About 60-75% of posts from Republicans and “Libertarians” (read: brainless conspiracy enthusiasts) I see are claims that COVID vaccines have caused an increase in deaths.
Many of these claims cite ”Died Suddenly,” yet another faux documentary by charlatans looking to cash in on the network of gullible dupes who think George W Bush did 9/11.
It’s pretty dumb to uncritically internalize an entirely unsupported claim to the point that it becomes central to your identity. But how do we know that the vaccines have not caused a spike in mortality? Can we really know anything?
For starters, there’s no evidence on their side of the claim, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no evidence at all.
Assuming you entirely disregard all of the evidence collected by private industry (including adversarial firms), national governments (including of adversarial nations), and third party healthcare orgs (most of whom are hostile to “big pharma”), there are three key pieces of evidence that each independently prove that the vaccines were safe (and an abundance of evidence that proves they were effective).
The continued excess mortality is almost entirely explained by the continued rate of COVID deaths, along with deferred medical treatment from the pandemic, and extreme weather (globally, but not in the US, where people don’t usually die from hot weather)
As seen on this graph, there is a negative correlation between vaccine uptake and excess mortality between countries
There is a substantial negative correlation between excess mortality and vaccine uptake over time
There’s belief based on evidence, and then there’s belief based on what your “leaders” told you.