Vaccination was supposed to prevent death from corona. In fact, the death rate has increased in the last two years. All age groups, but especially the young, died more than would be expected at the same death rate as in 2020. Apparently no one wants to investigate, writes Susan Bonath.
Many countries have recorded more deaths in the last two years than during the first year of the pandemic. Vaccination didn’t work? Could it have had something to do with it? Anyone who even vaguely thought this out loud immediately called the “fact checkers” into action. All fake news, they “checked”. Heat waves, Corona, flu were the culprits. But there is also little evidence for this.
In order not to speculate further on what has not been studied, a responsible question could be asked: have the vaccines against COVID-19 reduced the overall mortality in Germany compared to 2020? Data from the Federal Bureau of Statistics can be used to answer that question. The reported deaths are compared with the population figures of the corresponding age groups to determine the corresponding death rates for the last three years for comparison.
The result is clear: mortality in all age groups has recently been higher than in 2020, when there was no vaccination yet. In contrast to Corona, even the younger age groups are the most affected by percentage, although their mortality has been declining for decades. For example, if the death rate of people under 40 had been the same in the last two years as in 2020, about 1,350 fewer young people would have died, of which about 250 were children. Why isn’t anyone investigating this?
The death rate conundrum
According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), “many European countries have registered long periods of excess mortality in 2022.” For Germany, the Bundesamt für Statistik already announced the following for 2021:
“Based on 2019, a death rate of 960,000 to 980,000 could be expected for 2021, so an increase of two to four percent. In reality, it grew by eight percent.”
The situation did not ease last year either. On the contrary, 3.4 percent more people died than the year before, statisticians said in a statement at the beginning of the year. The authorities used numerous explanations, such as “heat records”, “Corona waves” and “respiratory diseases in general”, which were excessive.
Researchers, on the other hand, do not agree about the excessive mortality in Germany in 2020. Official statistics record three to four percent more deaths than expected, adjusted for population. This was contradicted by researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen, who investigated. Their result:
“There were no excess deaths in Germany in 2020, although there were around 34,000 deaths related to COVID-19.”
After all, the Institute for Economic Research Ifo from Munich published an interesting analysis early this year in which it found a steady increase in the death rate in Germany from 2020. Joachim Ragnitz, deputy head of If’s Dresden branch, said:
“What is surprising is that excess mortality accelerated again in 2022.”
Corona, heat and delayed works?
But all statisticians and commentators categorically rejected vaccination as a possible cause. When the AfD speculated about this in December 2022 based on the explosive data on health insurance (available here), it collected telling “fact checks” for it. For example, the MDR was genuinely persistent:
“High mortality has nothing to do with vaccination against corona”.
Public “fact checkers” referred to the statements of KBV and data modeler Kristan Schneider. They unanimously claimed: the AfD misinterpreted the data. For example, the increase in mortality does not follow daily vaccination doses and is not exponential. They do not explain why this is so. Their explanations therefore remain beliefs, and the actual increase in the number of deaths an unexplored mystery.
People like to mention the postponed operations that former health minister Jens Spahn (CDU) ordered hospitals to do between March and May 2020 to free up beds for corona patients. One could speculate that this may have increased the number of deaths from the leading causes of death, cardiovascular disease and cancer. However, the cause of death statistics for 2020 and 2021 do not have any special deviations here.
Speculations about heat waves as the reason are also wrong. First, there were no particularly strong heat waves in 2021. Second, the excess mortality in 2022 spanned the entire year and was by no means just a brief period when it was particularly warm.
There is another problem with the attempt to explain: since the beginning of the pandemic, the competent Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has not distinguished whether people died from the corona or only from the corona. For example, the federal institute registered about 34,000 “corona deaths” for 2020, 79,000 for 2021 and about 49,000 last year. But no one knows how many actually died from COVID-19. Especially since the numbers raise the question: Why were there more “deaths from corona” in the years of vaccination than before?
The paradox of prevention
All in all, the picture is as follows: despite the corona, there was no serious increase in mortality in Germany in 2020, and according to data from the University of Duisburg-Essen, not even at all. However, over the next two years, according to official reports, excess death rates continued to rise, even though Corona preparations were believed to prevent death.
Of course, this is not the fault of higher mortality from cardiovascular diseases as a result of delayed operations in the first corona year. Heat waves do not offer a satisfactory explanation, because even outside of them mortality increased. Unrecorded “corona deaths” are not very likely because everyone is tested in hospitals and every “positive” death is included in the statistics. There was too much reporting on “corona deaths”.
People also like to think about the paradox of prevention: if vaccines hadn’t been introduced, many more people would surely have died. This is speculation that cannot be proven. It could still be assumed for the year 2021, when the more dangerous “delta variant” is rampant, according to scientists. But doubt arises at the latest with the milder “Omicron”.
