He has released his latest forensic comparison of the international data on Covid-19 mortality - on the impact or otherwise of lockdown and mask-wearing as against other, more likely, causative factors.
His latest study of the international data, of the facts and of the science, continues to support his analysis that lockdowns don't work - at all.
He begins with his favourite country Sweden - favourite because as the only European country not to impose lockdown and masks, instead settling for just for one metre social distancing, it acts as a 'control' for the rest of the continent.
Taking a look back over the last ten decades, he shows that Sweden's Covid-19 outbreak is of a very similar order to many of the flu epidemics that the country has experienced, and is hundreds of times lower than the Spanish flu of 1918 which, unlike Covid, had a median mortality age possibly as low as 40 (certainly less than 60) and included many infants in its grim toll. Which is not the case with Covid, with an average mortality rate of over 80.
Nor, he shows, is Sweden's mortality rate materially different from ours, a 'result' if you want to call it that which has been achieved without crashing the economy or closing schools or putting the population under house arrest. The slight resurgence this autumn that many zealots have gleefully latched on to say the Swedish model doesn't work has a different explanation, he explains. Seasons must be compared with like seasons. Winters with winters, summers with summers. A low mortality winter season one year is likely to be followed by higher mortality one the next year. Deaths invariably catch up, for the elderly especially. Sweden had just experienced two 'soft' autumn/winter seasons. This late 2020 spike and outcome was inevitable.
Cummins reminds us, too, that at the start of the pandemic the World Health Organisation (WHO) did not recommend quarantine and, that since then, 25 published papers have continued to support their initial advice. These studies show that lockdown has no efficacy; and for those zealots who think the reason is because we are not obeying them diligently enough and we should crack down harder, he has this message: comparison of the stringency of lockdown across 50 countries shows that more stringency has no more impact than less draconian lockdowns. That is it makes no more difference than lockdown itself.
If that is the case (and it is) he asks, why are we where we are now? He points his finger directly at one man, Neil Ferguson, and his admission that Sage realised they could 'do it', that the government could act like China or a one-party state and impose a nationwide lockdown. They did it because they could. Not because it worked.
Cummins identifies other countries such as Japan with no lockdown at all which have experienced startlingly low Covid mortality rates. This, he demonstrates, is a function of two other conditions. One is the far higher rate of metabolic health of the Japanese elderly (Vitamin D levels in particular, which by contrast are strikingly low in Italy). The second is prior SARS immunity and the quick accretion of Covid19 antibodies in the population.
Before Cummins ends his video he takes us to the US, where mortality has been high overall because good metabolic health is low overall - by comparison with Japan for example.
Yet he shows how Florida still outsmarted the rest of the country by following the advice of Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University, a scientist who's argued that restrictions would have no impacts. The State Governor dropped them all and has proved proved Professor Levitt quite right. It has had no negative impact on Florida's mortality at all.
Before he closes, Cummins reminds us what the research says about masks: they don't move the needle at all on mortality. In fact the latest study from Stockholm's Karolinska Institute shows how futile the interventions of countries have been. Each country's mortality rate could have been predicted before the Covid pandemic and no lockdown could ever have done anything about it.
My own thought on watching all this is: How tragic it is that the one simple intervention that could have made some difference to the UK's metabolic health rate and mortality rate would have been if Chris Whitty had insisted on a nation wide roll out of free Vitamin D. He still could of course.
You can watch Ivor Cummins's latest Viral Update here.
Comment: See also: