UPDATED: December 29, 2024
Welcome to the Healthy Living Is Good Medicine Newsletter, a free publication covering a wide variety of health-related topics, with timely original articles intended to help people lead healthier and more fulfilling lives.
No Shortage of Fools
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
~ Jacques Abbadie, 1684 (Incorrectly attributed to Abraham Lincoln.)
There still seems to be no shortage of fools. A recent study published in BMJ Public Health has sparked another round of conspiracy theories claiming that COVID-19 vaccines caused excess deaths. What the study actually found was that excess mortality remained high in the Western World from January, 2020 to December, 2022, despite the implementation of pandemic containment measures that included vaccines. Although not considered in this article, deaths due to COVID-19 over time follow the excess mortality graphs for every country in this study.
The BMJ issued an expression of concern and a public statement about the article in response to its misreporting: “Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link. The researchers looked only at trends in excess mortality over time, not its causes. While the researchers recognise that side effects are reported after vaccination, the research does not support the claim that vaccines are a major contributory factor to excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection. The message of the research is that understanding overall excess mortality since the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for future health policy, but that identifying specific causes is complex due to varying national data quality and reporting methods.”
The most reliable analysis of excess death data was done by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, in which death registries were matched with vaccine histories for each death recorded. Age-standardized death rates were used to account for age differences between those who were vaccinated and those who were not.
During the period April, 2021 to May, 2023, the death rate from all causes was higher in the unvaccinated group than in people who had been vaccinated at least once. Even when known COVID-19 deaths were excluded, the death rate in the unvaccinated cohort was still higher. One model has estimated that COVID-19 vaccines prevented 20 million deaths worldwide during the first year they were used.
Vaccines Save Lives
We can still be confident that the excess deaths were not due to the vaccines. A CDC analysis found that before coronavirus vaccines were available, about 18 percent of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 died. Among those admitted to intensive care units, 44 percent died. The overall case-fatality rate was 1.7 percent. As one might expect, the fatality rate increased with age; nearly 1 in 4 people ages 85 and older hospitalized for the coronavirus died.
Notably, more vulnerable people, such as the elderly and those with chronic health conditions, had higher rates of vaccination than the general public. They are the very people who are had a greater risk of death, even before the pandemic. A recent study of death rates in the 44 weeks following COVID-19 vaccination showed no increase in mortality. Ever since the clinical trials of the first COVID-19 vaccines, there has never been any doubt about their effectiveness in saving lives. A recent study estimated that the cumulative impact of global immunizations has been the saving of 154 million lives. Of those, at least 14 million lives saved could be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccines during their first year of use, based on an analysis that included 185 countries and territories.
Possible explanations for the excess deaths noted in the BMJ article include the long-term effects of previous COVID-19 infections, and the resurgence of other airborne infections such as influenza and RSV, which had been suppressed during the pandemic control measures. There were also delays in people obtaining medical care for other health conditions during the state of emergency, and for some time thereafter.
The reality is that the global impact of the first year of COVID‐19 vaccination is that it prevented an estimated 14.4 to 19.8 million deaths, using data from 185 countries and territories.
Vaccine Misinformation and Disinformation
Despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy continue to flourish. That’s because it is far more difficult to refute misinformation than it is to create it, and the public appetite for baloney seems insatiable. Consequently, the health of our nation is suffering, and public health leaders are bearing the brunt of misguided attacks on the system.
A recent survey by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a quarter of Americans still mistakenly believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism. As a result, measles, a disease that had been nearly eradicated due to the effectiveness of vaccination, is making a comeback, with the number of new cases nationwide more than triple what they were a year ago.
An article in Science analyzed the significant impact that misinformation on Facebook is having. The findings are summarized in this post. The biggest anti-vaccination online influencers and organizations have been pushing three messages intended to keep people from accepting the COVID-19 vaccine. It appears as if they’ve been using the same strategic playbook.
Despite overwhelming evidence supporting the great benefits and minimal risks, support for lifesaving childhood vaccines has significantly declined due to widespread falsehoods that threaten the health of children nationwide. A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Republicans believe that vaccines are more dangerous than diseases they prevent.
Candidate Trump said during a campaign rally in June, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.” What’s even more frightening is that anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr. is in line for appointment as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.
A Bleak Future
In 1995, Dr. Carl Sagan, a renowned astrophysicist and science educator, warned about a future where people lack scientific literacy and critical thinking skills. As Sagan noted, “… with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” Obviously, his dire prediction was accurate, and now we are all paying the price.
The Bottom Line
Routine childhood immunizations in the United States have been an important public health strategy that has also been cost-effective, resulting in direct care savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion, involving children born during 1994–2023. A recent analysis found that vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths. Vaccination is medical science’s greatest achievement:
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