff real security and does not hire people who understand or value security.

The company had a bizarre trajectory of moving from self-hosted (e.g. Asterisk), then outsourced (but still Free software, ‘managed’ Asterisk), then outsourced proprietary spyware like Google Voice. If “Open Source has won” and if Free software is becoming more widely used, then why is Sirius going in the exact opposite direction of what it was advocating? This is a management decision. It’s not the fault of technical staff — the staff which all along opposed this.

Notice the practice of password outsourcing. Here’s a direct quote sent in a request to me personally: “Put the WordPress credentials (admin user, etc) in a lastpass note and share it with xxxxx (securely, within lastpass) and we’ll be setting up a very temporary and basic portal to share info across the team, to help keep everyone better updated given how Absolutely Mentally Busy it is right now. It’s entirely for internal use when on the VPN.”

It’s another example of mishandling access credentials inside third parties (Slack, LastPass etc.), oftentimes not just rejecting “Open Source” but actively ripping apart Open Source things that work, replacing them with technically inferior and likely illegal (in some cases, due to data protection) proprietary stuff.

The management did even worse than this; it failed to do very basic things, such as sending payslips and sometimes paying the pension provider. Instead they made colourful excuses, so I decided to take photographs of letters from the pension provider, recalling those blunders and deciding that it’s worth discussing belatedly (and maybe add E-mails also; there were loads of E-mails about payslips, not just pensions, spanning different years from 2018 until the present day; there were phonecalls too, but those aren’t recorded).

The management was also bad at communication and correspondence. See the example below (2019):

Subject: Re: I need these tickets dealt with by support
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 11:15:56 +0100
From: Rianne Schestowitz xxxxxxx
To: xxxxxxx
CC: xxxxxxx

Hi xxxxxxx,

I responded to this email last weekend. Please check your inbox. If you
haven’t received it, I can send it again.

Many thanks,

Rianne

–
Rianne Schestowitz, NOC Extension 2834423
Sirius – stress free technology

http://www.siriusopensource.com

t: xxxxxxx

> Hi,
>
> I need these tickets dealt with by support.
>
> 1. Ticket#108642: Roy or xxxxxxx need to answer about security.
> 2. Ticket#108813: Replied with more questions. Can’t reproduce the
> error so far. Back with Support, awaiting feedback.
> 3. (Multiple) Tickets relating to masking – Code fix done, Release done
> and in live. Check with each client once data reimported. Support
> team can do this. xxxxxxx have already confirmed it works.
>
> 1. Ticket#108833: Already fixed, just needs a fresh xxxxxxx import.
> 2. Ticket#108769: The masking fix is done, we just need to schedule a
> reload.
>
>
>
> xxxxxxx xxxxxxx
> Sirius – stress free technology
> http://www.siriusopensource.com
> Tel: xxxxxxx

This was the year bullying against staff started, not too long after Gates Foundation money had landed under an NDA and something called Sirius Open Source Inc. was quietly formed in the state of Washington (where Microsoft and Gates are).

We spent nearly a month explaining what I had already written internally before resigning; we remembered to publish the entire PDF at the end (crossposted in my personal site too) as it is important to emphasise that I raised most of these concerns for years inside the company. Inaction and retaliation led to what became of it, spilling the beans out in public. I never did anything even remotely like this with any of my past employers.

his is the latest (still ongoing):

> Good morning Dr Schestowitz
>
> Apologies, I didn’t note the screenshot in your first email.
>
> For the week you are referencing, we did not publish the numbers of
> death occurrences (date of death) for that week and these were updated
> the following week.
>
> There would have been no changes in any of the tables that use
> registrations data, but you would see the undercount in the occurrences.
>
> May I ask what table you are looking at?
>
> Kind regards
>
> Anne

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply.

On December 20th the page looked like this:

That was minutes after the 10AM (ish) update.

Despite what it said in the text, the spreadsheet file was updated that morning and included Week 49. Here is a screenshot:

This screenshot was taken on December 20th.

I was expecting that on January 5th this number should be amended, as the figure for Week 49 was incomplete. But in all subsequent updates that number remained the same, so either the missing deaths were added cumulatively to Weeks 50 (onwards) or something went wrong. No “(i) Notice” has been shown since then, so I’m left wondering what actually happened. I need to be sure this data is accurate.

I expressed these concerns publicly about half a dozen times before I learned that Professor Fenon et al had made a formal complaint to the Statistic Regulator. Their complaints is completely unrelated. But it increased my doubts and scepticism about ONS-provided data.

