It is super important that faked data and/or faked analysis is exposed so I appreciate the discussion.
I will say that listening to the two of you hurl childish insults at each other is exhausting. The reality is the truth will out so you don't have to sling insults at each other.
That said, everyone needs to be able to defend their assertions by showing their data and analysis so others can reproduce it. I'm pretty sure that will show who is right and who is wrong, no insults required. In my opinion if you don't want to play by this simple rule, you shouldn't get to play.
I haven't insulted him (while I knew for sure he was the kind of persons to lie about infant deaths) when this chat started. Until he brought up the gas-lighting and the doxing lies.
I have observed him discard critics with this very mixture of gas-lighting and false superiority for years. The only way (I know) to tackle that is with superior arrogance - and facts.
In the end, he could have ended it from the start simply providing the spreadsheet which never saw the light.
I owe respect to respectful and honest people, and despise & contempt is the only thing someone like TeS can hope from me.
But feel free to retro-engineer his next psyops yourself & to show me how it's done.
I realized after I posted this that perhaps the only way to get tes's attention is to yell.
I didn't mean to be a scold, and I really appreciate you calling bullshit. I just didn't understand the apparent melodrama from your side. TES needs to put up or shut up.
And I also realized it is not really sufficient to just shut up, bad information needs to be deleted as well.
Late for the party, but thanks a lot for this. TES has a schtick that involves intimidation and evasion, without a doubt. I'd read his posts, and while they seemed shocking and impressive, I couldn't really form a definitive judgement because it was way over my head. What I like to do in those cases is read what other experts in the field say. Some paraphrases of what I'd read from experts:
"This is is shocking! I'm also an expert, but I have to admit that this is completely over my head and I don't really understand it."
"I'm also an expert and I don't see what you're seeing. I see . . ."
TES comes in and thoroughly insults and taunts rather than providing transparency. Speaking of which: that pharma doesn't provide raw data is a fatal failure of transparency that should damn whatever they provide.
Same here. This conversation started fine, but TES acted like the guilty acts and rapidly descended into the schoolyard taunts and leftist guilt-tripping victimhood. Participant 3 didn't get it AT ALL. TES made it clear that there was nothing that would make him be upfront and prove himself right because he knew damn well he was caught. OpenVAET joined in with the taunts while making it clear that at any point, he was willing to engage in a challenge.
I had my own little run-in with TES. He posted something to the effect that it was impossible for anyone who is not an exert to be skeptical. I posted POLITELY otherwise and he was a total dick about it.
Oh! How could I forget: "Again, the conversation is ended." Seriously man: say it once and LEAVE ROFL. He totally made a fool of himself.
The image describes a procedure for calculating an exponential baseline, where the annual growth rate is determined based on the linear trend in the baseline period. I tried to replicate his procedure here, but I didn't come anywhere close to reproducing his figure of 77% excess deaths on weeks 14-20 of 2025: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Failed_attempt_to_reproduce_exponential_baseline.
If you use my method to reverse engineer the baseline in Ethical Skeptic's plot that shows excess deaths in ages 0-4, you'll see that the baseline drops by more between 2019 and 2020 than between 2018 and 2019, which would be impossible if he would've actually followed the methodology he described in his image file. It's one of the many lines of evidence I have found that he falsified his data.
Ah, I had missed that picture. This guy has the shittiest documentation ever. I would need to check my archives of his article, he changed it several times without documentation of the changes ; but who care.
Still, that's ironical 😂
Firstly because he could have highlighted that ; which confirms that he can't read a line of code.
Secondly because anyway, he couldn't show his spreadsheet - we agree on the fact that there was no way to get his plot, particularly the early 2020 reversal, without severe manual cooking.
Anyway, I'll leave you the care of the perfect retro-engineering ; you're better at that than me!
Yeah exactly. The methodology he described in his image doesn't match the actual baseline in his plot, which explains why he didn't include a column for the baseline in his PNG spreadsheet, because then he didn't have to show how he came up with the baseline. He knows himself that he falsified the baseline, so if he would document the exact methodology of how he derived the baseline, then he would also have to document how he falsified his data.
He has also made two other images where he described how he calculates his baseline, but he didn't include mathematical formulas in the other two images, so his precise methodology was not as clear.
But his methodology would've been even easier to understand if he posted a script or an Excel spreadsheet that demonstrated how he calculates the baseline.
For example his image says that the `GrowthRate` variable is defined as `Slope(Deaths_{w,y} vs. y)`. I didn't understand what the slope function meant at first, but I eventually realized that the SLOPE function in Excel returns the second coefficient in a linear regression, like `coef(lm(deaths~year))[2]` in R.
