Taiwanese Births and Deaths - 2022/2023

An update and the continually deteriorating situation and a temporal association between vaccine uptake and birth/mortality rates.

First, an update…

Taiwan has released its latest figures for births and deaths up to February, 2023. The reason it’s good to keep an eye on Taiwan is that their figures are the most up to date - only 10 days into March they already had their February figures out.

The February update can be found here.

Here’s the updated figures, with comparison back to 2019:

You can immediately see that 2023 has started off in a horrible fashion, with deaths continuing to be elevated (second highest month in the last 50 months) and births continuing to stay subdued (fourth lowest month in the last 50 months).

A Temporal Association

If you look closely enough, you will see that there is actually a relationship between births and deaths - both have 2 spikes in the first half of 2022 and both of those spikes are 3 months apart:

• Births (Low Spikes) - February and May;

• Deaths (High Spikes) - March and June.

Interestingly, looking at Our World In Data for Vaccine Uptake in Taiwan, we find this:

Most notable are the first two spikes, which are 3 months apart - the peaks are the beginning of August and November, 2021. I’m sure that is not a coincidence.

The third spike is the Booster campaign, and I do not include it in discussion here for 2 reasons:

1. Even though the spike is high, it is of short duration. Many more people were vaccinated in each of the first 2 waves and they would have had a higher resulting impact in future events;

2. The earlier spikes would have hit the vulnerable people already, and taken the brunt of the short-term vaccination impact already (and, yes, there are mid- and long-term impacts, but they are for other discussions).

Linking Vaccine Uptake to Births and Deaths in Taiwan

Putting the births/deaths graphs together with the vaccine uptake graphs for Taiwan, we can see the following delayed relationships:

• Births - August to February = 7 months. November to May = 7 months:

  • Meaning - First trimester pregnancies in August, 2021 would have been due for birth in Q1, 2023 (Jan to Mar). We can see the results on first trimester pregnancies clearly;

  • In addition, the birth rates remains subdued moving forward, showing that the vaccines impacted future fertility for women who were not yet pregnant.

• Deaths - August to March = 8 months. November to June = 8 months:

  • We can see that, from January to April of 2021, deaths in Taiwan were pretty much on average with 2019/2020 - with the exception of March, which ties in with the earlier vaccination uptake;

  • However, once that delayed reaction from the second spike hits in May, we see ongoing elevated levels of mortality in Taiwan. The vaccines have now settled in for the long-term kill;

  • There has been a lot of talk of a “5 month delay” in other parts of the world but when I look at the Taiwanese data I see a different delay. I do see the 2 vaccine spikes that sit with the same separation as the 2 mortality spikes, and I do see continued elevation of mortality after the second spike, so there is something there, irrespective of what others may be saying about different parts of the world.

Conclusion

Although there is a different delay in regards to vaccine mortality than is being reported in other parts of the world (8 months vs. 5 months elsewhere), there is a definite temporal correlation between Taiwanese vaccine uptake and Taiwanese elevated mortality.

Similarly, there is a clear temporal association between first trimester pregnancy failure and vaccine uptake in Taiwan, as well as the same elevated level of impact after the second spike that we see in Taiwanese mortality.

There is no denying the association between the two - vaccine uptake has had a clear delayed effect on the birth rate and the mortality rate in Taiwan, and while the first vaccine uptake produced only a single-month impact on both birth and mortality rates, the second vaccine uptake spike has created an ongoing crisis in both areas.

Heads need to roll.