Excess Mortality in 2023 Associated With Covid Vaccination Rates in 25 European Countries

In 2022, I wrote a series of posts discussing the correlation of excess mortality with vaccination rates. Several comparisons by country, German-Bundesland, and more showed a positive relationship between excess mortality and vaccination (or booster) rates.

That would be impossible if Covid vaccines saved lives. The real-world data bafflingly suggest that Covid vaccines may increase excess mortality instead of decreasing it.

Back then, I expressed a hope that excess mortality would moderate, a hope based on my wishing the best for all vaccinated people.

It is January 2024. Therefore, we can ask, what happened in 2023?

I found more data and re-analysed it. There is good and bad news regarding the relationship between excess mortality and vaccination rates.

Let’s take a look.

I found excess mortality for weeks 1-40 of 2023 on the OECD website.

I pulled total Covid vaccination rates from Our World in Data.

To calculate average mortality from weekly OECD data, I wrote this Perl script to load the CSV data and average it, limiting myself to countries with a full 40 weeks of data.

Please note that averaging ‘weekly excess mortality’ for weeks 1-40 is not a perfectly correct calculation for the excess mortality in that period (fact checkers, take note!) but it is a very close approximation.

Additionally, I excluded Israel due to the armed conflict that occurred during this period.

Here are the data:

Here’s the dot-plot visualization:

How significant is this association? I used GraphPad linear regression calculator to analyse the numbers:

It turns out that COVID-19 vaccination rates are associated with an increased mortality of 25%, and the association is highly statistically significant with the P-value of 0.0131, showing that it is unlikely a result of random chance.

Bad News

We were told that ‘Covid vaccines save lives’. The real-world data, unfortunately, show the opposite. The pattern seen in previous analyses continues: vaccination rates are associated with increases, not decreases, in total mortality.

Similarities between relationships between vaccination rates and excess mortality in 2023 and 2022 (2022 data discussed here) are striking:

Good News

I have good news for people tired of negativity: excess mortality during weeks 1-40 of 2023 was somewhat lower than in 2022. Could it be explained by people no longer vaccinating against COVID-19? We cannot be sure of the answer based on the data above, but we cannot dismiss that explanation either.

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