TallGuyJohninBKK

The Singapore Health Ministry is urging people to follow the science on this subject, so let's do some more of that -- another example of what the consensus of scientific research on this topic shows -- no increased risk of death from COVID vaccination: Effect of COVID-19 vaccination on mortality by COVID-19 and on mortality by other causes, the Netherlands, January 2021–January 2022 12 July 2023 "The risk of non-COVID-19 mortality was lower or similar in the 5 or 8 weeks following a first dose compared to no vaccination, as well as following a second dose compared to one dose and a booster compared to two doses, for all age and long-term care groups. ... Conclusion At the population level, COVID-19 vaccination greatly reduced the risk of COVID-19 mortality and no increased risk of death from other causes was observed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X23006606?via%3Dihub AND COVID-19 Vaccination and Non–COVID-19 Mortality Risk — Seven Integrated Health Care Organizations, United States, December 14, 2020–July 31, 2021\ October 29, 2021 "During December 2020–July 2021, COVID-19 vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site. What are the implications for public health practice? There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients. This finding reinforces the safety profile of currently approved COVID-19 vaccines in the United States." ... Discussion In a cohort of 6.4 million COVID-19 vaccinees and 4.6 million demographically similar unvaccinated persons, recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Janssen vaccines had lower non–COVID-19 mortality risk than did the unvaccinated comparison groups. There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients. This finding reinforces the safety profile of currently approved COVID-19 vaccines in the United States." https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm

And the publicity over this may be behind the following report from the South China Morning Post, where the Singapore Health Ministry has flatly rejected claims of any connection between excess death rates and COVID vaccines. Singapore slams opposition claims linking Covid vaccines to excess deaths Singapore’s Health Ministry has rejected an opposition party’s calls for the suspension of Covid-19 vaccination, claiming high incidences of severe side effects. ... The health ministry said it categorically rejected the egregious and false claims, adding that people must “draw the right conclusions and follow the scientific evidence on the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines”. “The primary reason why Singapore recorded one of the lowest excess death rates in the world during the pandemic is because the majority of Singaporeans took the vaccines,” it said. (more) Source link:

And meanwhile, we have more non-partisan reports on the same study that don't follow The Telegraph's unsupported claims. Yes there's concern about the high levels of excess deaths during the pandemic, but no blaming of COVID vaccines below in reporting on the study. Latest example: Study: High excess death rates in the West for 3 years running since start of pandemic despite containment and vaccines Excess death rates have remained high in the West for three years running since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, finds a data analysis of 47 countries published in BMJ Public Health. This is despite the implementation of various containment measures and the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, giving rise to "serious cause for concern," say the researchers, who call on governments and policymakers to thoroughly investigate the underlying causes. ... It's not clear how many of these excess deaths reflect the impact of COVID-19 infection, or the indirect effects of containment measures and vaccination programs, say the researchers [citing language from the news release issued about the study]. (more) https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-high-excess-death-west-years.html

The truth will out on this eventually regarding the unsupported nature of the claim made blaming COVID vaccines in The Telegraph's headline. But won't matter, as the anti-vax crowd got what they wanted, a headline to claim and use as a political/PR weapon. Most posters here probably have only seen the newspaper article's headline. Maybe some have read the whole newspaper article. I wonder how many here have actually read word-by-word the entire cited study as I have, several times over now. There's simply NO place in the cited study where they give any estimate or projection for what share or what number of excess deaths in the studied countries may have been related to COVID vaccines. NONE. For anyone here who actually has read the entire study that's the basis for The Telegraph's report, I challenge you to post here any text from the actual study providing any estimate or projection of the share of excess deaths related to vaccination. It's simply not there. (There is, just for the record, some discussion in the study about various potential vaccine adverse reactions... that as I've documented in earlier posts here, is based on a widely debunked study by an anti-vax doctor and on public database reports like VAERS in the U.S. where the sources clearly state that the reports themselves are no proof that vaccines were in fact the causes of the reported adverse reaction.)

