Are under-60s in England really around twice as likely to die from any cause if they’re vaccinated?

This headline and chart has been doing the rounds recently:

…so I decided to look at the figures from the ONS for myself. And you know what? Alex Berenson is right. I even took the source data and made my own chart:

To be clear, this is all-cause mortality in 10-59 year-olds, expressed as a proportion of the double-vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

If we look at the specific data for September, it shows clearly that in the 10 to 59 age bracket, 10 out of every 100,000 fully vaccinated people died, while just half that proportion of unvaccinated people died:

(Note: The population figures varied slightly from week to week,

so I took an average for the month)

Now, the situation probably isn’t as extreme as it might look. We’ve got to allow for the fact that more of the unvaccinated population will be children, who are less likely to die in general, while people towards the top of the age bracket, who are far more likely to have been double-vaccinated, are also much more likely to have underlying conditions. But do those factors make enough of a difference to remove the apparent imbalance? It would be more helpful to this question if the ONS had split the data further and given us figures for, say, 30 to 49-year olds.

But let's look at the older cohorts.

For 60 to 79-year olds, the data shows a huge swing in the other direction, with 105 out of every 100,000 fully vaccinated people dying in September, versus 175 out of every 100,000 unvaccinated people:

And in the 80+ cohort, the unvaccinated were about 50% more likely to die:

Of course, there are many contributing factors and it’s very hard to be black and white about exactly what effect these jabs are having, but I do find it very odd that the ONS have lumped 10-59 in one category but then specified the rest of the data in 60-69, 60-79 and 80+.

It’s as though they’re inviting headlines that they've then got room to discredit...