Unbelievable Impact of Vaccines on Stillbirths in Australia

***UPDATE: I find the data tables in the paper to be a bit confusing to interpret. I now think it may be that only 6 stillbirths were recorded for women who were vaccinated before week 20. The overall rate among all vaccinated women (I think) is 1.55 per 1K… still too low to be believed when compared to the pre-COVID rates of Australia.

I have almost completely stopped reading & posting on Twitter regarding COVID and/or politics in recent weeks, but earlier today someone brought me into a thread regarding a pre-print paper looking into the impact of vaccines on pregnancy outcomes in Australia.

In particular, they showed some rather stunning results in terms of stillbirths, namely they recorded only 6 stillbirths out of 9,667 vaccinated women (0.62 per 1000) (***I believe this should actually be 21 out of 9,682 or 1.55 per 1k, see above note) vs. 21 stillbirths out of 2,586 unvaccinated women (8.12 per 1000).

After a quick look, I definitely had some of my normal questions about whether they properly accounted for when in pregnancy the vaccination took place. However, it then occurred to me that, just at a very high cursory level, the rate among vaccinated women seemed remarkably low. I wondered, what was a typical rate of stillbirth in Australia in the past? Lo & behold:

Source: Parliament of Australia site

There are apparently two sources of reporting data here, but as we can see from the above, pre-COVID stillbirth rates in Australia are somewhere between ~5.5 per 1,000 and 7.4 per 1,000.

So, this paper would seem to imply that not only did vaccinated women have much lower stillbirth rates than unvaccinated women in the time of COVID, but somehow vaccinated women have stillbirth rates on the order of 8.9-11.9x (**3.5-4.8x per note above) less than women in the pre-COVID days. To the authors credit, they recognize that vaccinated women tend to be wealthier and healthier than average, but to bring us back to the title of this post, this result is quite literally unbelievable. It is also very hard to believe that apparently none of the 12 highly credentialed authors of the paper stopped to ask, “How could this be?”. I guess we all have blind spots, especially when you really, really want something to be true.

I know I have some very intelligent readers out there… do I have a blind spot? Is there something I’m missing here? Make this make sense.