John Dee's Almanac

Leaping Death (part 6)

John Dee — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:02:06 GMT

The ONS very usefully provide regular weekly bulletins of counts of registered all cause death in England & Wales broken down by age band. The trouble is they can’t seem to make up their mind on the coding framework and the format of the Excel spreadsheet.

Back in 2010 they offer a horizontal format with age broken down into 7 categories, thus:

I rather liked this format for it was easy to transpose the data, and having just 7 age bands kept things simple.

Then, in 2020, they decided to change things a little by shifting to 20 age bands; but at least they kept the familiar horizontal format, thus:

Leaping Death (part 5)

John Dee — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:02:42 GMT

I suspect we’re all agreed that something odd is going on with all these elevated deaths across England & Wales, and I suspect that we suspect that this something odd kicked-off sometime around 2021. An initial ARIMA model yielded an estimate of 785 excess all cause deaths per week since week 1 of 2021, but this was reliant on a binary indicator variable (0,1) that marked the entire period 2021 w1 – 2026 w32.

A good start, perhaps, but I’d now like to refine matters by determining exactly when these elevated deaths got into gear. If I plot out the registered death count for the period 2020 w1 – 2026 w32 we get this slide:

I’ve had a go at eyeballing when things seemed to change and this is that dashed grey line sitting at 2022 week 13. At this point the weekly count should start dropping down to 8,000 or so for the spring and summer periods… except that it doesn’t.

This is a very rough and ready approach to matters so I decided to aggregate registered death counts over each quarter. Thes…

Leaping Death (part 4)

John Dee — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:02:38 GMT

Well, I guess it had to be done at some point. The question of vaccine harm has reared its ugly head again some five years down the line, and this time I haven’t gone looking for it… it sneaked up on me whilst attempting to assess excess deaths due to heatwaves. Vaccine harm is likely to affect pretty much anybody who got pranged, and is likely to manifest in many different ways, so it makes sense to look at trends in all cause death across the entire population.

However, in spanning the years there is the confounding factor of the 2020 pandemic to consider, and normally I would establish an indicator variable to mark this as an event within an ARIMA model. That’s the classic approach, but I wanted something more sophisticated along the lines of weekly excess pandemic-adjusted registered deaths in addition to a gross-level indicator.

The obvious approach here is to pull down weekly ONS data for deaths due to COVID and simply subtract these figures from total deaths. But it ain’t that ea…

Founding Member Equinox Treat

John Dee — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:03:07 GMT

This afternoon, at 4pm BST, founding members over in John Dee’s Climate Normal are getting a sneak preview of a dataset I’m building for the study of the urban heat island effect. At 3am BST this morning I realised the same dataset could be used to explore the role of urbanisation in rise of modern diseases.

Sure, we have lifestyle, nutrition, education, and medical advances to consider (and many more besides), but I sat wondering if aspects of urban development might also correlate with the rise of certain diseases. We can’t go around claiming causality, but we sure as heck can have a look-see, followed by a bit of cogitation and cake!

Behind the scenes here at Dee Manor, I am collating historic time series that might form the backbone of a UK urbanisation index. What it boils down to is I am attempting to track how the built environment has evolved, and how these changes have influenced long‑term temperature trends… and, possibly, disease trends.

A comprehensive urbanisation index woul…

Leaping Death (part 3)

John Dee — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:04:08 GMT

In part 2 of this series I offered up four slides revealing the mean weekly observed registered death count for England & Wales for the period 2017 w1 – 2026 w32. I now need to repeat this for mean weekly crude mortality; and here are those slides…

All Cause Crude Mortality

Winter

As before, we need to make a mental note that winter of 2020 means week 1 – 13, which places it immediately prior to the pandemic outburst in week 14. It is thus the winter of 2021 that leads the way, this being a time when the flu season was all mashed-up with COVID (there being no flu viruses circulating, according to the experts: a most strange affair), and being a time when rollout of an experimental new mRNA treatment was underway.

