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During a parliamentary session on 24 January, Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen asked Maria Caulfield, Department of Health and Social Care Under-Secretary: “The ONS have not issued mortality data by vaccination status since 31 of May last year … can [the Minister] inform the House when it will be published?”

As if she was a pre-programmed robot answering an entirely different question Caulfield responded: “There are a number of factors, which are the same factors that have driven excess deaths across the United Kingdom but also across Europe.”

The data in question is published in a report titled ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status’.  Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (“ONS”) released this report containing data up to December 2022.

Joel Smally noted: “Sarah Caul [Head of Mortality Analysis at the ONS] added her commentary that was equally vacuous and also myopically focused on covid age-standardised mortality rates (ASMR) even though the non-covid ASMRs were consistently higher for the unvaccinated indicating that their dataset still needs a lot of cleaning up to remove whatever biases are responsible for that … I know my colleagues are picking through the anomalies in the ONS bulletin and will report on that in due course.”

Joel Smalley will take a closer look at the data in due course, as will John Dee. So keep an eye out on their Substack pages HERE and HERE respectively.

Dr. Clare Craig has looked at the latest data and found there are major flaws which need to be retracted and corrected. In the only table where it is possible to calculate a population denominator, “there is no data at all for males [ ] after September,” she tweeted.

“Without data for the males it is impossible to see what size denominator has been used.

“They have also completely omitted data on children with no explanation given.

“There are other issues too.”

You can read Dr. Craig’s Twitter thread by clicking on the tweet embedded below.

I've looked at ONS data on deaths by vaccination status.

There are major flaws in the data which needs to be retracted and corrected.@Vnafilyan

🧵

— Dr Clare Craig (not one of her impersonators) (@ClareCraigPath) February 21, 2023

Sarah Caul responded to Dr. Craig: “We are getting this sorted now.”

In the meantime, Igor Chudov has also taken a look at the data.

ONS Data: 25% Excess Mortality Among the Boosted is Obscured by Undercounting of the Unvaccinated

By Igor Chudov

Today, on 21 February 2023, UK’s ONS released the much-awaited ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status’ data set.

The report is expansive, shows covid-19 and overall mortality, and conveniently breaks it up by age, sex, or both – a very valuable and interesting resource.

It also shows “deaths per 100,000 person-years,” where the ONS statisticians calculated “person-years” lived by slices of the population they analysed, month-by-month. They divide the number of deaths in a given vaccination status category by person-years lived by that category to show us the mortality broken down by vaccination status.

That number of “person-years” is the denominator of the calculation.

The data appears soothing and demonstrates that unvaccinated people have somewhat higher mortality.

Be aware that the mortality per 100,000 person-years numbers is fake because ONS undercounts unvaccinated people by approximately one-half.

Let me demonstrate. Open up the latest ONS report in Excel. Go to the tab titled “Table 2” and go to line 2,616. You will see data for non-covid-19 deaths for March 2022 and age category 50-59.

Circled in red, I calculated the population percentage by vaccination status, computed based on person-years for each vaccination status, divided by total person-years for the entire age category for March 2022.

So, according to the ONS, the unvaccinated were 6.19% of the 50-59 subgroup population in March 2022. Were only 6.19% of 50-59-year-olds unvaccinated in the UK last March?

Let’s look for a better source of information!

In another window, open up UKHSA Week 13 vaccine surveillance report. Go to Page 17.

You will quickly see that for the same month, according to the UKHSA, about 87% of 50-59-year-olds had at least one dose of the vaccine, so 100-87=13% of 50-59-year-olds were unvaccinated last March of 2022!

So, whose number is correct? Were only 6.19% of 50-59-year-olds unvaccinated at the time (per the ONS), or 13% (per the UKHSA)? The answer is that the second number (13%) from the UKHSA is correct and is based on databases of named UK residents eligible for vaccination.

So, the ONS understates the number of unvaccinated people by about 2x (depending on age category). Prof. Norman Fenton and Martin Neil discussed this in January. I also discussed that in November 2021 (yes, 2021!). See “Debunking fact checkers” here: ‘UK: death protection downward slide accelerates’

Corrected Data Suggests Higher Non-Covid Mortality in the Boosted

With our knowledge from comparison to March 2022 UKHSA vaccination rates, let’s look at more recent all-cause death rates. Take a look at lines 999-1005 of the same ONS table. (all-cause deaths for 50-59 for Dec 2022, the most recent month of the report)

If the number of unvaccinated persons is undercounted by 2x, then their mortality is conversely OVER counted by roughly 2x – the precise calculation would require us to know the exact, corrected percentage of unvaccinated persons and corrected percentage of boosted persons, which we do not have, so this is a rough estimate. So, we would have corrected data along the lines of:

• Unvaccinated mortality: 366/2 = 183
• Boosted mortality: 229

These rough estimates suggest that boosted 50-59-year-olds experienced 229/183-1.0 = 25% greater mortality than the same age but unvaccinated people during December 2022.

Such estimates are quite consistent with the excess mortality that the UK experienced last December:

I am very sorry that the ONS used incorrect counts of unvaccinated people. Fortunately, we can correct them using publicly available, official UK data.

Such corrected counts of unvaccinated people lead to a much more realistic comparison of mortality between boosted and unvaccinated people, consistent with our observations of overall excess mortality in the UK.

Dear Substack authors: feel free to make similar calculations across other age groups. The results will follow the 50-59 age group. The undercounting of unvaccinated people by the ONS is pervasive across the entire UK dataset.

This is NOT a harmless mistake. Undercounting unvaccinated people will distract the public from looking at the real cause of excess mortality because ONS numbers falsely suggest that the boosted people experience lower excess mortality than the unvaccinated.

The opposite is likely true: as I have shown, the boosted people have higher excess mortality. Furthermore, corrected mortality explains the 20% or so excess mortality the UK experienced in December.

Do you think that the mistake was an accident? Do you think that my calculations are flawed? All opinions are welcome! [If you would like to note your opinions, please do so under Igor Chudov’s article HERE.]