A recent study has sparked another round of headlines claiming that COVID vaccines caused excess deaths. This was accompanied by a predictable outpouring of I-told-you-sos on social media. Excess deaths are a measure of how many more deaths are being recorded in a country over what would have been expected based on historical trends.
In the UK, and in many other countries, death rates have been higher during the years 2020 to 2023 than would have been expected based on historic trends from before the pandemic. But that has been known for some time. A couple of years ago I wrote an article for The Conversation pointing this out and suggesting some reasons.
But has anything changed? The authors of the new study, published in BMJ Public Health, used publicly available data from Our World in Data to determine which countries had “statistically significant” excess deaths – in other words, excess deaths that couldn’t be explained by mere random variation. They studied the years 2020 to 2022 and found that many, but not all, countries did indeed report excess deaths. The authors did not try to explain why these excess deaths occurred, but the suggestion that COVID vaccines could have played a role is clear from their text – and indeed widely interpreted as such by certain newspapers.
There is no doubt that a few deaths were associated with the COVID vaccines , but could the vaccination programme explain the large number of excess deaths – 3 million in 47 countries – th.
