Verdween Covid met of door vaccinatie?

Disinformation about the beneficial role that vaccines may have played is on the rise again. Time to highlight some crucial figures. No claims based on models, but the original figures. Had corona already disappeared before vaccination was carried out, or did the vaccines play an important role in this? We are going to discuss some hard facts in light of claims made by pharmaceuticals.

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"Vaccinatie stopte corona"

That seems to be the boldest claim. Corona stopped thanks to the vaccinations was the claim of the pharmacy, articulated by the government, which uncritically embraced this statement. The pharmaceuticals found a correlation between the decrease in mortality in January 2021 and the start of vaccination in January 2021 as well, so they pulled the correlation-is-causality wildcard. But is there also causality because of this correlation? Only the numbers will tell.

First, let's take a look at the CBS numbers in this chart and see what they tell us. First, we need to ask ourselves what the effect of vaccination should be. It was warned in advance that the vaccine would only become effective a few weeks after the first shot. A second shot would then increase that effectiveness to hopefully 90%. From the moment the vaccine protected you, you would no longer be able to get sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. Those who did become too seriously ill died at least two weeks after contracting an infection. That adds up to a delay of at least a month between vaccination and death, should a positive effect be visible in the figures.

Armed with this knowledge, let's look at this chart. There we see that the number of deaths from corona (red) was already declining on 1 January.

The green line in this graph indicates the accumulated vaccination coverage. By mid-February, only 5% had been vaccinated, especially the elderly. The first effect of the protection should therefore be seen from mid-March.

By mid-March, mortality from covid-19 had already fallen by more than 70%. In the months that followed, the decline stagnated completely, while the vaccination rate approached 40% in that period. In any case, this includes all the vulnerable and elderly – the groups in which the difference should be made.

A causal relationship between vaccinations and decreased mortality from corona must therefore be ruled out on the basis of the CBS figures. This principle is also part of the Bradford Hill test (described in this article on Virusvaria.nl).

In other words, vaccination came three months too late to be a candidate for ending the corona epidemic.

"Het waren ongevaccineerden die overleden tijdens Deltagolf"

That's an interesting claim. To evaluate this proposition, we first need to look at what the possible role of vaccination could have been in excess mortality. The government liked to attribute this wave entirely to unvaccinated people who died of covid-19, but is that true? We zoom in on the CBS figures on the Delta wave:

This graph shows the excess mortality during the Delta wave. If the hospitals were full of unvaccinated people, we should see that reflected in the deaths. Here we see the opposite.

On 23 February 2024, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) published tables of deaths in Covid Vaccination Status and Mortality from which we can calculate mortality per vaccination status. We see this in this graph as the two green lines. The drawn line is the percentage of deaths from covid-19 that have been vaccinated, the dashed line is the vaccination coverage calculated from the same figures (for an elaboration of these figures read e.g. CBS has revealed vaccine efficacy). As soon as the percentage of people vaccinated at the time of death would become equal to the vaccination coverage, the efficacy of the vaccines would have dropped to zero.

We can see in this graph that the percentage of vaccinated people before and after the Delta wave was around 60%, clearly below the vaccination rate, but the vaccine still seemed to provide some protection. In more severe corona periods, the protection should be more clearly visible, but during the Delta wave itself, the percentage of vaccinated people actually rose to 75%: almost the vaccination rate, a sign that the vaccine hardly made a difference at that time.

If 75% of covid-19 deaths during the Delta wave were vaccinated, there also seems to be no reason to assume that it would give a different picture in hospital admissions. So the hospitals must have been full of vaccinated people.

If we assume that CBS has the correct figures when it comes to the cause of death, this means that the protection during the Delta wave suddenly dropped to 20%. However, there is an alternative explanation for what we observe and that comes from the GGD. CBS added up WHO instruction Deaths with corona and covid-19, as a result of which a significant part of the mortality would actually have had another underlying cause.

The WHO now uses Official figures for deaths from covid-19 according to the GGD and during the Delta wave they are only a third of those of CBS. This means that the vaccines have only been effective on a much smaller proportion of mortality and thus the effectiveness could increase again. It is up to the pharmaceutical industry to use this information to possibly boost the protection during the Delta wave.

"Ziekenhuizen lagen na vaccinatie vol met ongevaccineerden"

That, too, is an interesting proposition. It's partly a story of taking the counts in the hospitals at face value, but in the first few months after vaccination, something very interesting happened. See this graph showing the number of hospitalizations according to NICE's figures since October 2020:

For orientation purposes, mortality from covid-19 is shown here as a black line according to CBS. Since the beginning of the epidemic, this has been more or less in line with the number of hospital admissions due to corona.

In this graph, hospital admissions are broken down by age. Roughly the same pattern for all ages. From February onwards, we suddenly see something very special. In the oldest age group, the course is still in line with the number of deaths from corona, according to figures from Statistics Netherlands. But among all younger ages, the decline stagnates from February onwards. That is very strange, because it happens both to the early vaccinated 70-79-year-olds and to all ages below that who were not vaccinated until later. So there seems to be no relationship between vaccination and the increase in hospitalizations.

Apart from the question of WHO was admitted, it is remarkable that with a decreasing epidemic, decreasing excess mortality, decreasing mortality from corona and increasing vaccination coverage, the number of hospital patients with corona increased tenfold in proportion. So we don't see any correlation with the vaccination pattern.

Finally, we also look at the associated referrals due to corona from primary care. 99% of admissions due to corona should come from general practitioners. One Research over the year 2022 showed that 36,223 admissions were recorded by NICE. Divided over approximately 7,500 GPs, this would amount to approximately 5 admissions per GP. The general practitioners themselves reported an average of only around 0.5 referred patients per doctor. The difference was apparently registered from the hospital itself, i.e. after an infection with SARS-CoV-2 detected in the hospital. The observation that hospitals were full of unvaccinated people therefore seems to be based on an internal procedure within the hospitals themselves. Not admitted due to corona, but found positive for another reason after admission.

Conclusions

The following conclusions can be drawn from the public figures released by Statistics Netherlands:

• Mortality rates were already declining before 1 January 2021 and became under-mortality on 1 March. The protective effects of vaccination could not be seen until March 2021 at the earliest. Vaccinations can therefore be ruled out as a cause for the end of the corona epidemic.
• The covid-19 mortality during the Delta wave consisted of 75% vaccinated people. There are two explanations for this. Judging by the CBS figures, the protection was reduced to 20%. However, if the GGD figures are a measure of covid-19 mortality, then most of the mortality during the Delta wave remains unexplained.
• There seems to be no other explanation for the increase in the number of hospital admissions in February 2021 other than admission with corona. Uit de naar leeftijd uitgesplitste opnamecijfers vinden we geen aanwijzingen dat vaccinaties hierbij een rol gespeeld kunnen hebben.