Are the Vaccines Killing UK Teens?

A brief look at the evidence from ONS and UKHSA publications.

There has been a bit of commentary about the risk Covid-19 poses to UK teens and the merit or otherwise of vaccinating them in light of this risk. The Telegraph recently reported

Covid killed just six healthy children during the pandemic, while lockdowns have fuelled a timebomb of health disorders among the young, new data showed.

The research examining more than 3,000 deaths of under-18s in England in the year since the first lockdown found a “tiny” proportion were linked to Covid.

Just 25 deaths were caused by the virus, and only six of those involved children without underlying conditions.

There are approximately 15 million under-18’s in the UK, so assuming all 15 million of them contracted Covid-19, healthy children have a 99.996% survival rate. If we included all children - presumably adding those with comorbidities - the survival rate ‘drops’ to 99.983%.

But what of their risk from being vaccinated? This gets a little more thorny, and I am going to ignore the Yellow Card system for now and instead concentrate on excess mortality using the ONS data. I have used 5-week SMA in this chart. Teen refers to the 15-19 cohort, while child refers to the 1-14 cohort.

I would have preferred to use the last five year average as my benchmark, but prior to 2020 ONS simply provided 0yr, 1-14yrs and 15-44yrs splits making it difficult to map with UKHSA’s more granular vaccination cohorts, as shown at the end of this post.

The chart appears to show us: -

1. Teen excess mortality went positive in Week 16 and has remained positive since

2. Child excess mortality is not closely correlated to teen excess mortality

Based on the underlying data: -

1. YTD teen mortality has seen 125 more teens die than over the same period in 2020

2. YTD child mortality has seen 14 fewer children die than over the same period in 2020

Obviously this isn’t good for the teens.

It could be correlation rather than causation as there are a range of confounding factors not the least of which might be the effects of lockdown on teens and children starting to flow through to the mortality statistics.

Experts said that the slew of data painted a devastating picture of the long-term harm inflicted on children and the problems being stored up for the future.

Dr Camilla Kingdon, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the study showed “very, very tiny numbers” of children dying from Covid.

Meanwhile, successive lockdowns and social distancing caused far greater consequences “through lost education, mental health, and other collateral damage”, she said, with much of the impact yet to be seen.

It will be interesting to watch this series develop. My hope is that it’s simply aberration because if we’re seeing the effects of vaccines and/or lockdowns then this toll on our teens will continue for months, and possibly years to come.

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Additional chart, from UKHSA Weekly Vaccine Surveillance Report 45