There are articles about which we sometimes wonder if we really should write them. We asked ourselves the question, reading the acknowledgments at the end of Pierre Chaillot’s book “Covid-19, what the official figures reveal”. The statistician expresses his gratitude for the fact-checkers of the World and of Release, “for the visibility they have given” to his work. “The vast majority of my 50,000 subscribers discovered my Décoder l’éco channel following (their) articles from debunking”, he wrote. Because the one who presents himself as Data Intelligence Project Director at the Pays de la Loire Regional Council on his LinkedIn page sided with the “reassuring” side from the start of the pandemic. His “dissident analyses” have earned him frequent updates in the mainstream media – which have undoubtedly unwittingly contributed to giving additional echo to his theses.
Should it, therefore, add more? “It is crucial not to desert the field in the face of disinformation. To stop providing a critical counterpoint to conspiracy theories would be a strategic error”, replies Rudy Reichstadt, director of the NGO Conspiracy Watch. In fact, Pierre Chaillot’s book hardly needed mainstream media to sell. All the representatives of the French covido-skeptics seem to have given themselves the word to make the article. “From radical conspiratorial youtubers like Silvano Trotta to prescribing media with a large audience like CNews, via Current valuesfar-right figures, or even André Bercoff of Sud Radio, they all talked about it, almost at the same time”, confirms Rudy Reichstadt, whose site has listed these different interventions. It must be said that the book takes up all the theses rehashed over and over in these circles – denial of the scale of the epidemic, lack of justification for confinements, ineffectiveness and dangerousness of vaccines, etc.
An appearance of scientificity
Their promotional campaign has borne fruit: the book has been on the list of the 20 best-selling essays published by L’Express with Edistat for four weeks. The human brain always seeking to reinforce its own beliefs (confirmation bias), it is not surprising that this book has won over the most convinced by conspiratorial discourse. Moreover, its veneer of seriousness – a statistician author, a 472-page pad, the emphasis on “the analysis of figures, with sourced data”, an abundance of graphics and a sober layout – may have attracted curious readers eager to deepen their knowledge of this turbulent period. Problem, this appearance of scientificity hides untruths galore, when they are not such eccentric theses that some conspirators themselves move away from them.
First example, the supposed lack of gravity of the epidemic, to which Pierre Chaillot devotes his first chapter (“Has there been a carnage somewhere?”). INSEE reports an excess of 95,000 deaths for the period from March 2020 to December 2021 (including 56,000 between March and December 2020). The author, who nevertheless relies on his experience within the Institute of Statistics to legitimize his work, does not hesitate to criticize the calculations of his former employer. For him, “this number of 95,000 is excessive with regard to any estimate that can be made from the data actually observed”. “Nothing exceptional happened in any European country in 2020 and 2021,” he still assures Express by email. According to his own calculations, “2020 mortality is between an under-mortality of 12,000 people, and an excess mortality of 37,000 people, which is a much less catchy title”. Forgetting in passing that the figure of 95,000 related to two years – 2020, but also 2021…
According to him, INSEE would have in fact incorrectly assessed the deaths which should have occurred anyway in 2020. However, this was taken into account, recalls epidemiologist Antoine Flahault: “In 2020, France reported 65,000 deaths by Covid, a number higher than the excess mortality established by INSEE, because some of the deaths from Covid-19 occurred in 2020 in very old or otherwise very ill people, who would have died of any way.”
Regarding vaccines, no surprise: Pierre Chaillot first endeavors to dismantle “the myth of vaccine efficacy”, before pointing out the supposed dangerousness of injections. He first criticizes the pharmaceutical companies for having included too many subjects under the age of 65 in their trials. At the time, the scientific community was indeed moved. However, this could not bias the results, contrary to what he maintains, because the efficacy analyzes were presented in all participants, and then by age group, with the same efficacy results. Another criticism, the trials would not have been double-blind: the participants could have known if they were receiving a vaccine or a placebo, thus distorting the results of the study. However, it suffices to read the protocols of Pfizer and Moderna to realize that this was not the case.
Fallacies
The rest is in keeping. The fraud of a laboratory participating in the Pfizer study, which Pierre Chaillot does not fail to recall, is certainly inadmissible. But since then, “real life” analyzes have shown the very high effectiveness of messenger RNA vaccines against severe forms of Covid-19. The statistician criticizes these population studies, carried out in particular in Israel, or in France by the Epi-phare consortium. In both cases, he puts forward the same arguments: lack of independence of the teams, absence of randomization (no study group and control group chosen at random and carrying similar characteristics), use of uncontrolled administrative data , an analysis based on positive tests (while the subjects know whether they are vaccinated or not, which can skew the results), mortality data relating to deaths linked to Covid-19 and not to deaths from all causes .
“The use of these population data is very widespread to study the safety and risks of vaccines and drugs, as was the case for example for Mediator or Depakine. The methodologies used are very classic and perfectly proven. Our studies such as the Israeli work have been published in prestigious scientific journals, such as the New England Journal of MedicineTHE LancetTHE British Medical Journal, Vaccinated, Plos Onewhere the Journal of the American Medical Association. Do you seriously think that so many journals would have accepted these results if the methods or the data had not been relevant?”, answers Mahmoud Zureik, professor of epidemiology at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and director of Epi-lighthouse.
He himself can hardly be accused of being under the thumb of the public authorities, contrary to what Pierre Chaillot asserts: one only has to go back to the epidemiologist’s Twitter feed and his numerous interviews to see that he did not never deprived of criticizing the health policy carried out in France! The statistician, however, does not budge: “The scientific press depends on the goodwill of its funders, the world of finance and pharmaceutical companies”, he still assures the Express.
As for the need to conduct studies on all-cause mortality and not on Covid-related deaths, Pierre Chaillot should be delighted: British researchers have just published this analysis. However, it shows that mortality was higher in the non-vaccinated than in the vaccinated… Which, by the way, proves not only the effectiveness, but also the safety of the vaccines. On this subject, Pierre Chaillot essentially returns to points already discussed and explained over the past two years. With one exception: he maintains that the wave of deaths in the fall of 2020 is linked to the anti-influenza campaign, which would have weakened the elderly population in the face of Covid. A surprising assertion that has never been verified in the scientific literature.
We will end here the list of fallacious arguments deployed by the statistician, at the risk otherwise of boring the reader. Note, however, that the signatory of the preface to the book, the antivax sociologist Laurent Mucchielli, distances himself from one of Pierre Chaillot’s theories: the idea that epidemics are not linked to the spread of viruses between individuals, but ” solely to the structural effect of the climate”. “It shows that it is the weakening of the individual terrain in winter that constitutes the substrate without which there is no epidemic risk for a population. But this is by no means a sufficient reason to conclude that infectious agents do not are not transmitted from individual to individual and that it would be necessary to return, in a way, to the ancient theories of spontaneous generation. If he says so…