more natality data from other countries

building on the sweden data in search of global patterns

to see if i could add some additional perspective on the swedish data i have been discussing i took at look at the other scandinavian countries.

as this whole region locked down barely at all, it makes for a bit of a cleaner “lab” than places that did so aggressively.

thanks to cm27874 and kahina for the very useful data links.

all 3 had monthly births data but only finland had monthly population to normalize the results so for denmark and norway, i used population at the beginning of each year for full year. this will skew the birth rates a little high by year-end relative to beginning (perhaps 0.4%) but should mostly cancel out as an issue when comparing year vs prior year in terms of % change. regardless, as will readily be apparent, the magnitude of what is going on swamps this small imprecision.

recall that with sweden, i plotted the change in births vs same month prior year vs the % of population that was unvaccinated 9 months prior to stack cause and effect vertically. (full description, sources, methods HERE)

i got this:

the timing of the inflections both for commencement and for leveling off at low rates once vaccination was widespread are striking and (as laid out in the link above) there is strong a prior reason rooted in clinical studies to suspect durable fertility suppression from mRNA vaccines. this combo and the persistence of the signal makes “vaccine induced drops in fertility” look like a worryingly plausible outcome.

this naturally led to the question of “are others experiencing this as well?”

as can be seen, this trend replicated with high similarity in the other 3:

it was possible to get some longer term perspective on finland and denmark as the data series went back further. i was not able to find this data for norway.

all seem to show the same basic trends, though of the group, finland looks most like the response in 2022 might be reflexive from 2021 and the overall trend, but as this issue is not really in evidence in the other countries and and all the action aligns, it does not seem to offer much in the way of refutation of a vaccine mediated birth rate decline.

all in all, these 4 taken as a whole are worrying.

cm27874 explored a number of other countries in this substack:

European births slideshow

i have made them into a collage to save space. note that they are not population adjusted and doing so would, in all cases, make 2022 look worse.

data is UN and moodys, so i’m not quite sure what level of accuracy to ascribe to it but it seems to align with reasonable accuracy to some data i had from direct sources. (note that this is plotted differently (monthly birth figures 2017-2022; difference, per month, to median value of cumulative birth figures for 2017-2021))

but the trends seem widespread and no one is having a good 2022.

to jump to a different part of the world, i tried singapore on the theory that they had very high vaxx rate and data that ought to be trustworthy. data is available by q, not by mo and is not population adjusted

again, we get remarkable alignment in timing and in inflections. (admittedly at lower res)

this sort of demographic data is massively multi-factorial and it can be pretty noisy and messy (which is why i tried to focus on the low lockdown nordics to limit this) but the broad shape of the pattern here look pretty consistent and the R2 on these shifts is jarringly high (in excess of 0.8).

were these truly indep variables, it would look like something of an open and shut case, but as the whole world had the same weird shocks and most vaccinated at pretty much the same time, it’s also very possible we’re picking up some synchronization effects and cross correlation of variables.

obviously, the gold standard here would be to examine relative birth rates by jab status, but i have seen no such data anywhere. (though it clearly must exist) the lack of curiosity on this huge drop in births all through the west (and perhaps the east as well) is astonishing to me. one would think that a demographic shift of this magnitude would be an all hands on deck sort of issue. instead, crickets.

(and the US data on vaxx status is such a mess that i doubt we could figure it out even if we tried)

so, we are left trying to find ways to back into it.

it would be useful to find something control groupy to stand as a counter-case.

i’d LOVE to see india as they did not use mRNA vaccines, but there does not seem to be any reliable data for 2022 and the stuff that is out looks to be modeled not actual.

what would be some other countries with good births data by month or by quarter and that have either very low vaccination rates or did not use mRNA vaccines?

what would be some countries that did use mRNA vaccines but did so noticeably later than the big Q1 2021 uptake kick that nearly everyone had?

or some that vaxxed hard and had an up year on births in 2022.

ability to show offset correlation on timing (or lack thereof) might also help us sort this out.

if anyone wants to help crowd source analysis of these, i can be reached via DM on twitter @boriquagato or post something in the comments here.

honestly, i really hope this not what it looks like. the ramifications are just staggering and it honesty is making me a little sick to my stomach to work with this data.

i can certainly see how the health systems and agencies that pushed this might be incented not to search for what they do not want to find.

but someone needs to.

if it takes a citizen army to get to the bottom of this, so be it.

thanks for all the help.