Birth Data in UK: Trend of who is having babies continues

Back in October I uncovered something in the UK data that seemed unusual and something to keep an eye on. Namely, several prominent voices had written about potential worrying signs regarding fertility and open questions about whether vaccination had impacted this. In that post, I used data from the UKHSA and ONS to show:

1. In the 2017-2020 period, the trend in the the UK appeared to be that less deprived women (women in quintiles 4&5 of the deprivation index) were having a greater proportion of the babies in UK, and the most deprived women (women in quintiles 1&2 of the deprivation index) were having a fewer proportion of babies:

   

2. The UKHSA reports beginning 2022 seemed to show a reversal of these trends. This was potentially interesting as we know that the most deprived women are the least likely to be vaccinated.

For some reason I decided this morning to check back in to see if there was any more data from the UKHSA reports that would allow us to see if this trend is continuing. At 1st glance, it appeared that this reporting had stopped (i.e. that none of reports 2022-Week 44, 2022-Week 48, 2023-Week 2, 2023-Week 9, or 2023-Week 14) contained any new information. However, upon looking closer, I believe 2023-Week 9 actually does contain some new data. The last report that I previously captured contained data from April→June 2022, and I think you will see why I didn’t at 1st think any new info was in this report:

🤬 So it appears that I had looked at the column header (April to June 2022), but missed that the description of the table says September to November 2022. It’s possible that this is simply updating that April-June period, but I’m going to assume the column header was a sloppy mistake and this actually represents the Sep-Nov period. While it is a bit disconcerting that this means they never reported anything on July & August of 2022, I’m going to take the opportunity to post a new data point to the chart above. I have added some additional data on the chart. The bold number in black is the % of births during that time period attributed to women of a given deprivation level. The number below that in green is the % of women of that deprivation level who were unvaccinated at the time of birth.

The trend appears to have continued. While the % of births to average women has remained almost constant, 19.5% in 1st report and 19.4% in the last report. The % to the more deprived women (1&2) has grown from 45.9% to 48.1%, while the % to the least deprived women (4&5) had decreased from 35.5% to 32.3%. It is entirely possible that this is 100% coincidental to the vaccination rates of these groups. I am sure there are vaccination enthusiasts who would say I’m being irresponsible in writing this post and I’m fear-mongering or creating a conspiracy theory. My counter to that is I am unaware of any studies showing there isn’t an impact on fertility. I don’t trust that anyone in public health is casting a skeptical eye at any of this stuff and it’s too damn important to ignore. Given already declining birth rates in most of the world (below replacement), if somehow the vaccines are further depressing birth rates, it’s a rather urgent topic to investigate.