A reader brought to my attention a CDC study of COVID-19 from late October that compared the mortality rate of vaccinated people vs. unvaccinated people. However, this study didn't do the usual boring thing and investigate deaths from COVID. It investigated deaths from non-COVID causes. Surprisingly, it turned out that mortality from non-COVID causes was way lower for people who had been vaccinated with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines:
The standardized mortality rate from non-COVID causes was about 0.35 for vaccinated people vs. 1.11 for non-vaccinated people. This disparity held for all age groups, all races and ethnicities, and for both men and women. The disparity was biggest among the Black community: the unvaccinated mortality rate was more than 4x that of the vaccinated.
I am suspicious of these results, but not because I have any specific objections to the data gathering or the statistical analysis. Somebody with access to the raw data would have to comment on that.
However, I'm routinely suspicious of studies that show gigantic results. I mean, if these vaccines had some odd property that reduced your mortality rate by 10% or 20% or so, I might buy it. But 3x or more? That's beyond belief.
There's also this: I couldn't find any critiques of this study. Why? If these results are real, every medical researcher in the world should be gobsmacked. Money should be pouring into research labs that want to investigate what's going on. But that doesn't seem to be the case. These results were reported fairly widely when the study came out, but the mainstream press mostly ignored it and after that it disappeared. This makes no sense.
If this study is true, it's yet another great reason to get vaccinated—and to get happily boosted every year. But I would hold on for some independent confirmation before I started celebrating.
My first guess without looking at the details of the study is that a lot of people whose deaths in the unvaccinated group that were attributed to non-Covid causes actually died of covid or covid was a contributing factor.
This is almost certainly right. The effect was Moderna > Pfizer > J&J, which is the same trend we know and love for Covid illness and death. The most likely source for this 'non-Covid' mortality is that people get very sick with Covid, recover, and then three months later have a stroke that is a 'non-Covid' death but which was triggered by complications from damage from Covid.
Simple message: This is much of why 'excess mortality' runs above Covid mortality. People are in fact dying of complications from Covid. It's just after they clear the virus.
My reaction is that this is almost certainly due to selection bias. That is, if you are someone who gets vaccinated, you take care of your health in other ways, as well. The proper comparison would be with, say, people who got flu shots, who, I'm guessing, also show reduced mortality from all causes.
Gods, yes. Given how the data is preseneted, it's an almost canonical example of selection bias. I speak, of course, of the ho-hum attitude of thge medical community to this otherwise astounding fact 😉
That was my first thought too. I would expect a strong correlation between longevity and a person's overall concern for protecting their health and accepting medical science as real. For example, people like me who got the Covid shot immediately probably get plenty of other shots, too- flu, shingles, hepatitis, pneumonia, etc. and probably also get regular medical screenings - colonoscopies, mamographies, etc. Don't know whether this study controlled for that factor somehow.
"The proper comparison would be with, say, people who got flu shots, who, I'm guessing, also show reduced mortality from all causes."
They controlled for this. Those included in the unvaccinated group were people who had received at least one flu shot in the past two years.
The report to which Kevin linked did not reference influenza vaccination. What is the source for your assertion?
Sorry, I relied on a page search for “flu” and it failed to find the statement about influenza vaccination status.
Are coders writing their own crappy string-search routines instead of using proven ones? The (Safari/iPad) Find on page found ‘infl’ but not ‘flu’, so was clearly expecting the target to occur at the beginning of a word. Recently I was trying to find ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ on Disney+ for my granddaughters. Searching for ‘nightmare’ found no result, but ‘Nightmare’ succeeded. Case-normalization is like coding 101. Kids these days!
Yep, although even there... As an example, my partner refuses to get a flu shot but had zero observable hesitancy about the COVID shot. She had a bad experience with a medical system once and now believes that the entire profession is incompetent. We got boosted at the same time; I also got the flu shot but she did not want it. I imagine number of people like her are small, and probably insignificant for a study that compared such a thing, but...
Yeah, it's gotta be behavioral/selection bias. Not only are you more likely to take care of your health in other ways, you're also more likely to be distancing and not being as active in life activities that carry risks of death with them - e.g., driving a lot less, crossing streets a lot less, living in a place where other people are driving a lot less, etc.