The hard-right Republicans in Congress have been calling for Dr. Fauci to be prosecuted (and now arrested) for years, and nothing's come of it, thus far, at least in the public domain. How far back? ------------------------------------ Rand Paul sends official criminal referral on Anthony Fauci to DOJ July 26, 2021 https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/564803-rand-paul-sends-official-criminal-referral-on/ ------------------------------------- Perhaps before they try to have Fauci arrested this latest time around, they ought to try to actually prove he's committed some crime, which thus far, they haven't been able to do, except in their own minds and rhetoric. For example: Per the Associated Press earlier this week: "A GOP-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started — yet found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing." [emphasis added] ... Republicans repeated unproven accusations against the longtime National Institutes of Health scientist..." https://apnews.com/article/fauci-covid-pandemic-origin-congress-a66625482f25824476ee315484790230 Per the New York Times earlier this week: "And for all the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and more than 100 hours of closed-door testimony that the panel reviewed, lawmakers produced nothing on Monday linking Dr. Fauci to the beginnings of the Covid outbreak in China...." https://archive.ph/Q2NKi Per subcommittee ranking member Raul Ruiz: Ruiz added that the evidence found that "Dr. Fauci did not fund research through the EcoHealth Alliance Grant that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci did not lie about gain of function research in Wuhan China, Dr. Fauci did not orchestrate a campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory." https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/anthony-fauci-covid-origins-hearing-06-03-24/index.html The Republicans, of course, have long claimed and are continuing to claim that Fauci lied to Congress about the so-called "gain of function" research that was done in China. But that hardly appears a clear or prosecutable proposition, given the following: As the AP reported earlier this week: "The definition of “gain of function” covers both general research and especially risky experiments to “enhance” the ability of potentially pandemic pathogens to spread or cause severe disease in humans. Fauci stressed he [in rejecting Republicans' claims of lying] was only using the risky experiment definition, saying “it would be molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied with EcoHealth’s funds to be turned into the virus that caused the pandemic." https://apnews.com/article/fauci-covid-pandemic-origin-congress-a66625482f25824476ee315484790230 And as the Washington Post previously reported back in 2021 on the same topic: "There is a split in the scientific community about what constitutes gain-of-function research." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/29/repeated-claim-that-fauci-lied-congress-about-gain-of-function-research/ or https://archive.ph/WG6VE But now suddenly, with this latest report in the OP, at least one congressman suddenly seems to have switched gears to focus on the CDC's former 6-feet social distancing policy -- which Fauci didn't even draft and wasn't responsible for. In his testimony this week, Fauci clarified his prior somewhat halting comments on the topic to say he meant there had not been clinical trials done on the distancing policy, a time consuming process that likely couldn't have been done first amid the urgency of the outbreak of the pandemic. "Fauci sought to clarify on Monday that the 6-foot guidance came from the CDC and was based on droplet research, telling lawmakers: "It had little to do with me since I didn't make the recommendation and my saying 'there was no science behind it' meant there was no clinical trial behind that." https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republicans-poised-grill-anthony-fauci-covid-19-response/story?id=110677611 In any event, the record shows that there in fact had been much research done on the issue of how far apart distances were optimal, as recounted in this 2020 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office: Science & Tech Spotlight: Social Distancing During Pandemics GAO-20-545SP Published: May 13, 2020. Publicly Released: May 13, 2020. "A CDC guideline based on historical studies of selected infections says that the area of highest risk is within 3 feet of an infected person. Some studies suggest a buffer of 6 feet may further reduce risk. Other studies examining droplet dispersion in sneezing and coughing found they can go more than 6 feet. Also, viral material may persist in the air within a room for up to 3 hours." https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-545sp In short, there was a lot of science and past deliberation behind the social distancing policy, hardly something that the CDC plucked out of thin air, and a policy that Fauci himself wasn't responsible for promulgating. Thus, all of the above hardly sounds like a winner for arrest and a successful, legitimate criminal prosecution. But it does make for a lot of political rhetoric.

You, and the rest of the world, had better hope that the avian influenza doesn't evolve into a human pandemic. https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wpro---documents/emergency/surveillance/avian-influenza/ai_20240524.pdf?sfvrsn=5f006f99_132

