New Zealand's spring 2020 warrants close examination. Australia too.
I'm a broken record on this, but ideally, more analysis should focus on cities/counties (or provinces, where provinces are small). Country level obscures much. This is probably most obvious in the U.S., but it's true elsewhere as well.
In your plot from OWID for COVID mortality rate by vaccination status, the mortality in unvaccinated people peaked in January 2022: ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status. But there were only a few people who got vaccinated so late that they had only completed the primary series within 2 weeks from January 2022, so at that point it shouldn't make much difference anymore if people are classified as vaccinated immediately after vaccination or not.
And in any case in the record-level Medicare data from Connecticut that Steve Kirsch published, there is a reduced number of deaths in the first few weeks after vaccination, so if the data is representative the US as a whole, then the classification delay should work in favor of unvaccinated people: sars2.net/connecticut.html#Deaths_by_weeks_since_vaccination.
The Czech Republic had a wave of COVID deaths around December 2021 during which unvaccinated people had a much higher spike in ASMR than vaccinated people. When I adjusted for the HVE by plotting the monthly ASMR as a percentage of the total ASMR in the second half of 2022 when there was a low number of COVID deaths, in December 2021 unvaccinated people had about 115% higher ASMR than in the second half of 2022 but vaccinated people had only about 14% higher ASMR: sars2.net/czech2.html#ASMR_by_month_and_vaccine_type. So it's somewhat similar to your plot from OWID for the United States where unvaccinated people have a huge spike in mortality in the winter of 2021 to 2022, except I plotted deaths from all causes instead of only COVID deaths so the difference between unvaccinated and vaccinated people wasn't as big.
When I calculated an age-standardized hospitalization rate by vaccination status in the Czech Republic, unvaccinated people had about 8.4 times higher rate than vaccinated people in March 2021, about 5.0 times higher in November 2021, about 3.5 times higher in February 2022, and only about 1.5 times higher in December 2023: sars2.net/czech3.html#Age_standardized_hospitalization_rate_by_vaccination_status. So the gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated people gradually got smaller over time like in your plot for COVID deaths from OWID, which might be if unvaccinated people gained natural immunity over time so vaccinated people gradually lost their relative immunization advantage.
No - I wrote, these unvaccinated numbers include vaccinated of which the vaccination status could not be verified. Also, there were different testing policies depending on vaxx status. Lastly, it's not all-cause mortality. The numbers are not representative!
I'm not commenting on your other topics, b/c I haven't looked at their underlying sources, because they're likely not trustworthy/accurate.
Well in the plot from OWID even if vaccinated people with an unknown status would be misclassified as unvaccinated, wouldn't that work in favor of unvaccinated people so that it would reduce unvaccinated ASMR? Or are you saying that the misclassified vaccinated people had much higher ASMR than the vaccinated people who were not misclassified?
Let's suppose that vaccinated and unvaccinated people both had the same COVID ASMR, and 10% of people who are classified as unvaccinated in OWID's plot are actually vaccinated people who have an unknown vaccination status. Then in order for people who were classified as unvaccinated to have about 10 times higher ASMR like in early 2022 in the plot from OWID, the vaccinated people with an unknown vaccination status need to have about 100 times higher COVID ASMR than vaccinated people who have a known vaccination status.
You wrote: "Fenton & Neil highlighted that the initial spike in mortality was merely an artifact caused by delays in reporting vaccination status. In response, the ONS removed the problematic data, effectively acknowledging that their initial analysis contained flaws."
Fenton and Neil later moved away from the hypothesis that the unvaccinated spike in early 2021 was due to a delay in reporting deaths, but they have instead favored the hypothesis that it was due to the "cheap trick" where people who died soon after vaccination were hypothetically classified as unvaccinated deaths.
However I think both hypotheses are wrong, and the various supposed anomalies that Fenton et al. identified in the ONS data can probably explained by the healthy vaccinee effect, and similar supposed anomalies are also present in the record-level datasets where there is no "cheap trick" utilized.
In the Czech record-level data the ASMR of unvaccinated people also shoots up in early 2021 when the first dose is rolled out: sars2.net/czech.html#Plot_for_ASMR_by_dose_and_date. In the Czech data people have temporarily reduced mortality for about 2 months after vaccination. So in the Czech data when I tried classifying peole as unvaccinated until 3 weeks from their first dose, it gave an advantage to unvaccinated people because it reduced the ASMR of unvaccinated people and it increased the ASMR of vaccinated people: sars2.net/czech4.html#ASMR_when_people_are_classified_as_unvaccinated_until_three_weeks_from_vaccination.
In Barry Young's New Zealand data, vaccinated people temporarily had much lower ASMR than the general NZ population in 2021 when people first got vaccinated, but the gap gradually got smaller as the healthy vaccinee effect waned out like in the ONS data: sars2.net/moar.html#Excess_ASMR_compared_to_reported_mortality_data_in_New_Zealand. Barry's dataset only includes about half of all vaccinated people in New Zealand, but if the vaccinated people in his dataset are representative of vaccinated people as a whole so that there wasn't much higher ASMR among the vaccinated people who are missing from his dataset, then it implies that unvaccinated people had a temporary increase in ASMR around the same time when vaccinated people had temporarily reduced ASMR.
Even in your own plot of Chris Johnston's NZ OIA data, unvaccinated people have a temporary increase in ASMR around August to December 2021, when there's a few month when unvaccinated people have more than twice as high ASMR as vaccinated people: usmortality.com/i/142334900/age-standardized-mortality. In your bar plot which shows the total ASMR of vaccinated and unvaccinated people starting from 2022, the reason why you got roughly equal total ASMR for vaccinated and unvaccinated people was because you omitted 2021 from your plot, but if you would've also included 2021 then you would've gotten much higher ASMR in unvaccinated people.
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In a preprint in March 2022, Craig, Neil, and Fenton speculated that because the ONS dataset for deaths by vaccination status had a low number of non-COVID deaths in the first two weeks after vaccination, deaths that occurred soon after vaccination were somehow systematically omitted or misclassified: researchgate.net/publication/358979921.
However there is also a very low number of deaths in the first few weeks after vaccination in the record-level datasets from New Zealand, Czech Republic, and United States: sars2.net/connecticut.html#Comparison_of_deaths_by_weeks_since_vaccination_to_other_datasets. The datasets show the date of vaccination and date of death of individual people, so you can calculate the number of deaths by weeks since vaccination manually so that you know for sure that there is no trick used where vaccinated people would be classified as unvaccinated for 1 to 3 weeks after vaccination. I have pointed it out to Neil and Fenton and I have tried to get them to look at Kirsch's record-level datasets, but I don't think I have been successful.
In the paper I linked Craig et al. wrote: "The healthy vaccinee hypothesis, that those close to death will postpone or decline vaccination might hypothetically account for a lower rate of death in the first two weeks. But as an explanation it is only plausible if every possible death that might occur in the first two weeks, after the offer of vaccination, was foreknown whilst those deaths in the third week were not, and hence those dying in the third week did not postpone or decline vaccination." However Craig et al. didn't take into account that the temporal healthy vaccinee effect actually lasts longer than 2 weeks, but if you plot deaths by weeks since the first dose in England, the increasing trend in mortality caused by the waning out of the temporal HVE is counteracted by the decreasing trend in the background mortality rate, because many first doses in England were given in the first three months of 2021 when the mortality rate was falling rapidly because the COVID wave in the winter was passing by. A similar phenomenon can also be observed in the Czech Republic and the United States, where first doses were given in early 2021 when there was a rapidly decreasing trend in the background mortality rate.
Clare Craig seems to have later changed her mind about the HVE, because a week ago when someone asked her what she meant by the healthy vaccinee effect, she answered that "Studies show that the first few weeks after vaccination are outliers because people who are feeling ill postpone." (https://x.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1844085783365550508)
For a long time Martin Neil seems to have also maintained that there was no evidence of a healthy vaccinee effect in the ONS data (or possibly even in general). Even last March he tweeted: "There is no evidence of a healthy vaccinee effect. You are signing up to an assumption usually exploited to pretend vaccines are effective. We demonstrated this using the ONS's own data." (https://x.com/search?q=from%3Amartinneil9%20%28%22healthy%20vaccinee%22%20OR%20HVE%29&f=live) However next month when he was commenting on a paper by Tomas Fürst et al. about how healthy vaccinee effect may have explained seeming vaccine efficacy in the Czech Republic, he now seemed to acknowledge that the Czech data may have in fact exhibited a strong HVE. [ibid.]
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You wrote that "ONS removed the problematic data" in response to Fenton and Neil, but I don't know if it as actually in response to them, because ONS had already fixed the issue of missing vaccination records nearly a year before they sent the email where they said that "Clare rightly pointed out in the past that te NIMS data were incomplete". (sars2.net/uk.html#Clare_Craig_Email_by_ONS_which_is_supposed_to_have_vindicated_Fenton_and_Neil) In either case Craig and Neil and Fenton misrepresented the email as somehow vindicating their preprints. The ONS had already fixed the issue mentioned in the email in the May 2022 edition of their dataset, but the issue affected so few people that it had little effect on mortality of unvaccinated people relative to vaccinated people. And it didn't explain any of the supposed anomalies that Fenton and Neil identified, because the anomalies are still present in the ONS data even though the issue was already fixed.
Covid positive PCR test is really inaccurate.
Never calibrated. A multitude of false positives caused by many different every day items
Orange juice, to Coke Cola and others.
But I suppose using their own data is the best way to show the stupidity of it all.
BEWARE the who pandemic treaty
Good work, Ben.
New Zealand's spring 2020 warrants close examination. Australia too.
I'm a broken record on this, but ideally, more analysis should focus on cities/counties (or provinces, where provinces are small). Country level obscures much. This is probably most obvious in the U.S., but it's true elsewhere as well.
They get their efficacy numbers from classification fraud. Excess mortality is all one needs to look at.
In your plot from OWID for COVID mortality rate by vaccination status, the mortality in unvaccinated people peaked in January 2022: ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status. But there were only a few people who got vaccinated so late that they had only completed the primary series within 2 weeks from January 2022, so at that point it shouldn't make much difference anymore if people are classified as vaccinated immediately after vaccination or not.
And in any case in the record-level Medicare data from Connecticut that Steve Kirsch published, there is a reduced number of deaths in the first few weeks after vaccination, so if the data is representative the US as a whole, then the classification delay should work in favor of unvaccinated people: sars2.net/connecticut.html#Deaths_by_weeks_since_vaccination.
The Czech Republic had a wave of COVID deaths around December 2021 during which unvaccinated people had a much higher spike in ASMR than vaccinated people. When I adjusted for the HVE by plotting the monthly ASMR as a percentage of the total ASMR in the second half of 2022 when there was a low number of COVID deaths, in December 2021 unvaccinated people had about 115% higher ASMR than in the second half of 2022 but vaccinated people had only about 14% higher ASMR: sars2.net/czech2.html#ASMR_by_month_and_vaccine_type. So it's somewhat similar to your plot from OWID for the United States where unvaccinated people have a huge spike in mortality in the winter of 2021 to 2022, except I plotted deaths from all causes instead of only COVID deaths so the difference between unvaccinated and vaccinated people wasn't as big.
When I calculated an age-standardized hospitalization rate by vaccination status in the Czech Republic, unvaccinated people had about 8.4 times higher rate than vaccinated people in March 2021, about 5.0 times higher in November 2021, about 3.5 times higher in February 2022, and only about 1.5 times higher in December 2023: sars2.net/czech3.html#Age_standardized_hospitalization_rate_by_vaccination_status. So the gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated people gradually got smaller over time like in your plot for COVID deaths from OWID, which might be if unvaccinated people gained natural immunity over time so vaccinated people gradually lost their relative immunization advantage.
No - I wrote, these unvaccinated numbers include vaccinated of which the vaccination status could not be verified. Also, there were different testing policies depending on vaxx status. Lastly, it's not all-cause mortality. The numbers are not representative!
I'm not commenting on your other topics, b/c I haven't looked at their underlying sources, because they're likely not trustworthy/accurate.
Well in the plot from OWID even if vaccinated people with an unknown status would be misclassified as unvaccinated, wouldn't that work in favor of unvaccinated people so that it would reduce unvaccinated ASMR? Or are you saying that the misclassified vaccinated people had much higher ASMR than the vaccinated people who were not misclassified?
Let's suppose that vaccinated and unvaccinated people both had the same COVID ASMR, and 10% of people who are classified as unvaccinated in OWID's plot are actually vaccinated people who have an unknown vaccination status. Then in order for people who were classified as unvaccinated to have about 10 times higher ASMR like in early 2022 in the plot from OWID, the vaccinated people with an unknown vaccination status need to have about 100 times higher COVID ASMR than vaccinated people who have a known vaccination status.
You wrote: "Fenton & Neil highlighted that the initial spike in mortality was merely an artifact caused by delays in reporting vaccination status. In response, the ONS removed the problematic data, effectively acknowledging that their initial analysis contained flaws."
Fenton and Neil later moved away from the hypothesis that the unvaccinated spike in early 2021 was due to a delay in reporting deaths, but they have instead favored the hypothesis that it was due to the "cheap trick" where people who died soon after vaccination were hypothetically classified as unvaccinated deaths.
However I think both hypotheses are wrong, and the various supposed anomalies that Fenton et al. identified in the ONS data can probably explained by the healthy vaccinee effect, and similar supposed anomalies are also present in the record-level datasets where there is no "cheap trick" utilized.
In the Czech record-level data the ASMR of unvaccinated people also shoots up in early 2021 when the first dose is rolled out: sars2.net/czech.html#Plot_for_ASMR_by_dose_and_date. In the Czech data people have temporarily reduced mortality for about 2 months after vaccination. So in the Czech data when I tried classifying peole as unvaccinated until 3 weeks from their first dose, it gave an advantage to unvaccinated people because it reduced the ASMR of unvaccinated people and it increased the ASMR of vaccinated people: sars2.net/czech4.html#ASMR_when_people_are_classified_as_unvaccinated_until_three_weeks_from_vaccination.
