Our number juggernaut Herman Steigstra produces one "bombshell" after another. Please note: each article is the result of a lot of texting back and forth with many other contributors, statisticians, scientists and researchers, with the last week a leading role for @leon1969, who knows how to link data aberrations to real-life events and ministerial decisions. I'm in a chateau in France at the moment, so I'm a bit less active. But this new finding had to be posted! It is part of a series in which we witness real "revelations", in the most literal sense of the word. Let's go team Herman!

Progressive insight sometimes continues for a long time. Again. In this article: Is dit de smoking gun? we made it plausible that the law means that a vaccination is not included in the vaccination register if the vaccinated person had died in the meantime. We showed this graph:

This graph was published earlier this year in the article Which vaccination coverage to use? We see here that the vaccination coverage as "seen" from the CIMS figures (black) lags behind the vaccination figures as published by RIVM (blue). We understand o.a. dat as a result, the VE value (Vaccine Effectiveness) calculated by RIVM is presented very much more favorably than it actually is.

In a previous article, we already described that the VE was even negative in the first 4 weeks. At the time, it was supposed to be due to lagging administration and the refusal of some to have their data included in the vaccination register.

So, as we now know, there is even a legislation behind the, which prevents persons who have died shortly after vaccination from being registered in the CIMS vaccination registry. Hence, the black and blue lines diverge.

But what happened in the first two months, because the lines are still the same. People who died in the first months after vaccination also seemed to have been included in the register. Of course that's great, because it allowed our calculation for the VE in the first 4 weeks to remain correct, but we want to understand the sequel.

What is CIMS?

After vaccination, the personal data of each vaccinated person is stored in CIMS, the registration system of the RIVM. After arranging the legal basis in November 2020, this system was built at a rapid pace from 8 December 2020, to be ready for the registration of the first vaccinations on 8 January. Our Leon has been able to find out the process behind this through WOO documents. He tweeted about this, among other things, on September 3, 2024.

We see that the vaccination figures have indeed ended up neatly in this system, but why are RIVM and CIMS still running at the same level until the end of February 2021? Were deceased people entered against the rules of the government if they died shortly after vaccination? It seems that something in the automatic links to data was not yet ready and had to be added manually, but of course we don't know that for sure. If you have to deliver a new system in a very short time, it is of course conceivable that not everything will be ready right away.

Leon found the explanation...

New software

In a context of the WOO declassified document of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport mentions in passing the production of a new version of the CIMS: version 2.0. This happened on 25 February 2021. Leon found in it this statement:

Ah, so on February 25, 2021, a new version of CIMS was put into use: CIMS 2.0. So an older version was used for this, let's call it 1.0 for the sake of convenience. Apparently, therefore, new functionality became available on that date, which is not further described in that report. Now let's zoom in on this date in the graph above:

And indeed, it is precisely from that date that the lines start to diverge. It is almost inevitable that specific functionality will have become effective on that date. From that date on, we see the difference arise. Was the legal requirement only implemented at that time? It's all very coincidental.

But now we have to go back to the drawing board, because in our original calculations we assumed that there was only an administrative backlog, regardless of how it would have come about. But what's going on here is that a vaccinated death is now being added to the number of unvaccinated deaths. The death is therefore used twice in the statistics: both to apparently reduce the vaccination coverage we calculated, but also to increase the number of unvaccinated deaths counted in this way.

And now the VE again

But what does this mean for calculating the VE? That was already a difficult matter and that we solved from the ratio of vaccinated to unvaccinated deaths. First, let's take another look at the graph with our calculated VE, which I published earlier in e.g this post:

Again, we zoomed in on the first few months and indicated when the new version of CIMS was put into use. And yes, here too we only see the VE increase after the new version was put into use. Until 25 February, we could still rely on reasonably reliable data, so the calculated negative VE based on the CBS figures must be correct. But from 25 February, we will have to deal with the incomplete vaccination figures. We just don't know exactly how many people died in those first weeks, because they are outside the administration.

A death short after 25 February 2021 two Effects: it lowers the effective vaccination rate and It seemingly increases the number of people who died unvaccinated. So even our calculated effectiveness based on the CBS figures is still too favourable, we can now determine. How much lower should that VE be? Those figures can no longer be traced. We must therefore regard the 60% as an upper limit, and a 0% LU will certainly be a possibility.

NIVEL

Last week, an extensive study by NIVEL was published with the promising title Under-mortality among COVID-19 vaccinated and excess mortality among unvaccinated people. Of course, this study is also based on these CIMS figures, the background of which we all now know. And indeed, they too see the sacred elixir effect. In the first 3 months, the risk of mortality for vaccinated people almost halved and ten times as much mortality among unvaccinated people (all causes). And that while we know that the excess mortality was only around 10%. But it was clearly necessary to counterbalance the scientific research by Meester and Jacobs. So not very successful from the NIVEL.

Conclusions

The negative protection we calculated until the end of February seems to be based on correct figures. After the introduction of CIMS 2.0, systematically vaccinated people who die in the weeks after vaccination will be considered unvaccinated. The conclusions of CBS and RIVM are then based on these rewritten figures. NIVEL also bases itself on these figures and, like the RIVM, comes to the conclusion that the vaccine is as beneficial as an elixir of life. People who refuse the elixir are more likely to die.

The real conclusion should be that even the previously calculated effectiveness of the 60% vaccine has not been achieved by a long shot. Meticulous analysis of the microdata might change this, but we doubt that it will happen. The CIMS database has been written with a fork.