No, This Viral Study Doesn’t Prove The COVID Vaccine Worked To Prevent Deaths
Research falsely suggested vaccines prevent deaths from traffic accidents and falls, not just COVID
The propaganda on COVID vaccines started almost immediately. They were 100 percent effective at preventing infection. They would end the pandemic once a specific percentage of the population got vaccinated. Anthony Fauci told us so, saying that the most important thing we could do was get vaccinated, and repeatedly stating that herd immunity could be achieved with high vaccination rates.
All unvaccinated Americans were in a for a winter of "severe illness and death," in 2021-2022. A prediction from then-President Joe Biden and his top medical advisors that never materialized. Vaccine passports were necessary to stop the virus from spreading in major cities. Vaccine mandates were necessary for the "safety" of corporations, businesses and employees.
On and on it went.
It's been almost exactly five years since COVID vaccines hit the market, and thanks to a new administration, the efforts to push COVID vaccines on everyone have diminished. New appointees have joined the FDA, CDC and the National Institutes of Health, leading to a renewed focus on important, ignored areas of research on potentially harmful side effects.
On the outside, however, the efforts to promote COVID vaccines continue unabated. The latest being a monstrously misleading study making wild, inaccurate claims about what they can and can't do. Which was, naturally, immediately picked up and shared across social media by incompetent medical "experts" who misrepresented what it said.
Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Photo: Leigh Vogel/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Misleading COVID Vaccine Study Generated Huge Amounts Of Attention
The study looked at over 28 million people in France, 22.7 million of which were vaccinated, with the remaining 5.9 million being unvaccinated. It was designed, ostensibly, to compare the long-term impact of COVID vaccines on all-cause mortality. Particularly among the 18-59 age group, or the "younger" age groups relative to elderly individuals.
There are several massive, gaping holes in the methodology that completely undercut the results. But that didn't stop high-profile medical accounts on X from getting huge amounts of attention by sharing the top-line results. Huge, huge amounts of attention.
Carolyn Barber, MD on X shared the study, getting over 10 million impressions and over 40,000 likes on her post saying that the study proved that there was a lower risk of death among vaccinated people.
Dr. Neil Stone, one of the most prolific spreaders of COVID misinformation still active on the internet, said that "mRNA vaccines don't cause deaths - they prevent them.
"This massive study from France showed that not only did mRNA vaccines not increase mortality but they reduced deaths and saved lives."
He got nearly 4,000 likes and over 150,000 impressions on that misrepresentation. Another account, Dr. Catharine Young, who's a fellow at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, went as far as to say that it was "some of the strongest evidence to date" that mRNA vaccines actually lower overall mortality.
There's only one, massive, gigantic, glaring problem with these posts: that's not what the study actually says. In fact, it doesn't really say anything of note, because it's hopelessly, catastrophically flawed.
This is a cohort study, meant to compare different cohorts of people based on differences in behavior or treatment. It can be a useful design, when the cohorts are well-matched. Meaning, essentially, that the two groups of people you're comparing have lots in common in most important aspects. This one is the exact opposite.
When looking at a sample size this broad, roughly 28.6 million people, it's simply impossible to match up the involved cohorts. When you can't match them up, you introduce the possibility that other factors outweigh the importance of the examined treatment. That's precisely what happened here.
They claim a 25 percent reduction in risk, after adjusting for sociodemograhpic factors and comorbidities. Except they then also admit that "residual confounding may persist." There's your problem. Confounding means that other, unstudied elements and factors within the cohorts could be influencing results. In this case, the healthy vaccinee effect, where those who are more likely to be healthy already choose to get vaccinated, leading to better outcomes among that cohort.
That's exactly the result they found. And they even spell it out in the study discussion, for those who actually go far enough in to read it.
When "excluding severe COVID-19 death" from their results, they got almost exactly the same outcome in terms of lower all-cause mortality. What that implies is that there were underlying differences between the two massive groups of people that led to a reduced risk of all-cause mortality. Sure enough, they admit that "Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."
And that is why this study is useless. The vaccinated group, the 22.7 million people, had a lower risk of death from all causes because they were healthier, richer, and more likely to have higher-quality medical care. That's the effect they just found, which, of course, has nothing to do with COVID vaccines.
Sure enough, Table 2 in the study, which compares causes of deaths between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, shows that COVID vaccines are apparently miraculously protective against all sorts of negative outcomes.
Here's just a few areas where COVID vaccines prevent deaths, according to this study, that even Anthony Fauci couldn't have predicted.
- Transportation crashes
- Falls
- Drownings
- Unintentional injuries
- Mental and behavioral disorders
- Colorectal cancer
- Breast cancer
- Unknown causes
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Congenital malformations and chromosomal anomalies
- Diseases of the digestive system
- Diseases of the skin and subcutaneous tissue
So there you have it. COVID vaccines, according to this study, reduce your risk of dying in a traffic accident, or by a fall, or by drowning. They reduce your risk of dying by unintentional injury, or by having a mental or behavioral disorder. They can prevent deaths by colorectal cancer or breast cancer, as well as congenital malformations. They can even lower your risk of dying by the scariest form of death, unknown causes.
Weirdly though, there were more suicides in the vaccinated group.
This is why the results of this study are meaningless. Obviously, it's insane to suggest that COVID vaccines have any impact on the likelihood of dying in a crash or by drowning. Yet this "reduction" in all-cause mortality, in the topline results, was credited to COVID vaccines by prominent medical communicators.
Tens of millions of views. Tens of thousands of likes and shares and algorithms promoting these posts was applied to a study so hopelessly useless that it claims COVID vaccines can prevent deaths by falling.
What this actually demonstrates is that the two cohorts were very different in meaningful ways. Unvaccinated people had a higher risk of mortality from all causes, because of inherent differences in their overall profiles. Whether from poorer underlying health, or riskier behavioral choices, or potentially from being in blue-collar jobs or having hobbies that were more likely to lead to other accidental causes of death.
Anyone taking five minutes to read the study could see this. The problem is that, as they often did during the pandemic, the people who are supposed to be "experts" don't actually read anything. Or if they do read it, they have no intellectual honesty around interventions they want to sell.