There’s a question that’s been burning inside me for months now about the Covid statistics we hear about on the news every night, and I’m still waiting for some journalist out there to ask it.

The question came up because I noticed something peculiar about the statistics concerning deaths from Covid.  The current death toll in the UK, for instance, always says: 43,293 deaths ‘among those who tested positive within the prior 28 days.’

So, not deaths directly from Covid.  But deaths among those who’d had a positive Covid test sometime within the month before.

And according to an increasing number of doctors in other countries, this is the measure of Covid fatalities used pretty much everywhere around the world.

The question that no journalist seems to be asking of all those governments is simply this:  why are we using this very imprecise yardstick?

People who died of road accidents, or heart disease, or cancer, who might have had Covid during that final month, are included.  People who had a false positive test, but died of something completely unrelated, are included.

Does this mean that all those people who had ‘pre-existing other illness’ actually died from the other illness and not Covid?

A few days ago for our new web TV channel Health Uncovered, my husband Bryan Hubbard and I were asking just this question of Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, former chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz, an eminent virologist who has published over 300 scientific papers in the fields of immunology, bacteriology and virology, for which he has received numerous awards, including a German Order of Merit.

So bear in mind that I am focusing on the experience of one of the countries applauded for handling Covid-19 better than most.

Bhakdi and biologist Dr Karina Reiss have just published a book called Corona: False Alarm? This small book became an overnight bestseller in Germany and has just been published in Britain and America (Chelsea Green Publishing).

In the book, Bhakdi and Reiss said the following:

‘If I drive to the hospital to be tested and later have a fatal car accident – just as my positive test results are returned – I become a coronavirus death.  If I am diagnosed positive for coronavirus and jump off the balcony in shock, I also become a coronavirus death.  The same is true for a sudden stroke.’

Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute, the Germany federal government agency and research institute for disease control, has openly declared that every individual with a positive test result at the time of death should be entered into the statistics.

The first ‘coronavirus death,’ they said, occurred in a palliative ward in the Schleswig-Holstein, in the northernmost state of Germany, where a patient with terminal esophagal cancer was given a coronavirus swab test just before he died.  That test turned out to be positive.  He became a ‘Covid-19’ victim.

As Bhakdi and Reiss say: ‘He might equally well have been positive for other viruses such as rhino-, adeno- or influenza viruses – if they had been tested for.’

This kind of highly elastic counting system has occurred in countries around the world. During an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph Professor Walter Riccardi, an advisor to the Italian Ministry of Health, revealed that 88 percent of so-called Italian deaths from Covid-19 were not due to the virus.

In Belgium, according to Bhakdi and Reiss, the official count has not only included actual coronavirus deaths but those where it was just suspected.

With a new disease like this, say Bhakdi and Reiss, it’s imperative that autopsies be carried out to confirm the cause of death.  Only a single brave pathologist, Professor Klause Puschell, director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Hamburg University, had the temerity to do this – against the specific advice of the German government’s RKI.

Puschell performed autopsies on all so-called ‘coronavirus victims’ and discovered that not a single one had been healthy.  All had serious pre-existing conditions – many of them multiple serious conditions – and one in three already had lung embolisms, the same problem that kills such patients when they get regular flu.

Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, one of the world’s eminent virologists, put the Covid figures into perspective.

Say that the official figure in one season is that 8,500 German people over age 80 died from Covid-19. There are 8.5 million people who are 80 or older in Germany, so the risk of dying from Covid would be 10 for every 10,000 people in this age group.

Now, according to Ioannidis’ calculations, every year about 1,200 per 10,000 people 80 or older die from heart disease, cancer or respiratory infections.

Even if the figures about Covid were correct, they are not significant compared to the other killers.  And if other illnesses are being blamed on Covid, the deaths from coronavirus are insignificant compared to what kills people every year.

The difference is:  you’re not seeing those statistics – the numbers of people in your country who die every day from heart disease and cancer, and embolisms and more – on the nightly news.

So the question that burns inside me every night when I’m watching the latest death figures is: why?  Why overplay the statistics when any virologist or epidemiologist worth his or her salt recognizes that they are vastly overblown?

And why, for instance, did the UK’s Public Health England downgrade this virus as not dangerous right before the government instituted lockdown?

And, finally, why is no journalist asking that question?

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe that Covid-19 is being staged and the victims simply actors.  I don’t believe that this is being orchestrated by some Dr Evil cabal to take over the world.  I do believe that this is a nasty new flu virus – but not anywhere as nasty as the official stats would have you believe.

But you have to admit, when you recognize that most major governments are chucking in every possible illness and calling it Covid, there are only three possible scenarios.

One, sheer incompetence in the face of a new and unforeseen enemy.  Two, politics.  Having pursued one course of action, governments can’t be seen to backtrack. Saying ‘just kidding’ would be committing political suicide.

And three:  here it all gets a whole lot darker. I don’t even want to go there.

This is the first time I can remember hoping and praying that it’s all down to  government and medical incompetence.