Those who were vaccinated against corona had a lower risk of dying from Covid-19 in 2022 than people without vaccination. Each repeat injection reduced the risk.
RIVM and CBS looked at data on mortality and excess mortality and released their latest findings on Monday. Once again, there are no indications in the CBS figures that vaccinations lead to excess mortality.
Excess mortality is the number of deaths in a certain period in addition to the normally expected number. In 2020-2022, the excess mortality was 45.8 thousand, and 48 thousand people died from Covid-19 in those two years. Gradually, the excess mortality became higher than the number of corona deaths. Proportionally more people died from other conditions in 2022, such as dementia, stroke and heart failure.
The number of deaths from Covid-19 decreased in 2022 and fell further in the first seven months of 2023. Up to and including July of this year, almost two thousand people died from corona.
The figures do not support the idea that excess mortality would be caused by the vaccination itself. People were less likely to die from causes other than Covid-19 in the eight weeks after a booster. There are deaths in which doctors report that the vaccination initiated a chain of side effects that ultimately led to death, but Statistics Netherlands counted no more than eight such cases in 2022. In 2021, there were 11 cause of death declarations with the Covid-19 vaccination as the starting point of such a causal chain.
Lower mortality after vaccination
After each vaccination the risk of death was lower than before. In the first three months after the first booster, the risk of death for people over 70 who did not have long-term care was 83 percent lower than those who had only received the previous vaccinations. That difference decreased slightly as more time passed. And in people who already use long-term care, the effectiveness decreased slightly faster. “This is yet another confirmation that each booster round reduces the risk of death,” says RIVM epidemiologist Brechje de Gier.
This also applies to the repeat injection this autumn. The chance of hospitalization is 77 percent lower among people over 60 who have had this injection than among people who have had the first series of injections but skipped the autumn round.
What is new is that the RIVM has corrected for medical risks in the analysis for 2022. People with other conditions, such as lung disease or diabetes, can distort the results because they are extra motivated to get vaccinated. De Gier: “By correcting for this, we saw that the effectiveness of the vaccination was a few percentage points higher than in previous calculations.”
Additional cause of death
The latest excess mortality figures also reinforce the picture that people who die from Covid-19 more often have another condition as an additional cause of death than people who die from something other than Covid, writes CBS. This may be due to a poorer immune system in people with, for example, dementia, COPD, asthma, diabetes or obesity.
Excess mortality in the Netherlands during the corona pandemic was higher than in many other Western countries. In an overview of 34 countries recently published in the scientific journal PNAS appeared, the Netherlands is halfway up, above Austria, for example, but below Belgium and Portugal.
Now that mortality from Covid-19 has decreased so much, CBS will stop the weekly mortality monitor as of January 1. The RIVM is again becoming the most important source for excess mortality figures.
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