The physicist Denis Rancourt, who says he worked at the University of Ottawa for 23 years and is now involved with the research organization “Correlaton Research in the Public Interest,” describes his work as broad-based research on topics of societal relevance. He cites fields including geopolitics, environmental issues, and health, and points to extensive publications, among them a 2019 geopolitical analysis of the development of geoeconomics and globalization since the Second World War. Since 2020, he says, he has worked intensively on the COVID era, initially by reviewing the scientific literature on the effectiveness of masks in the general population; he claims that reliable clinical comparative studies showed no benefit, after which a review he wrote sparked controversy and led to his contribution being barred on ResearchGate.
Rancourt describes the analysis of all-cause mortality as a central tool for assessing the situation, because it is independent of test errors and political bias in assigning causes of death and has been recorded in state systems for more than 100 years under fixed rules. He says that in the data he examined there was no “detectable” rise in mortality until the pandemic was declared; the first major peak then appeared synchronously worldwide in certain regions, especially where treatment in hospitals and care homes was aggressive, such as in New York and Northern Italy. For Germany, he claims there was “zero detectable” excess mortality compared with surrounding countries because certain protocols were not implemented there; overall, he argues this points to a politically driven process rather than a pattern consistent with spread models. He reports analyses with high temporal and spatial resolution down to county level and individual hospital locations, refers to more than 30 reports, and puts the global number of additional deaths in the first three years at 31 million, which he says were largely triggered by societal and medical responses, isolation, and stress, mostly among older people.
Rancourt describes biological stress as a scientifically defined primary factor that, through fear, immobilization, social isolation, and the restriction of normal contact, could promote fatal outcomes in vulnerable people; at the same time, he emphasizes that infections are real and points to phenomena such as aspiration pneumonia and changes in microbiomes. To explain social dynamics, he cites dominance hierarchies in social animal species, which he says are stabilized through ongoing aggression and, via access to resources, also create a “gradient” in food quality; as an example he points to the US obesity epidemic driven by cheap, high-sugar and high-fat but nutrient-poor food. He also outlines a theoretical model by Joseph Hickey and his supervisor that describes societies with two parameters: authoritarianism (the chance of winning conflicts against higher-status individuals) and violence (the severity of punishment for losing), with a rapid shift beyond certain limits toward a highly authoritarian order with few elites and many “serfs.” As a consequence of the COVID period, he cites persistently elevated mortality among younger people due to addiction, especially to opioids and alcohol, which he says increased during isolation.