Overall Mortality for Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Respectively

That's what we want to know, isn't it? So that we can see if the vaccines have saved lives or not, when considering not only the risk from the disease, COVID-19, but also the rare side effects of the vaccines.

However, there is no institute or agency that publishes this data that I've found. At least not directly. But here is my brave attempt at compiling this data myself, from statistics that are available. I will discuss uncertainties etc. below, as I narrate how I did my compilation, but this is the end result:

(A person here counts as "vaccinated" if they have had at least one injection. Most of those have also had two or three injections.)

This looks pretty good! Clearly, the vaccines have saved lives, especially in the 80+ group. But if we zoom in on the lower age groups, which are maybe a bit too small to see in the above graph, it actually looks like this:

Here, we see that the mortality is actually slightly higher among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated in the age group 10-39!... Now, the death numbers in this group are very low so it's likely this small difference is not significant, and the data is also preliminary. Therefore, this result may very well change when the numbers are finalized. Then again, if this does turn out to be the case, it is, of course, a huge scandal.

This is the data table:

About the data

There are uncertainties in the above data. Mostly so because even though there is rather good (if also preliminary) data for the number of deaths, and the health care knows exactly how many vaccination doses they have given, it turned out to be hard to find exactly how many unvaccinated people there were!... The number of unvaccinated is the population size minus the number of vaccinated, but population data is apparently just an estimate.

But here, let me explain what I did, before presenting my conclusions below:

As I said, I wanted to know the overall, i.e. all-cause, mortality for vaccinated and unvaccinated respectively. This would give a robust measure of whether or not the vaccines have saved lives, and if so roughly how many, independent of differing definitions of what constitutes a "covid death" and other vagaries. Since both a death count and a vaccination count are so robust and straightforward, this also minimizes the risk of any human bias in collecting the data.

I chose England for my analysis, because someone tipped me off that their Office for National Statistics, ONS, publishes data over death numbers by vaccination status. They do so in a table looking like this:

That is the tab "Table 12" from the Excel file that can be downloaded here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland?fbclid=IwAR3NI_xGROkmMEcyW48zKRffmVR2WNFJAxKcEsJhnkQBut9gSTAzh0q3GJs 

by clicking "Deaths occurring between 1 January and 31 December 2021 edition of this dataset".

Now, to find and compare the mortalities for the different groups, I needed to know how many people were in each group, vaccinated and unvaccinated respectively. I found such data by clicking "Download" here, on (the beautiful) date 2022-02-20:

That's the bottom graph on this UK Government page on COVID-19:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaType=nation&areaName=England

(You have to choose "England" at the top of the page for this graph to appear.)

I downloaded the data in JSON format, and then converted it into an Excel file with some online converter, probably this one: https://www.convertcsv.com/json-to-csv.htm 

I noticed that this gave me the number of vaccinations given each day, plus the cumulative value on that day, and also the population size in each age group on that day. But when working with the data, I soon noticed that the population was exactly the same for every day of the year, in each age group. This obviously wasn't right, since every day people have birthdays, thus moving in and out of the age groups... As you can maybe see in the image above, they say: "For English areas, the denominator is the number of people aged 12 and over on the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS) database." Why this is the same every day, I don't know. But anyway, if the UK Government felt it was good enough for them, I decided it was good enough for me!

But now, I encountered my first real problem. I had only the total death number for each group for the whole year, but people switched from unvaccinated to vaccinated during the year! Nicely illustrated in this BBC image:

So how could I know how many were in each group at the time of death? I.e. the denominator for the mortality.

I never found a complete solution to this problem. But unless I'm thinking wrong somehow, this is the effect I believe it will have:

If death numbers were evenly distributed over the whole year, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I just calculate the average size of each group over the year, and divide the death number in that group with that number.

