Skip to content

Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2021

Are COVID-19 vaccines the reason vaccinated people ages 10 to 59 in England are dying at twice the rate of the unvaccinated?

Dean Miller, Lead Stories
no

A very popular spy novelist who is anti-vaccine did not know how to explain the apparent correlation between vaccines and higher death rates in England because he is not a statistician and did not ask a statistician to explain it to his readers.

He wrote that vaccinated English adults under 60 are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people the same age.

Put simply, most of those who die in England are older and therefore vaccinated. The data demonstrate Simpson's Paradox, the name for a common statistical problem: 

A trend apparent in several groups of data disappears or reverses when the data are combined because you aren't considering an extra, and consequential, variable. In this case, that variable is the higher death rate of older people from all causes.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.