Actually, I see that Channel 4 have recently published a 'fact check' on the 120,000 deaths and similar studies;
"The report’s authors, academics at University College London, compared trends in mortality in the years before the Conservatives took office in 2010 with the years after.They found that in the 2000s, death rates were falling while in the first three years of the 2010s, they increased."
"Is austerity to blame?"
"As FactCheck and Full Fact have reported before, this study’s findings should be handled with care."
"The researchers concluded: “we have found that spending constraints since 2010 especially [public expenditure on social care] may have produced a substantial mortality gap in England.”
"But other scientists have raised doubts."
"Professor Martin Roland, who specialises in health services research at the University of Cambridge, responded to the paper at the time."
"He pointed out that while something seems to have happened in 2014 that caused deaths in the UK to rise, “the link to health and social care spending is speculative as observational studies of this type can never prove case and effect.”
"Dr Richard Fordham, senior lecturer in health economics at the University of East Anglia, was also cautious about such “longitudinal studies,” noting that “different time periods are rarely identical.”
"So it may not be fair to compare trends from one decade (the 2000s) with another (the early 2010s), as this study has done."
"In other words, the paper does not prove that austerity caused the 120,000 “excess deaths” that the authors estimate may have occurred between 2010 and 2017 (based on three years’ worth of data)."
"In 2019 another study, this time from left-leaning think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, estimated there were 130,000 deaths in England between 2012 and 2017 that could have been prevented."
"Unlike the UCL researchers, the IPPR don’t attribute the figure directly to austerity (although some outlets reported it as such)."
"However, the authors note that “prevention services and public health has been severely impacted” by the policy."
"But again, this is not the same as proving cause and effect—and the IPPR authors don’t claim to have done so."
"Jeremy Corbyn shared a claim from a left-wing commentator that “Austerity was […] paid for with people’s lives, 120,000 people.”
"But the study is limited by a number of factors.The “120,000” figure comes from data covering 2012 to 2014 which was then extrapolated to cover 2010 to 2017."
"More importantly, it does not prove that austerity policies actually caused the recorded and estimated extra deaths."
"Ultimately, we cannot say—based on the evidence in this study—that austerity policies caused 120,000 extra deaths."
www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-did-austerity-kill-120000-people