UK data shows mortality peaks in the vaccinated, 4-5 months after start COVID-19 vaccination campaigns

Rethinking own data

A molecular biologist professor told me once how he judges data: I only believe it when I can see the difference from a 2 meter distance. I think the discussion was about Western blots and the value of quantification and statistics.

Our publication Age-adjusted non-COVID-19 mortality rates according to the COVID-19 vaccination status in the Journal of the Academy of Public Health was recently discussed by Dr. Mikolaj Raszek from Merogenomics, which made me think again about our own data.

Especially Supplementary Figure S9, which clearly, from a 2 meter distance, shows peaks in the overall non-COVID mortality in the vaccinated (First Dose), which shift in time, to the right, from old to young. Such a peak shift is not present in the unvaccinated (Benchmark) data. These shifts correlate with starts of vaccination campaigns in the UK.

We mention this in the paper as “vaccination timing associated mortality peaks”.

Although a causal relationship between excess mortality and vaccination against COVID-19 cannot be established, a higher age-adjusted non-COVID-19 mortality rate among the COVID-19 vaccinated in several age groups was found, that, together with vaccination timing associated mortality peaks require further research.

But there was one thing we didn’t understand. Why the delay? Roll-out of the vaccination campaign for 80 and 90 year and older started December 8, 2020, while the peak in mortality of these age groups is somewhere in May 2021. A 5 month delay. Looking at the COVID vaccination UK roll-out across age groups, similar delays occur in other age groups. Don’t discuss what you don’t understand is probably a good thing if you want your paper published, so we didn’t mention these delays in detail.

Enter the Japanese microlevel data, recently discussed by Dr. Phillip McMillan.

A group of volunteers from the Japanese United Citizen stopping the mRNA Vaccine, led by prof. emeritus of the Tokyo University of Science, Dr. Yasufumi Murakami, acquired and analyzed individual vaccination and death records from local governments of 21 million COVID-19 vaccination records.

This data has not been published, and it is collected by a group of people that are opposed to mRNA vaccinations. This does not disqualify the data but certainly is a possible conflict of interest.

Taken from Online Press Conference, July 13, 2025, by Dr. Yasufumi Murakami.

The Japanese microdata reports a delayed peak in overall mortality of 3-4 months after COVID vaccination.

Inspired by this, I performed the following analysis on our own published data, which is directly taken from the Office for National Statistics of England:

(1) Find global maxima in the different age brackets of the log10 transformed age standarized Non-COVID mortality rates (per 100,000) using spline interpolation, not using the noisy and low-mortality under 40 data.

(2) Obtain the timeline of the start of the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns for different age groups in England:

(3) Calculate for each subgroup the delay (in days) between the start of the vaccination campaign and the date of the global peak in overall, non-COVID mortality.

Conclusion: the time difference between the start of the vaccination campaigns in the UK and the overall non-COVID mortality peaks is 118-160 days, roughly 4-5 months, which seems consistent with the 3-4 months delay seen in the Japanese microdata.

Am I comparing apples with oranges? For sure, the UK data is bulk data, and the Japanese data is individual microdata. Furthermore, I calculate the time difference from the start of the vaccination campaign, not the middle of it. We use non-COVID mortality, whereas the Japanese record all-cause mortality, including COVID-attributed deaths.

Still it is interesting that from two continents similar time delays can be observed in comparing mortality versus COVID shot timing.

“Requires further research.”

Raw Data