I’ve used your data for a long time. I need to understand why the Week 49 figure (shown in the screenshot above) remained unchanged.
You said: “For the week you are referencing, we did not publish the numbers of death occurrences (date of death) for that week and these were updated the following week.”

If you mean you did not publish Week 49 figures on December 20th, then that is patently untrue and I took a screenshot to prove it. The spreadsheet file was updated that day. It contained the figure for Week 49.

I have more screenshots from around that time and I can provide them to you.

Are we talking about sheet #2 rather than #11?

Regards,

For some background see this prior episode.

AM grieving today. I lost my best friend. I had been worrying for more than 20 years that this day would come.

Many decisions that I made in my life were guided in part — if not largely — by Harvey. I always listened to him and asked him for advice, since I was a teenager in fact. Harvey was like a second father to me. Harvey was honest, attentive, and knowledgeable. I could see it and I could feel it. I felt like it was reciprocal. We had a special chemistry in spite of the vast age difference (more than 50 years). Maybe the age difference assured me that he knew a lot better than me what life would bring, how to prepare for it, and what paths to choose. We used to amicably joke about this unusual connection and we corresponded a lot. Anita and Harvey sent me more gifts than I can recall and I sent them some too. Anita’s extensive and marvellous artwork has been at my site for two decades. Harvey constantly bragged about her skills.

Harvey was a proud father of 3 children and a loving husband who appreciated human values (and contact) rather than accumulation of wealth. This is a quality that sadly so many people nowadays lack. Harvey was a principled person who did not judge people based on what they had but based on who they really were.

I first met him in the late 1990s, if I recall correctly first at the gym at a hotel (that’s where I worked out back then), only hours or days before he came to our home. As a teenager back then, I didn’t know much about him but I had met his son 2 years earlier (his son is the husband of my mom’s cousin). But there was good mental chemistry and because he had a lot of witty things to say we stayed in touch for the next 22+ years. He always had very useful advice to offer and he never lacked the time to advise me on matters of personal life, career, and so on. My “career” ended up as mostly activism. I devoted my life to exposing injustice and corruption. I still do that. Harvey was supportive, whereas my (biological) parents don’t fully understand me.

In 2004 I set up a blog for him and he was active until January 16th of this year. Only 1-2 days before his death he forwarded me an E-mail boasting about his granddaughter Rachelle. Years ago he asked me to advise him (and her) on some personal and technical matters or key decisions. I remember all this like it happened yesterday, but upon a closer look that was a long time ago. Last time I met them in person (2006) he gave me valuable guidance. While it’s difficult to remember the dialogue in detail, the overall picture stayed with me, as did the thousands of E-mails we exchanged. My home still has many gifts that he sent over the years; I use them regularly; he’s still there everywhere I turn. I can’t forget all he did for me. I tried to reciprocate as best I could. I hope I enriched his life as much as he enriched mine.

Harvey wasn’t a man of greed. He would occasionally dismiss the mindset of collecting money and that helped inspire me in my current route. He had a lovely sense of humour since the first time I met him and he didn’t judge people based on superficial things. I’ll always admire that trait of his. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that without his guidance I could end up living a less fulfilling and more unhappy life. I always valued Harvey’s vast experience in life (he was already in his 70s when we first met). Young people should learn from Harvey, not from television.

Harvey knew that a stroll in the beach can be not just healthy but also a truly rewarding experience — something that money cannot buy. I’m grateful that I had the experience joining him in his walk there and a regret I still have is that we never did that again (and cannot do it again, either). A long time ago I vouched to Harvey that I would keep his blog running as long as I’m able to; I know how much he liked writing there, knowing people from all over the world were reading it, even total strangers. His words can inspire many, even if some people under-appreciate what he has to say. He loved his wife a great deal and he repeatedly asked about my wife too. He even occasionally wrote to her directly. He kept asking about my family and he knew my siblings individually, all of them by name. He cared a lot less about matters like work and money; I appreciated that. I envy how sharp he was even in his 90s. It’s like he never aged since his 70s and in my mind I still had the picture of him as when we first met.

While I’m deeply sad, grieving, I can still imagine witty Harvey saying something to the effect of, “cheer up!” He always valued good banter or humour and he was rarely sad, at least publicly. You only live once. Be happy.

If I ever turn 90 I will still remember Harvey and miss him very much. Thank you for everything you have done. Nothing can replace that.