The peculiar thing about this ‘safe and effective’ treatment is that pretty much everyone I know still suffered flu-like symptoms during the flu season, and three of my family members died shortly after receiving their mRNA booster. Apparently, that was all a coincidence, as was…

Leaping Death (part 2)

John Dee — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:01:11 GMT

In part 1 I promised 8 slides following a trip to the shops to grab a bag of Grumpy Mule. With that all done, and a decent cup of coffee on the brew, then I suspect it is best to start out with registered deaths by season first, then have a look at crude mortality by season later on.

My reluctance to dive into crude mortality straight away is that I don’t, as yet, trust the rusty mid-year population estimates issued by the ONS that I have sitting on my HDD. Get these wrong and a serious amount of error is injected into an otherwise robust measure.

N.B. Just in case some readers are bewildered I’m defining seasons as winter (week 1 – 13), spring (week 14 – 26), summer (week 27 – 39), and autumn (week 40 – 52).

Here goes…

All Cause Registered Deaths

Winter

OK, so there are some interesting features here that I ought to point out. If we start by considering winter alone then the pandemic year of 2020 doesn’t feature because it was a spring and autumn affair; it is the winter of 2021 that turn…

Leaping Death (part 1)

John Dee — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:02:59 GMT

Influenza is not revealing its secrets that easily, and so my interest has faded like our lettuces in the recent heatwave. And it was this heatwave that got me cooking in the kitchen over in John Dee’s Climate Normal, starting with this article. All was going well, and I thought I had a handle on things, until I plotted out ONS weekly all cause death registrations and crude mortality in England & Wales for what I called the pseudo-summer season (week 21 to week 31 of each year). Here are the very same plots:

Not Quite So Cosmic Influenza (part 10)

John Dee — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

You’ll need a fresh pot and tea and a decent packet of biscuits for this episode because I shall be throwing the kitchen sink at it; ‘it’ being the enigmatic issue of seasonal influenza that is also said to be contagious in terms of human-to-human transmission (often without symptom), and usually appearing in a bevy of far-flung places all at once. A funny business for sure; and here I am, pushing numbers, hoping that land surface temperature might hold a clue. I guess we better go find out, starting with what multilayer perceptron has to say about age group mortality in relation to the national record for England & Wales over the period 1920-2022.

We know that age groups flip in and out of dominance over time; with the flu striking the elderly, and then the very young, and then those who have to work for a living. So… I’d like to step back and try and get a handle on the big picture – what age group has dominated the most over this 103-year study period? Once I’ve got that nailed I’ll…

Not Quite So Cosmic Influenza (part 9)

John Dee — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

So… we’ve got a Mann-Whitney U-test and a Generalised Linear Model indicating that high levels of unseasonably warm winter days are associated with lower levels of influenza mortality for England & Wales over the period 1920 – 2022. This might sound groovy but it makes me uneasy, and it makes me uneasy because I’m using statistical techniques developed for cross-sectional datasets and not time series data.

Yes indeed, I’ve got nice-looking and rather interesting results on the table, but these can easily be misleading. I’ve already mentioned a potential confounding factor of warmer winters tending to be recent winters, and earlier in this series we saw mortality for influenza in sharp decline over the years. Put the two together and you’ve got bias bigger than my brunch today, and it sure was a big brunch!

