On excess deaths and the impact of Covid vaccines (again)

A new paper stirs previously unthinkable headlines... but without real basis

A nothing-burger study with common sense ideas

A new paper appearing in the BMJ — Mostert, et al. — has provided fodder for headlines similar to that appearing at The Telegraph on Tuesday:

telegraph.co.uk

This of course is yet another sign of the modern intellectual handicap which makes impossible a distinction between “claims about facts” and facts themselves (I’ll link again to my comments on the problem in the context of the Claudine Gay fiasco).

In this case the claims are reasonable and plausible, in so far as even one vaccine-induced death can be construed as “helping fuel” overall excess deaths, but I still must bring up immediately that this article, and the repackagings of it which are yet being published by other outlets as of a few minutes ago, exist squarely in the space where simple and common-sense ideas about what might possibly be true are being inflated with the counterfeit currency of “authority” and “study”-doing, to pass off as scientific revelations rather than mere speculation.

Here, the study authors — who The Telegraph’s Knapton officiates as “experts,” “scientists,” and “researchers from The Netherlands” within the first 40 words of the article — have collected publicly available all-ages excess mortality numbers for 2020, 2021, and 2022, and compiled them into their paper with some graphs.

This labor is then followed by a discussion section in which the (simple and common-sense) ideas that lockdown secondary effects and Covid vaccines may have caused deaths are floated, along with the opinion that authorities should make a more serious effort to investigate the latter question, including with autopsies. The authors deem the fact that excess mortality continued throughout 2022 a matter of “serious concerns” — but this is merely a subjective opinion.

But “followed” does not mean “followed from” — in this case the conclusions offered by the authors are not implied by the facts in any overt form. There were excess deaths in 2021 and 2022, when Covid vaccines were used by the millions — is this causation? Nothing in the paper argues the case that it is. In fact, the discussion section treats such an investigation as a “next step” — it isn’t what the paper itself achieves. Rather, the discussion section functions as a stand-alone editorial relying on citations of previously-aired concerns about the under-reporting of adverse events after Covid vaccines.

For my part, I have never supported lockdowns; I think the West would have been better off not paying any attention to the virus, and getting on with life; but I have also argued that the virus is exactly what is primarily responsible for the excess deaths of 2021 and 2022 (including cardiac deaths, even among the young). This disagreement with other Covid vaccine skeptics — I still count myself as one, but I think more time will be needed to see if the vaccines are truly very harmful — does not change my agreement with the critique these authors voice regarding the difficulty of accurately finding out what is really killing people.

But even if I tended to view the Covid vaccines as a bigger driver of these yet opaque statistical anomalies, I would find the pretense that this new paper added any substantial evidence to the question as just too annoyingly dumb.

What the authors write is all reasonable:

Every death needs to be acknowledged and accounted for, irrespective of its origin. Transparency towards potential lethal drivers is warranted. Cause-specific mortality data therefore need to be made available to allow more detailed, direct and robust analyses to determine the underlying contributors. Postmortem examinations need to be facilitated to allot the exact reason for death. Government leaders and policymakers need to thoroughly investigate underlying causes of persistent excess mortality and evaluate their health crisis policies.

But as it does not follow from their own work in this case, this paper has not in any way “discovered” or “raised” the concern that the experimental therapies issued to millions of human Guinea pigs “may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” — it’s just a common sense possibility which follows from the fact that the trials were quickly sabotaged by unblinding to absolute fanfare, and that the question has otherwise been so poorly studied to date.

The case against the Covid vaccines having a big impact

I’ve argued before that excess deaths trends do not convincingly suggest that Covid vaccines have played a big role, especially in younger ages. I will summarize the argument here, and then take a look at how this new study adds to the case.

Background: What should be expected

The new paper by Mostert, et al. is of limited value because it looks at all-ages deaths. The fact that all-ages excess deaths persist in most Western countries in 2021 and 2022 is taken as the primary insight of their analysis, but this isn’t anything of an insight at all: In all countries, large numbers of older people were still experiencing first-time infections with SARS-CoV-2 and dying as a result.

