Did COVID vaccines cause massive deaths?

In a hearing called by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson titled “The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines,” many false statements about the vaccines were made. This is a special edition of our newsletter where we will tackle several claims from that hearing.

Senator Johnson claimed that COVID vaccines have caused 38,607 reported deaths.

These claims are based on laypeople searching the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. As noted on the VAERS website, anyone can report anything to VAERS, regardless of causation. If this claim were true to any degree, we would expect more deaths in areas with higher vaccination rates. However, higher excess deaths were seen in areas with lower vaccination rates.

The website’s most important warning helps put the above claims into context: “VAERS reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Reports to VAERS can also be biased. As a result, there are limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.”

These death claims usually don’t have any proof to back them up.

What is the likely number of deaths actually caused by COVID vaccines? Careful reviews by CDC experts have found nine deaths in the United States linked to a rare blood-clotting condition after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. No other deaths have been confirmed as caused by any COVID shot, out of hundreds of millions of doses given. That works out to far less than one death per million doses, many times lower than the risk of dying from COVID itself.