Journey

Now, here are the countries they studied, and these are the percentages of the primary courses. Of course, all of this is in the article. I just put this here to show you what a huge epidemiological study this actually is. So, the percentage of primary courses by the end of 2021, and that’s what they took their correlations from, so low in Bulgaria going all the way up to Iceland and Ireland 76.6 percent. Countries that you might be interested in, you can see there, of course, the UK, no longer a member of the European Union, but we will be at the very much higher end of this, and of course, accounting for population size, needless to say.

Their conclusion, here’s a direct quote from the paper: “The interaction between vaccine uptake and time passed in months since the beginning of 2022 is strongly significant and implies that the mortality increases, the higher the vaccine uptake.” So, the more people had vaccines in 2021, that was vaccines in 2021, and this was an increasing deaths in 2022. There is a positive correlation between the two. The higher the vaccination rate, the higher the deaths. The lower the vaccination rate in 2021, the lower the excess deaths. Now, of course, these are correlations, so they rightly went on and looked at other things that could be causing this.

Potential reverse causality we looked at, could it be the excess mortality that was causing the vaccinations? Well, they eliminated that because, of course, the excess mortality came after the correlations, and we know from the need for temporal correlations that the cause has to come before the effect. But anyway, they carried on concerning alternative explanations. We control for average or cause mortality in 2020 and 2021 by dividing the average between 2016 and 2019. So, the mortality data they were taking was from before the pandemic, so that got rid of that variable.

Relatively low mortality at one period is followed by relatively high mortality and later on, and vice versa. So, in other words, what they’re saying here is, well, if lots of people died in 2020, you’d expect, or 2021, you’d expect fewer people to die in 2022, and the exact opposite was the case, but they did mathematically account for that, so we know that it’s not that is not the cause of the excess mortality.

Even when they took account of this, here’s a direct quote from the paper: “We still observe a significant association between 2021 vaccination uptake and 2022 monthly increasing all-cause mortality. Countries with higher vaccines in 2021 had a higher all-cause mortality in 2022.” They did acknowledge what’s called the ecological fallacy. Now, this would say that because something is true of a nation, it is not necessarily true of individuals, which, of course, is true, and they acknowledge that.

“We are cautious about making individual-level inferences from our nation-level findings,” so very honest of the researchers there. Excess mortality caused by delayed medical treatment or diagnosis, which, of course, is the main reason given in the UK Parliament for the excess deaths that are caused by delays in medical treatment during the pandemic and indeed the relative chaos in the NHS at the moment, which is true, but we cannot see that the issues have been more prevalent in high vaccine versus low vaccine countries.

In other words, delay in healthcare is all over the place, all countries have delays in healthcare, but the correlation is still there when they looked at the countries’ vaccine rates. They don’t think it’s caused by that, and they actually specify this, i.e. we do not expect delayed diagnosis or medical treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic to substantially overcome omitted variable bias. So they don’t think it’s that. So there we have it, it’s very clear that there’s a positive correlation. It’s in that paper there, the higher the vaccination rates were in 2021, the higher the excess mortality in 2022.