However, deaths in our northern countries tend to congregate around the winter months, especially in the higher age groups. Therefore, for those groups that got vaccinated right by the end of winter, the mortality would be underestimated for the vaccinated, as they would have an unproportionally large share of summer months in the year in question. For those groups that got vaccinated just before the next winter, mortality would be overestimated for the vaccinated, as they would have an unproportionally large share of winter months in the year, and for those who got vaccinated in the middle of the summer, the mortality would be about right, as they would have the correct winter to summer months ratio. The error would also be small in the lower age groups, as their few deaths tend to be rather evenly distributed over the year.

Thus, I calculated the average size of the different groups over the year, by age and vaccination status, and used this as the denominator for the mortality. I.e. the number 166 for example, for unvaccinated 40-49 year-olds, means the whole-year mortality for unvaccinated 40-49 year-olds was 166 deaths per 100,000 (N.B. per 100,000 unvaccinated, not per 100,000 in the whole group of 40-49 year-olds).

The second problem that I wasn't really able to solve was the lowest age group. For one thing, ONS lumps together a very large group there! 10-39, to compare with all the other groups which have only 10 years in each group. It would be interesting to know the benefits for 10-19 year-olds and for 20-29 year-olds separately, but we don't have this data. For the other thing, the vaccine uptake data - and therefore the population size data - starts with the age group 12-15 year-olds... Thus, I am comparing the deaths for the group 10-39 year-olds with the population size of 12-39 year-olds. If, again, I'm not mistaken, this means that the mortality would be overestimated among the unvaccinated in this age group... because all the people aged 10-11 would be unvaccinated. Therefore, the real denominator for the unvaccinated group is bigger than in my calculations, which would give a smaller real mortality. On the other hand, the real denominator for the vaccinated group would be the same as the one I've used - including 10-11 year-olds wouldn't make a difference to the number of vaccinated.

I did find another ONS estimate of the population size of the 10-39 year-old group, here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/populationestimatesforukenglandandwalesscotlandandnorthernireland 

That is the mid-2020 estimate, they say. But if I sum up the groups from 10 to 39 there, I get 21,358,326, which is smaller than the value 23,691,079 I got from the UK Government graph on vaccine uptake!... How can the population be 10% smaller, when I include 5% more ages? Has the population really grown that much since mid-2020, to whenever the NIMS took their data from?

I decided, in any case, to stick with the NIMS data given by the gov.uk page on vaccine uptake. But I did check, and even using the smaller denominator of the ONS mid-2020 data, the mortality is still slightly lower in the unvaccinated group than in the vaccinated group for this age group; 29 per 100,000 instead of 28 per 100,000 for unvaccinated, to be compared with 30 per 100,000 in the vaccinated group. However, as stated above, the real denominator should reasonably be larger than the NIMS data, not smaller, as the NIMS data is for the age group 12-39, not 10-39 as it should be.

Finally, we can note that the vaccination coverage in the very lowest age groups is only around 60%. It is reasonable to assume that the vaccine coverage is higher in the high-risk groups within this age group, than in the age group at large. This would give a higher mortality for the vaccinated, without indicating that the vaccines are at fault, as the high-risk individuals would have had a higher mortality in any case.

Conclusions

Let me repeat the images again, so that we have them at hand:

The  data indicates that the COVID-19 vaccines have indeed saved lives. Mortality in England in 2021 was 30 - 60% lower in the vaccinated groups than in the unvaccinated groups for ages 40 and above, with a bigger difference the higher the age.

This made a huge difference in the higher age groups, where mortality was high. In the 40-49 group, on the other hand, the mortality was very low in both groups. (You hardly see them in the first graph.) The 30% relative reduction in this group therefore corresponds to an only 0.04 percentage units of absolute reduction. (From 166/100,000 to 122/100,000, i.e. from 0.166% to 0.122% = 0.044 percentage units.)

However, in the large group of 10-39 year-olds, the data indicates that the vaccines may have taken more lives than they have saved - mortality was 9% higher among vaccinated. It is worth noting that this is based on "only" 6,831 deaths, of which 4,181 among the unvaccinated and 2,650 among the vaccinated. The difference may therefore not even be significant, in which case the only correct conclusion we can draw is that it doesn't matter to mortality if you are vaccinated or not, in this age group.

