Why Has Delta Killed More Vaccinated Than Unvaccinated People in England? [Updated 23rd Dec 2021]
According to official UK Government data, 679 fully vaccinated people have died of Delta
Something worrying seems to be happening with the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
I was looking at the official data from the UK Government titled Investigation of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern: technical briefings. The August 2021 briefing shows some startling numbers.
First, I would like to draw your attention to this on page 22:
Here it shows that 183,133 unvaccinated people have been diagnosed with the Delta variant. Compare that to the 73,372 fully vaccinated people and it seems that you’re almost 2.5 times more likely to get Delta if you’re unvaccinated.
But let’s compare this with the deaths on page 23:
This shows that Delta has killed 390 unvaccinated people and 679 fully vaccinated people. So, although you’re less likely to get Delta if you’re fully vaccinated, you’re more likely to die from it if you do!
But what’s also interesting is the ages…
These numbers have been split into people aged under 50 and over 50. Let’s take a look at those two pages again but focus on the age ranges.
This shows that most Delta cases are under 50 years old:
But this shows that most DEATHS occur in people over 50 years old:
But here’s where it gets even more interesting!
For people over 50 years old, far more fully vaccinated people have contracted Delta than unvaccinated people:
And if you’re over 50, it seems like you’re more likely to die of Delta whether you’ve been vaccinated or not:
To summarize, in England:
- More unvaccinated people have caught Delta than fully vaccinated people
- More people under 50 years old have caught Delta
- More fully vaccinated people have died of Delta than unvaccinated people
- More people over 50 have died of Delta than people under 50.
- If you’re over 50, you’re more likely to catch Delta if you’ve been fully vaccinated, and you’re more likely to die from it whether you’ve been vaccinated or not.
Why is this happening?
I’m not qualified to speak about the science behind what’s going on. All I am doing is presenting the numbers that are freely available from the UK Government.
But we can speculate on why there are these differences for the broad age groups. Younger people may be getting into close contact with each other more, so they might be more likely to contract a virus anyway. Older people are more likely to have other health issues, so are more likely to die from anything.
But when we consider that this virus has killed mostly older people anyway, it is worrying that the vaccines that were created to try to reduce deaths are actually making death more common in the very people they were designed to protect.
*UPDATE* 13th September 2021
Susie Kearley pointed out this tweet that provides some additional information:
When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe I’d missed it when I first read through the report. But when I went back and checked, it’s not in there, so this seems to be from a different report to the Delta one I was referring to. But even so, I thought it was worth including in the interest of providing balanced information.
*UPDATE* 23rd December 2021
I received this response from Michael Brumage, MD, MPH:
Dear Edward John,
There is a basic epidemiological error in the calculations you made to reach this conclusion: This shows that Delta has killed 390 unvaccinated people and 679 fully vaccinated people. So, although you’re less likely to get Delta if you’re fully vaccinated, you’re more likely to die from it if you do!
You correctly point out that age 50 and older is the risk factor but lumped all age deaths together to come to your conclusion. By looking at the numbers for 50 and older alone, 612 deaths/32828 cases is a death rate of 0.88% among vaccinated. among unvaccinated 50 and older, 318 deaths/4891 cases with a death rate of 6.5%. So among those 50 and older, unvaccinated were 7 times more likely to die than vaccinated.
For those less than 50, the death rates are 0.06% and 0.04% for vaccinated and unvaccinated, respectively. Given the very low number of deaths in each group less than 50, these are not statistically different and we can make no real inferences about vaccination in this group.
Thank you for taking the time to reply, Michael. Yes, to be fair, I could have done a better job of analysing the data than I did here. Since then, I have been looking at more recent numbers and trying to do a better job of analysing them. I may write a new article about that sometime. In the meantime, I will copy your response to this article as a quote.