Version 1
: Received: 8 September 2023 / Approved: 11 September 2023 / Online: 11 September 2023 (11:31:34 CEST)
Version 2
: Received: 13 September 2023 / Approved: 14 September 2023 / Online: 15 September 2023 (05:26:17 CEST)
How to cite:
Hegarty, P. Excess Mortality and the Effect of the COVID-19 Vaccines Part 1: European Data. Preprints2023, 2023090674. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0674.v2
Hegarty, P. Excess Mortality and the Effect of the COVID-19 Vaccines Part 1: European Data. Preprints 2023, 2023090674. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0674.v2
Hegarty, P. Excess Mortality and the Effect of the COVID-19 Vaccines Part 1: European Data. Preprints2023, 2023090674. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0674.v2
APA Style
Hegarty, P. (2023). Excess Mortality and the Effect of the COVID-19 Vaccines Part 1: European Data. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0674.v2
Chicago/Turabian Style
Hegarty, P. 2023 "Excess Mortality and the Effect of the COVID-19 Vaccines Part 1: European Data" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0674.v2
Abstract
Using publicly available data for 28 EU/EES countries from Eurostat and Our World in Data, we investigate how the current rate of Covid vaccination in a country compares to its average rate of excess mortality (EM) in the pandemic to date. We find that, in the linear regression, the correlation between average EM and vaccination rate is strongly negative, a priori evidence to support the claim that the Covid vaccines have saved many lives. However, a closer analysis of the timeline suggests otherwise. The correlation was already strongly negative before the vaccines were rolled out and is only weakly negative thereafter. In theory, survivor bias could still explain this shift, especially since waves of EM closely align with Covid waves. However, we find in addition that about half of our 28 countries experienced higher EM in 2022 than in 2021, and all that did so have higher than average vaccination rates. This is something which survivor bias cannot explain and raises the real possibility that the vaccines have not just failed to save many lives, but may have already caused net harm. Moreover, any such harm may be ongoing since we find that EM and vaccination rates have been consistently positively correlated since April 2022. We show that all these findings are robust to several different ways of measuring EM and/or vaccination rates. Finally, using public data from Worldometers, we show that the correlation over time of official Covid mortality rates with current vaccination rates closely tracks that of EM rates, even as Covid mortality has waxed and waned and even in the post-omicron period.
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:
15 September 2023
Commenter:
Peter Hegarty
Commenter's Conflict of Interests:
Author
Comment:
The main change is to the Title, as seen on the website, which for some reason (I assume I entered it incorrectly) didn't match the actual title of the paper, which one sees when one downloads the pdf. The latter is the correct title.
I have also fixed a handful of minor typos. The first two and the last are important in the sense that the typo gave the sentence the opposite of an intended assertion.
Page 5, line -2: "April 2020" changed to "April 2022". Page 10, line -1: "below-average" changed to "above-average". Page 11, line 23: "being" changed to "bring". Page 12, last line of Section 3: I removed an unnecessary linebreak from the .tex file. Page 17, line -12: "sceptical" was misspelt. Page 19, Table 11: I removed the "(est.)", which is unnecessary. Page 21, line -4: changed "smallest" to "largest".
Finally, I now have a Twitter profile so I added a link to that.
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment:
For the correlation plot, you can just plot your table 1 with X the vaccination rate and Y the EM rate. The different update dates somewhat complicate the situation but it is still striking.
We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.
Commenter: Peter Hegarty
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: Author
I have also fixed a handful of minor typos. The first two and the last are important in the sense that the typo gave the sentence the opposite of an intended assertion.
Page 5, line -2: "April 2020" changed to "April 2022".
Page 10, line -1: "below-average" changed to "above-average".
Page 11, line 23: "being" changed to "bring".
Page 12, last line of Section 3: I removed an unnecessary linebreak from the .tex file.
Page 17, line -12: "sceptical" was misspelt.
Page 19, Table 11: I removed the "(est.)", which is unnecessary.
Page 21, line -4: changed "smallest" to "largest".
Finally, I now have a Twitter profile so I added a link to that.
Commenter:
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.