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The number of excess deaths in Australia is positively correlated with the number of COVID-19 booster vaccinations, a new peer-reviewed study found.
Experts interviewed by The Defender criticized some aspects of the study but said overall it contributed to the research on COVID-19 vaccines, including by showing that contrary to the mainstream narrative, the Australian states that were more vaccinated or boosted were the ones that fared the poorest in terms of excess fatality.
David Edmund Allen, Ph.D., published his report on July 31 in the European Society of Medicine’s official journal, Medical Research Archives.
Allen — whose research publications have been cited more than 2,000 times since 2019 — is a visiting professor in the School of Math and Statistics at the University of Sydney, an honorary chair professor in the Department of Finance at the Asian University in Taiwan, and an honorary professor of the School of Business and Law at Edith Cowan University.
Using official health statistics, Allen conducted a statistical analysis to determine if there was a relationship between the number of excess deaths and the number of COVID-19 booster vaccinations in each Australian state or territory during the first quarter of 2023.
He also looked at whether there was a relationship between excess deaths and the total number of COVID-19 vaccine doses.
COVID-19 booster vaccination rates and the overall number of COVID-19 doses were both linked to an increase in excess deaths during that timeframe.
“The results are quite striking and suggest the existence of a strong regression relationship with significant coefficients,” he wrote in his report.
Links between COVID vaccines and excess deaths ‘deserve greater scrutiny’
Although Allen noted that vaccination appeared to be significantly correlated with excess deaths, he avoided claiming there was a causal link.
He said his findings “suggest that this topic deserves greater scrutiny.”
Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., lead author of a recent study examining excess mortality in 125 countries, cautioned against drawing conclusions from Allen’s analysis. He told The Defender:
“This type of correlation analysis between bulk measures of excess mortality and vaccine doses administered has many caveats, pitfalls and known confounding factors.
“It should never be used as a stand-alone result, as was done here. On its own, it has a high likelihood of being misleading, and it does not imply any meaningful relation.”
Rancourt said that even if a relationship exists between COVID-19 vaccination and excess death, there are better ways of statistically showing it.
“Scientists should avoid being right for the wrong reasons,” Rancourt said. “A better approach is to look for temporal associations, which has been done in some detail for Australia.”
‘A lot of complex factors’
Andrew Madry, Ph.D. — a data analyst who authored a chapter on excess deaths in the state of Queensland in the Australian Medical Professionals Society’s book “Too Many Dead: An Inquiry into Australia’s Excess Mortality” — also noted that Allen’s analysis failed to look at how other factors, such as lockdown measures or poverty rates, may be linked to excess deaths.
“There’s a lot of complex factors in play here,” he said.
Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., president of Correlation Research in the Public Interest and a co-author with Rancourt of the recent study examining excess mortality in 125 countries, agreed.
Hickey told The Defender that another weakness of Allen’s statistical approach, which Allen acknowledged in his report, was that his variables of interest — excess deaths and vaccinations — were correlated with state population.
States with larger populations naturally have higher numbers of COVID-19 vaccinations and more excess deaths.
Hickey told The Defender that Allen could have done a better job of choosing variables before running statistical tests.
For instance, he could have used the P-score — which is the ratio of excess deaths divided by expected deaths — as the dependent variable for regression on other variables, such as vaccination doses administered per state population.
The P-score “naturally adjusts for population age-structure and health status,” Hickey explained.
That’s what he and Rancourt did in their recent study, Hickey said:
“We found positive correlations in scatter plots of P-score for the first half of 2023 vs number of vaccine doses per population in 2021 and 2022 across many world countries, with wealthier countries, including Australia, having higher P-scores and the more vaccinated populations.”
Another shortcoming of Allen’s study is that it examined only official government data, Madry said.
“It’s looking at the data that’s publicly available, which is quite limited,” Madry said. “That’s been one of the issues — we don’t have the granularity that is needed to really look at these things in detail.”
More detailed data can sometimes be purchased from the Australian Bureau of Statistics or obtained via a freedom of information request, Madry said.
That’s what Madry did when he conducted an in-depth analysis of excess mortality in Australia in response to a Senate inquiry into excess mortality.
Study undermines mainstream narrative that the vaccinated died less
Nonetheless, the study made some important contributions, according to Madry.
“Basically what it’s showing,” Madry said, “is that — contrary to what the mainstream narrative is — the states that were more vaccinated or boosted were the ones that fared the poorest in terms of excess fatality.”
Allen also noted in his analysis that being unvaccinated against COVID-19 wasn’t significantly linked to an increase in excess deaths.
It’s unlikely Allen could have obtained these results if COVID-19 vaccines actually were reducing or preventing excess mortality, Madry said.
Hickey and Rancourt both emphasized that it would be important to redo Allen’s analysis using a P-score approach before reaching any useful conclusions on if and how vaccination is linked to excess deaths.
Hickey added, “This approach could be extended to sub-national jurisdictions in many countries with available vaccination and mortality data.”
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