Version 1
: Received: 18 February 2023 / Approved: 21 February 2023 / Online: 21 February 2023 (03:49:52 CET)
How to cite:
Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.
Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints 2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.
Cite as:
Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.
Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints 2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.
Abstract
We primarily study a possible link between 2021 COVID-19 vaccination uptake in Europe and monthly 2022 excess all-cause mortality, i.e., mortality higher than before the pandemic. Analyses of 31 countries weighted by population size show that all-cause mortality during the first nine months of 2022 increased more the higher the 2021 vaccination uptake; a one percentage point increase in 2021 vaccination uptake was associated with a monthly mortality increase in 2022 by 0.105 percent (95% CI, 0.075-0.134). When controlling for alternative explanations, the association remained robust, and we discuss the result emphasizing causality as well as potential ecological fallacy. Also, the study shows that 2021 all-cause mortality was lower the higher the vaccination uptake, but this association became non-significant when controlling for alternative explanations.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received:
22 February 2023
Commenter:
Per Stangeland
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
An interesting and very controversial article. As you mention, the correlation should be analysed by age cohorts. A possible explaining hypothesis could be that countries with high vaccination rates (Denmark) have vaccinated a younger strata of the population, including more young adults and children. Countries with lower rates (Bulgaria) vaccinated only the high risk population, the elderly. If negative side effects of the vaccines are more extended among the young, the vaccines might indeed have caused higher mortality.
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
Thanks for the constructive comment.
Response 2 to
Comment 1
Received:
22 March 2023
Commenter:
Ewin Barnett
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
I am very interested in what changes in correlation are associated with 1) comorbidities and 2) 25-hydroxy vitamin D serum levels. Neither of these stratifications are commonly considered, yet an early CDC study of hospital admissions showed a 17X (!!) increase in severe outcomes for 4 or more comorbidities. This implies a very non-linear severity curve.
Comment 2
Received:
2 March 2023
Commenter:
Herve Seligmann
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
Please have a look at the following manuscript from 2021, which analyses all cause mortalities for age cohorts in the USA and in Europe, in relation to COVID19 injections. The analyses of the european data also indicate the dynamics of deaths in relation to duration since the 1st injection. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355581860_COVID_vaccination_and_age-stratified_all-cause_mortality_risk
More updates of these data are also available at my Researchgate profile.
Best,
Herve Seligmann
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
Thanks for notifying me.
Comment 3
Received:
22 March 2023
Commenter:
Dr Avinash kinikar
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
How is it possible to relate mortality to vaccines, as history of vaccinations is readily available but past history of covid is not reliable as asymptomatic undetected undiagnosed covid will be missed out. After 2021, almost more than 85 percent population had covid, either asymptomatic undetected undiagnosed covid or symptomatic covid.
Antibodies to N antibodies have short half life and they disappear faster but T cell immunity persists.
Unless TCell immunity studies are done in all population, it is not possible to rule out past covid only from N antibodies studies..
How do we know about side effects of
vaccines or something to do with side effects of covid itself .
Received:
23 March 2023
Commenter:
Soteris Christodoulou
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
Interesting question. Let us think of some possibilities.
First: The excess mortality is indeed related to a set of (late) complications to COVID disease. If this is the case we would expect countries with higher vaccine uptake to have lower prevalence of COVID infections and as a result of that we would expect in turn to have less complications as well. In this case the relationship between vaccine uptake in 2021 and excess mortality in 2022 would have been negative, i.e. higher vaccine uptake = lower all-cause ex. mortality.
Second: As you already mentioned the great majority of people have been exposed to the virus. Is there a reason to believe that countries with higher vaccine uptake would have higher percentage of people infected? I would expect that all countries during all this time have all very high percentage of people infected. Either vaccine or natural immunity are short lived and with this widespread infectious disease virtually everyone would have been exposed. If there is any difference in all-cause mortality between different countries is observed this would hardly be associated with differences in prevalence of past COVID infections.
Third: There is indeed a statistical positive association between the excess mortality and vaccine uptake.
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
Dear authors,
I performed a very simple reanalysis:
Plotted using using Excel scatter graph your vax uptake values versus excess deaths p scores (via https://ourworldindata.org/)
The result was clear correlation: higher the vaccination uptake the lower the excess deaths at end of 2022. Apparently the opposite to your finding.
Received:
23 March 2023
Commenter:
KUCHIR S.
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
I would like to encourage you to conduct an analysis using the data made available by the UK's ONS agency and the recently shared data from Australia and New Zealand.
It should be noted that Our World in Data cannot be considered a neutral source of data.
Best regards,
KUCHIR S.
