News Round-Up: Children's Mental Health Crisis, the Causes of High Excess Mortality and Pulling the Plug on EVs

Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.

Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:

• The aftermath of Covid: children's mental health crisis.

• Covid vaccines and excess deaths.

• Carmakers pull the plug on EV production.

• Research: the Wuhan laboratory could have been a source of the polio virus in children.

• London: men taking over a women's football team.

Aftermath of Covid: children's mental health crisis

In the UK, more than 500 children a day are referred for mental health treatment. This is more than double the number before the Covid pandemic. According to official figures, there were more than 200,000 new anxiety patients aged 17 and under in the country between 2023 and 2024, writes The Guardian. Just over 98,000 children needed help for anxiety before the Covid pandemic in 2019-2020, and fewer than 4,000 in 2016-2017. Currently, one child every three minutes is referred for mental health treatment in the UK, or 4,000 children a week.

The UK data does not address the causes of anxiety, but experts cite intensifying academic pressures, particularly related to exams, the powerful influence of social media and cyberbullying, growing pressures around appearance, widening inequalities, rising poverty levels and the cost of living crisis. The measures used during the Covid pandemic exacerbated all these causes and fuelled a sense of isolation, and now children have huge fears for the future. The constant propagation of a coming climate catastrophe is surely not helping as well.

The situation with children who need mental health treatment is so bad after the Covid pandemic that it is justly seen as a crisis now. Photo: María Prieto/Pixabay.

The trend is seen as a mental health crisis for children by UK health officials and doctors. Queues for treatment have become extremely long and many are unable to get help in time. It is feared that many cases go undiagnosed and only a small proportion of those in need receive treatment.

Many other countries have also reported a growing feeling of anxiety among children. In the US, for example, it has been observed that children feel twice as anxious after the pandemic. The same has been found in Asia, where immense isolation and economic hardships for the families, caused by the Covid measures, are thought to be the cause. A review of European countries has been carried out by UNICEF and it also found that mental health problems among young Europeans have increased in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Covid vaccines and excess deaths

A recently published research study looked at excess mortality data in Europe, which shows that high death rates are set to continue into 2024. Mortality rates are higher in countries with higher levels of vaccination against the coronavirus.

Sydney University lecturer Dr Raphael Lataster looked at the correlation of excess mortality with Covid vaccines and compared vaccination data from 31 European countries with excess mortality data from March 2023 to January 2024. The data showed a positive correlation between vaccination levels and excess mortality, in other words, the higher the vaccination level in a country, the higher the excess mortality. The correlation varied from weak to medium but was almost always statistically significant. A slightly higher correlation was observed between the doses of Covid vaccines administered and excess mortality, i.e. the more additional doses of vaccine injected, the higher the excess mortality. At the same time, in the period covered by the Lataster study, excess mortality was not a problem in the least vaccinated countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania.

The graph shows the excess mortality in the EU countries in December 2023 compared to the 2016-2019 average. Figure: Eurostat, Daily Sceptic.

Dr Lataster argues that while correlation does not prove causation, it does not express a lack of causation either. In an effort to identify the causes of worsening excess mortality, such a correlation should provide a sufficient basis to further investigate the role of Covid vaccines and other measures that were used during the Covid crisis. For example, Mostert et al. have found in their study of 47 Western countries that the excess mortality was high in most of them for three consecutive years: 41 countries in 2020 (87%), 42 in 2021 (89%) and 43 in 2022 (91%). This is despite the fact that all methods, from lockdown policies to vaccination, were used to fight the virus.

Dr Lataster's paper is actually only the latest to take a similar angle on Covid-19 vaccines and excess mortality. Several previous research papers have reached a similar conclusion. For example, previous studies on excess mortality have looked at excess mortality in Japan and Germany, where higher mortality was observed in 2021 and 2022, when Covid vaccines were already on the market. A correlation between excess mortality and Covid vaccines was also shown by Norwegian researchers here and here.

Carmakers pull the plug on EV production

The market for electric vehicles (EVs) in Europe has been artificially kept afloat by public subsidies. However, the end of subsidies has led to a sharp drop in interest. Compared to last year, sales of EVs in Europe fell by a tenth this July. This was particularly affected by a 37% drop in Germany, the largest market, Bloomberg reports.

The direct reason for this is the high price of electric cars, which has been offset by public subsidies. In Germany, for example, taxpayers have been subsidising the purchase of electric cars to the tune of €10 billion since 2016, but this was no longer in the budget this year. This means that countries have tried to drive innovation and create demand by distorting the market and using 'top-down' methods. This also includes the decision at the European Union level to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars in ten years' time. But the other side of the coin with such programmes is the usual course of subsidised solutions - without subsidies, the demand goes quickly into decline. In other words, once the subsidies are dropped, the market dies down.