Unless excess deaths greatly exceed Covid deaths, the mere fact of large numbers of elderly Covid deaths makes all-ages excess deaths useless as a tool for estimating whether the Covid vaccines also drove deaths.

Nor does this mere fact support the case that there are “serious concerns” with the fact that excess deaths continued after the Covid vaccines were available, which implies that the authors view the deaths as aberrant in light of the fact that the vaccines were used. One needs to have some model of what number of deaths, relative to 2020, would suggest that the Covid vaccines were futile. The authors do not provide such a model to supply the grounds for their “concerns,” so we will construct one ourselves.

Regarding the elderly, unless older adults are 100% vaccinated by a 100% protective vaccine, it should be expected that excess deaths continue to accumulate after the vaccines are available; and of course these bona-fide “Covid deaths” will be a main driver of all-ages excess mortality (the main driver, unless the vaccines are really incredibly deadly).

This dovetails with a question raised last week by “T Coddington” at I Numero:

Cage Match: Vinay Prasad's "staggering efficacy in adults" vs. Summer 2021 data

This is the question of, if the Covid vaccines are substantially protective against death, how can it be the case that there was a comparable number of Covid deaths and excess deaths in 2021 among the elderly as the year before?

But in fact “comparable number of Covid deaths” is suggestive of protection. Only somewhere between 10 - 20% of surviving seniors had been infected for the first time before May, 2021. After this point, a comparable number of surviving seniors is unvaccinated, and the other 80-90% are vaccinated. If all that happens next is that the vaccine does nothing, it should be expected that 5 to 10 times more Covid deaths are tallied by the time the virus has infected everyone for the first time. As an analogy, if say 10 cars were lined up to be crashed into trees, and after the first 2 cars some useless measure of protection was added, the other 8 cars would still wind up crashed. But this isn’t what happened after May, 2021 in terms of Covid deaths.

What we saw instead is that elderly Covid and excess deaths in late 2021 were comparable to the prior 15 months before May — in other words we could imagine that if a substantially useful measure of protection was added to six of the remaining cars, the final two still crashed — this model would support high protection. Or maybe some of the protected and unprotected crashed in late 2021, and more later in 2022. The point is that in the end, because the cumulative number of crashed cars never reached 8, it does seem like the vaccine did something.

A counter-argument is of course that the reduction in eventual deaths was primarily driven by the emergence of the milder Omicron variants.

This is fine, because in either case it is not being supposed that these protective factors are 100% distributed or 100% effective. The virus is still killing old people in 2021 and 2022. But this isn’t in fact “seriously concerning;” only an overall number of deaths about 5 to 10 times as what occurred before May, 2021 would provide grounds for such a claim.

To repeat the problem this creates for evaluating deaths from Covid vaccines: Because bona fide Covid deaths among the elderly are still a main driver of overall excess deaths, the question of the influence of the vaccine on driving deaths is not going to be revealed by looking at any one cumulative trend of all-ages deaths. If one could know with perfect accuracy the number of overall deaths truly caused by the virus, it would be a simple matter of subtracting this value from excess deaths to produce “excess deaths caused by something besides the virus” — but there is no way to know the precise relation between recorded Covid deaths and actual Covid deaths in every place or every time, if at any (in fact, estimating the contribution of other factors is necessary to gauge this relation).

Thus, one should examine the trends in deaths among younger ages alone, because there are fewer deaths caused directly and indirectly by the virus in this group. As well, one should compare different local trends in younger deaths deaths by vaccine uptake.

Previous insights from younger excess deaths

We may now summarize the argument I have previously made on the topic of younger excess deaths trends, which primarily resides in this post:

American excess mortality does not reflect Covid vaccine harms (yet)

• Many highly-vaccinated countries had death deficits in “working age” adults (15-64 years old) in 2021, using the same resource employed in this new study, the Human Mortality Database.

