The 2021 rise in working-age excess deaths not attributed to Covid also happened to coincide more or less with the rollout of vaccines to working-age Americans, so I’m sure skeptics will keep looking for evidence that vaccine side effects are to blame. So far there isn’t much. One analysis of data on 11 million Americans through July 31 found that “vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–Covid-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site.” The CDC has identified increased risk of two heart conditions, myocarditis and pericarditis, as side effects of the dominant Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but deaths from heart disease actually appear to have fallen slightly from May through September 2021 relative to 2020 (they fell much more than slightly in March and April, but that’s probably because a lot of Covid deaths were misclassified as heart disease deaths in those months in 2020).
Another way to look at vaccines’ role is to examine who died and where they died before and after the vaccines arrived. Those 65 and older were vaccinated first and continue to have much higher vaccination rates than younger Americans, and since the vaccines have arrived the age distribution of Covid-19 deaths has definitely shifted younger.
Another way to slice it is by geography. I took the 10 states with the lowest vaccination rates for those ages 18-64 for which there was adequate data (for privacy reasons the CDC suppresses death statistics for which the number of deaths is very small, so for the smallest states age-group deaths numbers are not reported every week) and compared them to the 10 with the highest vaccination rates.
This doesn’t prove anything. Most of the low-vax states are in the South and the high-vax ones are on the coasts, and the fact that Covid waves (pre-omicron, at least) tend to be regional in character probably explains a lot of the disparity. Still, the CDC also has some data on Covid-19 deaths by age group and by vaccination status, and it’s clear that the overwhelming majority of working-age Covid deaths are among the unvaccinated. (The age range is different here from in the other charts simply because the CDC reports the vaccination-status data differently.)
Davison of OneAmerica definitely believes that the unvaccinated drove most of last year’s awful surge in working-age mortality, and is acting on that belief. “Most of us in the industry are starting to target and to add premium loads onto employers that are based in counties that have low vaccination rates,” he said. “That's just typically what we would do for underwriting when you have a risk factor like that.”
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Market.