That's the public opinion one Thai doctor is expressing, after the Thai government has basically decided to cease spending any government funds to protect its citizens with COVID vaccinations. And note what Yong actually said in The Thaiger report was not "no need" for COVID vaccines. But instead, it starts out saying: "Most people do not need a booster against the latest strain of Covid-19, except for vulnerable groups and the unvaccinated [emphasis added]. And the Post's report, despite its headline, also includes the exception "except for vulnerable groups and the unvaccinated." What's the Thai government doing to protect the "vulnerable groups" from COVID -- the older folks, those with chronic health conditions (overweight, diabetes, respiratory problems, etc), pregnant women, etc... Right now, nothing at all. The U.S. public health agencies still recommend the updated COVID boosters for almost everyone. The U.K. government continues to recommend and run government paid COVID booster vaccine programs for the elderly and others at higher risk. Singapore continues to recommend COVID boosters to its at-risk groups, etc. Maybe Dr. Yong hasn't been reading the local news and Ministry of Public Health reports that show new weekly COVID hospitalizations here have more than tripled since mid-March, up above 1,800 per week right now. And serious condition COVID hospitalizations right now (738 as of last week) are at their highest level since fall 2022... Perhaps he might want to reconsider his opinion, or at least start paying attention to what the Thai MoPH is actually reporting. If COVID is actually so mild for everyone, then who's filling up all the Thai hospital beds, as reported below?

The actual study title as previously posted above... no mention of COVID vaccines in the title of the research. If what the Telegraph reported was in fact a finding of the study, you'd think the study authors would have emphasized / explicitly stated that claim. But they didn't, as shown below. Their headline is nothing remotely the same as The Telegraph's headline, and both their headline and "Results" section are silent on the issue of causes. Results The total number of excess deaths in 47 countries of the Western World was 3 098 456 from 1 January 2020 until 31 December 2022. Excess mortality was documented in 41 countries (87%) in 2020, 42 countries (89%) in 2021 and 43 countries (91%) in 2022. In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present 1 033 122 excess deaths (P-score 11.4%). In 2021, the year in which both containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines were used to address virus spread and infection, the highest number of excess deaths was reported: 1 256 942 excess deaths (P-score 13.8%). In 2022, when most containment measures were lifted and COVID-19 vaccines were continued, preliminary data present 808 392 excess deaths (P-score 8.8%). https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000282

I was previously corrected and acknowledged it so...

That baht figure, according to the BKK Post, was just in reference to their plans to start taxing major online vendor platforms -- nothing to do with individual residents/taxpaxers. But...I think my answer would be... dartboard. 🙂

And presumably, more months now of being left in limbo and doubt... and think of all the vast hours and thousands of posts here spent analyzing and debating the prior (and now perhaps discarded) tax changes that were floated... Yeesh! At this point, who knows where they'll end up and what kind of tax plan will ultimately be enacted, if any.

I'm not the one offering opinions. I'm leaving that to the credible experts, and just passing along their expertise.

I generally haven't expressed my personal opinions at all here, and I generally don't... Instead, I've posted credible information from credible, non-partisan sources backed up by weblinks showing the original sources, not to mention posting and quoting from the OP study itself, which, unlike The Telegraph, has no language actually blaming COVID vaccines for causing any specific number or share of excess deaths. Don't listen to me... Read the actual OP cited study. See what experts in the field have reported about the causes of excess deaths during the COVID era. See how the experts consistently report that COVID vaccination does NOT contribute to higher mortality rates, all cited and supported above. Read how the largest international study on COVID vaccine safety reported earlier this year that serious COVID vaccine side effects have been rare. Read the reports from the Associated Press, USA Today and others of how anti-vax folks have misrepresented and made false claims wrongly attributing deaths to COVID vaccines, etc etc... None of the above is cherry picking. It's the consistent findings of credible experts in the field, often repeated in multiple studies and findings over time.

A Google search done as of Wednesday night -- COVID vaccine excess death content from the past 24 hours -- shows that the reporting about this study, and The Telegraph's unsupported version of it, has been mostly limited to a handful of well-known right-wing news sources... and none of the major mainstream media outlets or credible international news sources like the Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, etc. There's clearly a reason for that. Source: A non-partisan source like Physician's Weekly / HealthDay News had a not-surprisingly vastly different article reporting the findings of the OP study here, not blaming COVID vaccines for contributing to global excess deaths, because in fact the cited study here doesn't: Excess Mortality Persisted in Western World From 2020 Through 2022 Jun 05, 2024 "TUESDAY, June 4, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Excess mortality persisted in 2020 through 2022 in the Western world, according to a study published online June 3 in BMJ Public Health. Saskia Mostert, M.D., from Amsterdam UMC, and colleagues explored excess mortality in the Western world from 2020 to 2022 using all-cause mortality reports abstracted from the “Our World in Data” database. Historical death data were used from 2015 to 2019, accounting for seasonal variation and year-to-year trends. ... “Excess mortality has remained high in the Western World for three consecutive years, despite the implementation of COVID-19 containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines,” the authors write. “This is unprecedented and raises serious concerns.” https://www.physiciansweekly.com/excess-mortality-persisted-in-western-world-from-2020-through-2022/ And just to say again as said before... saying COVID excess deaths occurred during the time of COVID and COVID vaccines isn't the same thing as blaming COVID vaccines as a cause. The "concern" they're explicitly, chiefly expressing is about the high levels of excess deaths during the 2020-2022 period, which is the explicit topic of the study.

