Vaccine Deaths in the Frail Elderly

Flu or Covid, take your pick...

There was something in the Australian Cause of Death data that made me wonder if the flu vaccines could be dangerous for the frail elderly.

Backstepping… on the 19 January 2021 the British Medical Journal published an article saying that Norwegian doctors had been asked to assess their very frail patients for the risks and benefits of the covid-19 vaccines. This came after 33 post-vaccine reports of death in the elderly had been received by the Norwegian Medicines Agency. The article said that (ordinary) reactions to the mRNA such as fever, nausea and diarrhoea might be dangerous in the frail elderly. That story goes on, but returning to the main discussion…

When I went to the TGA’s DAEN (Database for Adverse Events Notifications) and called up reports for influenza vaccines from 2020 to 2023 (May 28), I found that fever, nausea and diarrhoea are all common adverse reactions suspected* to have arisen from the vaccines, and that each had a death listed beside them.

NB: These Drug Adverse Event databases have a notorious reputation for under-reporting.

After spending a lot of time on the Cause of Death and Multiple Causes of Death data I see there is a lot of room for discretion in how a death is attributed.

Two posts ago I asked “If a person with Dementia, who has lost a lot of muscle control, has trouble eating, gets the flu leading to pneumonia and sadly passes away, did they die of Dementia, Pneumonia, Musculo-skeletal Weakness, Malnourishment, or Influenza?”

Now I ask “If a person with Dementia, who has lost a lot of muscle control, has trouble eating, gets the flu shot leading to fever and diarrhoea, and sadly passes away, did they die of Dementia, Diarrhoea, Musculo-skeletal Weakness, Malnourishment, or the Influenza Vaccine?” What cause would a Doctor list, following the death of his or her patient? The Dementia, or the vaccine they recently administered?

I worry about vaccines and the frail elderly, suspecting deaths could be invisible. Switching back to the Norwegian story, they ended up analysing 100 reports of post vaccine death, deciding 10 were ‘probable’ for cause, 26 were ‘possible’, 59 were ‘unlikely’ and 5 ‘unclassifiable’. While I suspect that probably more than 100 frail Norwegian elderly died early as a consequence of the vaccines we do know that the reviewers have admitted at least 10. They also included this helpful schematic on how a vaccine can cut a life short…

Anyway, there were some strange regular ‘blips’ in the Australian Cause of Death data, so I laboriously searched the TGA’s DAEN to collect weekly report numbers for the Influenza vaccines, from 2015 onwards. These are the report numbers I found…

Most flu shots are administered in the lead-up to winter in Australia, in the April/May months, and the adverse event reports show the consequent cyclical reporting.

Imagine how things might be for the frail elderly if they were given BOTH the flu shot and the covid-19 vaccine, possibly at the same time….

Yes. The flu vaccine reports are lost in the drama of the reports of the covid-19 vaccines. And the comparable deaths….?

The reports suspecting* death as a consequence of the flu vaccines are dwarfed by those in respect of the covid vaccines.

The numbers, snipped from my excel sheet….

Over the period 2020 to 28 May 2023 roughly 67.6 million covid-19 vaccines were administered and 32.5 million flu vaccines.

Over this same period 138,511 reports were made where the covid-19 vaccines were suspected* of an adverse event, of which 989 included an adverse event of Death. In respect of the flu vaccines, 4,536 reports were received, including 31 Deaths.

Although the Doses and Reports can’t be exactly matched, due to the reporting delay, we can get ballpark reporting rates. For the covid-19 vaccines there were 2049.0 reports/million doses, and 14.6 reports of suspected* deaths/million doses. For the flu vaccines the respective numbers were 139.6 reports/doses(m) and 1.0 deaths/doses(m).

As such the reporting rates for the covid-19 vaccines are 15 times higher for the covid-19 vaccines than the flu vaccines #, and the suspected* death rates are likewise.

I use the word suspected* because the people who made the reports suspected a link between the adverse events and the vaccine. The TGA had in fact only acknowledged 14 of these 989 deaths (last time I looked). The coroner and doctors have done only a little better, acknowledging 15 deaths in the (still incomplete) 2021 Cause of Death Data. So we see the TGA is not really the sole omniscient authority on cause of death. Looking at the Norwegian experience among their ~35,000 aged care residents with at least 10 deaths, possibly 36, and knowing Australia had ~180,000 aged care residents at the time, and seeing reports of 989 deaths (likely under-reported), I think our authorities can all do a little better on their cause of death attributions.

#The covid-19 vaccines are registered as Black Triangle provisional approvals, where reports on suspected adverse events are especially encouraged, and it’s possible this increased the reporting rate. However the TGA also directly encourages reporting on the flu vaccines, possibly because they seem to be an annual novel concoction specific to the expected strains.