England Deaths by V-Status (21 Feb 2023)

Up until yesterday, the UK’s Office for National Statistics Death by V-status, England hadn’t been updated since July last year, over seven months ago, with a next release date set for 21st Feb. Well that day has arrived, and they kept their promise. This is the latest data regarding Deaths by vaccination status, England (link to data below).

Scrolling down a bit, this is the data that we are interested in, “Deaths occurring between 1 April 2021 and 31 December 2022”, the latest data they have published. I’ll be downloading the Excel spreadsheet. The data is made up of five tables. But before we get started, I’d just like to have a quick look at the Notes page. There are a whole bunch of notes, but if you scroll down, the one I find most interesting is Note 17: “There were some people who were vaccinated but not included in the NIMS data as they died soon after vaccination.” NIMS is the National Immunisation Management System, but why would NIMS be not including people who died soon after vaccination? I don’t really understand that. And how many people is “some” people? “Some” people were not included as they died soon after vaccination. Anyway, moving on.

First of all, we’ll be looking at Table 1: Monthly age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status for all cause deaths, deaths involving COVID-19 and deaths not involving COVID-19, per 100,000 person-years. So this is the table. This initial data is from April 2021, so as you can see, there is no booster data, as boosters weren’t available, so I’ll fast-forward in time. Of course, you can check all of this data for yourself. I’ve got no interest in making anything up, and quite frankly, the truth is always so much more interesting. Well, the truth. Let’s just call it the “published data” from now on. Obviously, there’s going to be mistakes and omissions and all the rest of it.

Anyway, these are the deaths from all causes in December 2022. So this includes COVID deaths, non-COVID deaths, heart attacks, traffic accidents, everything. Unvaccinated people had an Age-standardised mortality rate of 1026.7 per 100,000 person-years. In comparison, first dose individuals who had their only shot more than 21 days ago, had a mortality rate of 1741, much higher than the unvaccinated group. Remembering this is from all-cause mortality. It could be COVID, it could be diabetes, it could be a traffic accident. The point is, in December 2022, people who had a single dose of a COVID vaccine were more likely to die than those who hadn’t. I’m not here to explain it, I’m just showing you the numbers.

People who had a second dose in the last six months had the highest all-cause mortality rate of 2450, noting that this is labelled with a “u” meaning the publishers consider this data to be unreliable due to the small numbers of deaths, that is, 18 deaths is considered to be a small number from a statistical point of view. Noting that age-standardised rates are not provided for categories with fewer than 10 deaths.

There was not enough data for people who had their boosters in the last 21 days, but those who had a booster, that is, people who’ve had at least three shots at least 21 days ago had the lowest mortality rate at 935.9, which although is the lowest, it’s only a little bit lower than those in the unvaccinated group at 1026.

If we look at non-COVID deaths over the same time period, December 2022, so these are deaths that definitely didn’t involve COVID, the same trend occurs. Unvaccinated and boosted people had similar non-COVID mortality rates of 963 and 901 respectively, while those who had only one or two doses were more prone to dying (for whatever reason).

I thought it would also be interesting to take a look at Table 2, which breaks down deaths by age category. If we look at all-cause deaths in December 2022 for the youngest age category, 18-39 year-olds, we can see that the unvaccinated cohort have the lowest rate of death at 14.8. This is lower than first dose and second dose at 24.1 and 15 respectively, but perhaps surprisingly, boosted young folk have a significantly higher rate of all-cause death at 23. If you ask the experts, they’ll tell you it’s because young people who get boosted tend to have other health issues. Make of that what you will. But one thing that we should note, young people have a very low mortality rate regardless, obviously.

Anyway, that’s my little summary on the UK’s Death by V-status data. I’d just like to finish with a note from the senior statistician, “Today’s data are not as a measure of vaccine effectiveness as many other factors can affect mortality rates”. So just be wary of that. And also keep Note 17 in mind, “There were some people who were vaccinated but not included in the NIMS data as they died soon after vaccination”.

ONS DATA LINK
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland

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