Time series modelling needs to come to the rescue, and that means I’ll be reaching for my ARIMA spanner once again. If I get another positive result supporting the hot winter = less …

Not Quite So Cosmic Influenza (part 8)

John Dee — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

I signed-off in part 7 desiring a spot of luncheon, and a bit of cogitation, with a promise of an ARIMA model for the mean daily temperature range. I’ll rip through that model now in next-to-no-time for I have come up with an altogether better idea of looking for a connection between influenza and unseasonable weather. Winter weather, that is, that has folk in the street saying things like, “it’s unseasonably warm for this time of year, is it not?”, or, “this is the hardest frost in living memory”. I’ll focus on daily temperature to begin with since I’ve been bashing through the Central England Temperature Record (HadCET) over on John Dee’s Climate Normal for a fair few weeks now, and what I’ll need from that dataset will pop out at the press of a couple of buttons. If this proves promising I can have a look at hours of sunshine and precipitation. And so… on with the show…

Mean Daily Temperature Range

More boring tables for you…

These were generated by an ARIMA(0,1,1) model that did a mi…

Not Quite So Cosmic Influenza (part 7)

John Dee — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:01:41 GMT

As I type these words I find myself in the middle of an almighty heatwave – a rare thing for the UK. The usual globalist narrative is being spun by the media big time and, according to those who subliminally shape thought and mind, we’re swimming in record-breaking temperatures (or so they claim) that are killing people, and with more death and distress lined-up for our sordid futures unless we pay plenty of taxes, eat bugs and drive EVs. Bizarre ain’t the word, yet people swallow this stuff!

Over in my sister publication of John Dee’s Climate Normal you’ll find me tackling the Central England Temperature Record (HadCET) – being the longest running temperature record in the world – and over in the Notes bit of Substack you’ll find me firing-off thought pieces that hopefully will get people questioning how the Met Office go about the business of selling man-made global warming (a.k.a. climate change) on behalf of the globalists. Here’s one such weeny note:

Whenever the Met Office announc…

Cosmic Influenza (part 6)

John Dee — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:01:17 GMT

I guess we better start with a simple Pearson bivariate correlation matrix of the four variables of interest:

There is absolutely nothing on show here, though we probably guessed this back when button-pushing for part 5 resulted in a soggy bottom. Next up, then, are those cross-correlation plots (CCF) that have a habit of turning our hypotheses upside down:

Cosmic Influenza (part 5)

John Dee — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:01:08 GMT

I could sleep easier at night were it not for that one inexplicable result that links influenza mortality to an unusually quiet sun after a lag of 6 years or so, then again after a further lag of another 6 years or so. Dagnabbit, and bother, you pesky result, you!

At this point I can go in search of the source of what might well be an artefact hiding down in the data, or I can broaden the scope of the study to include the potential effect of the Earth’s magnetic field on human health. Now, before we all reach for the tin foil again, I want us to do some bedtime reading, starting with this sample of papers:

Azcarate et al. Influence of geomagnetic activity and atmospheric pressure on human arterial pressure during the solar cycle 24. Advances in Space Research (2016)

Babayev and Allahverdiyeva. Effect of geomagnetic activity variations on the physiological and psychological state of functionally healthy humans. Advances in Space Research (2007)

Babayev et al. (2012) Potential effects of so…

Cosmic Influenza (part 4)

John Dee — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:02:22 GMT

I think I can nail this in one easy-to-understand slide. Take the penultimate slide of part 3 in this series and imagine that the homogenous data cloud for this gets coded into normal and extreme mortality periods. That sure would nail things, and in a grisly graphical manner.

To get the ball rolling we have to define ‘extreme mortality’ and I’ve gone for the easy option of declaring this to be a rescaled influenza mortality for England & Wales exceeding 5 deaths per 100k population for the period 1965 – 2022. This simple definition yields 7 extreme years, and if I re-jig that penultimate plot of part 3, it looks like this:

This makes it pretty clear that there’s no obvious and immediate link between cosmic ray counts, solar activity and influenza mortality (if we ignore the likelihood of lagged effects, that is). If cosmic rays were a problem, then those whopper extreme mortality blobs would cluster top left; if solar activity was a problem then they’d congregate bottom right; but tha…

Cosmic Influenza (part 3)

John Dee — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:02:49 GMT

Last time I promised to follow through with slides revealing the cross-correlation of quiet sun (zero sunspot) days with rescaled influenza mortality for adults across England & Wales over the period 1901 – 2022. Here are those slides:

