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Did COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Excess Deaths?

No. The terrible science behind equally awful headlines.

Gideon M-K; Health Nerd
7 min readJun 12, 2024
Pictured: deaths. Photo by Janne Simoes on Unsplash

The COVID-19 vaccines have been, almost across the board, quite miraculous. Within a year of the start of the pandemic, against a completely novel virus, researchers developed immunizations that prevented the vast majority of deaths from the disease and even had some remarkable benefits against infection and transmission. At the beginning of the pandemic, we set the benchmark for a useful vaccine at a 50% reduction in diagnosed disease — the vaccines we ended up with surpassed this threshold by leaps and bounds.

Which makes it strange that recently there have been a slew of headlines proclaiming that the COVID-19 vaccines might have caused excess deaths across the world. According to a wide range of reporting, new research has emerged showing that the COVID-19 vaccines were associated with more death than the disease, in a stark contrast to the many thousands of research papers already published that show precisely the opposite.

Fortunately for us all, the claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused excess mortality is based on extremely shoddy science. In fact, the data shows that the immunizations have saved countless lives.

The Study

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Responses (13)

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The new paper in the BMJ simply lifted the methods and part of this dataset, added their own opinions on top, and published it as “original research”.

My brother is one of the biggest anti-vaxxers out there and I have to remind him that the only way his "science" holds up is with shoddy studies and nitpicking facts. Any day now, he's going to send me this study and say, "See!" If my eyes roll any further back in my head, I'll pull an ocular muscle.

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I think that it's important to note that there were decades of MRNA research behind the tail-end research that resulted in the COVID-19 vaccines being developed and made available so quickly. And they have absolutely saved countless lives.

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Thank you so much for this insightful review. I have to constantly battle a friend and family member who are anti-vaxxers. This information is helpful, but sadly, I doubt it will make them change their minds.

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