German Births in the News

"fact checkers" check claims vaccines caused Germany's birth rate to plunge, plus French contrast

Clearly the crash in German births has not gone unnoticed. CheckMate seems to be a “fact-checking” collaboration between ABC News (Australia) and RMIT Fact Lab (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). Full marks on their catchy fact checking marketing: “CheckMate” - your partner in fact-checking and check-mating opponents; “Your inoculation against misinformation” - to protect you against viral news! I hope their promised inoculation against misinformation is more effective than COVID-19 vaccinations are against infection with SARS-Cov2.

On Friday last week they published an article online stating, “We have fact checked claims that vaccines caused Germany's birth rate to plunge.” I think it important to know arguments the mainstream is trotting out and so I shall try to cover the main points raised here. Feel free to read the short article yourself. They report:

A number of blog and social media posts have sought to draw a link between COVID-19 vaccines and the risk of infertility, highlighting large falls in the birth rates of various countries, including Germany

After quoting the juiciest lines of impending doom from these blogs, they concede that the births have in FACT fallen substantially and then wonder (as many of us have also wondered):

So, what was happening with COVID-19 vaccinations when the January babies were conceived, back in April 2021?

According to the official data, roughly 9 million 18-59 year-olds (20 per cent) had received a single jab. Of those, just 1.8 million (4 per cent) were double-vaccinated.

They don’t provide full quotes from the spokesperson from Destatis - the German Federal Statistics Agency, so I have reconstructed the presumed argument from their judiciously worded paragraph:

Because predominantly only elderly people and vulnerable groups were vaccinated prior to elegibility restrictions being dropped on June 7th, this makes a connection between births and vaccinations very unlikely.

This of course neither denies nor disproves that potentially million(s?) of women of child-bearing women did receive at least one dose in April. (I say potentially because nobody really knows since Germany’s shoddy vaccination record with ridiculously broad age-bands does not permit us to actually know.) And don’t forget, saying something is very unlikely is not a very strong answer in the high stakes game of “what the f*ck is causing this unprecedented fall in your country’s births”.

The writers also quote Natalie Nitsche, a research scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, who cautions that although the correlation between births and the vaccine rollout was "striking", there was "of course no indication of a causal relationship". The basis for her claim?

If such a relationship existed, she said, there should be a gradual decline in births. "But we don't see this, all three months have about the same number of births".

This and the prior defense offered by the Destatis spokesperson are basic ideas that need to be explored more by substackers pushing the “vaccine effect”. The vaccine was rolled out over prioritising older age groups with the overall percentage of women of child-bearing age cumulatively increasing. Recall, the vast majority of this age group were NOT vaccinated 9 months prior (in April), nor even 8 months prior (in May), before the drop in births started in Germany in 2022. This cannot just be waved away with generalised statements like “approximately 9 months after the start of the vaccination campaign”. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Dr Nitsche also pointed to vaccinated countries such as Serbia and France to note that crashing birth rates were not a "universal phenomenon".

So, a couple of exceptions to the growing rule for some follow up. France seems very interesting because they had a very similar vaccine rollout to Germany but have not seen births fall in 2022. They also helpfully provide a more detailed breakdown of the vaccination uptage in narrower age groups:

The above graphic shows the cumulative vaccine uptake in the 18-39 cohort. April saw less than 4% of this group vaccinated, end of May less than 26% total, and by the end of Q2 it was still less than 47%. (I used the interactive graph at the French vaccine tracker website to quickly average the values for 20 year-olds and 30 year-olds for the given dates). I suspect the percentages for Germany are quite similar.

Meanwhile, the table below shows France’s births have NOT fallen in 2022. Such exceptions have to be diligently addressed and explained if extraordinary claims are to be entertained.

What follows in the article is more hand-waving quotes by so-called experts about population level data being misleading, and various pandemic era factors which could be in play. My favourite was the juxtaposition of families having both brought forward family plans during lockdown and then delaying family plans until they’d gotten vaccinated:

The statistics office spokeswoman told CheckMate that "a significant increase in births" during 2021 could mean that some people had brought forward their pregnancy plans, so were not having children now.

Other people, however, may have delayed their plans until after they were fully vaccinated, which Dr Nitsche said was in-line with the health advice.

All the while reading the article it was clear to me, that none of these experts (except presumable the German ones?) had actually looked at the data. At least, none of them actually attempted to address the FACT that the magnitude of the crash in birth figures is unprecedented outside of wartime.

The article finishes up by briefly mentioning the Israeli study finding vaccination reduced sperm quality before swiftly quoting other studies with opposite findings in order to assure us this surely cannot be.

Take Aways: The experts avoided quantifying the significance of the drop in births. There was a lot of hand-waving - they DON’T KNOW - with the primary argument being that the timing does not quite fit (can this be reconciled?) Also we get an interesting exception, France - a large western highly vaccinated nation with decent granular data on the vaccination campaign and also monthly births data for 2022. What do the “vaccine effect” proponents have to say about France’s (and Serbia’s) figures?

One possibility might be early miscarriages and I will post on this next.