Unraveling the Pandemic Puzzle: The Intricacies of COVID-19 Vaccination and Causality
In his opinion piece, titled “How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccine?”, right-wing political commentator and television personality Tucker Carlson asks the question: “How many Americans have died after taking the COVID-19 vaccine? Not Americans who’ve been killed by the virus, that’s a huge number, but how many Americans have died after getting the vaccines designed to prevent the virus?” (Carlson 2021). Carlson implies that the vaccination itself might be responsible for many deaths in the United States without providing a theoretically and empirically rigorous foundation to evaluate the causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and subsequent deaths in the United States.
Carlson’s argument relies on the observation that seemingly more people die after taking the COVID-19 vaccination compared to the regular flu shot. Carlson writes: “[…] Every flu season, we give influenza shots to more than 160 million Americans. Every year, a relatively small number of people seem to die after getting those shots. To be precise, in 2019, that number was 203 people. The year before, it was 119. In 2017, a total of 85 people died from the flu shot.” (Carlson 2021). Carlson contrasts this to the COVID-19 vaccine-related death cases: “[…] Between late December of 2020 and last month, a total of 3,362 people apparently died after getting the COVID vaccines in the United States. Three thousand, three hundred and sixty-two — that’s an average of 30 people every day. So, what does that add up to? By the way, that reporting period ended on April 23. We don’t have numbers past that, we’re not quite up to date. But we can assume that another 360 people have died in the 12 days since. That is a total of 3,722 deaths.” (Carlson 2021).
Carlson seems to attempt to compare the percentage of deaths in regular versus COVID-19 vaccination groups. There are several issues with his approach. First, Carlson does not seem to provide sufficient evidence to indicate the reliability of the data. Second, Carlson ignores the fact that there might be overlaps between the groups, i.e. people who received a regular flu vaccination might as well have received a COVID-19 vaccination, rendering direct comparison of ratios theoretically incorrect. Third, Carlson completely ignores the issue of selection bias, i.e. people who are already suffering from health issues and already have a higher probability of dying either from COVID-19 or any other causes might self-select to get the COVID-19 vaccination, which could potentially introduce selection bias into Carlson’s analysis.
To test whether COVID-19 vaccination causes a statistically significant higher ratio of deaths we need to design a randomized control trial (RCT). We would first need to have a randomly selected sample of individuals from a population with similar characteristics, then divide this sample into a control and intervention group, in which the intervention group would receive COVID-19 vaccination. Finally, we could compare the mortality rate in the treatment group and the control group. If all initial characteristics are, on average, similar then the differences in mortality rates should be attributed to COVID-19 vaccination. In this way, we could test whether Carlson’s hypothesis about the causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and increased mortality rates holds.
References
Carlson, Tucker 2021. “How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccine?” foxnews.com, May 6. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-how-many-americans-have-died-after-taking-the-covid-vaccine
(Carlson 2021)