An analysis of the error sources in this group, however, gives at hand that the final number might be even more to the disadvantage of the vaccines than the above. This is primarily because the death numbers were given for the age group 10-39, but the population number was given for the age group 12-39. Since none of the 10-11 year-olds would be vaccinated, all in this age group would be in the unvaccinated population, thus lowering the mortality (deaths per 100,000) for the unvaccinated group even further. However, it might also be the other way around, that the vaccines have greater advantages in this group than this data has shown, as the higher mortality among the vaccinated may be caused by more high-risk individuals in this group.

In any case, it is unlikely that we will ever find any large positive effect of vaccinating the younger age groups, except maybe for the high-risk individuals. This because the risk from the disease COVID-19 in this age group, as the mortalities above confirm, is very near 0, and thus can't very well be lowered much further.

Final words

In this analysis, I have only differed between "vaccinated" and "unvaccinated", where "vaccinated" includes anyone who has had at least one injection of COVID-19 vaccine. Even though the majority of those who have had at least one injection have also had two or three injections, the result might be different if we compare the mortalities for the groups with more than one injection. This could go in either direction, as the protection against COVID-19 would increase with more injections, but so would likely also the risk of side-effects, including death.

ONS also has data over people who died within 21 days of an injection. Also this data might reveal results that differ from the above, but I have not looked into that at this point.

Comments and inputs are most welcome! I'll also be happy to send you my Excel files where I've made my calculations, on request.

If You Could Have Cancelled Hitler

“If you could have cancelled Hitler, and thus stopped his lies from inciting the hatred that lead to the Holocaust, wouldn’t you?”

 

This was a question that was asked in my Facebook group a while ago.

I think it’s wrongly asked. Because that’s not a realistic scenario!

 

Who is more likely to cancel others with the “wrong opinion”, Hitler or a non-Hitler? If Hitler could have cancelled everybody who didn’t share his views, wouldn’t he? Didn’t he? Didn’t he put political dissidents in those death camps?

 

“Yeah, but that’s not a problem if you only cancel things that are false!”, you may say. “Because true or false is not a matter of opinion, it’s objective.”

 

Is it, really? Don’t you think Hitler actually believed in his alternative world-view, in which the Arian race sprung from some forgotten deities, and the Jews were the root of all evil? When he cancelled all Jewish scientists and put his own Arian scientists there instead, who said, for instance, that the sun was made of ice, don’t you think he truly believed he got better science that way? He marched his army into Russia wearing summer uniforms in winter, because his Arian scientists had told him it would be such an extraordinarily mild winter in Russia that year!... Surely, he didn’t do this because he was longing for the utter humiliation that followed, when his soldiers froze to death? Surely, he believed that what his Arian scientists had told him was the truth!

 

So if somebody can be so thoroughly convinced that something that is actually false is true, whom can we trust to decide what is ok to cancel and what is not ok to cancel? Hitler would surely have cancelled all modern talk about “all people being equal” for instance, because according to him, that would be “false”. So would the statement “homosexuals are not a threat, and deserve to live a life in peace like everybody else” be.

 

 

Mark Zuckerberg is not a political leader, like Adolf Hitler was. Many people point this out when we talk about Freedom of Speech, that it only applies to governments. And it is true that the way that that human rights clause has often been incorporated in national laws, it mostly limits how government can stop anybody from speaking freely. However, back when those laws were written, and the Internet didn’t even exist, what was the greatest power of any nation? Probably the government. And what is now the greatest power? Facebook has nearly 3 billion unique monthly users. That’s more than one third of the population of the world… just saying. Now, Zuckerberg uses this, what used to be only a technical platform where people from all over the world could discuss whatever they wanted with each other, as his own gigantic propaganda machine for what he regards as true!...

 

Mark Zuckerberg happens to believe that Global Warming is a really dangerous thing, and that vaccines are the only way to stop COVID-19. So he cancels anybody who says differently. Anybody who even criticizes those two “truths” just a little bit, is cancelled on different levels. Posts are down-rated, attached with “additional information”, deleted, blocked from even being posted, sometimes leading to the user who posted them being suspended from Facebook and entire groups being deleted. One group that was deleted was “COVID19VACCINE VICTIMS AND FAMILIES” – a group where people who felt they had had side-effects of the vaccines could meet and share their own personal experiences.