  • (This study uses all-ages in order to include more countries in one set, but there is a wealth of data available at the HMD).

  • So in other words, in several highly-vaccinated countries, fewer working-age adults died in 2021 (and 2022) than would be expected even without a “pandemic.”

• Countries which did have working-age excess mortality in 2021 were frequently less vaccinated, but (seemingly more importantly) feature high rates of obesity (with hat tip to Ron Unz for identifying this trend, link in the post above).

• This same pattern is reflected when comparing individual states in the US during 2021:

  • Highly-vaccinated and boosted states do not contribute to 2021’s collective US excess working-age mortality.

  • Gains in excess working-age mortality, in those states where those gains take place, follow the states’ Covid case counts.

(Dim, low quality) insights available from this study

Although this study can’t really be useful for detecting a signal for deaths from the Covid vaccines, we can test whether the results are consistent with the trends in younger age groups.

In this case the metric the study furnishes is excess deaths as a percentage of the expected value in each country, so that all values are scaled according to the population of that country (and to an extent, the age of the population).

These are shown in cumulative form in Figure 1:

It is notable that two nations which were isolated but vaccinated in 2021, Australia and New Zealand, are not remarkably different from some more opened-up northern countries in that year (the orange portion of each bar). This is an ambiguous result; in Australia’s case, there are 4,130 excess deaths in 2021, which is comparable in percentage terms (2.5%) to Canada (4.1%) despite the latter corresponding very closely to the 10,500 recorded Covid deaths in the “Alpha wave,” which would mostly have been among the unvaccinated. On the other hand, Australia would seem to have “owed” those 4,130 deaths to return to the expected trend, after a deaths deficit the previous year.

Overall, the island countries including Australia are strong performers before 2022, suggesting no excess deaths from the vaccine roll-out.

Supplemental Table 1 tallies the values which produce these numbers. This allows for simple comparison of percentage excess with vaccination rates — but again, this wouldn’t be especially nuanced data. A preprint from last year (Renton, et al.) already performs this kind of analysis on US states, tracking mortality from July, 2021 through September, 2022: States with high cumulative excess mortality (492.1 per 100,000 among the top 10) had middling vaccination rates before Delta, and states with low excess mortality (94.9) had higher rates. Of course, this doesn’t tell us the effect of pre-existing age and health differences, or the “deaths debt” of the vaccinated simply putting off infections until mid-2022, after which time their states may have had higher persistent excess mortality in accordance with Igor Chudov’s analysis in Europe.

At all events nothing is obviously incriminating about the excess mortality in the new paper. Limiting the results to countries with over 30,000 expected deaths in 2020, and excluding Switzerland due to unavailable vaccine counts:

Raw data at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-hq16mKHVtTiGHEfzaYpyjOyZMUjc_RExav512O9CoQ/edit?usp=sharing

Almost every country in the west hovers near 10% excess deaths in 2022, which has the result of cementing the pattern of deaths from 2021 into the two-year combined rate. That pattern being namely, that plotting deaths by the percentage of adults seemingly unvaccinated at the end of 2021, there were more deaths in countries with more unvaccinated adults. The US might be expected to match this trend poorly due to such heterogeneous health and vaccination rates, but in fact it falls exactly at the “threshold” to the higher 2021 death rates of the Eastern European countries.

As expected, this tells us very little about how many might have died from the Covid vaccines. It merely helps render the results from the current study into a picture of reality.

The takeaway from this doesn’t undercut the commentary in the discussion portion of the same paper: It reinforces that it is really difficult to determine exactly why people are dying (though I still think it is clear that the persistent excess deaths are predominantly driven by the virus). Thus, better investigation is needed before anyone can still retroactively claim that the Covid vaccines were safe; and more time is needed, and with that time some type of change in the statistics of who is dying, before there is anything like a case that they have caused a ton of deaths.

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

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