Over the past week there have been a number of posts about data on deaths in England by vaccination status, both for deaths related to Covid and other deaths.
This approach doesn't tell the whole story, however - there are far fewer unvaccinated in England thus you'd expect there to be far fewer deaths with Covid.
The actual data from the ONS suggest that there are more deaths with Covid in the unvaccinated than in the triple-vaccinated for May 2022:
That seems fairly conclusive - vaccination seems to offer a slight benefit for those aged under 60, with reductions in mortality from an already low risk to even lower. But as always, the devil is in the details.
The ONS doesn't actually give the full data that it uses to calculate its age-standardised mortality rate, but it does give the number of person-years in each age category with which it used to make its calculation. From a person-years value it is easy to calculate the population that it is using in its dataset (as there are 31 days in May and 365 days in a year). Performing this calculation and adding up all of the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and including all age groups (i.e., everyone over 18) gives us a total of approximately 35 million used in the ONS data for deaths by vaccination status. This understates the population of England significantly - even the official count of the population by the ONS gives an estimate of around 44.5 million aged over 18, while the NIMS estimate of the population aged over 18 is just under 51 million.
This makes me question the validity of the ONS data. If we assume that the problem is only with the population estimate and not the actual deaths count we can calculate an independent estimate of the mortality rate per 100,000 person-years using official estimates of the population of England by age range. The two fairly reasonable estimates of the population of England are from the ONS and NIMS (the immunisation service of the U.K.). The ONS estimate of the population of England is a little suspect because its estimate is, for many age ranges, lower than the population that has actually been vaccinated - so that leaves the NIMS estimate of England's population....<<<Read More>>>...