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Anyone following social media could be excused for thinking that the vaccines against COVID-19 are not just ineffective but extremely dangerous. Here are a few of the categorical assertions from a recent post on a nominally progressive news site:
"The COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. They are 800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine, which was the previous record holder. The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans and permanently disabled even more. They don't make sense for anyone of any age. The younger you are, the worse it gets. For kids, it is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent...”
"So we are 'saving' fewer than 10,000 lives at the expense of over 150,000 (vaccine) deaths. In short, we kill 15 people to save 1. That's incredibly stupid."
“The eminent Dr. Peter McCollough has emphasized: "You are about five times as likely to die of the vaccine than you are to take your risks with COVID-19.”
“A recent medical research article said: "A novel best-case scenario cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic."
We can now test such frequently repeated claims against actual data:
Currently 454 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the US, and 195 million US residents have received two or more of the shots. Logically, if the vaccines were as dangerous as vaccine critics want us to believe, taking 5, 15, or, for children 117 lives for every life saved, those hundreds of thousands of deaths should be showing up somewhere. To put it crudely—show us the bodies.
Here's some striking new research that tells us that those bodies are never going to be found because they simply don't exist.
We already know that COVID-related deaths are consistently far lower among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated people. So the deaths supposedly caused by the vaccines must show up among deaths that are not COVID-related. Unfortunately for vaccine critics (but fortunately for everyone else), a large new study shows that the death rate from all causes other than COVID-19 is significantly lower among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated Americans.
If the hundreds of thousands of deaths from the COVID vaccinations don't show up as COVID-related, or as non-COVID-related, they don't exist. Period. The bodies will never be found because they were never there.
The new research appears in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of October 29, 2021. It's open access, so you can read the entire article here. (I know from experience that true-blue COVID vaccine critics pre-emptively discount all information from the CDC, JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine and other "mainstream" sources. So they will doubtlessly discount this study too.)
Researchers at 9 large healthcare organizations across the US extracted anonymized data from the medical records of 6.4 million vaccinated people and 4.6 million unvaccinated people 12 years old or older. The data included vaccination dates, the kind of vaccine received, and subsequent health outcomes, including any deaths. In order to control for generalized vaccine or healthcare avoidance, the group who did not receive COVID vaccination was selected from people who had chosen to get flu vaccinations within the last two years.
The researchers calculated and compared deaths per 100 person-years at risk between December, 2020 and July, 2021.
The results were striking:
After one dose of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, vaccinated people's risk of dying from all causes other than COVID-19 was just 41 percent of the risk of unvaccinated people.
After two Pfizer doses, that relative risk went down to 34 percent.
After one dose of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, the non-COVID death risk was 34 percent.
After two doses of the Moderna vaccine, that relative risk went down to 31 percent.
After a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson adenovirus-vector vaccine, the risk of death from all causes other the COVID-19 was 54 percent compared to unvaccinated people.
With the exception of children age 12 -17, for whom the risk of death was equally low regardless of vaccination status, these findings held for all age groups, for men and women, and for all racial and ethnic groups.
The study's understated, but extremely clear conclusion:
“There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients.”
To restate the implication of these findings from the actual medical histories of 11 million people across the US:
There have not been 363,000 deaths (expected if the vaccines were in fact “800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine.”)
There have not been “over 150,000 Americans” killed by the COVID vaccines.
The vaccines are not killing 15 people to save 1.
You are not “5 times more likely to die of the vaccine than … your risks with COVID-19.”
There have not been 5 times the number of deaths from each inoculation compared to COVID among people 65 and older.
It's actually just the opposite. Not only do the COVID vaccines prevent deaths from or related to COVID, they are strongly associated with reduced deaths not related to COVID.
The researchers raise the intriguing question of just how the COVID vaccines lead to these additional lives saved. They suggest three plausible factors—it's possible that people who have chosen to get vaccinated have healthier lifestyles, they may be healthier in general, and perhaps there were some deaths from COVID in the unvaccinated cohort that were attributed to other causes. Further research is needed and is being planned.
Whatever the reasons for the strikingly reduced rates of non-COVID-related death among these 11 million Americans, the fact remains that the vaccines emphatically do not put us at risk, or “only” reduce COVID-related deaths, they actually reduce our risk of dying from causes other than COVID.
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A slightly different version of this article appeared on OpEdNews on 12/1/21.
There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients.
Let's start with the claim that the COVID vaccines are “800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine.” According to the National Library of Medicine, the death rate from smallpox vaccination was one death per million vaccinations. If it's true that the COVID vaccines are 800 times more deadly, then the 454 million COVID shots must have killed 800 x 454 = 363,200 Americans. That's about 45 percent of the 800,000 CoVID-related deaths that have dominated headlines, filled and sometimes overwhelmed hospitals and intensive care units, and orphaned 150,000 to 200,000 children.
If the vaccine critics want to be taken seriously—show us the bodies.
Another claim in the same paragraph: “It is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent.”
[TK—go directly to new data about deaths, put the discussion of VAERS, etc. below]
When pressed, the vaccine critics start by citing VAERS, the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS has received over 10,000 reports of deaths following COVID vaccinations. VAERS emphasizes that:
“FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause. Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.”
Despite that unambiguous warning, vaccine critics typically take the number of deaths reported to VAERS as definitely caused by the COVID vaccines, and then multiply that number by a large factor—up to 100--based on assumed under-reporting.
There are many reasons why the VAERS data can't be taken literally, but a basic one is the background rate of deaths that would be expected in the weeks following the 450,000,000 vaccinations Americans have received—or 450,000,000 events of any kind.
You can check the math at the end of this post, but the fact is that if you picked 450,000,000 random weeks in the lives of Americans, you would register more than 75,000 deaths. In other words, it's basically impossible to know if any of the deaths reported to VAERS following COVID vaccinations are caused by the shots, related to the shots, or just part of the much larger number of deaths that occur among hundreds of millions of people any given week. Clearly, multiplying a meaningless number by 15, 50 or 100 doesn't make it any more meaningful.
Vaccine critics perform another trick to minimize the effectiveness of the vaccines. They cite a CDC report that just 6 percent of COVID-related deaths are in people with no known risk factors (such as obesity) or co-morbidities (such as diabetes). They then assume that the remaining 94 percent of COVID-related deaths must actually be from something other than COVID. This trick reduces the number of COVID deaths by 94 percent, so currently from 770,000 down to 46,200.
So, with a little hand waving and a few abracadabras, the vaccine critics manage to “find” 150,000 or more deaths from the vaccines compared to only 46,000 deaths from COVID itself. Clearly we should be far more scared of the vaccines than by COVID, right?
Luckily, we have some new and much more reliable data about the alleged dangers of the COVID vaccines.
How many Americans can be expected to die in the week following a COVID-19 shot (or in the week following any given event)?
About 2,855,000 Americans die every year. That's 870 per 100,000 person-years or 16.7 per 100,000 person-weeks.
Let's suppose that vaccine administrators report any deaths that occur within one week following a COVID shot. That means that any deaths among 454,000,000 people for one week, or 450,000,000 person-weeks would potentially be reported. But we would expect 16.7 natural deaths per 100,000 person-weeks, or 167 deaths per million person-weeks, so 167 x 454 = 75,818 natural, but potentially reportable deaths.
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