Covid-19 Vaccines: Success or Failure? Part 1
A major theme of this series of posts is going to be the laying out of data that runs counter to the prevailing myth of progress: the myth that human progress is a one-way ticket from the cave to the stars - from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. Mandatory vaccination programs are just the kind of technoprogressive project that I intend to examine.
There’s no shortage of opinions on the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccination program. Many commentators seem to get lost in the details - they don’t “see the wood for the trees”, as the saying goes.
In this post, I’m going to look at the issue with the longest lens possible, and see if the “all-cause deaths” figures published by the CDC in the US can teach us anything at all about the efficacy of the program. By looking only at all-cause deaths, we can side-step many controversial issues, such as these:
How many people died with covid, rather than from covid?
How many deaths attributed to covid should correctly be attributed to the vaccine?
We can start by noting the average number of all-cause deaths for the years 2015 to 2019 - we will call this number the baseline:
2,788,5061.
Next. let’s look at all-cause deaths for 2020, a year of the epidemic without the vaccines:
3,389,1002
And 2021, a year of the epidemic with the vaccines:
3,420,407
These numbers should be uncontroversial: one is either alive, or dead, and even the most jaded statistician can count.
The thing to note here is that both the 2020 and the 2021 numbers are about 22% above baseline. If the objective of the vaccination program was to reduce all-cause mortality, we can conclude it has failed to meet that objective.
Next, we can look at the numbers of deaths in 2020 and 2021 that “involved” covid-19 - meaning that covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate:
2020: 385,469 (in a year without vaccines)
2021: 456,406 (in a year with vaccines)
Note that in 2021 the number of covid-related deaths increased by 18.4%. If the objective of the vaccination program was to reduce covid-related mortality, we can conclude that it failed to meet that objective, too.
So far, and using only CDC data, we have found 2 criteria (all-cause mortality, and covid-related mortality) that lead me to believe that the vaccination campaign has been a failure. Perhaps I am using the wrong criteria? Have I misidentified the objectives of the vaccination program? If anybody can explain how this data can be spun as a vaccine success story, I am all ears.
In Part 2, I will drill down into the age-stratified data from the CDC to see if any additional insights can be gained. Spoiler alert: it’s bad news for anyone under 65 years old.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-Jurisdiction-and-Age/y5bj-9g5w
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm