Playing with dead kids: using dodgy data to promote children's jabs

Since Japanese parents still aren’t rushing out to pump mRNA into their young kids, the government and media have turned up the injection promotion campaign.

Most pediatric Covid deaths were unnvaccinated

Here are the details from the Mainichi (hit-tip Faz for bringing the article to my attention).

A survey on 41 children under the age of 20 who were infected with the coronavirus and died between January and August revealed that many of them had passed away within a week after the onset of symptoms.

The NIID [National Institute of Infectious Diseases] was able to look into and analyze the detailed information on 29 children. Of these, 14 patients, or 48%, had underlying medical conditions and 15, or 52%, had no such conditions.

Of them, 15 children were aged 5 or older and eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but 13, or 87%, were unvaccinated and just two, or 13%, had received their second shots.

87% unvaccinated! 52% without underlying medical conditions! Needless to say, TV hyped these numbers uncritically to tell parents that no matter how healthy little Taro may be, he still needs to get his gene juice. And don’t forget the booster!

Unnvaccinated: 13. Vaccinated more that 3 months previously: 2.

So what are we to make of these results? Well, for one thing, lumping 5-11 and 12-19 year olds together is quite disingenuous since 5-11 year olds weren’t eligible for vaccination before late March and only 20% had been jabbed by the end of August. In contrast, 75% of 12-19 year olds had been jabbed by the start of the year. If we break them out, we get:

5-11 year olds: 12 unvaccinated / 0 vaccinated

12-19 years olds: 1 unvaccinated / 2 double-vaccinated

The data for 12-19 year olds hardly screams “necessary” or “effective”. Also, seven cases (30%) aged 5-19 were excluded from the analysis due to having missing details (such as unclear vaccine status) or dying from external causes, e.g., in accidents.

But the cause-of-death data is what makes these numbers really suspect.

The main causes of death were "circulatory system abnormalities" including myocarditis and arrhythmia in seven patients, or 24%, and "central nervous system abnormalities" such as acute encephalopathy in another seven patients. Among others were multiorgan failure and unknown causes.

I was under the impression that Covid-19 was a respiratory illness, but the NIID’s report shows only 3 (10%) of the cases died of respiratory abnormalites. At the end of the report in the section “Limitations and Future Work”, the reader is told that “it is necessary to bear in mind that the causal relationship between SARS-Cov2 infections and the deaths was not investigated”, but somehow the media forgot to mention that.

In an attempt to make more sense of these findings, Prof Seiji Kojima of Nagoya University collected the publicly available data of all 26 Covid deaths under 20 that were reported in the Japanese media up to 31 August: 3 in 2021, and 23 in 2022.

Obviously, the data available in the media is less detailed than that in the recording system since it is released at the discretion of the deceased child’s parents or guardians, who may wish to withhold details such as cause of death (CoD), underlying medical conditions (UMC), or vaccination status (VS). With that in mind, let’s see how well we can replicate the NIID’s results for vaccine-eligible children when taking CoD into account.

Of the 26, CoD was reported in 18 cases. Eight died from causes unrelated to Covid: 2 from underlying blood diseases, 2 from external causes, and 4 from causes “other than Covid (コロナ以外)”. Three of them were reported to be unvaccinated; five had unclear VS.

Another six were ineligible for vaccination or had unclear VS: 3 had UMC related to CoD; 2 no UMC; 1 unclear.

Only 4 were eligible for vaccination, had clear VS, and had a CoD that could be plausibly linked to SARS-CoV-2 infection. UMC/CoD are in parentheses.

•1 unvaccinated (no UMC/acute encephalopathy)¹

•1 single-vaccinated (interstitial pneumonia/respiratory illness)

•2 double-vaccinated (1: unspecified UMC/respiratory illness; 1: no UMC/sudden change in health condition (容体が急変))

So based on publicly available data, we’ve gone from “87% unvaccinated!” to “1 unvaccinated death from a rare neurological reaction”.

The Japanese government wants the NIID to be merged into a Japanese CDC: centre for data crime. It looks like its researchers are definitely up to the job.

1. [The original post incorrectly counted a pre-school student with a hereditary condition who died of respiratory failure as an unvaccinated death. His VS isn’t mentioned, but he tested positive in early March 2022, just around the time vaccines started being rolled out to 5-11 year olds, so he was almost certainly unvaccinated. But since this hasn’t been confirmed, he is now counted amoung the unclear/ineligable.]