 

And when I was trying to find the name of that group for this blog post, this was the result I got on Google:

 

All about how “false claims” and “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines are circulating on Facebook, and at the very top, a paid ad from the WHO with the “correct” information about the said vaccines.

 

And this is the result I got seconds later, on DuckDuckGo:

 

All the 3 first hits were related to exactly the piece of news I was looking for. Nobody believes that this is because DuckDuckGo is more competent at finding relevant information than Google is…

 

A prominent scientist, Dr. Judy Mikovits, famous for her groundbreaking achievements within the treatment of HIV/AIDS, gave an interview talking about COVID-19 and also about how she had already been going through a “judicial murder” for a discovery that she felt she had made years ago and which wasn’t popular. I found the video interview interesting and posted it on Facebook. It was deemed “Featuring unsupported and inaccurate information”. I read the fact-checkers’ comments, and found that the fourth claim that they “debunked” was when Dr. Mikovits said she was not anti-vaccine!... She said that her job is to work within immune therapy, and vaccines are a type of immune therapy, so she’s definitely not anti-vaccine. But the fact-checkers said that the type of immunotherapy that Dr Mikovits works within is different from the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines that “anti-vaccine movements” are usually against… as if wanting to say that she actually IS anti-vaccine after all, or at least could be, despite her own statement to the contrary!... As if it’s not entirely up to her to declare if she is “anti-vaccine” or not! How can this be called “fact-check”?

 

Many of their other “debunks”, at least those that actually concern COVID-19, admit that there is a debate about the issue where Dr. Mikovits is giving her view, but that “most experts” or “the consensus” have a different view from hers. Something she, of course, never denied.

 

But isn’t this the kind of discussion we could have on equal terms? Dr Mikovits could give her views, Zuckerberg and his mates could give theirs, and everybody would get wiser in the process! Is it sound that Zuckerberg’s mates instead be given the status of “Bringers of The Truth”, while an expert within immunotherapy, with many years of experience on the highest level, be down-rated, deleted and banned for voicing an educated minority opinion? Because surely, if this is how little it takes for a claim to be labeled “false” or “misleading”, is there anybody in the world who can manage to actually give a completely “accurate” or “true” interview?... Can’t ANY statement that one person utters be deemed “misleading” by another, simply because it doesn’t lead to what that person feels we should focus on and talk about?

 

And isn’t this discussion about where facts and observations should lead us, exactly what Freedom of Speech is for? Isn’t this kind of public debate, on equal terms, what has long been held as the safest and most effective way to produce the best decisions, and isn’t that precisely why it is considered so crucial to our societies that most nations have chosen to protect it in their constitutions?

 

 

Hitler and his mates were clearly wrong about the Russian winter. This mistake largely lead to their demise. What if Zuckerberg is wrong about the best way to tackle COVID-19? What if Hydroxychloroquine, zinc, Ivermectin and vitamin D are actually much safer and more efficient treatments than rushed vaccines, and what if this minority opinion would have been able to become a majority opinion had it been given an equal opportunity to be heard on the platform that counts more than a third of the world as its users? How many people will then have died in vain, because it wasn’t given this equal opportunity?

 

 

Would I stop the Holocaust by cancelling Hitler if I could? Sure. But since, in reality, it’s much more likely that I will produce a Hitler and unnecessary mass-death with my cancel culture, I’m going to stick with the principle of Free Speech, instead. Because I still believe that Free Speech is the safest, most effective, most robust way for a society to reach at the best decisions. Anything that hampers Free Speech – be it a government that prohibits critical newspapers or brilliant nerds who truly want to save the world using their technical inventions as giant propaganda machines for their personal views – can only make this decision-making process less safe, less likely to lead to the best decisions, and thus more dangerous. Lies and harmful opinions have a much greater chance of gaining majority support in a world that accepts cancel culture than in a world that doesn’t.

