Aarstad (F1000Research 2026, 14:133, v5) analyzes English Office for National Statistics (ONS) data on monthly age-standardized mortality rates (ASMRS) by COVID-19 vaccination status from April 2021 to May 2023, and concludes that vaccination, despite a possible window of temporary protection, may have increased long-term mortality. The paper's central statistical procedure reduces algebraically to a rescaling of the published rates: the person-years cancel from the pseudo-count construction, so the resulting logistic-regression confidence intervals and significance claims are not valid uncertainty statements for the ASMR-based comparisons. In addition, the "ever vaccinated" exposure definition collapses heterogeneous dose histories; the key inferential comparison is anchored to an especially non-exchangeable reference month; and the supporting citation bundle does not establish what the text claims. ONS has also published an adjusted, individual-level, Census-2021-linked analysis of an overlapping period in the same underlying data stream. That analysis uses non-COVID mortality as a control outcome within a richly adjusted design and reaches different conclusions. The narrower descriptive point that simple ASMR-based comparisons are heavily confounded is valid; the causal claim about vaccine-induced mortality is not.
Ludvig Sjöström (Tue,) studied this question.