And most of what you describe above has been shown to be unrelated to COVID vaccinations, despite persistent misinformation claims: Claims baselessly link COVID vaccines to athlete deaths "Cardiologists have told the AP there have been instances of athletes experiencing sudden cardiac death and cardiac arrest long before the COVID-19 pandemic and that they have not observed the dramatic increase alleged on social media." https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-vaccines-athlete-deaths-1500-989195878254 ‘Died suddenly’ posts twist tragedies to push vaccine lies "But those facts didn’t matter online, where Anastasia was swiftly added to a growing list of hundreds of children, teens, athletes and celebrities whose unexpected deaths and injuries have been incorrectly blamed on COVID-19 shots. Using the hashtag #diedsuddenly, online conspiracy theorists have flooded social media with news reports, obituaries and GoFundMe pages in recent months, leaving grieving families to wrestle with the lies." https://apnews.com/article/vaccine-died-suddenly-misinformation-a8e3a80a015ba9bf78b6bd4f3c271f58 False claim COVID-19 vaccines are linked to 'spike' in cancer cases Our rating: False "There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer or are associated with a greater risk of developing cancer, experts said." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/03/13/covid-19-vaccines-are-not-linked-to-spike-in-cancer-fact-check/72943934007/

Yellow Card reports in the UK are just that, reports, that anyone can make, and not necessarily having verification that the given vaccine was the actual cause of whatever was being reported. "Part of our monitoring role includes reviewing reports of suspected [emphasis added] side effects. Any member of the public or health professional can submit suspected side effects through the Yellow Card scheme. The nature of Yellow Card reporting means that reported events are not always proven side effects. Some events may have happened anyway, regardless of vaccination." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting COVID-19 Vaccines "Vaccines are the most effective way to prevent infectious diseases and they save millions of lives worldwide. Like all medicines, vaccines can cause side effects. Most of these are mild and short-term, and not everyone gets them." https://coronavirus-yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/

The source you cite is owned by the Australia subsidiary of the Murdoch family's News Corp in the U.S., with the related Fox News operation in the U.S. that brought the world stolen election claims and other nonsense. And ended up paying for it dearly via the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit settlement. "News.com.au (stylised in all lowercase) is an Australian website owned by News Corp Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News.com.au "News Corp Australia is an Australian media conglomerate and wholly owned subsidiary of the American News Corp." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corp Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network "The settlement was one of the largest defamation settlements in U.S. history,[60] and is believed to be the largest defamation settlement in U.S. history by a media organization.[62] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox_News_Network

The only dam that has broken here is the Telegraph, either intentionally or unintentionally, becoming part of the worldwide COVID vaccine misinformation pandemic... And, contrary to your claim above, there's nothing in the cited report that says "excess deaths continue to rise." Especially since the last year cited in the study was 2022 (2+ years ago now) and 2022 had a lower total excess deaths number (deaths from all causes beyond the expected norm) in the study than the two prior years, as the authors noted, at least in part because they only had partial incomplete data for 2022. Four Years After Shelter-in-Place, Covid-19 Misinformation Persists April 1, 2024 "on social media and in some public officials’ remarks, misinformation about covid vaccine efficacy and safety is common. U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built his 2024 campaign on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories about the vaccines. PolitiFact made that its 2023 “Lie of the Year.” PolitiFact has seen claims that spike proteins from vaccines are replacing sperm in vaccinated males. (That’s false.) We’ve researched the assertion that vaccines can change your DNA. (That’s misleading and ignores evidence). Social media posts poked fun at Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce for encouraging people to get vaccinated, asserting that the vaccine actually shuts off recipients’ hearts. (No, it doesn’t.) And some people pointed to an American Red Cross blood donation questionnaire as evidence that shots are unsafe. (PolitiFact rated that False.) https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/fact-check-covid-19-misinformation-persists-vaccines-deaths/ PS - The Telegraph is a right-wing publication that regularly has gone out of its way to promote negative information about COVID vaccines. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-telegraph/

What's being discussed in the source report here is the widely acknowledged numbers of excess deaths in recent years attributed to COVID disease and various indirect effects of the pandemic. It's only The Telegraph's unfounded report that makes claims that COVID vaccines were any kind of meaningful contributor -- something that simply isn't stated anywhere in the source report.

