Daily Fact-Check: COVID-19 Vaccines Save Lives, Are Not More Lethal Than COVID-19

The CDC and FDA have programs for monitoring vaccine safety, and researchers regularly share updates on vaccine safety based on data from these systems and other sources.

It is clear that the vaccines have not led to mass deaths, contrary to Kirsch’s and McCullough’s claims. “The body of evidence suggests there is no increase in risk of death after covid vaccination, and if anything there is a decrease,” Morris said.

“People receiving COVID-19 vaccines are less likely to die from COVID-19 and its complications and are at no greater risk of death from non-COVID causes, than unvaccinated people,” the CDC website says. “CDC scientists and partners have performed detailed assessments of deaths after COVID-19 vaccination and made the information available to healthcare providers and the public.”

One of these monitoring systems, Vaccine Safety Datalink, gathers electronic health data from various health care organizations in the U.S. Researchers use this system to monitor for adverse events linked to vaccination and have not detected adverse events that could lead to the large number of deaths McCullough and Kirsch describe.

Analyses of deaths after vaccination do not indicate any increased risk of death. For instance, a study using VSD data on people vaccinated or not vaccinated during the initial COVID-19 vaccine rollout, through June 2021, found that people who received the vaccines had a lower rate of death through August 2021 from non-COVID-19 causes than those who did not get vaccinated. 

The authors of the study wrote that they did not think the large risk reduction they found could be entirely owing to “any real protective effect” of COVID-19 vaccines against non-COVID-19 death. They pointed out that people who believe they are near death may be less likely to get vaccinated, which could influence the results.

However, the results are inconsistent with claims that the COVID-19 vaccines are causing mass deaths. “In the context of widespread suggestions on social media that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, it is reassuring that we found no evidence of any association of COVID-19 vaccination with increased risk of death,” the researchers wrote.

Another system, commonly used deceptively by anti-vaccine groups, is VAERS. Anyone can submit an unverified report of a death or other health problem to VAERS. There are also requirements that health care providers file VAERS reports about deaths after vaccination, “even if it is unclear whether the vaccine was the cause,” the CDC explains on its website.

“It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner,” Schaffner said of VAERS, explaining that it collects “anything that happens after vaccination,” or even sometimes reports of events that occurred before vaccination. “You cannot just count up things in VAERS and draw conclusions,” he said. “You have to do further studies.”

The CDC and FDA review and investigate reports of adverse events and take action if needed. For instance, as we’ve previously written, the FDA temporarily stopped use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six reports to VAERS of a very rare and sometimes fatal condition involving blood clotting and low platelets. The CDC later endorsed a “clinical preference” for giving other COVID-19 vaccines, and the FDA eventually limited the authorization of the vaccine — which was found to have caused nine deaths in the U.S. after 19 million doses administered — to adults who couldn’t or didn’t want to get another COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine is not currently available in the country, after the remaining supply expired.

VAERS data do not indicate increased risk of death after COVID-19 vaccination. For instance, a study of deaths after COVID-19 vaccination reported to VAERS through November 2021 found that the rate of reported deaths was lower than the expected death rate in the general population. “These findings do not suggest an association between vaccination and overall increased mortality,” the authors wrote.

But anti-vaccine advocates often incorrectly attribute all reports of deaths in VAERS to vaccines. The Instagram post quoting McCullough, for instance, said there were “18K VAERS d❌aths” and then multiplied this by an “underreporting factor” to falsely claim there have been more than half a million U.S. COVID-19 vaccine deaths.

The CDC indeed said there were around 18,000 preliminary reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination as of December 2022, according to a prior article by the Associated Press. But the social media post neglected to say that these reports were not verified and that VAERS deaths are not necessarily causally linked to vaccination.

In fact, it is fully expected that people will coincidentally die after vaccination. “For example, in the USA if there are 2.8 million deaths per year, that means >7500 per day and 50,000 per week,” Morris said. “Thus, if vaccines were given to every USA resident at a random time and all events within a week of vaccination were reported to VAERs, we’d expect >7500 deaths within 1 day of vaccination to be reported to VAERS and 50k within 1 week. Thus, it is not surprising to see many reports of deaths to VAERs even if vaccines contributed to none of them.”

McCullough then multiplied the number of preliminary reports of deaths by an “underreporting factor” of 30. As we have previously written, claiming underreporting is a common VAERS-related deception, and ad hoc estimates of an “underreporting factor” are scientifically unsound. The underreporting rate is not simple to determine, and there will be no single underreporting rate that applies to all types of adverse events or all vaccines.

Morris said that it’s known that severe events like death are reported to VAERS at a higher rate than other adverse events, for instance, and that reporting rates are up for COVID-19 vaccines compared with other vaccines prior to the pandemic.

Morris went on to explain that the U.K. Office of National Statistics was able to link national medical records to death rates and published the dataset. “These data clearly show death rate was lower, not higher, after vaccination,” he said.

ONS does not adjust for people’s health problems, Morris said, limiting the ability to say there is a causal relationship between vaccination status and the lowered death rates. But again, the data run counter to claims of large numbers of deaths from vaccines.

Individual studies using other sources of data, such as records on U.S. nursing home residents and national registries in the Netherlands, also have not found an elevated risk of death after COVID-19 vaccination. 

“None of this rules out the possibility that there have been deaths related to vaccination,” Morris said, giving the example of the very small number of deaths causally linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. He added that “there are likely more, but there is no plausible way given existing data that claims like those of McCullough (and Kirsch) can be true.”