[C4stor]

Here's a conclusion that you can also take from the same article :

"In the UK, ages 1-59 year olds are dying at almost eight time the rate if they don't have any baby tooth left and don't absurdly love dinosaurs".

The fact that people have to actually write the whole data analysis down is mind boggling, because it's so trivial to understand the reason.

Still, this is the conclusion : "Thus, the results we see in the actual UK all-cause deaths for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated is not unexpected, and can be fully explained by the Simpson's paradox artifact since the observed ratio of vaccinated:unvaccinated all cause death rates, 1.82x in week 30, is less than the expected background ratio of 2.41x based on their disparate age distributions."

That's not "a lot of hand waving to try and explain it away". They do a very methodical and sensible mathematical analysis of the data at hand, including the initial data point, to explain a very simple thing : people tend to die older overall, and older dying people tend to vaccinate more.