The waning impact of Covid vaccines on all-cause mortality
With the WHO declaring that Covid no longer presents a global health emergency, in this week’s infographic we look at UK data showing how death rates by Covid vaccination status changed throughout the pandemic, using data from The Office for National Statistics.
The data shows clearly that throughout 2021 there was a significant benefit to Covid vaccination in terms of death rates, with the all-cause mortality rate per 100,000 unvaccinated people consistently being much higher than the death rate for vaccinated people:
However, as you can see from the above chart, throughout 2022 the death rate of unvaccinated people steadily decreased, presumably because of increasing natural immunity amongst the unvaccinated. Meanwhile the death rate of vaccinated people remained roughly stable. By the end 2022, the unvaccinated were still consistently dying at a higher rate than the vaccinated, but by a much smaller margin.
However, the above figures cover all age groups, and the chances of dying from Covid vary massively by age. The Office for National Statistics also provides a breakdown by age group.
Looking at the data for 18-39 year olds it appears that there was some benefit from vaccination in terms of all-cause mortality in 2021, however the data is less unambiguous about this than the data across all age groups. And it appears any benefit to 18-39 year olds had disappeared by the last four months of 2022.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Martin De Benito Gellner or call 0207 183 3779.