And if you do a linear regression of weekly deaths against a year variable, where there's 52 weeks with the year 2018 and 52 weeks with the year 2019, it's equivalent to doing a linear regression of average deaths in 2018 against average deaths in 2019, which is also equivalent to simply subtracting the average deaths in 2018 from the average deaths in 2019:
After that I think ES converted the slope to an annual growth rate by dividing it by the average weekly deaths in the baseline period, because in another image where he described how he calculates his baseline, he wrote that first he determined "the first derivative dx/dy slope of 2014 - 2019 records for each ICD-10 code", and then he factored "this slope as a percentage of the average 2014 - 2019 week": https://theethicalskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ICD-10-Code-Excess-Death-Derivation-small.jpg.
ES told you: "You crafted a fake baseline, that departed from a 25-year record, that was purposely buried in your 'R-code' to deceive."
He referred to the CDC plot of infant mortality that started from 1995. If you plot infant mortality rate going back even further to 1968, which is when the mortality data at CDC WONDER starts, the long-term trend seems to rather follow an exponential curve than a line. But if you start the x-axis from 1995, the trend since 1995 looks deceptively close to a line, because the mortality rate was below the exponential curve in the the second half of the 1990s: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Infant_mortality_rate_since_1968. If you would even extend the x-axis back by 5 years so it would start from 1990 instead of 1995, it would be clear that the infant mortality rate declined more steeply in the 1990s than in subsequent decades, because the decline was steeper in the early 90s than the late 90s. And the decline was also steeper in the 80s than the 90s, and steeper in the 70s than the 80s.
When I fitted the exponential curve to the infant mortality rate in 1968-2019, the curve flattened out by the 2020s. So in fact a simple 2018-2019 average is fairly close to my exponential curve in the 2020s, but a linear regression of the mortality rate in the 2010s is steeper than my exponential curve in the 2020s.
The most brazen line by ES was "You paltered the baseline".
"Paltering" is one of the great terms he has invented, which normally means that 2020 or later years are included in the baseline fitting period, so that the slope of the baseline is influenced by pandemic years. He says that paltering is not merely unethical, but also immoral: https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1746685316465852776. He also said about paltering that "Never trust a person who does this. Seek their removal from office." (https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1746594438174978431)
But his "legacy trend" appears to be a hand-drawn approximation of the trend in 2018-2020, so ES fell victim to the sin of paltering himself when he drew the legacy trend.
ES claimed that in his plot where he got the 20 sigma 77% excess deaths, the baseline was fitted against 2018-2019 and not 2018-2020: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Did_ES_use_a_2018_2019_or_2018_2020_baseline. But if he fitted a baseline against 2018 and 2019 alone, it wouldn't be nearly as steep as his "legacy trend".
There was an unusually low number of both infant deaths and births in 2020, so it doesn't make sense to include 2020 in the baseline fitting period.
And anyway it doesn't even make sense to use only 2 years of data to fit the baseline like ES. ES refuses to combine pre-2018 data with new data because he falsely believes that CDC WONDER used different suppression behavior before 2018: https://sars2.net/ethical.html#Does_the_provisional_dataset_have_different_suppression_behavior_than_the_final_dataset. The documentation for the provisional dataset says: "All statistics representing one through nine (1-9) persons are suppressed, in the provisional mortality online database for years 2018 and later." ES misinterpreted it to mean that the suppression behavior was somehow changed from 2018 onwards, but similar text is also included in the documentation for the final dataset, which says that the suppression starts from the year 1999.
We both agree that Ethical Skeptic is a fraud but the biggest frauds are the ones who fell for the debunked conspiracy theory that there was no novel virus or pandemic.
People like Nick Hudson and Jonathan Engler will forever be a stain on humanity & represent all that is evil with this world. They make Fauci look honest!
Wow, that was a long read.
It is super important that faked data and/or faked analysis is exposed so I appreciate the discussion.
I will say that listening to the two of you hurl childish insults at each other is exhausting. The reality is the truth will out so you don't have to sling insults at each other.
That said, everyone needs to be able to defend their assertions by showing their data and analysis so others can reproduce it. I'm pretty sure that will show who is right and who is wrong, no insults required. In my opinion if you don't want to play by this simple rule, you shouldn't get to play.
I haven't insulted him (while I knew for sure he was the kind of persons to lie about infant deaths) when this chat started. Until he brought up the gas-lighting and the doxing lies.
I have observed him discard critics with this very mixture of gas-lighting and false superiority for years. The only way (I know) to tackle that is with superior arrogance - and facts.