This is why European car manufacturers have had to react to the situation. This week, Volvo announced that it is abandoning its plan to sell only electric cars by 2030. However, the carmaker, owned by the Chinese company Geely, still expects 90% of its cars sold in 2030 to be plug-in hybrids and EVs. German carmaker Volkswagen, on the other hand, is talking about the possibility of closing factories in its home country of Germany, which would put 25,000 people out of work. Alongside rising costs, the cuts are justified by weak demand for EVs.

Volvo announced that it is walking back the promise to be all electric in 2030. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Mercedes-Benz, another flagship of the German automotive industry, also had plans to produce only EVs by 2030, but announced their abandonment in May.

In fact, the problem of weak demand for EVs is not something unique to European carmakers. For example, US carmaker Ford announced in January this year that it lost $65,000 (€60,450) for every EV sold in 2023. The carmaker also cut its investment in EV production by $12 billion (€11.16 billion) and put on hold a $3.5 billion (€3.26 billion) investment in a battery plant in Michigan, USA. General Motors, on the other hand, abandoned its target of selling 400,000 electric cars this year.

Sales of second-hand EVs are also a concern. For example, in January this year, Euractiv wrote that car dealers said it was difficult to say whether there was such a thing as an aftermarket for EVs. The majority of European drivers who buy a second-hand car prefer an internal combustion engine. In Germany, second-hand EVs account for only 1.58% and in Italy and Spain for less than 1% of the sales. Again, the reason for the lack of interest is that they are too expensive.

Research: the Wuhan laboratory could have been a source of the polio virus in children

French researchers have concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was the source of the coronavirus that triggered the global crisis in 2020, can also be linked to at least one previous outbreak, namely polio in China in 2014. Researchers from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, have recently published a study which found that the polio strain that infected a four-year-old boy in Anhui province, China, in the middle of an outbreak in 2014, was 99% identical to a strain of the virus variant that was stored at the same time at the Wuhan Virology Institute, a few hundred kilometres away. The researchers did not say in their paper that they could say with certainty where the strain originated but noted that the possibility that it originated from the Wuhan laboratory needed to be investigated.

“The findings underscore the shocking unsafe state of global virology research,” Harvard-trained molecular biologist Dr Richard Ebright, who was not involved with the research, told The Daily Mail.

French researchers have concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was the source of the coronavirus that triggered the global crisis in 2020, can also be linked to a polio outbreak in China in 2014 Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Pasteur researchers suspect that WIV14 polio, so named by the Wuhan scientists who first catalogued the strain, likely evolved from a well-preserved, 1950s strain of the virus used — almost exclusively — in vaccine production and laboratory settings.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology became notorious after the outbreak of Covid in Wuhan, China, which triggered a worldwide crisis in 2020. Although from the outset many experts thought that the virus outbreak might have originated in the Wuhan laboratory, which had been working on coronaviruses, several reputable scientists around the world tried to ridicule this possibility and pointed to the Wuhan market as the origin of the outbreak. However, it has since emerged that most of these scientists who sought to deflect attention away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had links to the Institute themselves.

It has also emerged that the gain of function research of coronaviruses that was carried out in Wuhan was funded by the United States. Specifically, it was done through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci at the time. We have written more about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its links to the coronavirus and the start of the pandemic here.

London: men taking over a women's football team

The women's team at London-based football club Sutton United recently took on Lucy Clark, a man who calls himself a woman, as their new head coach. Now the man has set about reshaping the women's team by recruiting other men who call themselves women to play for them. Recently the club signed a new goalkeeper Blair Hamilton, who is a biological male. Coach Clark has also said in the past that he would like to create a women's team made up exclusively of transgender men who identify as women. He has been called both the first transgender referee and now the first transgender coach.

However, the recruitment of a man in the team's goalkeeping immediately led to a setback. Sutton United had to pull out against Ebbsfleet United, apparently as a result. Clark sent an email to the opposing team just hours before the game saying that unfortunately, his team would not be able to get the players together this time. Although he gave no further explanation, it can be understood that the problem arose with Hamilton's participation, which the rest of the team was not happy about. However, representatives of Sutton's team announced some time later that both the transgender coach and the newly signed man to play for the women's team have the full support of the team and the club.

Such problems in English women's football leagues are unfortunately becoming commonplace. For example, in November last year, four women's teams in the Sheffield league boycotted matches in which the opposing team had a 'transgender' player, i.e. a man who identified himself as a woman. As well as being unfair, male participation in women's sports, such as football, is also dangerous for women because physically stronger men can and have been known to cause extremely serious injuries to women.