UKHSA Data on Vaccines and Pregnancy- Remarkable Improvement or Shoddy Data?

Sep 01, 2022

Alex Berenson’s post today about birth rates in Singapore reminded me that I hadn’t checked in on the UKHSA data on vaccines and pregnancies in awhile. This was an area I explored ~8 months ago:

I Numero

Vaccination and Pregnancy in the UK

***Part 2 addresses some concerns ***Part 3 for some updated estimates Many of my posts over the last six weeks or so have involved analyzing the UK Weekly Vaccine Surveillance Report. While my focus has been looking at cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among different age cohorts and vaccine status groups, I would like to focus this post on a section …

3 years ago · 43 likes · 36 comments · T Coddington

I had several follow up posts & also posts where I showed that the data included in their reports was very odd & either signaled incompetence on their part, or was a possible reason for concern:

I Numero

UKHSA- Vaccines and pregnancy... incompetence or a warning signal?

I must admit that as much time as I have spent looking at the UKHSA reports & in particular the section on vaccination and pregnancies, I have never spent much time on the included bar charts. You can’t get the exact metrics from those charts and they are not very interesting, so I generally just ignored them and moved on to the sections that had actual…

3 years ago · 24 likes · 8 comments · T Coddington

The UKHSA stopped providing weekly updates in Week 17 of this year, and now publish a report every 4 weeks or so. In addition, they stopped providing detail of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This has led me to stop paying much attention to these reports. However, today I decided to check out the last published report, which was in Week 35 (Sept. 1 2022). Within that report is the following statement on stillbirths:

You see that it says from Jan ‘21 through May ‘22 the stillbirth rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated was 3.35 & 3.83 per 1,000 respectively. From memory, these numbers were lower than previous reports. Indeed, this is the same statement from Week 17 report:

The rate reported for vaccinated (remember this is cumulative) drops from 3.73 to 3.35 over the course of Feb-May, while the rate for unvaccinated goes from 3.93 to 3.83. Using Table 6 in the report on births per month, we can back into a few numbers:

The columns in grey on the left are those provided within the report. To the right are columns I’ve added for calculations. For Jan ‘21- Jan’22 the UKHSA reported 214,864 births among vaccinated women (one dose or two doses) and a stillbirth rate of 3.73. This implies there were 801 stillbirths in that period. Further, a reported 440,033 births among unvaccinated women and a stillbirth rate of 3.93. This implies there were 1,729 stillbirths in that period.

Now, move to the reporting on Jan ‘21- May ‘22. For 414,640 vaccinated women births, a rate of 3.35 implies a total of 1,389 stillbirths. For 484,258 unvaccinated women births, a rate of 3,83 implies a total of 1,855 stillbirths.

Finally, to see what happened in Feb ‘22- May ‘22, we can subtract the former numbers of births and stillbirths from the latter.

Vaccinated women:

414,640 births - 214,864 births = 199,776 births Feb ‘22-May ‘22
1,389 stillbirths - 801 stillbirths = 588 stillbirths Feb ‘22- May ‘22
→ Rate of stillbirths Feb ‘22 - May ‘22 = 2.94 per 1,000

Unvaccinated women:

484,258 births - 440,033 births = 44,225 births Feb ‘22-May ‘22
1,855 stillbirths - 1729 stillbirths = 125 stillbirths Feb ‘22- May ‘22
→ Rate of stillbirths Feb ‘22 - May ‘22 = 2.84 per 1,000

These numbers would mean that in the Feb-May period of 2022, vaccinated women had a 21% lower risk of stillbirth than they had in the previous 13 months & unvaccinated women’s risk of stillbirth was reduced 28%.

Either there has been a truly remarkable improvement in prenatal care in the UK in the last few months, or this is another example of why any reported data coming out of our public health agencies needs to be treated with skepticism.