Results on vaccination status of Covid-associated deaths in Germany

More than half a year ago, I wrote about an FOIA-type request on vaccination status of Covid-associated deaths in Germany. Hooray! Now I got some data from the Robert Koch-Institut (RKI), but…

• … I had to write several reminders;

• … and they did not send a csv file or spreadsheet but a badly formatted pdf;

• … and they only sent weekly totals and claimed not to be able to stratify the figures by number of doses (or other parameters);

• … and I will have to pay for the data (invoice to be expected by snail mail, amount predicted between 180 and 240 Euro).

I won’t complain. The data are useful, and who knows? Maybe the person who compiled them is the whistleblower who gave us the unredacted RKI minutes?

My predictions have turned out to be true:

• Most of the 2020 deaths are classified as “vaccination status unknown”, not as “unvaccinated” (in particular, there are many more than 3,000 unvaccinated deaths after 2020)

• After a while (from early 2022, that is) the proportion of vaccinated deaths among deaths with known vaccination status is larger than the vaccination rate in the population (85% vs 77%)

To illustrate, the following diagram shows, for all calendar weeks of the years 2020 to 2024 (separated by grey vertical lines),

• in red: proportion of vaccinated deaths among deaths with known vaccination status

• in red/dashed: proportion of deaths with known vaccination status among all Covid-associated deaths

• in blue: proportion of vaccinated ICU Covid cases among ICU Covid cases with known vaccination status (as per my earlier FOIA-type request)

• in blue/dashed: proportion of ICU Covid cases with known vaccination status among all ICU Covid cases

• in grey: vaccination rate in the population, computed as number of first doses given divided by population size

• in green: total rate of vaccinated deaths previously claimed by the RKI for the period shown (I won’t go into the details here)

Main results:

• Since the beginning of 2022, the rate of vaccinated Covid deaths among all Covid deaths with known vaccination status has been hovering around 85% (note that very few cases had been recorded in 2024)

• The results are very close to those for ICU cases

• A rate of vaccinated deaths higher than population vaccination rate does not necessarily indicate negative effectiveness (due to age being a confounding factor) but any claim of significantly positive effectiveness against serious illness or death is laughable

• The peak of vaccinated deaths in early 2021 is curious but might be an effect of age confounding as well

More detailed analysis of the data will probably be published in German somewhere.