There are other confounders/biases that can impact the rates too. In some cases they could potentially have a massive impact on the interpretation of the rates (much like you noted with different ages) if the rates are not adjust…
There are other confounders/biases that can impact the rates too. In some cases they could potentially have a massive impact on the interpretation of the rates (much like you noted with different ages) if the rates are not adjusted to take them into account. One such bias is the underlying health of the different groups. Age is but one factor impacting that.
It's been shown that those more likely to take vaccines are generally in better health to begin with than those who dont. We need to take that into account when looking at these mortality rates if trying to pinpoint what difference vaccination alone makes to them. If we don't then the unjabbed group, which would generally be unhealthier, would have a much higher death rate and might lead us to think this is because they were not jabbed, which is often very misleading. So we need to adjust for the differing general health of each group as well as the ages, to take that difference out of the equation. Age standardising does that to a degree but I'm not convinced it is a good enough proxy for the health differences.
Hopefully someone can work out what the healthy vaccinee effect/bias is for these two groups of Kiwis, adjust for it and we can at least take that out of the picture. That said, given other research on other groups has shown the HVE accounts for 50% or more of the difference in rates, and even before adjusting for it in this NZ data the jabbed deaths rates are already higher, they'd only go relatively higher still after adjusting for the HVE. So there would have to be something seriously flawed in this NZ chart, and the deaths rates for jabbed would need to be corrected down and the unjabbed up drastically to swamp even what I think might be a conservative HVE impact.
I hope someone can work out what the HVE is for these two groups of Kiwis, make the adjustment and also correct for any flaws in the current charts and we can at least see with a bit more clarity how the rates compare.
By using age-standardised rates, those differences in the ages are taken into account:
https://ourworldindata.org/age-standardization
There are other confounders/biases that can impact the rates too. In some cases they could potentially have a massive impact on the interpretation of the rates (much like you noted with different ages) if the rates are not adjusted to take them into account. One such bias is the underlying health of the different groups. Age is but one factor impacting that.
It's been shown that those more likely to take vaccines are generally in better health to begin with than those who dont. We need to take that into account when looking at these mortality rates if trying to pinpoint what difference vaccination alone makes to them. If we don't then the unjabbed group, which would generally be unhealthier, would have a much higher death rate and might lead us to think this is because they were not jabbed, which is often very misleading. So we need to adjust for the differing general health of each group as well as the ages, to take that difference out of the equation. Age standardising does that to a degree but I'm not convinced it is a good enough proxy for the health differences.
Hopefully someone can work out what the healthy vaccinee effect/bias is for these two groups of Kiwis, adjust for it and we can at least take that out of the picture. That said, given other research on other groups has shown the HVE accounts for 50% or more of the difference in rates, and even before adjusting for it in this NZ data the jabbed deaths rates are already higher, they'd only go relatively higher still after adjusting for the HVE. So there would have to be something seriously flawed in this NZ chart, and the deaths rates for jabbed would need to be corrected down and the unjabbed up drastically to swamp even what I think might be a conservative HVE impact.
I hope someone can work out what the HVE is for these two groups of Kiwis, make the adjustment and also correct for any flaws in the current charts and we can at least see with a bit more clarity how the rates compare.