Response 2 to
Comment 4
Received:
23 March 2023
Commenter:
Simon Fauckner
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
You made an error by using using cumulative p scores from https://ourworldindata.org/ because those scores include death that occurred prior to the vaccination (from 1/1/2020 to end of 2022). Post vaccination period excess deaths (deaths in 2022) is unquestionably the lowest in low vaccinated countries (both according to eurostat and ourworldindata.org - look at p scores for 2022 alone not cumulative p scores since Jan 2020) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Excess_mortality_-_statistics
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline?tab=table
Comment 5
Received:
22 March 2023
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
An interesting article that shouldn't be controversial.
It will be interesting to remove certain causes of mortality that are likely to be not directly due to vaccination, e.g. road accidents and crime. Although these data may not be readily available for all the countries included in the analysis.
Received:
22 March 2023
Commenter:
Philip Jones
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
I am not a statistician, but surely, if, for whatever reason, there is a year (2021) with lower than average excess deaths, we have a following year/years where there has to be a catchup.
If 2022 is that year, is it surprising that the excess deaths take a jump, or am I mis-reading something?
Received:
23 March 2023
Commenter:
Damian T. Rafal
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
Hi
When you aim at discovering that of Covid-19 role it can be done directly by the original mathematical method. It shows the role can be only a minimal one, and a very vast majority of excess deaths must be due to not Covid-19 causes, including vaccines, like in the U.S. (or in the U.K) in 2020 >90% of "Covid-19 deaths" were wrongly attributed to Covid-19. ...It is new place from October is the major based in Switzerland preprint (as blocked, without any excuse, by the U.S ones, including journals): https://zenodo.org/record/7372672
To some people it seems so difficult that they give up.
Commenter: Per Stangeland
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Commenter:
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Commenter: Ewin Barnett
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Commenter: Herve Seligmann
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355581860_COVID_vaccination_and_age-stratified_all-cause_mortality_risk
More updates of these data are also available at my Researchgate profile.
Best,
Herve Seligmann
Commenter:
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Commenter: Dr Avinash kinikar
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Antibodies to N antibodies have short half life and they disappear faster but T cell immunity persists.
Unless TCell immunity studies are done in all population, it is not possible to rule out past covid only from N antibodies studies..
How do we know about side effects of
vaccines or something to do with side effects of covid itself .
Commenter: Soteris Christodoulou
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
First: The excess mortality is indeed related to a set of (late) complications to COVID disease. If this is the case we would expect countries with higher vaccine uptake to have lower prevalence of COVID infections and as a result of that we would expect in turn to have less complications as well. In this case the relationship between vaccine uptake in 2021 and excess mortality in 2022 would have been negative, i.e. higher vaccine uptake = lower all-cause ex. mortality.
Second: As you already mentioned the great majority of people have been exposed to the virus. Is there a reason to believe that countries with higher vaccine uptake would have higher percentage of people infected? I would expect that all countries during all this time have all very high percentage of people infected. Either vaccine or natural immunity are short lived and with this widespread infectious disease virtually everyone would have been exposed. If there is any difference in all-cause mortality between different countries is observed this would hardly be associated with differences in prevalence of past COVID infections.
Third: There is indeed a statistical positive association between the excess mortality and vaccine uptake.
Commenter:
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
I performed a very simple reanalysis:
Plotted using using Excel scatter graph your vax uptake values versus excess deaths p scores (via https://ourworldindata.org/)
The result was clear correlation: higher the vaccination uptake the lower the excess deaths at end of 2022. Apparently the opposite to your finding.
https://twitter.com/Paul_A_Coombes/status/1638562850976288770?s=20
Regards,
Paul Coombes
Commenter: KUCHIR S.
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
It should be noted that Our World in Data cannot be considered a neutral source of data.
Best regards,
KUCHIR S.
Commenter: Simon Fauckner
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Excess_mortality_-_statistics https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline?tab=table
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
It will be interesting to remove certain causes of mortality that are likely to be not directly due to vaccination, e.g. road accidents and crime. Although these data may not be readily available for all the countries included in the analysis.
Commenter: Philip Jones
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
If 2022 is that year, is it surprising that the excess deaths take a jump, or am I mis-reading something?
Commenter: Damian T. Rafal
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
When you aim at discovering that of Covid-19 role it can be done directly by the original mathematical method. It shows the role can be only a minimal one, and a very vast majority of excess deaths must be due to not Covid-19 causes, including vaccines, like in the U.S. (or in the U.K) in 2020 >90% of "Covid-19 deaths" were wrongly attributed to Covid-19. ...It is new place from October is the major based in Switzerland preprint (as blocked, without any excuse, by the U.S ones, including journals):
https://zenodo.org/record/7372672 To some people it seems so difficult that they give up.