SUMMARY: The baffling pattern of positive association of excess mortality with COVID vaccination rates continued in 2023, contradicting the thesis that “COVID vaccines save lives.” It is statistically significant and is unlikely to have occurred by chance. It continued the patterns seen in 2022.
In 2022, I wrote a series of posts discussing the correlation of excess mortality with vaccination rates. Several comparisons by country, German-Bundesland, and more showed a positive relationship between excess mortality and vaccination (or booster) rates.
That would be impossible if “Covid vaccines saved lives.” The real-world data bafflingly suggests that Covid vaccines increase excess mortality instead of decreasing it.
Back then, I expressed a hope that excess mortality would moderate, a hope based on my wishing the best for all vaccinated people.
It is January 2024. Therefore, we can ask, what happened in 2023?
2023 Update
I found more data and re-analyzed it. There is good and bad news regarding the relationship between excess mortality and vaccination rates.
Let’s take a look.
I found excess mortality for weeks 1-40 of 2023 on the OECD website.
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I pulled total Covid vaccination rates from Our World in Data.
To calculate average mortality from weekly OECD data, I wrote this Perl script to load the CSV data and average it, limiting myself to countries with a full 40 weeks of data.
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Please note that averaging “weekly excess mortality” for weeks 1-40 is not a perfectly correct calculation for the excess mortality in that period (fact checkers, take note!), but it is a very close approximation.
Additionally, I excluded Israel due to the armed conflict that occurred during this period.
Here’s the data:
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Here’s the dot-plot visualization:
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How significant is this association? I used GraphPad linear regression calculator to analyze the numbers:
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It turns out that COVID-19 vaccination rates increase mortality by 25.01%, and the association is highly statistically significant with a P-value of 0.0131, showing that it is unlikely a result of random chance.
Bad News
We were told that “Covid vaccines save lives.” The real-world data, unfortunately, shows the opposite. The pattern seen in previous analyses continues: vaccination rates are associated with increases, not decreases, in total mortality.
Similarities between relationships between vaccination rates and excess mortality in 2023 and 2022 (2022 data discussed here) are striking:
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Good News
I have good news for people tired of negativity: excess mortality during weeks 1-40 of 2023 was somewhat lower than in 2022. Could it be explained by people no longer vaccinating against COVID-19? We cannot be sure of the answer based on the data above, but we cannot dismiss that explanation either.
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Share Your Thoughts!
Your thoughts and predictions on excess mortality will be greatly appreciated, so please comment on this post:
What is the biological reason for such a positive association?
How come Covid vaccinations, which mainly occurred in 2021, still affect excess mortality two years later?
Will this get better or worse?
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