Higher COVID jab rates in England linked to greater excess deaths: gov’t data

The more vaccine doses an area of England has received, the greater the number of excess deaths it has experienced, an analysis of official data has found – adding to worries that the novel COVID vaccines are contributing to the sharp rise in excess deaths seen since mid-2021.

The analysis looked at excess death rates and vaccination rates for all 300-plus lower tier administrative areas in England. It used the pre-pandemic five-year average (2015–19) as a baseline and controlled for confounding factors such as age and deprivation by comparing the findings in the vaccination era to those in the first COVID wave, before vaccines were available.

In the first wave (March 15 to June 21, 2020) the areas which would go on to be more highly vaccinated had lower excess deaths on average (the reference vaccination rate is as of March 7 2021, first dose only). This is a result of the healthy vaccinee effect, whereby people who choose to get vaccinated tend on average also to be people who had better health outcomes pre-vaccine (note that vaccination and health both tend to correlate with wealth). As a result, even if the vaccine was a placebo that had no effect, more-vaccinated areas would have fewer excess deaths on average than less-vaccinated areas.

The analysis looked at the three periods of excess deaths in England after the vaccine rollout. These are, broadly, the alpha period of winter 2020–21 (December 20, 2020, to March 7, 2021), the delta period of the second half of 2021 (June 27, 2021, to January 9, 2022) and the omicron period of 2022 (March 27, 2022, to January 1, 2023) – though it’s important to keep in mind that for the delta and omicron periods many or most of the excess deaths were not COVID related.

Data analyst Joel Smalley, who is behind the analysis, commented: “As always, remember, the burden is not on me to prove that COVID jabs result in higher excess deaths, the obligation is solely on the jab pushers to prove unequivocally that they reduce death.”

The government has refused to carry out an investigation into the cause of the recent wave of tens of thousands of excess deaths in England. Perhaps this is why.