New Green Perspectives

“Despite knowing that life is so much more than money and gold
I fall in line like a good boy, and close my eyes to my guilt and others’
My heart is heavy and my head is bent, my steps echo grey and empty
The snow lies black and toxic on the roofs
I turn on my TV and sleep it off

And when the acid rain falls, I put up my umbrella…”

http://dfg.rosnix.net/musik/det_sura_regnet/

A freely translated song by The Lost Generation that I fell in love with when first I heard it. It’s so heavy and melancholic! It captured so well the feeling I had...

I have later realized that this is the lefties’ idea of how rich people are, or the greenies’ idea of how “normal people” are… and that they’re wrong. The rich or normal are not closing their eyes to any guilt. They’re not FEELING any guilt!... It is these “progressive” people’s idea that they SHOULD be feeling guilt, and so they wrongly assume that they do. The progressives also feel this guilt, themselves, and so naturally – but wrongly – expand their feeling to all of human kind.

Our hearts were heavy and our heads bent… not theirs. And I truly, genuinely believed that this depended on them closing their eyes to reality!... Because I felt that this was how it had happened for me… That one day, I opened my eyes to all the misery in the world, and all the pain came gushing in… and ever since that day, I was carrying all the grief of the world. Those who didn’t hadn’t yet opened their eyes.

But you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way! Because I still have my eyes open to all the misery in the world… but my heart is not heavy and my head not bent! It is a fantastic world we’re living in! And an absolutely fantastic time!... Sure, there’s lots of misery in the world, but it’s only a tiny, tiny part of it. And most of it is actually part of life, part of nature, part of what makes life so fantastic! Death, for instance. Suffering, dangers and death are parts of nature, and included in the things that make life fantastic. But just look at how much we have actually reduced these, over the last few hundred years!... We humans defy nature by having a survival-rate to adult age of more than 50%!... This is unmatched. In Sweden, this rate is over 99%... which is insane. And fantastic!

And if you look at it that way, there is of course no reason at all to grieve. On the contrary, these are times for celebration.

The funny thing is that you seem to have surpassed me in grieving, now!... This was NOT a development I saw coming 10 years ago, that I can tell you! But now, you “normal people” are walking around feeling guilt over the climate and are all worked up over Covid-19!... You think it’s a tragedy that 200,000 Americans – most of them already near their deaths – have died in Covid-19, and you think I’m cold and lacking of empathy because I don’t. But how could I, when I’ve already been aware for over a decade that 20,000 children die every day from poverty, and I’ve found peace with that knowledge? That’s 7 million dead children every year, and pretty much ALL those deaths could have been prevented if resources had been there… I used to feel THAT was a tragedy… but I’ve gotten over it! I’ve realized that 20,000 per day, in a population of 8 billion, is after all extremely little. No other organisms have a youngling mortality that low! People never had it before. 200 years ago, more than half of all children died before they were 5 years old.

Also, I’ve lived for several years now in a country where the child mortality is skyrocketing compared to Sweden, and I can see that it doesn’t mean that people are walking around suffering. Quite the opposite! They have much more peace and happiness in their everyday life than the Swedes have. I would have gladly lived here the rest of my life, if they only hadn’t harassed me so much for my white skin.

And so it appears to me that the great tragedy is not death, but the modern Westerners’ attitude to death. Which probably springs from the fact that we have too little death in our lives, rather than too much. Had we had more of it, we would be wise enough not to grieve so much, but instead to celebrate every day that we are alive.

I’ve become like the guy in the song, who puts up his umbrella when the acid rain falls. But I don’t close my eyes, I don’t bend my head and I don’t grieve!... My eyes are completely open,
as I’m singing
and dancing
in the rain.

------

Read also:

How I've changed in my foundation over the last few years, July 30, 2018

The terrorism in France and me, Nov 17, 2015

Karolina and the Climate, July 20, 2015

A small bubble of peace and harmony, Oct 31, 2015