‘Smaller, older, sicker’ read the headline in last week’s Guardian responding to the Australian government’s 2022 Population statement. It shows an increase in mortality since the roll-out of the Covid vaccines in 2021 has lifted death rates to historic highs and caused a fall in life expectancy.

The impact hasn’t been as ‘large’ as in many developed countries, the authors claim. The normally phlegmatic BBC sums up the situation with the alarming headline, ‘Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years’, nine per cent higher than in 2019. Yet the most recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics puts excess deaths to the end of September 2022 at 16 per cent more than the historical average. And the situation is getting worse. Covid hospitalisations and deaths in NSW tripled in December compared with November.

In fact, excess mortality is shockingly high in a range of highly vaccinated countries including the US, Canada, New Zealand and Europe. Germany had excess mortality of 37 per cent in the penultimate week of 2022. Excess mortality in Chile and Finland reached 17 per cent this year.

The pandemic also reduced fertility rates in Australia which fell to 1.59 babies per woman in 2020. They recovered to 1.7 in 2021, although rates are projected to fall to 1.66 in 2021-22 and to 1.62 by 2030-31.

The situation appears to be worse in other highly vaccinated countries. In the UK, the most recent data from June 2022 showed a 15 per cent decline in live births compared with a year earlier. California’s live births dropped 5 per cent in November compared with the previous year, Germany had a 9.5 per cent decline in births in September compared with a year earlier, while Sweden’s birthrate was down 13 per cent in October compared with 12 months earlier.

Yet the response to rising death rates and falling birth rates has been muted to say the least, when it has been noted at all. In the case of Guardian readers perhaps it reflects the view of Robin Maynard, executive director of Population Matters, who wrote in a letter published last week that ‘population growth is a key driver of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss’. Indeed, ‘it’s not just our climate that’s breaking down catastrophically’ he writes, ‘ but nature wholesale’. It’s an ongoing theme in the Guardian which reported in December that the biodiversity ‘collapse’ is a ‘crisis humanity can no longer ignore’ and gloomily concluded that ‘curbing population growth will do little to solve the climate crisis’. Why? Because ‘global heating is the fault of the overconsumption of the richest billion people on Earth’. Another miserable Malthusian wrote that, ‘It is clear that the planet can’t even sustain one billion of our environment-devouring western lifestyles’.

Apocalyptic predictions about population growth are nothing new. In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, researcher Anne Howland Ehrlich, predicted worldwide famine caused by overpopulation, in their book, The Population Bomb. In response to this catastrophe the Ehrlichs suggested adding ‘temporary sterilants’ to the food or water supply, although they rejected this as impractical. They also proposed incentives for the permanent sterilisation of men, and the promotion of sex selection and abortion because families might have fewer children if they could kill female foetuses, as well as the creation of a US Department of the Population and the Environment with the power to do whatever was necessary to reduce the population to protect the environment.

The Population Bomb was hugely influential. In the 1970s, the World Bank financed a population control program in India run by Sweden. During India’s 1975 emergency, Sanjay Gandhi, son of former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi conducted a campaign of forced sterilisation.

David Rockefeller Sr, head of the Chase Manhattan bank and scion of the Rockefeller family that made its fortune from Standard Oil was one of many American magnates that feared population growth. He told the Business Council for the United Nations in September 1994 that the fall in infant mortality and the increase in life expectancy meant global population could easily exceed eight billion by 2020 and, ‘The negative impact of population on all of our planetary ecosystems are becoming appalling evident’.

Rockefeller was a great fan of China, which began imposing a ‘one-child’ policy in the 1970s that became universal in 1980. He wrote in the New York Times in 1973 that, ‘The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.’

A quarter of a century later in May 2009, the UK’s Sunday Times and the Guardian reported that some of the world’s richest philanthropists – who refer to themselves as ‘The Good Club’ – had secretly met to discuss how they could use their wealth to curb population growth. The meeting was convened at the initiative of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Rockefeller. Those invited included George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. It was held at the residence of the president of Rockefeller University, Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel laureate who was jointly awarded the prize in physiology or medicine in 2001 for discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle. Nurse went on to be the first chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute, named after the discoverer of DNA who was also an advocate of sterilising ‘poorly endowed’ people by bribing them.

What did they discuss? Reportedly, population control. Gates outlined a plan to cap global population at 8.3 billion because anymore than this posed a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat. The Times reported the threat as ‘so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,’ ‘independent of government agencies,’ which would be ‘unable to head off the disaster we all see looming’.

When the Times reporter asked why the meeting was so secret, the reply was the billionaires wanted to speak ‘rich to rich’ without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, ‘painting them as an alternative world government’. Good luck with that.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that ‘those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience’.

Is the sudden rise in deaths and decline in births after the administration of a genetic injection just a conspiracy theory, or a coincidence? Perhaps someone should ask the Good Club.