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As reported for The BFD (This Is Not Normal), Australia’s Actuaries Institute has highlighted an alarming surge in excess deaths downunder in 2022. The Actuaries Institute has poured cold water on the idea that the spike is related to Covid-19 vaccinations, arguing that the timing and age profile of the excess deaths doesn’t correlate to the vaccine rollout.
But Australia’s death surge is far from the only alarming public health trend around the world in 2022.
When governments first hit the lockdown panic button, there was widespread speculation that it would lead to a “Covid Baby Boom”. In fact, the opposite is happening. Alarmingly so.
Evidence is growing in Europe that many fewer babies are being born in the aftermath of – and circumstantially related to – the Covid-19 vaccination rollouts. This widespread phenomenon is alarming doctors, data analysts and others who say a monumental shift is being ignored.
Whether or not the baby bust can be linked to the vaccines is a matter of dispute. What cannot be disputed is that there’s something dire happening.
“Since January 2022, the number of live births has fallen like never before in Switzerland and the canton of Bern,” reads an urgent report by canton legislators. A separate Swiss research study, meantime, reported a 10 per cent decline in births in the first half of 2022 compared to the prior three-year average. Using statistical modelling, it found “a striking temporal correlation between the peak of first vaccination and the decline in births in Switzerland”.
But Switzerland is far from the only European nation to be affected.
In perhaps the largest study on this worrisome trend, three analysts based in Germany studied data from 19 countries in Europe. They found a seven per cent decline in births, translating into 110,059 fewer births in the first half of 2022 than the average of similar periods from 2019 to 2021. (Data was not analyzed for the United Kingdom and Italy) […]
The European study reported drops in births of more than 10 per cent in five countries. In 10 others, births declined from four per cent to 9.4 per cent. The highest decline, 18.8 per cent, was in Romania.
It should be pointed out that much of this research is not ‘official’, mostly performed by independent researchers: “a doctor, university professor and legislator here; a high school educator, pharmacist and statistician there”. But data doesn’t care about credentials. To paraphrase Richard Feynman, the facts don’t care how many letters you have after your name, or who you work for.
The Swiss report was co-authored by Dr Konstantin Beck, a University of Luzern insurance economist and statistician, and infectious diseases physician Pietro Vernazza.
For now, Vernazza told me, he is “not convinced” that vaccines are indeed driving down births. But he is also suspect of the early official assurances, for example, that vaccine particles did not move throughout the body; evidence has since shown they accumulate in reproductive organs.
“With this situation, as a physician who wants to decide, or help decide, whether to take a booster or vaccine,” he said on our call, “I have less and less confidence that this vaccine cannot cause fertility issues.”
On the other hand, the Federal Institute for Population Research, in Germany, and Stockholm University are very much “official” institutions. As it happens, they’ve looked into population decline as well.
A second study, released in early September by the (German) Federal Institute for Population Research and Stockholm University, entitled “Fertility declines near the end of the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence of the 2022 birth declines in Germany and Sweden,” reported birth declines in Germany and Sweden of 14 and 10 per cent in early 2022. The study found a “strong association between the onset of vaccination programmes and the fertility decline nine months after of this onset.”
The study also rules out other possible variables, such as changes in unemployment, infection rates or Covid-19 deaths.
The fertility decline occurred some nine months after the implementation of broad-based vaccination programmes for the general population in Germany and Sweden […] These declines are remarkable for two reasons: First, Germany and Sweden are countries that experienced no fertility decline during the course of the pandemic itself, in 2020 and 2021. Second, both countries reached fertility levels that were lower than what had been experienced for many years.
Other well-known explanations of fertility change during the course of the pandemic, such as the impact of health-related and economic factors, seem not to be associated with the timing of fertility decline in 2022.
Rescue with Michael Capuzzo
Despite all those caveats, the German-Swedish study shies from making any explicit links between Covid-19 mass vaccination and the remarkable decline in fertility they are correlated with.
Correlation is not, it must be emphasised, causation. But such a striking correlation, and the discounting of other possible factors, at the very least indicates that there’s a whole lot of smoke blowing around. The object now must be to find the source of the fire.