Cosmic Influenza (part 2)

John Dee — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:01:24 GMT

The final two slides…

Cosmic Influenza (part 1)

John Dee — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:02:48 GMT

Before we begin please be assured that it isn’t wee mini-moi who is suggesting there is a link between sunspots and the flu - I am merely an innocent statistician. If wearing tin foil might make you feel more comfortable before launching into this left-of-field new series, then we can pause momentarily to fashion our hats. As for me, I am sporting my Turkish folkloric hat replete with golden embroidery, coloured beads and inlaid mirrors. It’s a beautiful thing, and it has the added advantage of the mirrors averting the gaze of the evil eye.

One Dozen Papers

I think, that with this racy topic, I better start out by presenting the dozen papers I’ve come across to date, so you can get a feel for where this idea has come from and how it has developed:

1: Iagodinskiĭ VN, Aleksandrov IuV. O tsiklichnosti épidemicheskogo protsessa pri grippe v sviazi s periodichnost’iu solnechnoĭ deiatel’nosti [On the cyclic nature of the epidemiologic process of influenza in relation to the periodicity of sola…

What I Got Up To In The NHS...

John Dee — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

This is not an exhaustive list by any means.

For one thing, all those little extra analyses that consecutive Clinical Directors and Departmental Managers wanted at the last possible minute before their many meetings are not included, as are the myriads of weeny little jobs that surgeons wanted me to undertake whilst standing looking over my shoulder and thrusting a USB in my face. Then there were the ‘suits’ working for NHS England whose shared hot-desks were down the end of the corridor; they’d approach me with, “John, if I buy you lunch could you do this analysis for me?”

Then there was the Director of the Primary Care Trust who’d phone and say, “John, are you free right now?” - can’t say no to the purse holder! And then, pretty much every other morning at 8am, was a queue of pale-faced senior house officers waiting outside my office, who were all going to get bawled at terribly by their consultant at 8:30am for not handing in their clinical audit project.

The key for early morning arr…

An Enigma: Transmission of Epidemic Influenza (part 23)

John Dee — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:01:32 GMT

Before we proceed with the final tray bake I’d like to show everyone what the absolute differential series looks like for influenza in England & Wales for those aged 65 – 74y over the period 1980 – 2019. This is what my generalised linear modelling was crunching through back in part 22, but I reckon it’s always a good idea to look at the raw data. Here it is:

I’ve added a locally estimated scatterplot smoothing function (LOESS) to guide the eye and we can see that this trundles along reasonably horizontally until the year 1999 or thereabouts, after which it starts to climb. That climb over the period 2000 – 2019 means increased variability in mortality, and ChatGPT reckons this can be taken as evidence of an ineffective vaccine campaign (and possibly vaccine harm); for vaccines, as with any other intervention, will serve to reduce the variability of clinical outcomes when genuinely beneficial. One way to think of this is that instead of one bunch of people surviving and another bunch d…

An Enigma: Transmission of Epidemic Influenza (part 22)

John Dee — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:02:09 GMT

In part 21 I briefly acquainted readers with a ChatGPT session undertaken by a most cunning subscriber. I ended the article by adopting a suggestion made by ChatGPT to use the 55 – 64y data as control for the jabbed 65 – 74y group. ChatGPT reckoned that divergence in mortality following the year 2000 national rollout of flu vaccines for those age 65 years and over would show that “vaccination mattered at population scale”, and that this exercise alone “would dramatically improve credibility”.

Well, I’ve now tried that suggestion and the situation is still as clear as mud!

Instead of divergence post-2000 we discovered convergence, and we figured that this could be due to the older age group surviving better in the post rollout period; but that it could also be due to the younger age group faring less well! And there’s a nasty plot twist I ought to mention… this faring better or worse may not be a real-world biological thing; it may simply be administrative artefact as coding fashions co…