The actual real science on that topic -- as opposed to made up nonsense like The Telegraph report above -- says that VACCINATED people overall have LOWER levels of non-COVID mortality than the unvaccinated. A safety study evaluating non-COVID-19 mortality risk following COVID-19 vaccination 16 January 2023 Non-COVID-19 mortality rates were lower among COVID-19 vaccinees in the US. Adjusted hazard ratios comparing COVID-19 vaccinees and comparators were below 1. No increased risk was found for non-COVID-19 mortality after COVID-19 vaccination. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22015614?via%3Dihub AND "Jeffrey Morris, a biostatistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine told AAP FactCheck in May 2023 that one way to test claims vaccines caused large numbers of deaths was to compare non-COVID mortality rates between people who have and haven’t had the jab. Professor Morris said credible studies comparing the two groups found mortality was the same or lower among people who had the jab, indicating vaccines did not significantly increase the risk of death, as seen here and here. Fewer than one per cent of people in the US sought medical care following COVID vaccination, this 2022 study shows. https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/data-debunks-wild-claim-of-one-billion-deaths/

It's also noteworthy that the study authors here cited many dozens of mostly old and obscure sources for their article citations, but managed to totally avoid what earlier this year was the largest ever international study done on the safety and risks of COVID vaccines: That international study looking at actual medical records for some 99 million COVID vaccine recipients in multiple countries found as follows: Posts misrepresent findings of world's largest Covid vaccine safety study "Epidemiologist Anders Peter Hviid, one of the study authors, told AFP the findings confirm previous research and should not deter people from receiving Covid-19 shots. "What we take away is that the Covid-19 vaccination campaigns have been very effective in preventing severe disease," he said on February 23. "The few serious side effects that we have observed in this and other studies have been rare." [emphasis added] The Global Vaccine Data Network conducted the study misrepresented online, which included records from more than 99 million people vaccinated in Australia, Canada, France, Denmark, Scotland, Argentina, Finland and New Zealand. https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.34K78ZW

This, BTW, is a very peculiar study, in that it has been authored mostly by a group of pediatric cancer oncologists from the Netherlands whom, based on their bios, have no experience with COVID vaccines and have never published research on COVID related topics, except for a couple articles talking about how COVID pandemic restrictions impacted cancer care for children. ----------------------------------------------- There are a few tell-tale signs however, of just what's going on here, including: --it cites COVID infection fatality rate estimates from a Stanford professor, John Ioannidis, who once infamously predicted that the U.S. would only suffer 10,000 deaths from the COVID pandemic. [The actual figure thus far has ended up being about 1.2 million!] Ioannidis in 2020: "If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ ------------------------------------------------- --it includes a reference to an article by an "independent" French researcher claiming that COVID vaccines are "gene therapy" -- a notion that's been widely debunked and discredited. No, COVID-19 vaccines aren’t gene therapy https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-vaccines-gene-therapy-806280914802 ---------------------------------------------- --it relies in talking about the extent of vaccine related reported adverse reactions from the original vaccine clinical trials on a paper by a U.S. doctor called Joseph Fraiman, who's been involved with misinfo peddling anti-vax politicians in Florida, and whose paper likewise has been widely discredited. "The V-Damage Report also relies on a paper written by emergency medicine physician Dr. Joseph Fraiman and colleagues to argue that vaccine damages led to the rise in disabilities. As we’ve previously explained, the paper makes an unsubstantiated claim about adverse events based on a flawed reanalysis of the clinical trials of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines." https://dallasexaminer.com/no-evidence-excess-deaths-linked-to-vaccines-contrary-to-claims-online/ ----------------------------------------------- --and, in talking about supposed vaccine adverse reactions, it relies on reported data from several public reporting systems -- VAERS in the U.S., the Yellow Card scheme in the UK, and Eudra in Europe where ANYBODY can report anything, and the data collected is specifically said by the collecting agencies to not be proof of any causal connection between the report and the given vaccine. In other words, unverified. What VAERS Can and Can’t Do, and How Anti-Vaccination Groups Habitually Misuse Its Data "But for nearly as long, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, has also been exploited by people opposed to vaccination. With a publicly searchable database, full of unverified reports of health problems that occurred sometime after vaccination, VAERS has proven irresistible to the anti-vaccination community, which often falsely claims the number of reported deaths or other issues is proof that vaccines are dangerous." https://www.factcheck.org/2023/06/scicheck-what-vaers-can-and-cant-do-and-how-anti-vaccination-groups-habitually-misuse-its-data/ ------------------------------------------ All of the above pretty well suggests what the authors here are all about, and how much credibility to give to the way The Telegraph has misrepresented their data.