In Barry Young's New Zealand data, vaccinated people temporarily had much lower ASMR than the general NZ population in 2021 when people first got vaccinated, but the gap gradually got smaller as the healthy vaccinee effect waned out like in the ONS data: sars2.net/moar.html#Excess_ASMR_compared_to_reported_mortality_data_in_New_Zealand. Barry's dataset only includes about half of all vaccinated people in New Zealand, but if the vaccinated people in his dataset are representative of vaccinated people as a whole so that there wasn't much higher ASMR among the vaccinated people who are missing from his dataset, then it implies that unvaccinated people had a temporary increase in ASMR around the same time when vaccinated people had temporarily reduced ASMR.
Even in your own plot of Chris Johnston's NZ OIA data, unvaccinated people have a temporary increase in ASMR around August to December 2021, when there's a few month when unvaccinated people have more than twice as high ASMR as vaccinated people: usmortality.com/i/142334900/age-standardized-mortality. In your bar plot which shows the total ASMR of vaccinated and unvaccinated people starting from 2022, the reason why you got roughly equal total ASMR for vaccinated and unvaccinated people was because you omitted 2021 from your plot, but if you would've also included 2021 then you would've gotten much higher ASMR in unvaccinated people.
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In a preprint in March 2022, Craig, Neil, and Fenton speculated that because the ONS dataset for deaths by vaccination status had a low number of non-COVID deaths in the first two weeks after vaccination, deaths that occurred soon after vaccination were somehow systematically omitted or misclassified: researchgate.net/publication/358979921.
However there is also a very low number of deaths in the first few weeks after vaccination in the record-level datasets from New Zealand, Czech Republic, and United States: sars2.net/connecticut.html#Comparison_of_deaths_by_weeks_since_vaccination_to_other_datasets. The datasets show the date of vaccination and date of death of individual people, so you can calculate the number of deaths by weeks since vaccination manually so that you know for sure that there is no trick used where vaccinated people would be classified as unvaccinated for 1 to 3 weeks after vaccination. I have pointed it out to Neil and Fenton and I have tried to get them to look at Kirsch's record-level datasets, but I don't think I have been successful.
In the paper I linked Craig et al. wrote: "The healthy vaccinee hypothesis, that those close to death will postpone or decline vaccination might hypothetically account for a lower rate of death in the first two weeks. But as an explanation it is only plausible if every possible death that might occur in the first two weeks, after the offer of vaccination, was foreknown whilst those deaths in the third week were not, and hence those dying in the third week did not postpone or decline vaccination." However Craig et al. didn't take into account that the temporal healthy vaccinee effect actually lasts longer than 2 weeks, but if you plot deaths by weeks since the first dose in England, the increasing trend in mortality caused by the waning out of the temporal HVE is counteracted by the decreasing trend in the background mortality rate, because many first doses in England were given in the first three months of 2021 when the mortality rate was falling rapidly because the COVID wave in the winter was passing by. A similar phenomenon can also be observed in the Czech Republic and the United States, where first doses were given in early 2021 when there was a rapidly decreasing trend in the background mortality rate.
Clare Craig seems to have later changed her mind about the HVE, because a week ago when someone asked her what she meant by the healthy vaccinee effect, she answered that "Studies show that the first few weeks after vaccination are outliers because people who are feeling ill postpone." (https://x.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1844085783365550508)
For a long time Martin Neil seems to have also maintained that there was no evidence of a healthy vaccinee effect in the ONS data (or possibly even in general). Even last March he tweeted: "There is no evidence of a healthy vaccinee effect. You are signing up to an assumption usually exploited to pretend vaccines are effective. We demonstrated this using the ONS's own data." (https://x.com/search?q=from%3Amartinneil9%20%28%22healthy%20vaccinee%22%20OR%20HVE%29&f=live) However next month when he was commenting on a paper by Tomas Fürst et al. about how healthy vaccinee effect may have explained seeming vaccine efficacy in the Czech Republic, he now seemed to acknowledge that the Czech data may have in fact exhibited a strong HVE. [ibid.]
---
You wrote that "ONS removed the problematic data" in response to Fenton and Neil, but I don't know if it as actually in response to them, because ONS had already fixed the issue of missing vaccination records nearly a year before they sent the email where they said that "Clare rightly pointed out in the past that te NIMS data were incomplete". (sars2.net/uk.html#Clare_Craig_Email_by_ONS_which_is_supposed_to_have_vindicated_Fenton_and_Neil) In either case Craig and Neil and Fenton misrepresented the email as somehow vindicating their preprints. The ONS had already fixed the issue mentioned in the email in the May 2022 edition of their dataset, but the issue affected so few people that it had little effect on mortality of unvaccinated people relative to vaccinated people. And it didn't explain any of the supposed anomalies that Fenton and Neil identified, because the anomalies are still present in the ONS data even though the issue was already fixed.