Digging Deeper Into EudraVigilance (part 5)
Fatalities by dose
Now and then a result comes along that is something of a shocker and I usually scramble back over the data to ensure I didn’t make a mistake, then sit with it for while in case I’ve misunderstood something. This morning I am going to publish just such a result that is certainly not a mistake and, as far as I can cogitate, has not arisen because of a simple misunderstanding. We shall start with a simple tabulation of deaths by doses received, there being 23,891 unique fatalities recorded in EudraVigilance between 20 Dec 2020 and 28 Feb 2022:
How is it possible that 96.7% of all post-vaccination fatalities within EudraVigilance were registered after the first dose when the European Centre for Disease Control COVID-19 vaccine tracker is currently reporting 75.2% uptake for the first dose, 72.4% uptake for the second dose and 52.3% uptake for the booster?
If we take ECDC's tabulated data for vaccine uptake back to 2020/w50 we arrive at the following plot:
If we suppose that COVID vaccines are not generating fatalities then we’d expect to see cumulative deaths by dose rising in a similar fashion simply because more doses means more people dosed, and more people dosed means more deaths. It would follow that we’d expect to see similar numbers of deaths for dose 1 and 2, and far fewer deaths for dose 3. Except we don’t, we see an extraordinary proportion of deaths straight after the first dose.
Could it be COVID?
The first thought that sprung to mind was that dose 1 wasn’t doing anything and large numbers of folk were dying of COVID. This was easily checked by crosstabulating dose with diagnosis (as derived from reaction field data). In the table below we observe similar highly elevated rates for dose 1 regardless of whether folk were testing positive for COVID-19 or not, so we can’t go blaming dose 1 death on vaccination failure for COVID.
This simple result is quite a corker and I’m going to have to let it sink in. If vaccinations are not causing any harm why is EudraVigilance heavily biased toward registration of first dose death?
Kettle on!
After a cuppa
What if healthcare professional and non-healthcare professionals alike are simply not bothering to record earlier doses, such that the second and third doses are sitting pretty in the record as the only dose? There’s no dose date or sequence info we can use to check this but I’ll have a think over another pot…
I'm rewriting a paragraph as: 'If we suppose COVID vaccines ARE generating fatalities then we would expect to see cummulative death rise, more doses more deaths. If certain people are at risk from the vaccine, the first dose could result in deaths for the majority of those people. Deaths from the second does would be less and the third dose even fewer death'. This is what is seen in the data. Happy for you to shoot me down.
Something is very wrong in Eudravigilance with the fatality count after the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd dose! VEARS has the following deaths count per dose number:
For the U.S. after 1st, 2nd, and 3rd dose - 5,746, 5,188, and 735 accordingly.
For the U.S. plus foreign - 10,3339, 9,526, and 2.039.
That looks real, though the total count is under-estimated as in about 20% to 30% of cases the exposed reporting engine doesn't pick up the death reports (and I was lazy to export the whole database).