ONS Vaccination Deaths Analysis (part 2)

Another poke at the vital dataset that should be error-free but is not

In part 1 of this series I derived crude mortality for the vaccinated and unvaccinated sub-populations of England over the period Jan 2021 – Dec 2022 using data from table 1 of the file of files. This slide was a bit of a shocker and many Twitterlanders decided to ignore what I’d written. Here are some cautionary words again:

A quick reminder that what we are looking at in this final slide is crude mortality and crude mortality (deaths per 100,000 population) doesn’t take account of important confounding factors like age and health status. We see a difference and that difference may be due to vaccine harm and it may not.

So what we need to do next is consider age standardisation, there being a number of ways we can go about this. The simplest method is not to standardise at all but to look at what is happening within age groups. The ONS, in their wisdom, decided to provide counts for the 18 – 39, 40 – 49, 50 -59, 60 -69, 70 -79 and +80 year groupings. This is a start but the 18 – 39y gr…