I think Dr. Jay is on to it... People who refused to get vaccinated are idiots and losers. Your average young black / latin gangbanger isn't going to get vaccinated. And the lazy fat white anti-vax white folks are probably learning to skip all their doctors advice.
Anyway - if this is correct, it's a victory for rational people everywhere. We have the key to wiping out the idiot faction. We should use it.
"A 13-year-old boy riding a dirt bike died in a crash Sunday afternoon as he was fleeing police on a Florida highway, a report said. The teen, identified by family to WPBF 25 as Stanley Davis Jr., lost control of the dirt bike and careened into a median on US Highway 1 in Boynton Beach, police said."
I'll bet that kid wasn't vaccinated. LOL Sometimes the stupidity of the average person (even more for 13 year old boys) counteracts all the good things that we can bring to life for our fellow humans. It's people like this who make life challenging for the rest of us. They become criminals and terrorists. They join the military or some rebel group in some god forsaken place even more dysfunctional that Florida.
With any luck they die young before they do too much damage. Not often enough, though.
And another crazy rural Michigander is dead. Ding dong! These are the people you want to see killing each other. Thank goodness dad had a gun. It doesn’t even matter why. This is what happens when crazy people have guns. And this represents normal mortality for them. You’d be surprised how many rural people are killed by family. It happens all the time here in Michigan.
MONROE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — A man is in custody after he shot and killed his son near White Cloud Monday night, authorities say.
The Newaygo County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were called shortly after 7 p.m. for a report of a shooting on E. Pierce Drive between Evergreen Drive and Woodbridge Road in Monroe Township, north of White Cloud.
When deputies arrived on the scene, they found a 38-year-old man on the ground with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene, the sheriff’s office said. The victim’s father, a 69-year-old man, was taken into custody and lodged at the Newaygo County Jail on murder charges, according to the sheriff’s office.
I would guess what these results show is not so much the direct effect of the vaccines, but tell us something about the behavior and general health of the people who chose to get vaccinated compared to those who did not. In other words, if you are a vaccine resistor, you likely have other things going on in your life that would cause your mortality rate to be slightly higher. Whether this means you are more likely to have other health related issues or if you are possibly just more of a risk taker would be anyone's guess.
Always read the other comments first . . .
I think Kahner and Dr. Jay have the likely reasons, but let me float an interesting connection. We've been confused by the disconnect between violent crime overall (flat numbers) and murders (going up rapidly). What if the cause is that a higher percentage of people subject to violent crime are dying of it in 2020-21 than earlier? IE, the fatality rate for violent crime is higher -- because a lot more of them have covid when they're hurt than before and that contributes.
It would be interesting to check what the vaccination rate among murder victims is.
Unvacced covid infections might be behind this. At the beginning of Covid, I remember seeing that SARS or MERS (forget which one) infection was associated with poor health outcomes beyond the initial infection and recovery. High rates of death from other causes.
Wouldn't be surprising if this is true of COvid and is playing a role in these results.
I too believe that Doctor Jay (selection bias) and Kahner (unattributed COVID-related deaths) have hit the mark. As the CDC study itself points out:
"Lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality in vaccinated groups suggest that COVID-19 vaccinees are inherently healthier or engage in fewer risk behaviors"
"Although deaths associated with COVID-19 were excluded, causes of death were not assessed. It is possible that the algorithm used might have misclassified some deaths associated with COVID-19 because of lack of testing or because individual mortality reviews were not conducted."
The first thing to do is probably to look at the nature of the non-covid deaths in both groups. This would give information about both possible flaws in the study and what could actually be responsible for the difference (if not a flaw). In fact the absence of this is itself a major flaw.
Numbers since many people have been fully vaccinated are not huge. But as this was done in collaboration directly with the health-care organizations - not state bureaucracies - the information should be available immediately. The long-term averages in causes of death are pretty well known.
Access to mRNA vaccines hasn't been equally distributed. People in lower income and more rural areas with worse healthcare access have been more likely to get J&J or none at all. If they didn't control for socioeconomic status and healthcare access to begin with, these results are almost meaningless.
This too.
For example, the entire population of people at my county's emergency shelters was given access to J&J in early 2021 because that's what was easiest. That's also what they've been boosting them with. So...
I agree with the comments above but I think part of it is due to the behavior of people like me. 21 days after my second vaccination, I started going out and about but quickly backed away from that. I didn't go back to my pre-vax life but to a hybrid existence. I still go out far, far less than pre-Covid which means less driving (less likely to die in a car accident), less exposure to other illnesses etc... and I wear masks and try to keep my distance from others. Of course I don't know how I compare to the average.
There are a number of ways to explain these results without assigning magical properties to the vaccines.
- Deaths from undiagnosed COVID. We know that the US has not tested as much as it should have. Running the same study in a country with high rates of testing would be a way to verify/falsify this.
- People who choose to be vaccinated are more health conscious in general. I don't quite see how you would run a study to test this (possibly a poll at a mass vaccination site?).
- Rural people tend to be less vaccinated as well as less healthy than city people and have less access to care. This should show up in a regional analysis of the original data set (if it covers a sufficiently diverse area).
Maybe this is the reason why nobody is rushing into research into vaccine properties that supposedly delay the time of death?
One more possibility: One subgroup of the unvaccinated are people who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. Those people will have higher mortality rates than the average population.
Also: Evangelicals con'w wait to get into heaven....
I’ll bet getting a library card reduces mortality even more.
It seems that in some parts of the country dying from COVID just isn't done:
"Uncounted: Inaccurate death certificates across the country hide the true toll of COVID-19"
https://missouriindependent.com/2021/12/22/uncounted-inaccurate-death-certificates-across-the-country-hide-the-true-toll-of-covid-19/
Thanks for posting this. I'm glad someone did this analysis.
I agree with the consensus here. It's selection bias. The correlation of COVID, and, for that matter, non-COVID death, with obesity and a range of other comorbidities is related. Not everyone who is seriously overweight is poor, can't maintain a proper health regimen and has spotty medical care, but it's more likely. They are also more likely to die sooner.
Studies such as this, and additionally reports such as https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/coronavirus/?id=81952698 are at least part of why "Because science" arguments are fraught with peril. Because presenting science as an absolute, when its conclusions are often wrong or evolving, leaves it open to attack. I'm not sure though how one fixes that, but it needs to be fixed somehow.
The problem isn't the study, it's the shoddy interpretations Kevin made about it.
This is a perfect example of "believe what the talking head says about something he knows nothing about" only because you like him/her or usually agree with his/her opinions.
For starters, contrary to what Kevin says, the reduced mortality didn't apply to all groups, it wasn't seen in the youngest cohort where in total they only had 12 deaths regardless of the group. The study itself plainly states the reduced mortality was not seen in this group.
Second, the reason why the public and scientific reaction wasn't what Kevin expected (mass media coverage, multitude of studies, etc.) is because the study wasn't trying to prove some magical benefit from the COVID vaccines, and clearly stated so. All it wanted to show was that getting the COVID vaccines was safe and wasn't going to kill you, as many fearmongered. In their limitations they plainly explain why this is not showing that COVID vaccines are some sort of magic bullet to have a reduced risk of mortality, which was Kevin's made up take home message.
This leads to the second problem, reading the comments, it became a circle jerk of Kevin readers trying to answer Kevin without reading the actual study or understanding it, because most of what was commented was included in the study if they had taken the time to actually read it, and it clearly explained what the study's limitations were and what that means.
If I were a naive reader and only went by Kevin's description of the study, and then the comments about it from the other commenters here, I'd think this was a crappy study and one more example why you can't trust scientists or scientific organizations like the CDC.
I wouldn’t be so hard on the commenters that noted pretty much the same limitations as the researchers did. Few if any of the comments implied that the researchers were unaware of selection bias and differential comorbidities; just that KD hadn’t noticed these confounds.
I do have a quibble with the researchers over the use of ‘ensure’ in the following; I think it expresses unwarranted confidence:
One question is the amount of selection bias. Do people who get vaccinated for Covid do other things that produce fewer deaths? Do people who won't get vaccinated for Covid also refuse other vaccinations or other preventative care that reduces deaths?
In which case, getting vaccinated for Covid wouldn't particularly help, but getting vaccinated in general would.