In lateral thinking, there are always trackers who believe they have discovered a bloody trace of the corona vaccination in mortality statistics. However, the tracks regularly turn out to be missteps in the swamp.
Now it has caught AfD MP Martin Sichert. He requested data from the statutory health insurance provider. In it he said he saw a massive increase in sudden deaths from the first quarter of 2021 and suspected the vaccinations. He went public with that yesterday. The central institute for statutory health insurance immediately denied it. A dpa report today states:
“The ZI rejected Sichert’s account and said the apparent increase was a logical consequence of the data selection by the AfD. It is a “cohort effect”. Because for the analysis, only the data of those who had health insurance in 2021 were queried. Logically, anyone who was still in the health insurance system in 2021 could not have been diagnosed with death in the previous years, which is the explanation for the steep increase in numbers from 2021 onwards Deaths occur in previous years, but these could only be errors in input or transmission.
If so, the data was probably not checked very carefully before transmission. The fact that those with statutory health insurance in 2021 must not include those who have died beforehand does not actually require an in-depth epidemiological analysis. But of course that also applies to Mr. Sichert. If he requested data for 2021 policyholders, he too should have checked whether what he was getting was plausible. Especially when evaluating routine data from healthcare caution is always required – the basic epidemiological rule “shit happens – always and everywhere” applies here.