Does the fact that nations that vaccinated their people against covid has far lower death rates from than those that didn't make total nonsense of the anti-vaccine campaigner's claims?
Originally answered on Quora July 21, 2023
This appears to be an American-centric question. Borders in the modern world are very porous. Nations are not closed systems that accurately act as controls and variance in deaths is far greater between WHO regions.
The 2nd lowest death rates were found in Africa in 2021 (6 mo into the vaccine rollout) and the lowest in 2022. Note Africa has a much larger population than both Europe and the Americas.
As of November 2022, only 24% of people in Africa had completed the primary series. Explanations ranging from younger demographics to malaria epidemics somehow dampening Covid have been put forth but none explain why the intervention is much a weaker mediating factor and we do not see these excuses trotted out to explain polio deaths for instance (the false equivalence Pfizer stooges love to use) because they are actually higher in Africa and lower vaccination rate is the obvious mediating variable.
Anyways this is likely what you were looking for:
This is data from John Hopkins U as of March 2023 on the 20 countries with the highest COVID mortality per 100K. The leading country by far, Peru, has a fully vaccinated rate of 84% with 89% receiving at least one dose. Notice none of the top 20 countries in low vaccination rate Africa.
And maybe you think CFR is what actually matters and low vaccine rate Africa leads there. Well here is CFR rate by country; still no sign of Africa and Peru is still the global leader.
CFR: refers to proportion of deaths among known and documented cases (which usually excludes mild and asymptomatic cases that don’t require hospitalization) e.g. my asymptomatic cases of delta and omicron were not counted towards CFR
IFR: refers to the proportion of deaths among the estimated number of infections within a given population
Edit:
After closer examination of the CFR numbers provided by John Hopkins U on 185 countries I realized there were some African countries that had both higher and lower CFR values than EU countries, but none had higher vaxx rates so I decided to run a simple linear regression comparing the CFR numbers provided by John Hopkins and the Vaccination rates by country data provided by WHO. I found r^2 = 0.1201146594 (p < 0.05), thus the shot predicts about 12% of the variance in CFR.
Otherwise the data comparing COVID deaths per 100K looks pretty random on a country-by-country basis with r^2 = 0.01525357514 (p > 0.05), thus the super “effective” shot predicts about 1.5% of the variance in deaths per 100K population across the world.
A regression analysis of Eurostat all cause mortality data for 31 countries, weighted by population size, in the first 9 months of 2022 and vaccine uptake data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control for the previous year, published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Health Sciences, found that a 1% increase in vaccine uptake in 2021 is associated with a 0.105% increase in monthly all cause mortality in the first 9 months of 2022: a borderline statistically significant result. All cause mortality increases were found to be highest in nations with the highest 2021 vaccination rates and relatively lower or even negative, indicating a decline in all cause mortality, in nations with lower 2021 vaccination rates. This was found after controlling for average all cause mortality in 2020-2021 divided by average all cause mortality between 2016-2019 to eliminate the bounce back effect that may have occurred. These 5 regression models also included nation level median age and 2019 per capita GDP to adjust for differential rates of all cause mortality due to a higher proportion of senior citizen population and impoverished populations. A similar study of 17 nations in the global south, conducted by Rancourt et al., also found that a higher vaccination rate was associated with a higher all cause mortality rate the following year. ., found that the risk of death after injection.
The Deeply Flawed Watson et al., model Suggesting the vaccine saved >14 million lives excluded the unvaccinated (i.e. control group) from their estimate which would include most people in Africa for the years they are modelling.
Source: Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination (Volume 14, Issue 5)