COVID Deaths and Anti-Vax Nonsense

Recent data should settle the issue about what was killing Americans

There is a widespread assertion by some people, including Elon Musk’s favorite village idiot, the aptly-named Catturd, that we have seen some kind of structural increase in deaths in the United States in the aftermath of the mass vaccination program against COVID-19. Every single incident, including January’s collapse on the field of football player Damar Hamlin, has led to posts like this from the fool and his ilk:

In probably the most notoriously widespread of these sorts of assertions, he went on to state what amounts to a prediction: That those who had received the COVID-19 vaccines were basically ticking time bombs and would die at any moment.

108,000+ likes and 7.7 million views. That’s so depressing that I’ll choose to swiftly move on.

Suffice it to say, he’s hardly been alone on this. Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, etc have all made or at least actively entertained assertions that the COVID-19 vaccines have radically increased long-term health risks for those who got vaccinated. State legislatures these days are full of anti-vax conspiracy theorists who boldly assert that health experts have “blood on their hands” for pushing mass vaccinations and we even have at least one U.S. Senator, Ron Johnson, who has said the same.

I would like to offer these people a simple theoretical framework for testing their assertions: If the United States observes excess deaths that are not highly correlated with COVID-19 outbreaks, influenza outbreaks, or some other acute known phenomenon, I will say it’s worth looking into why that is happening.

However, we now have an observation from the New York Times this morning that excess deaths have virtually disappeared in recent weeks while official COVID deaths have dropped to the lowest levels since the pandemic started.

I had not looked at this data in a while since I was busy with other things, but it indeed is true. Total excess deaths have vanished while average weekly COVID deaths have essentially disappeared.

This is a continuation of the trend we have seen since the pandemic started: Excess deaths are basically correlated 1:1 with COVID-19 deaths, though the reemergence of seasonal influenza now that people are socializing again can create spikes in the winter months.

If there were some kind of largescale residual excess death phenomenon in this country, or any other that engaged in widespread vaccinations, that might be interesting to look into for ascertaining why deaths are structurally higher.

That’s *if* such a thing were occurring.

It’s not.

Instead, the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is leading to an end of excess deaths, which is what we would have expected based on the correlation between official COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths throughout the pandemic. There is no structural increase in mortality beyond what COVID-19 caused.

The conspiracy theorists and perpetual malcontents are wrong. Again. And Always.