That doesn't say COVID vaccines CAUSED deaths.. It says deaths occurred during a period when COVID and COVID vaccines were present. Those two different concepts are WORLDS apart. It's hardly surprising that, as the study correctly reports, many countries had high levels of excess deaths during the 2020-2021 years that were the peak of the COVID pandemic, and many people never even were vaccinated for that matter. And as the news release accompanying the study specifically says: "It’s not clear how many of these excess deaths reflect the impact of COVID-19 infection, or the indirect effects of containment measures and vaccination programmes, say the researchers. While it’s likely that the indirect effects of containment measures did change the scale and nature of disease for numerous causes of death following the pandemic, those caused by restricted healthcare use and socioeconomic upheaval are difficult to prove, they add." https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1046663 The authors of this study don't know, and their study doesn't say.

There's absolutely nothing new or surprising about the notion that world countries have had large numbers of excess death during the 2020-2022 years of the pandemic, which is the period address in this report. And, it's the broad consensus, unsurprisingly, that COVID disease itself and related impacts -- overcrowded hospitals, missed health care, etc etc. -- and not COVID vaccines -- are responsible for the vast share of those deaths. Here's what the legitimate research shows: How COVID-19 shots slash all-cause mortality and outshine misinformation "The accumulation of evidence solidly affirms that COVID-19 vaccines not only directly save lives by preventing virus-specific deaths but also play a crucial role in reducing all-cause mortality among vaccinated populations. While claims about COVID-19 vaccines being associated with increased mortality have circulated, they are often based on misinterpretation of data, anecdotal evidence, or preliminary research that does not stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. [emphasis added] The consensus among health authorities and scientific community is that COVID-19 vaccines are a critical tool in reducing mortality and severe illness from the virus, with the benefits significantly outweighing the risks." https://www.globalvaccinedatanetwork.org/blog/Vaccine_Victory_How_COVID-19_shots_slash_all-cause_mortality_and_outshine_misinformation Global Vaccine Data Network: About Us The GVDN® addresses limitations in vaccine safety "Our aims are to work with vaccine safety and effectiveness experts, global health agencies, and other global non-profit health alliances to help assure the safety and risk benefit of vaccines through vaccine monitoring..."

That's correct regarding the study itself. This, on the other hand, is a BOGUS false news article by The Telegraph. There's nothing in the actual study that in any way quantifies any share of COVID vaccine-related deaths in any legitimate way. The term vaccine isn't even listed in the title of the actual study, and nor are vaccine related deaths even cited in the key findings of the actual report. Here's what it actually says: Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022 "Results The total number of excess deaths in 47 countries of the Western World was 3 098 456 from 1 January 2020 until 31 December 2022. Excess mortality was documented in 41 countries (87%) in 2020, 42 countries (89%) in 2021 and 43 countries (91%) in 2022. In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present 1 033 122 excess deaths (P-score 11.4%). In 2021, the year in which both containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines were used to address virus spread and infection, the highest number of excess deaths was reported: 1 256 942 excess deaths (P-score 13.8%). In 2022, when most containment measures were lifted and COVID-19 vaccines were continued, preliminary data present 808 392 excess deaths (P-score 8.8%). Conclusions Excess mortality has remained high in the Western World for three consecutive years, despite the implementation of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines. This raises serious concerns. Government leaders and policymakers need to thoroughly investigate underlying causes of persistent excess mortality. https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000282#ref-85 There's also an accompanying news release done in conjunction with the report that specifically says the following: "It’s not clear how many of these excess deaths reflect the impact of COVID-19 infection, or the indirect effects of containment measures and vaccination programmes, say the researchers. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1046663 It's NO surprise to anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for years that the worst years of the COVID pandemic resulted in large number of excess deaths around the world due to COVID disease and related factors, something that long ago has been widely and repeatedly reported.