HMM: Vaccinated English adults under 60 are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people the same age. And have been for six months. This chart may seem unbelievable or impossible, but it’s correct, based on weekly data from the British government. “I have checked the underlying dataset myself and this graph is correct. Vaccinated people under 60 are twice as likely to die as unvaccinated people. And overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal.”
So my first thought was that people with health problems might be more likely to get vaccinated. But the overall death rate for that age group is up too.
UPDATE: Jim Bennett writes: “I wonder if the unvaccinated population has been checked for prior COVID exposure. It may be that most surviving over-60s in England have been infected with COVID and many had mild or no symptoms, and had acquired immunity without knowing it.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh writes:
Glenn: I looked at the dataset mentioned in the post below, and I saw that they just have one band for everyone 10-59. But both death rates and vaccination rates for various parts of that band are very different, and I’m nearly certain that both go up with age – older people are more likely to be vaccinated, and also more likely to die from COVID. Wouldn’t that adequately explain the twice-as-likely data point? (It’s a version of your “people with health problems might be more likely to get vaccinated,” but the “health problem” is simply being older.) And that’s consistent with the death rates being sharply lower among vaccinated people in each of the higher bands. Am I missing something here?
That could be. There are any number of potential confounding variables here, but that said the difference in groups is pretty striking. I certainly hope someone is looking into this more closely.
MORE: Long-time reader Daniel Aronstein writes:
I saw the Volokh critique you added.
The numbers simply do not support Berenson’s claim that the vaccinated are dying at a higher rate than the unvaccinated.
This Reuters analysis completely debunks Berenson. (Please review it.)
He, and other antivaxxers, made similar errors analyzing data from Israel, where – like Britain – about 80% are vaccinated. (At the time about 700 Israelis were hospitalized with covid, and of these 500 were vaccinated. Berenson and others claimed this meant one was more than twice as likely to be in hospital with covid if you were vaccinated. Wrong: 8 million Israelis were vaccinated and 1 million were not; therefore, 500/8,000,000 is a much lower hospitalization rate than 200/1,000,000.
(Neither rate is an existential threat, and the government overreaction and power grabs are hurting humanity more than the virus!)
The development of the vaccines were one of Trump’s greatest accomplishments. They have saved lives. They shouldn’t have ever been solely distributed by the government or ever mandated. This added to the paranoia surrounding them. (The handling requirements of the mRNA vaccines made government distribution necessary.)
Publishing bad analysis, like that from Berenson, only makes the irrational paranoia surrounding these “Trump/Operation Warp Speed” vaccines worse.
Other than that: you are still the greatest.
He adds:
From the same source Berenson used; (though from a different page):
“Between 2 January and 24 September 2021, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.”
Stay tuned.