The doubt is supported by data from the DIVI Intensive Care register published by the RKI from the beginning of 2022. According to the data, the share of unvaccinated patients in the ICU in April last year was 20.3 percent, which is less than the then share in the total population of about 23 percent. In November, only 13 percent of intensive care patients were unvaccinated, compared to 22 percent in the general population.
In any case, the data from the intensive care registry does not prove that unvaccinated patients were more likely to end up in intensive care with Corona and possibly die there. They do not even support the theory valid today that preparations reliably prevent severe disease courses.
Excess deaths from vaccines
Therefore, not even the slightest scientific conclusion can be drawn from the available data as to whether vaccination is causally related to excess mortality or not. The fact that the Government is not investigating this leaves the impression that people are consciously looking the other way. It is absurd that the lack of studies is now being used to deny a link to vaccination.
The only question that can be answered convincingly is the following: did vaccinations in Germany lead to fewer people dying relative to the population than in the first corona year without life-saving preparations? The Bundesamt für Statistik published here the development of population data by rough age groups. The author had more accurate data sent to him so he could compare deaths recorded in other cohorts in an Excel spreadsheet.
The result is explosive: more people have died in all age groups in the last two years relative to the population in question than in the first Corona year without vaccination. The only exception is the over-90s in 2021, but at -0.3 percent, about 550 deaths, the drop in mortality was very small in this group, which naturally has the highest death rate of about 25 percent per year.
In total, about 16,500 more people died in 2021 than would be expected with a similar death rate to 2020. Almost 10,000 deaths, 60 percent, were in people under 70, mostly middle-aged people. Last year there were even more than 43,000 more deaths compared to the first Corona year without vaccination, and all age groups were affected, especially the very young.
What is particularly striking is that the largest increase in the death rate in 2022 was recorded in the age groups below forty and above seventy. In the middle age groups, on the other hand, the death rate jumped in 2021, but fell only slightly the following year.
Higher death rates especially among the young
If mortality rates are directly related to a specific number of persons in a relevant age group, the magnitude becomes clearest.
Out of a million people under the age of 40, 386 people died in the first corona year. In 2021, there were 395 deaths in this age group per million inhabitants, and in 2022 as many as 417. This is still a moderate increase in mortality from a good two in the first year of vaccination, but a full eight percent in the second year. of vaccinations compared to 2020.
This means that a total of about 1,350 more people under the age of 40 died than would be expected at the same death rate as in 2020 – more than 1,000 of these deaths occurred in 2022. This is the largest percentage increase in mortality in any age group. The 15-29 age group is particularly affected here, with a death rate more than eleven percent higher than in the first Corona year.
Out of 100,000 people between the ages of 40 and 69, 560 people died in the first corona year. In the first year of vaccination, there were 593, and in the second year of vaccination, 591 deaths per 100,000 persons of this age group. For 2021, this will result in an increase of five percent and more than 9,000 deaths compared to 2020. Last year there were approximately 6,500 more deaths in the middle age group than in 2020.
Among those older than 70, there were about 590 deaths per 10,000 people in 2020. A year later, there were 604, and in the second year of vaccination as many as 630 per 10,000 people in this age group. This results in an increase of almost seven percent compared to the previous year, meaning that there were about 35,000 more deaths over the age of 70 than would be expected at the mortality rate as it was in 2020.
In short, the picture looks like this: if as many people had died in the past two years as in the first corona year, when the population was completely unprotected from the virus according to the state doctrine, there would have been almost 60,000 fewer deaths in total, of which slightly less than a third ( more than 17,000) were under the age of 70, i.e. significantly below the average life expectancy. This means that the group that had an extremely low risk of death from COVID-19 was most affected by increased mortality.
If vaccination is a problem…
Vaccination against Corona therefore did not reduce the death rate. Whether it is partly responsible for the excess mortality needs to be clarified. If one dares to assume that vaccination may have played a role, one might ask: why did more people under forty and over seventy die in 2022, and more middle-aged people in 2021?
A possible explanation for this would be that young people were mostly vaccinated for the first time later, i.e. at the end of 2021 or at the beginning of 2022. Until the end of 2021, there was no vaccination advice for children under 12 years of age.
People over the age of 70 were more likely to be vaccinated early, but this may have been less harmful for them than for young people. However, they could be affected by the boosters that were increasingly being used in this age group in 2022.
Middle age groups, on the other hand, were often vaccinated in 2021, but were less likely to use one or more boosters the following year, according to RKI data.
However, until the cause of the thousands of additional deaths, including in younger age groups, is clarified, this remains as much speculation as the assertion by numerous “fact checkers” that vaccination plays no role.
Clarification of this would also be of great importance for the future. Pharmaceutical companies are already expanding the controversial mRNA technology to other vaccines, such as against the flu and RSV viruses, and to drugs, such as against cancer. Unlike the marketing campaigns of the pharmaceutical industry, which makes money from it, it is still doubtful whether these preparations are actually harmless.
