THE DAILY SKEPTIC - DR JOSH GUETZKOW - DEC 24, 2022
A fearless, selfless Israeli researcher named David Shuldman has worked tirelessly to get data released from the clutches of Government agencies. He recently obtained data via FOIA request on neonatal deaths from the Israeli health insurance fund Maccabi, which covers about 25% of Israelis.
Neonatal deaths are defined as deaths in the first four weeks of life, from the moment after birth until 28 days later. Recently, he obtained data on the quarterly number of neonatal deaths beginning the first quarter of 2019. Here is what that looks like:
The quarterly number of neonatal deaths is very low, hovering between 4-8 for 2019 and 2020. Then in the second quarter of 2021, it suddenly jumps three-fold to 17, dips again in the third quarter and then jumps again to 18 in the last quarter of the year.
Since the total number of births changes little from month to month, these spikes are about triple the usual rate of neonatal deaths. (I confirmed this using data from a separate FOIA he filed with monthly data on live births from April 2019.)
In February 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health started to officially recommend COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women in their second and third trimesters, so the timing of the second quarter spike would coincide with women being jabbed later in their pregnancy two to four months prior.
The fourth quarter spike coincides with the booster vaccination campaign in Israel in August and especially September – a drive that aggressively targeted pregnant women. Unfortunately, the health insurer claimed not to have information on the vaccination status of pregnant women, so we are not able to differentiate by vaccination status.
However, the spike in the second quarter and again in the fourth quarter of 2021 is similar to what I found earlier this year in an analysis of data from a large Israeli hospital (also FOIA’d by David), where we saw a large jump in the rate of stillbirths, miscarriages and abortions (SBMAs) among vaccinated women in the second quarter (April-June):
So it is quite a coincidence seeing a spike in the neonatal death rate in the same quarter as we see a spike in the stillbirths, miscarriages and abortions rate among the vaccinated. (We don’t have November-December data so we cannot compare fourth-quarter stillbirths, miscarriages and abortions to neonatal deaths.)
What are the chances that those spikes are just a fluke? A statistical test called Chi-square can help us compare an average quarter to one of the quarters with a big spike. If we look at the average number of neonatal deaths per quarter in 2019-2020 (which is 6) and the average number births (which is 10,882) and compare that with either the second quarter or fourth quarter of 2021, the result is statistically significant: for the second quarter, you would expect that number of neonatal deaths or more about 2.5 times out of a hundred; for the fourth quarter you’d expect that number 1.8 times out of a hundred. (Anything less than 5 times out of a hundred is considered statistically significant according to conventional standards.)
The significance increases a bit if we do an annual comparison: