> there were about 31 million excess deaths across the 2020-23 period

...am I missing something, or are you saying there were 31 million excess deaths during which the world had COVID ??? I'd say, yeah that tracks ...?

"At the same time everybody was using umbrellas, lots of people got wet! Clearly, umbrellas are at fault."

If only there were some method by which we could disaggregate effects like these...

Perhaps we could get a huge number of people and then randomly assign some of them to a "treatment" group and then some to a "control" group. We don't tell people which group they're in. Then we measure whether they got wet.

Just a thought...

The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Rancourt

He's not a credible source. HAL is not a peer reviewed journal, it is an open archive where you can upload papers regardless of publication status.

Meanwhile, we have excellent actual research done by credible researchers in peer reviewed journals like https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... that directly dispute this nonsense.

> The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.

I invite you to read another important Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

No doubt Denis Rancourt holds false and reprehensible beliefs. But you can defeat his claims without attacking his person.

I would argue that his general stance on COVID is HIGHLY relevant and not poisoning the well, as is his general stance on other science-related topics, which climate change definitely is. If someone claims that COVID doesn't even exist then I think it is quite fair to immediately discard anything they have to say on this topic.

Mentioning his racism is perhaps poisoning the well, but the other stuff I think is relevant.

Well that's a ridiculously stupid paper.

Major claim: COVID is not the correct explanation for the 31 million excess deaths during... COVID.

Reasons provided:

* Excess deaths didn't rise until after public healthy emergencies were declared (yeah, duh, emergencies were declared as testing showed extreme growth which occurs at least weeks prior to most deaths)

* Vast differences in mortality rate between political jurisdictions, even among those who shared borders (yeah, duh, sharing a border doesn't mean you have the same public health or data reporting systems as the county, state, or nation nearby)

* Erratic mortality patterns (yeah, duh, there's a seasonality to many viruses and one can quite obviously see that in excess mortality and also by uhh... living through winter...)

* Unstable economic correlations (yeah, duh, there were different interventions protecting or exposing different people disproportionately at different times)

So all of these things they say disprove the virus hypothesis.

Frankly laughable. Thank you for sharing!