Vaccinated versus unvaccinated: CDC numbers suggest…hmm
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Recently, I wrote about admissions by Pfizer and pro-vax experts that the COVID19 vaccines do not stop you from getting COVID, or from transmitting COVID to others.
This came as no surprise to me, since the entire premise of the COVID pandemic is false. They say there’s a dangerous virus that skilled virologists can find little pieces of, if they turn their specimens into virus soup—but I’d be more impressed without the soup. In any case, I’m going to pretend here, solely for convenience, that the official COVID19 narrative is legitimate, and virus soup is good, tasty science.
With preventing COVID19 infection and transmission both off the table as possible benefits of vaccination (not that they were ever really there, but…), the only possible benefit left is preventing severe cases of COVID19. I trust we can all agree that death is the most severe of severe cases.
In this paper, I look at vaccinated and unvaccinated US COVID19 death data collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). I don’t know how reliable it is—I’m just showing you what’s there, and pointing out some of its obvious limitations, based on the CDC’s own descriptions. As you’ll see, the data is far more ambiguous than anything—the sort of data that instead of wowing you, makes you go, "hmm.”
I wanted to look at vaccination status for all-cause deaths as well—since deaths from many different causes could potentially be tied to vaccination, such as heart attacks, strokes, cancers, even accidents, which are sometimes caused by medical emergencies. I’ve written before about the huge increase in excess deaths, peaking most recently in January 2022—whether they are dying suddenly or slowly, they are dying at an unprecedented rate, much higher than ever before in recent history. But I couldn’t find any place vaccination status was being tracked for deaths from all causes.
Basic definitions and limitations of the data
Tracking COVID19 vaccination status is tricky in the US—there is no official certification of unvaccinated status, nor is there a central database of the vaccinated. Nor does anyone want them, I hope, in the Land of the Freeish. Given the long history of pharmaceutical corruption and coverups, if someone still wants to use vaccines, they have plenty of evidence of extreme risk and nonexistent benefit to ignore already—they don’t need a database of everyone’s private medical decisions to ignore, too.
This pesky insistence on autonomy and privacy means there’s a major problem with the vaxed-unvaxed database, which probably can’t be fixed: when a death occurs and vaccination status is unknown—which may be common, considering vaccination status has never been tracked in connection with deaths before—it is classified as an “unvaccinated” death. This falsely inflates unvaccinated deaths in the database—maybe by a little, but potentially by a lot.
The main link to the CDC’s vaccinated-unvaccinated data is here. Under the page title, Rates of COVID-19 Cases or Deaths by Age Group and Vaccination Status, click “more” for the details summarized in the bullet points below.
Chart 1. See Note 1 for the source of this data, and a data table.
But first, a sneak peek inside the database—Chart 1, showing that for most of 2022, there were actually more COVID19 deaths among the vaccinated (violet columns) than among the unvaccinated (aqua columns)—a reversal of the trend over the previous year.
Back to details about the vaxed-unvaxed database:
The COVID19 death data comes from 30 states in the US, and represents 72% of the total U.S. population.
“Vaccinated” means the deceased completed the primary series of vaccines (no boosters necessary) at least 14 days before collection of a specimen where SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen was detected.
If a deceased has a verified vaccination record, and either didn’t complete the primary series, or completed it less than 14 days before collection of a specimen where SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen was detected, they are considered partially vaccinated and are “excluded.”
Chart 2. See Note 1 for the source of this data.
I expected to find columns of data for the “excluded” deaths and the “excluded” population of the partially vaccinated—but there were none. This means a lot of interesting comparisons could not be done. The CDC obviously has the data—they couldn’t have excluded those deaths without reviewing them first; also, they used the partially vaxed population to calculate the unvaxed population, according to the formula they provided. I attempted to estimate partially vaccinated deaths, using other CDC data, but had so little confidence in the estimate that I didn’t do much with it, other than this cool chart, Chart 2, showing the percentage of COVID deaths each week that were vaccinated (violet), unvaccinated (aqua) and partially vaccinated (gold).
“Unvaccinated” includes everyone whose vaccination status is unverified, as mentioned above. This means the “unvaccinated” group also includes an unknown number of fully or partially vaccinated people.
“COVID19 death” means the deceased had “a documented COVID-19 diagnosis.” Although vague, other parts of the description seem to require a positive lab test for the diagnosis. In contrast, the CDC’s regular tally of “Deaths involving COVID19” only requires that the deceased died “with confirmed or presumed COVID19”—meaning no lab test required, and it could be an eyeball or rule-out diagnosis, based on the symptoms.
Comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths
Two COVID shot crusaders from the Scientific American, Amanda Montañez and Tanya Lewis, want everyone to know that just because there have been more COVID deaths among the vaccinated, it doesn’t mean the vaccines don’t work—that’s called the “base-rate fallacy,” and it’s a common problem in the disordered minds of anti-vaxers. In reality, it doesn’t actually matter that hundreds of vaccinated people die with COVID every week—that’s why no one bothered to tell you about it, before you got the shot.
“Looking at COVID data in recent months, it may appear that a significant proportion of the people who have died of COVID were vaccinated against the disease. But it is important to put those numbers in context. […] Taken at face value, these numbers may appear to indicate that vaccination does not make that much of a difference. But this perception is an example of a phenomenon known as the base rate fallacy. One also has to consider the denominator of the fraction—that is, the sizes of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.”
And by gum, them gals are right—we need to consider the incidence rate (IR). The IR is the number of deaths compared to the size of the population, and usually the CDC expresses it as the number of deaths per 100,000 people. The IR is calculated by dividing the number of deaths in the population by the size of the population, and multiplying the result by 100,000.
Chart 3. See Note 1 for the source of this data.
Chart 3 shows the IR for COVID19 deaths in the vaccinated (violet line) and the unvaccinated (aqua line). Through early 2022, the IR for unvaccinated was high; however, since about week 10 of 2022, COVID19 deaths have been consistently low, with very little difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated.
In fact, if you consider that the “unvaccinated” group includes some vaccinated people whose vaccine status cannot be verified, it raises the question of whether there is any real difference at all between vaccinated and unvaccinated.
The CDC actually offers 2 different incidence rates: the “crude” IR and the “age-adjusted” IR. I did a comparison in Chart 4 to see what affect the adjustments had (shown by the dotted lines). Do you notice anything peculiar? That’s more of a commonsense question than a math question.
Chart 4. See Note 1 for the source of this data.
Here’s a close-up of the most recent data available:
Chart 5. Detail of the Incidence Rate of COVID19 death among the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
What kind of adjustments would consistently improve the IR for vaccinated, and consistently make the IR worse for the unvaccinated? Maybe there’s some perfectly legitimate answer that escapes my addled anti-vax brain, but it’s the kind of unexpected thing that makes you go hmm. I don’t feel inclined to spend time trying to run down the answer; but I don’t feel inclined to trust those adjustments much, either.
Closing thoughts
Does the information here support the idea that COVID19 vaccines prevent COVID19 deaths? It would have been easier to make a case for it a year ago, but now…
IMO, all the COVID19 numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, because they are probably driven more by policy than any real fluctuations in “the disease.” Financial incentives to medical care providers related to testing, diagnosing and treating COVID19, are surely an important driving factor.
I could do some calculations, try to adjust for the falsely inflated number of unvaxed deaths, see if the difference between vaxed and unvaxed is “statistically significant” in recent months, but that would not only be boring, it would be too speculative, given all the unknowns. Instead, I’m considering an investment in some kind of vintage fortune-telling machine, or possibly even a real live fortune-teller, if the price is right, and he offers readings by Skype.
