Where's the goddamn vaccine deaths, anti-vaxxers?
Anti-vaxxers promised deaths by the millions! Where's the goddamn vaccine deaths, anti-vaxxers?
Recently I was strolling Twitter and came across a set of Tweets by Nicholas Grossman making a great point: if the fears of anti-vaxxers were true, there should be an “uncover upable” amount of deaths. Over 660 million vaccine doses were distributed just in the US alone between primary sequences and booster shots. Over 80% of Americans have received at least one dose and nearly 70% have received the full primary sequence. Every single person reading this should know someone that died if the fears of anti-vaxxers were true.
But they weren’t. In this post, I want to add to Nick’s tweets with some nifty visualizations. To do this I pulled US data from the OurWorldinData.com COVID-19 Data Explorer. Specifically, I am looking at:
Daily new COVID cases
Cumulative COVID cases
Daily new COVID vaccinations of any dose type (ie first-dose, second dose, or any booster)
Cumulative COVID vaccinations of any dose type
Cumulative Excess deaths1
Weekly Excess deaths, as a percentage
I also transformed the data using a Python script I built myself. The transformations were:
Daily new COVID cases as a seven-day average
Cumulative COVID cases per million people
Daily new COVID vaccinations as a seven-day average
Cumulative COVID vaccinations per million people
Cumulative Excess deaths per million
The first set of visualizations I created was to look at daily COVID-19 cases and weekly excess deaths over time. From prior knowledge, we know these two time series are related. COVID cases lead to COVID deaths and COVID deaths are a significant driver of excess deaths. And when we look at the two time series, we see a similar story from both. For the initial observations, there doesn’t appear to be much of a relationship, but this is because the US hadn’t begun mass testing yet so COVID cases were going undetected. Once the summer of 2020 starts and testing starts to scale, we can see that when COVID cases increase, there is an increase in excess deaths and when COVID cases decrease, there is a decrease in excess deaths. This is what a causal relationship between two time series should look like on a line graph.
If you look closely enough, you can tell that cases consistently reach inflection points before excess deaths do, providing further evidence for the directional flow of causation.
Yet, when we replace new COVID cases with new COVID vaccine doses, there is no relationship. For the first months, excess deaths go up and down but no one has even been vaccinated! And once COVID vaccinations start, it is during a massive fall in excess deaths!
A similar pattern can be seen with cumulative COVID cases and total excess deaths per million.
And between cumulative COVID vaccinations and cumulative excess deaths, there is no relationship between the two.
OWID defines cumulative excess deaths as “The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years.”