Excess Deaths and Excess Covid Booster Vaccine Doses – are they related?
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Abstract
This paper features an analysis of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country level data generated by the COVID-19 pandemic as revealed in data related to booster vaccinations, excess deaths, populations, infections, recovered cases, and tests, for a sample of 38 countries, plus measures of their policy responsiveness and relative preparedness, including various other indicators of trust, stringency and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. The paper uses OECD weekly data on excess deaths. The data on COVID-19 vaccine boosters administered was obtained from ourworldindata.org, the assessment includes measures of GDP per capita, and indices of country specific trust levels, the cumulative data set is taken from the Worldometer data source. The Global Health Security (GHS) Index and Oxford Stringency Index (STR) are used as policy benchmarks. Other indicators used include GDP/capita, Trust, and Personal Trust Indices from the OECD. Cross sectional regression analyses suggest that COVID-19 booster vaccines explain between 69 and 79 per cent of the variation in excess deaths in OECD countries as captured by excess deaths in the first week or averaged across the first three months of 2023. An adaptive lasso technique was used to screen the explanatory variables in multivariate regression analysis. This analysis suggested the addition of either the GHS or Stringency indexes, plus a version of the Trust Indices, but none of these added much to the explanatory power of the regressions which were dominated by the contribution of the measure of vaccine boosters. The results suggest a strong association between excess deaths and booster vaccinations across this sample of OECD countries.
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