COVID was not a significant health threat to Israeli children for all of 2020, as indicated by their average weekly excess death rate of -20% (child deaths each week, were on average 20% BELOW what they were from 2015 to 2019).
But while COVID itself was not a significant health threat to Israeli children, the COVID vaccine is another story:
Notice that Israel began vaccinating 12 to 15 year-olds before they began reporting statistics on vaccinating 12 to 15 year-olds — which is an irregularity that is potentially dishonest.
Beginning your data set off with 34.6% of them already being vaccinated may merely be a ploy to hide the date of the vaccine rollout for them. This would be especially useful to government officials if, say, the largest-ever weekly excess death rate in kids coincided with the vaccine rollout for them.
By the Numbers
Before the week of 21 Mar 2021, when weekly excess death in kids reached 96.1%, the standard deviation around the mean of -20% was, itself, 20%.
One way to interpret the week of 21 Mar 2021 is that COVID was essentially a non-threat to kids in Israel before then, and then, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, excess death from COVID spiked to 6 standard deviations above the mean — an event with expected probability of less than 1-in-a-billion (when data have a normal distribution).
But annual lightning strikes on people (1 in 1.2 million) are more probable than THAT interpretation being true. The other interpretation of the data is that this six-standard-deviation jump in excess kid death coincided with the vaccine rollout for them.
Bolstering this interpretation is the fact that the difference in weekly excess death in kids in Israel before vaccines versus after vaccines is statistically significant — even with a sensitivity analysis that places the peak weekly death rate into the “before vaccine” group of values.
That’s important enough to repeat:
Even when you arbitrarily assign the peak death rate to the “before vaccines” group, there is STILL a statistically significant increase in child death after the vaccine rollout for them.
A second line of reasoning, though less direct, which could be seen as to be implicating the child vaccinations in the earlier deaths comes from a report which found peak myocarditis cases in February and March of 2021.
While children in Israel had negative excess death rates in 2020 and even up to March of 2021, they had positive excess death rates from that point, forward (i.e., when they were being given COVID vaccine).
Now that the vaccine has rolled out for children in Israel, they have begun dying more than they ever had under just COVID alone, with no vaccine. These data are robust enough to prove a statistically significant increase in death in kids in Israel after they had begun being exposed to COVID vaccines.
Reference
[Share of people with at least one dose COVID-19 vaccine by age] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
[P-scores by age group using five-year average baseline] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
[Peak Myocarditis in Israel in Feb and Mar of 2021] — Supplementary material to: Mevorach D, Anis E, Cedar N, et al. Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 in Israel. N Engl J Med 2021;385:2140-9. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2109730