Covid death tolls: scientists acknowledge errors in WHO estimates

I’m glad they’re correcting the mistakes but based on this article they seem in no rush to actually fix the report. “We’ll get to it later this year.” I’m sorry, what?!? The report should be pulled until they have confidence in the numbers. And they should get that confidence through peer review.

I am not fine with calling it a mistake when almost everyone who pointed issues out upfront was marginalized, factchecked™, downvoted and/or vilified.

It's really not.

You seem to be talking about COVID science in general, but this specific WHO debate is something else. Regardless of which way you slice things, it's colossal incompetence and/or mendacity:

1. Either the changes being proposed for Germany and Sweden in the WHO report are correct, in which case the WHO published a report with extremely basic mistakes in it and then realized "immediately" that they had got it all wrong. These wouldn't be "science is hard" type errors, they're "we have no idea what we're doing" type errors, like using the wrong figures or not extrapolating a curve correctly.

2. Or (seems equally plausible), the original report is reasonable and the criticisms are politically motivated. The article admits that they immediately "re-checked" their work because "some critics used the report to criticize Germany's pandemic policy". Then they decided that their scaling factors were not only wrong but shouldn't have been used at all yet they don't explain this.

The Nature article doesn't seem to give the people who made the original decisions much of a chance to explain themselves. We're left to assume it was Wakefield who did this but he also doesn't explain the sudden change of heart over scaling nor where those numbers came from or why they were used. Nature just presents what they did as objectively wrong, but it's all just modelling. So Wakefield decides that he doesn't like the fact that lockdown sceptics were using his report and rewrites its conclusions. Why is the WHO report adjusting the death figures reported by national governments to begin with? That would be interesting to know, but he doesn't explain and nor does Nature. He just discards the scaling factors and then asserts his new work is correct now (why should we believe this?).

Almost certainly Wakefield and friends don't like the original methodology because it makes Sweden look good and Germany bad. It's predictable "scientists" would attack anything that reports these outcomes because they've been doing that for two years. Sweden proves beyond doubt that lockdowns were a terrible disastrous error by our expert classes, their great death figures make the whole thing immediately obvious. Bad modelling is the primary tool public health people use to control politicians and populations, and they will happily play with models until the data says Sweden was a bloodbath and Germany saved the world.

"it doesn't alter science of excess mortality one bit to me, that it happened."

It should! You have a group of people who went through multiple rounds of review, then adjusted their methodology immediately after publication for what appears to be political reasons. Clearly this stuff is more like opinions than facts.

What is "the status quo"? A study was released recently. People pointed out some errors in the study. The errors were acknowledged. Where's the "traitor" part here?

> Other researchers, including Schöley, have taken a related approach, reporting in preprints how average life expectancy — which is calculated using age-specific mortality rates — has changed over the pandemic in more than 20 countries. On the basis of these calculations, for instance, the United Kingdom has fared worse than Spain and Italy in terms of life expectancy lost over the past two years, even though the three countries have broadly similar excess-death numbers. Spain, Italy and Germany have roughly equal values for life expectancy, and Sweden and other Scandinavian nations had by the end of 2021 recovered the average life-expectancy losses caused by the pandemic (see ‘Life-expectancy losses’).