Why do people vaccinated for COVID have such radically lower mortality rates than the unvaccinated, even AFTER you exclude all COVID-related deaths?

This is a fascinating study that features some really startling data.

Short version: The authors compared mortality rates between 6.4 million people vaccinated against COVID and 4.6 million unvaccinated people, between last December and this July. The really startling part is that, after excluding all COVID-related deaths, the unvaccinated people had mortality rates that were more than triple than those of people who received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, after adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, and study site.

The numbers themselves are pretty shocking. Remember these figures exclude all COVID-related deaths, which in the study were defined as any death that took place within 30 days of a COVID diagnosis or a positive COVID test — which seems like an intentionally quite over-inclusive definition of what constitutes a COVID-related death.

Here are the numbers:

Among people who received both doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the standardized mortality rates per 100-person years among people who had received both doses were, respectively, 0.35 and 0.34. Among unvaccinated people, the mortality rate was 1.11, i.e., more than three times higher. Again this excludes all COVID-related deaths, even extremely broadly defined.

The effect was still very much present among those who got the J&J vaccine, although it wasn’t as extreme, as the mortality rate for J&J recipients was 0.84, relative to 1.47 in the unvaccinated comparator group.

If you look at the data in more detail, the tripled mortality risk among the unvaccinated for non-COVID-related death is very consistent across all age groups, except among teenagers, where the mortality rates across both groups were almost non-existent (0.01).

Why this should be the case is obviously speculative, but it seems like an extremely significant social fact.