Moderna and AstraZeneca were the most lethal COVID-19 vaccines

The AstraZeneca vaccine had an especially high death rate among younger women

Norwegian version here.

While the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) let the public down, the Czech Republic demonstrated responsibility by publishing, among other things, anonymized individual-level data on women’s COVID-19 vaccination status and mortality. This post offers initial analyses from the dataset for 2021-2023.

The reason I use “were” in the title is that I sincerely hope no one will take COVID-19 vaccines anymore. They are lethal, as I have shown in population analyses of international and US data.

I’ll demonstrate here that the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines were the most lethal COVID-19 vaccines. The AstraZeneca vaccine was especially dangerous for younger women.

The reference group, or comparison group, includes women who received the Pfizer vaccine, making up nearly 90% of those vaccinated. Although it is less lethal than the other two, it is not harmless, as I will address in future posts.

It might seem reasonable to mainly compare unvaccinated with vaccinated groups, which is possible in theory, but it becomes hard to make meaningful conclusions because the groups are fundamentally very different. This has led to absurd results in several studies, even when adjusting for inequalities, as I have discussed in other research and on Substack.

While vaccinated and unvaccinated people are fundamentally different, I am less inclined to believe that individuals who have received different types of vaccines are equally distinct. Instead, the type of vaccine offered and accepted might be largely random, depending on the distribution and availability of vaccines at different times and locations. I am not claiming that the groups are completely randomized—that is, entirely random who receives which vaccine—but I do believe that the level of randomization is relatively high. Therefore, I have little reason to think that someone with particularly good or poor health has systematically chosen one type of vaccine over another. Studies using this approach are called natural, not randomized, experiments.

In the analyses, I also adjust for age differences and the number of doses women have received of different vaccine types. This helps reduce systematic, non-randomized differences between the groups that could exist. The dataset includes 2,953,940 women, of whom 91,180 died between 2021 and 2023. Among these, 89.7% received Pfizer, 5.76% received Moderna, and 4.58% received AstraZeneca (Note 1).

The table displays hazard rates, which represent the likelihood of death in 2021, 2022, or 2023 (assuming the event hasn’t occurred yet) for women who received Moderna or AstraZeneca compared to those who received Pfizer (Note 2). A hazard rate of 1.36 in the top left corner indicates that a woman of any age who received Moderna has a 36% higher risk of dying than a woman who received Pfizer, all other factors being equal (confidence intervals, CIs, in parentheses). Numbers in bold are statistically significant at 95% CI, showing that mortality rates for women who received Moderna are significantly higher than for those who received Pfizer. The hazard rate for AstraZeneca across all age groups is 1.51, slightly higher than Moderna’s, and also statistically significant.

When analyzing different age groups, the figures are not statistically significant for women born between 1910 and 1919. This is because very few women in that age group were still alive from 2021 to 2023, and although a high proportion of them died, the overall number remains low.

For women born after 1919, we observe higher mortality rates among Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccine recipients compared to Pfizer vaccine recipients across the four age groups between 1920 and 1959. That is, the relative mortality was greater the younger they were. In the last four age groups, women born between 1960 and 2009, the results are somewhat mixed and partly not statistically significant, which can be attributed, among other factors, to the relatively few deaths among younger individuals. However, we see that the hazard rate was 4.46 for AstraZeneca vaccine recipients born between 2000 and 2009. This means that among the youngest women, the mortality rate was 4.46 times, or 346%, higher for AstraZeneca vaccine recipients than for Pfizer vaccine recipients.

Although the latter finding is statistically significant, it should be interpreted with caution, as there were few deaths overall in the age group, and the percentage of people taking AstraZeneca was also low. That said, it cannot be denied that the hazard rate was consistently highest for women taking AstraZeneca, including in age groups with both more deaths and a higher percentage of women taking that drug. Another consistent finding is that the hazard rate increased with age in younger age groups.

A sobering conclusion is that the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines were the most lethal COVID-19 vaccines, and that the mortality rate of the AstraZeneca vaccine was especially high among younger women.

On May 7, 2024, the AstraZeneca vaccine was completely withdrawn from the global market, allegedly due to “market considerations.” After 132,686 doses had been administered in Norway, it was pulled from the market there in March 2021 following five hospitalizations and two deaths among young women aged 37 and 42, caused by immune responses leading to fatal blood clots.

My analyses therefore support what many of us have long known: that the AstraZeneca vaccine was very dangerous, especially for young women.

After they were stopped here, approximately 216,000 unused AstraZeneca vaccines were initially “lent” to Sweden and Iceland. Then, in a gesture of kindness, they were donated—with the blessing of then-Minister of Development Dag Inge Ulstein (Christian Democratic Party)—to Uganda and Nicaragua. Absolutely free! Additionally, Norway donated 182,900 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to Kosovo and Haiti as part of a total of five million doses of various types.

The fact that mortality was also highest in women vaccinated with Moderna compared to Pfizer is echoed in studies from Denmark and Canada that show the highest incidence of myocarditis in the former group.

Notes

1. The data include women who have received at least one dose of Moderna, AstraZeneca, or Pfizer (Janssen vaccines are grouped with AstraZeneca), possibly in modified versions, but exclude those who have received different types in one or more follow-up doses. The data also exclude a few women who have received vaccines other than those listed above or whose vaccine numbering is missing.

2. I used Cox proportional hazards regression with Efron estimation for deaths recorded at the same time, i.e., within the same year. In the top model that includes all age groups, I include a dummy control variable for the number of vaccine doses (1, 2, 3, 4, or more) each woman has received, and a dummy control variable for her age cohort (born between 1910-19, 1920-1929,..., or 2000-2009). In analyses of each individual age cohort, I include a dummy control variable for the number of vaccine doses.