Excess Mortality Still Correlated With COVID Vaccination Rate - Dec 2023 data
Data to be swept under the rug, as usual
December 2023 was unusually but not unexpectedly severe: a new COVID variant, JN.1, swept Europe and the rest of the world. Other pathogens circulated as well, in addition to the usual killers such as cancer, heart disease, blood clots, dementia, and so on. As a result, Europe experienced a month of 10% greater mortality than expected.
What happened in December 2023 allows us to ask: Could vaccination rates affect excess mortality rates a long time after vaccinations? December 2023 was 2.5 years after people received their first doses, so looking at the data for that month could help us answer that question.
Sadly, data from last December shows a strong positive correlation between excess mortality and Covid vaccination rates, despite most first doses given out long ago, 2.5 years before that month.
We were told that COVID-19 vaccines protect us from severe illness and death. Therefore, we are supposed to expect countries that gave their citizens more COVID-19 vaccines to fare better.
Those who still believe such assertions may be surprised: in December 2023, like during many recent periods, more Covid vaccines meant greater excess deaths.
I downloaded excess mortality data from Eurostat and Covid vaccination rates (percentage of citizens who received initial doses of Covid vaccine) from Statista.
Here’s the data:
We can analyze this dataset with a “linear regression calculator” to see if the data shows a trend:
Surprisingly, the analysis shows that COVID vaccination rates explain 24% of excess mortality, despite vaccinations happening in the distant past! Not only is there a trend, but it is also highly statistically significant, with a p-value as low as 0.0057.
The December results are similar to the pattern for the entire past year, which suggests that they are not spurious but reflect a real phenomenon.
Relationship for the whole year of 2023, from the above post, is here:
My desire is for mortality to return to normal and for all people, regardless of vaccination status, to enjoy a low rate of death and serious illness. Sadly, what we have instead is elevated rates of death and Covid vaccines still affecting the unwitting recipients’ changes of negative outcomes.
This excess mortality is not investigated. The people asking why citizens of their countries are dying at elevated rates are demonized and dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
The real culprit, we are told, is climate change:
Why would COVID vaccination rates explain excess mortality if climate change were the culprit? Please help me answer this question!
Should we stop asking for explanations? Is speaking the truth dangerous to our democracy? Should we all shut up?
Let us know what you think!
I would like to know how climate change is driving food insecurity. According to NASA satellite survey total vegetation on earth has increased about 20% since 1984. Surely this increases rather than decreases food security?
Climate change is far from catastrophe. In fact it will make the world a better place for humans to live. The ideal CO2 level for plant growth, and therefore food security for all life on earth, is 800ppm. We are a long way from that. Trying to reduce carbon levels is not only a total waste of capital, but if successful will reduce earth's ability to sustain the abundance of life on our world.
Unfortunately there are big flaws in Igor's analysis (https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/excess-mortality-still-correlated). Igor's analysis makes the implicit assumption that the trend line through the scatter plot would have a slope of zero if there were no difference in vaccination rates. Suspecting that might not be true, I did an experiment using the same data source, as follows:
If I start with Igor's assumption that in the absence of vaccination rate disparity, the slope of the trend line would be zero, that assumption implies that in such a case, it would not matter how I order the countries to make the scatter plot, because I would get a trend line with a slope of zero no matter how I arranged the order in the horizontal scatter. Since the order would not matter, it would be valid to go back to a time when the mRNA vaccination rates in all countries in the scatter plot were zero, and keep the same order as Igor used in the December-2023-ordered plot he did.
First I downloaded the data set, and verified that I got the same scatter plot he did for December, 2023, ordered by December, 2023 vaccination rates. I do indeed get the same plot he did:
https://stopgrinding.com/images/December2023EuropeanExcessMortalityDataOrderedByVaccinationRatesOfDecember2023.png
Now I replace the December 2023 data in the above chart with April 2020 data (when no one had an mRNA vaccine), and I get this chart:
https://stopgrinding.com/images/April2020EuropeanExcessMortalityDataOrderedByVaccinationRatesOfDecember2023.png
Note that the trend line in the above chart is even steeper than the trend line in the post-vaccination chart. The countries (horizontal axis) are in the same order. If I then assume that the second chart is the true reference for zero-vaccination bias, then the first chart, which has a less steep trend line, would actually be an indication that vaccination decreases overall mortality rather than increasing it. I am not making that argument, but rather I am using this to demonstrate that Igor's assumption the trend line "should be flat" is false, because there are so many different variables that go into how each country defines "excess deaths", and so many variables in the differences between healthcare in different countries, that the fact that Igor got a trend line with the slope he got cannot be used to infer anything whatsoever about vaccination rate's effect on excess deaths.
--Lee