Covid-19, the vaccine, and mortality in the EU (thread)

I took a quick dive into the all-cause mortality and Covid vaccine uptake data, in the EU.

1) From 2020-2023 EU countries have from 15% (Sweden) to 67% (Cyprus) aggregated excess mortality compared to 2016-2019. Notice that some countries have < 100% mortality in 2023 (i.e. lower than the average before Covid).

2) The vaccines rolled out in 2021. There’s a negative correlation between vaccine uptake and death rates in 2021 and this suggests that the more a population was vaccinated the less people died. Correlation does not imply causation (for any of the graphs), this means just because two things happen at the same time, it doesn't mean one caused the other. But it makes sense and looks like the vaccine did its job in 2021.

3) The data for 2023 indicates a positive correlation between vaccine uptake and death rates. This suggests that the more the population was vaccinated, the more people died. The same trend is in 2022 (r = +0.42). That's of course potentially disturbing.

4) As a sanity check, I ran the data against 2020 where no vaccine was available and as expected got a weak signal (r = -0.25). Then I also ran the data for 2021-2023 and got an even weaker signal (r = -0.13). I.e. no correlation between vaccination status and excess death rate.

5) How can we explain an increase in deaths in 2022-2023 for the more vaccinated countries? One simple hypothesis could be that the vaccines worked, very briefly in 2021, and that the protection then waned off so fast that people that would have died from Covid in 2021 died 6-18 months later. Since this is all-cause mortality data there could easily be numerous other explanations. When 2024 mortality data is available it’ll be incredibly interesting to re-run this analysis. I hope that in 2024 the vaccine-to-death signal will disappear 🙈🤞 Share your thoughts in the comments. 6) Data was pulled from EuroStat and EU’s vaccine tracker. For vaccine uptake I simply took the percentage of the population with at least one shot.

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