In the end, he could have ended it from the start simply providing the spreadsheet which never saw the light.
I owe respect to respectful and honest people, and despise & contempt is the only thing someone like TeS can hope from me.
But feel free to retro-engineer his next psyops yourself & to show me how it's done.
I realized after I posted this that perhaps the only way to get tes's attention is to yell.
I didn't mean to be a scold, and I really appreciate you calling bullshit. I just didn't understand the apparent melodrama from your side. TES needs to put up or shut up.
And I also realized it is not really sufficient to just shut up, bad information needs to be deleted as well.
Thanks. A critical examination of this gentleman's graphic works is at least reasonable.
Leave my alter ego alone!
Late for the party, but thanks a lot for this. TES has a schtick that involves intimidation and evasion, without a doubt. I'd read his posts, and while they seemed shocking and impressive, I couldn't really form a definitive judgement because it was way over my head. What I like to do in those cases is read what other experts in the field say. Some paraphrases of what I'd read from experts:
"This is is shocking! I'm also an expert, but I have to admit that this is completely over my head and I don't really understand it."
"I'm also an expert and I don't see what you're seeing. I see . . ."
TES comes in and thoroughly insults and taunts rather than providing transparency. Speaking of which: that pharma doesn't provide raw data is a fatal failure of transparency that should damn whatever they provide.
Same here. This conversation started fine, but TES acted like the guilty acts and rapidly descended into the schoolyard taunts and leftist guilt-tripping victimhood. Participant 3 didn't get it AT ALL. TES made it clear that there was nothing that would make him be upfront and prove himself right because he knew damn well he was caught. OpenVAET joined in with the taunts while making it clear that at any point, he was willing to engage in a challenge.
I had my own little run-in with TES. He posted something to the effect that it was impossible for anyone who is not an exert to be skeptical. I posted POLITELY otherwise and he was a total dick about it.
Oh! How could I forget: "Again, the conversation is ended." Seriously man: say it once and LEAVE ROFL. He totally made a fool of himself.
You wrote "the blue line is what he claimed to have calculated", even though your blue line was a simple average of 2018 and 2019 adjusted for seasonal variation: https://github.com/OpenVaet/us_mortality/blob/main/compare_real_excess_with_tes_fakes.R.
But that's not how ES claims to have calculated his baseline, because in the caption below his plot, ES wrote "The procedure for construction of a DFT/inflection chart can accessed here", where he linked to this image: https://theethicalskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Deviation-from-Trend-Retrospective-Plot-Procedure.png.
The image describes a procedure for calculating an exponential baseline, where the annual growth rate is determined based on the linear trend in the baseline period. I tried to replicate his procedure here, but I didn't come anywhere close to reproducing his figure of 77% excess deaths on weeks 14-20 of 2025: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Failed_attempt_to_reproduce_exponential_baseline.
If you use my method to reverse engineer the baseline in Ethical Skeptic's plot that shows excess deaths in ages 0-4, you'll see that the baseline drops by more between 2019 and 2020 than between 2018 and 2019, which would be impossible if he would've actually followed the methodology he described in his image file. It's one of the many lines of evidence I have found that he falsified his data.
Ah, I had missed that picture. This guy has the shittiest documentation ever. I would need to check my archives of his article, he changed it several times without documentation of the changes ; but who care.
Still, that's ironical 😂
Firstly because he could have highlighted that ; which confirms that he can't read a line of code.
Secondly because anyway, he couldn't show his spreadsheet - we agree on the fact that there was no way to get his plot, particularly the early 2020 reversal, without severe manual cooking.
Anyway, I'll leave you the care of the perfect retro-engineering ; you're better at that than me!
Yeah exactly. The methodology he described in his image doesn't match the actual baseline in his plot, which explains why he didn't include a column for the baseline in his PNG spreadsheet, because then he didn't have to show how he came up with the baseline. He knows himself that he falsified the baseline, so if he would document the exact methodology of how he derived the baseline, then he would also have to document how he falsified his data.
I had also overlooked the methodology image until recently. The image was in fact missing from the earliest version of his blog post that was archived by the Wayback Machine, which probably explains why I didn't notice the image earlier: https://web.archive.org/web/20250821003336/https://theethicalskeptic.com/2025/08/19/houston-we-have-another-problem/. He seems to have added the image some time between August 22nd and September 3rd.
He has also made two other images where he described how he calculates his baseline, but he didn't include mathematical formulas in the other two images, so his precise methodology was not as clear.
But his methodology would've been even easier to understand if he posted a script or an Excel spreadsheet that demonstrated how he calculates the baseline.
