3x More Covid-19 Deaths in the Philippines in the 2nd Year of the Pandemic after the Vaccine Rollout. % of Deaths Increased in Younger Age Groups and in Women.

A successful public health intervention should have resulted in less C-19 deaths. Instead deaths tripled, and this is before assessment of excess deaths which also soared. Failure of intervention?

While waiting for updated 2021 All Cause Mortality from PSA as of March 2022 which should be released shortly, I decided to look further at the covid-19 attributed deaths in the two pandemic years from 1 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, and 1 March 2021 to 28 February 2022. I did this using the downloaded covid-19 death data set from Philippines DOH dated 23 April 2022.

Lockdowns in Philippines started on 16th March 2020. Vaccination officially started on 1st of March 2021. Therefore we have a 1 year control period of lockdown only, before we have the lockdown plus vaccination!

In the first year there were 13,962 C-19 attributed deaths, of which 60.1% were men, and 39.9% were women.

In the second year there were 45,236 C-19 attributed deaths, of which 53.7% were men and 46.3% were women. Women did far worse in the second year of the pandemic. Could the vaccination which was widely rolled out have changed their vulnerability to covid-19 illness and death? Women as nurses and caregivers were prioritized in the rollout.

Looking at the age distribution of deaths, we can see major changes in the deaths distribution. During the first year the most vulnerable age-groups were middle old age, between 60 to 74 years of age, not the very elderly. Could it be that those who reached extreme old age 75 to 80+ had done so because they were fundamentally healthy! In the second year of the pandemic though, the extreme old age group of 80+ did worse than all other age-groups. Again, could the intervention, which targeted the elderly and the frail have changed their ability to cope with the illness? I also cannot discount that vaccine deaths, were counted as covid-19 illness deaths.

We also see that in the second year of the pandemic the deaths move towards the younger age-groups who did worse in % mortality in the second year. This is a worldwide pattern. Increases in covid-19 infections and deaths followed the vaccine distribution which started with the elderly and medical professionals, and then moved to younger cohorts.

I looked at the deaths by gender. It is notable that male babies (0-4) died at a higher rate in the second year, while female babies had slightly higher % of deaths in the first year of pandemic. Younger men notably did worse than younger women in 2021-22.

The mass vaccination rollout has not been associated with improvements in public health. It has been associated with greatly increased covid-19 infections and deaths affecting younger age-groups. There are also the very high excess deaths, nearly 40% above usual rates in still preliminary count for 2021, which cannot be explained by covid-19 deaths. There were no famines, wars, or other events which could have caused these excess deaths. While the effects of lockdowns have been detrimental, they also cannot explain more than 1/4 of a million excess deaths. Key suspect are the C-19 vaccines.