Budapest is the new Taiwan -- Birth Rate Drop of -22.2%!
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Thanks to my incredible reader “handyman” and Twitter user @overcatbe, I came
across two pieces of data:
- Vaccination Rate in Hungary by county as of July 13, 2021 (archive link)
- Change in Birth Rate in Hungary by
County for Q1 2022 (archive link)
I took my time to prepare a map of Hungary with vaccination data as of
Jul 13, 2021, with birth rate changes overlaid and listed as BLUE (for
declines) or RED (for increases).
Unfortunately, this data is noisy, as it
presents only a single-moment
snapshot of vaccination rates, and they are not super
dissimilar. To make the comparison less noisy, I decided to pick five MOST vaccinated counties,
and five LEAST vaccinated counties. The idea is
to compare changes in birth rates among the most divergent counties,
eliminating some amount of noise, driven by little-different counties.
Before I go further, I have to remind my readers: birth rates are always seasonal! Most parents prefer to make a “spring baby”, which often ends up with
them making a “summer baby” because conception takes more time than expected.
So, never compare adjacent quarters as they are guaranteed to have dramatic
changes that are simply seasonality-driven, with differences very repeatable
over the years. Only compare quarters of one year with same quarters of another
year, please.
My own birth rate comparison compares Q1 of 2022, against Q1 of 2021.
Since they are within-country comparisons, we can be more confident that they
are driven by vaccination rates, as opposed to political, economic, or ethnic
differences. These people are all Hungarians.
So, here are the 5 most vaccinated counties, contrasted with the 5 least
vaccinated counties.
You can see that the five least vaccinated counties experienced only a 4.66%
drop in birth rates between Q1
of 2021 and Q1 of 2022. At the same time, five most vaccinated countries experienced a 15.2%
drop in birth rates! (NOTE:
birth rate decline numbers are averaged without weighing by population. Feel free to weigh them by population)
This is a tremendous 10.5% difference between birth rate outcomes! Put
in other words, the birth
rate decline in most heavily vaccinated Hungarian counties was THREE TIMES
greater than the decline in least-vaccinated counties!
This is an apples-to-apples, Hungarians-to-Hungarians, same time period
comparison! Pretty much the only variable is the extent to which those counties
vaccinated their citizens by July 2021, including young people likely to make
babies. Again, to remind you: the vaccination rates are a snapshot for July 13,
2021. You can add 9 months to July 2021, which gives you April 2022. Thus, you
can see why birth
rates in Q1 2022 changed: because of Covid vaccination.
The result? The more vaccination, the greater the declines in the birth rates.
Q.E.D.
For more interesting news regarding drops in birth rates this year, see
my series:
- Sweden (dramatic steady
decline to -10% this year)
- Taiwan (-23%
decline)
- Germany, North Dakota, UK, and Switzerland. (12-13% declines)
Will Fertility Come Back?
It is becoming fairly apparent that the 2022 fertility drops are the true “black swans” of
demographics, unprecedented in the
breadth of countries involved, very large, extremely statistically significant,
and very worrying.
A big question of the day is: is this a temporary
situation or will the declines be permanent? If they are permanent, it may lead to depopulation of affected
countries!
The answer is UNKNOWN to me and is also unknown to
anyone else. Beware of vaccine
advocates saying “birth rate declines are a temporary no big deal, the vaccine is working
as expected”. Beware of vaccine
skeptics jumping the gun and proclaiming that we will for sure be depopulated.
We genuinely do NOT know, yet. The time has not passed yet, for us to know.
Despite not knowing, we can start worrying right
now.
From other articles, we know that
- Disruptions in female periods after
vaccination seem to be mostly temporary (please correct me if I am
mistaken)
- The decline in sperm quality
seems to be permanent, with a minor rebound around 6 months, and that did
not even consider booster doses
- Further vaccination past July or so was
extremely extensive, including booster vaccination of young fertile people, possibly further damaging their fertility.
Dear readers: do you think that we are dealing with a temporary decline,
or a permanent decline? Please comment and explain your opinion.