For example his image says that the `GrowthRate` variable is defined as `Slope(Deaths_{w,y} vs. y)`. I didn't understand what the slope function meant at first, but I eventually realized that the SLOPE function in Excel returns the second coefficient in a linear regression, like `coef(lm(deaths~year))[2]` in R.
And if you do a linear regression of weekly deaths against a year variable, where there's 52 weeks with the year 2018 and 52 weeks with the year 2019, it's equivalent to doing a linear regression of average deaths in 2018 against average deaths in 2019, which is also equivalent to simply subtracting the average deaths in 2018 from the average deaths in 2019:
t=fread("https://sars2.net/f/wondervaccinial0to4.csv")
coef(lm(dead~year,t[year<2020]))[2]
# -12.42308
t[,.(dead=mean(dead)),year][year<2020,coef(lm(dead~year))[2]]
# -12.42308 (same result)
t[,.(dead=mean(dead)),year][,dead[year==2019]-dead[year==2018]]
# -12.42308 (same result)
After that I think ES converted the slope to an annual growth rate by dividing it by the average weekly deaths in the baseline period, because in another image where he described how he calculates his baseline, he wrote that first he determined "the first derivative dx/dy slope of 2014 - 2019 records for each ICD-10 code", and then he factored "this slope as a percentage of the average 2014 - 2019 week": https://theethicalskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ICD-10-Code-Excess-Death-Derivation-small.jpg.
ES told you: "You crafted a fake baseline, that departed from a 25-year record, that was purposely buried in your 'R-code' to deceive."
He referred to the CDC plot of infant mortality that started from 1995. If you plot infant mortality rate going back even further to 1968, which is when the mortality data at CDC WONDER starts, the long-term trend seems to rather follow an exponential curve than a line. But if you start the x-axis from 1995, the trend since 1995 looks deceptively close to a line, because the mortality rate was below the exponential curve in the the second half of the 1990s: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Infant_mortality_rate_since_1968. If you would even extend the x-axis back by 5 years so it would start from 1990 instead of 1995, it would be clear that the infant mortality rate declined more steeply in the 1990s than in subsequent decades, because the decline was steeper in the early 90s than the late 90s. And the decline was also steeper in the 80s than the 90s, and steeper in the 70s than the 80s.
When I fitted the exponential curve to the infant mortality rate in 1968-2019, the curve flattened out by the 2020s. So in fact a simple 2018-2019 average is fairly close to my exponential curve in the 2020s, but a linear regression of the mortality rate in the 2010s is steeper than my exponential curve in the 2020s.
In other developing countries, the decline in the infant mortality rate has also become less steep over time, and in some countries the infant mortality rate already reached a flat level in the 2010s: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Infant_mortality_in_other_developed_countries.
The most brazen line by ES was "You paltered the baseline".
"Paltering" is one of the great terms he has invented, which normally means that 2020 or later years are included in the baseline fitting period, so that the slope of the baseline is influenced by pandemic years. He says that paltering is not merely unethical, but also immoral: https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1746685316465852776. He also said about paltering that "Never trust a person who does this. Seek their removal from office." (https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1746594438174978431)
But his "legacy trend" appears to be a hand-drawn approximation of the trend in 2018-2020, so ES fell victim to the sin of paltering himself when he drew the legacy trend.
ES claimed that in his plot where he got the 20 sigma 77% excess deaths, the baseline was fitted against 2018-2019 and not 2018-2020: https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Did_ES_use_a_2018_2019_or_2018_2020_baseline. But if he fitted a baseline against 2018 and 2019 alone, it wouldn't be nearly as steep as his "legacy trend".
There was an unusually low number of both infant deaths and births in 2020, so it doesn't make sense to include 2020 in the baseline fitting period.
And anyway it doesn't even make sense to use only 2 years of data to fit the baseline like ES. ES refuses to combine pre-2018 data with new data because he falsely believes that CDC WONDER used different suppression behavior before 2018: https://sars2.net/ethical.html#Does_the_provisional_dataset_have_different_suppression_behavior_than_the_final_dataset. The documentation for the provisional dataset says: "All statistics representing one through nine (1-9) persons are suppressed, in the provisional mortality online database for years 2018 and later." ES misinterpreted it to mean that the suppression behavior was somehow changed from 2018 onwards, but similar text is also included in the documentation for the final dataset, which says that the suppression starts from the year 1999.
We both agree that Ethical Skeptic is a fraud but the biggest frauds are the ones who fell for the debunked conspiracy theory that there was no novel virus or pandemic.
People like Nick Hudson and Jonathan Engler will forever be a stain on humanity & represent all that is evil with this world. They make Fauci look honest!