2021 Excess Deaths in the US: Pinpointing Where They Come From
Life insurance claims are up 40% in Indiana. It turns out that’s because of covid, not vaccines.
A few readers sent me a story about excess deaths in Indiana. An Indiana insurance company, called OneAmerica, said they were seeing a 40% increase in deaths among people aged 18–64 years old:
Every anti-vaxxer linked to this, claiming it was proof of mass vaccine casualties. See here or here or here or here.
I promised I’d look into it, go through US death statistics for 2021, and try to look for covid vaccine deaths.
Here are mortality statistics for leading causes of death in the US over the last 3 years:
Most of these numbers come from the CDC’s provisional mortality data. Gun violence statistics are from the gun violence archive. Overdose data is available here.
Before we get to Indiana, I’ll point out these numbers tell a lot of different stories.
1. There was a lot of fear that lockdowns would kill people, that people would get depressed and kill themselves in large numbers.
That didn’t happen. Lockdowns did not cause more suicides. Suicide numbers didn’t change from 2019 to 2020. I can’t find a number for total suicides in 2021, but I found data on firearm suicides. That number hasn’t changed over the last 3 years. I’d imagine that total suicides haven’t changed either.
It was the same story in other countries. There was no increase in suicides in Canada. Despite Australia’s strict covid lockdowns, there was no increase in Australian suicides.
Although many have worried about the effect on children, the spring 2020 lockdowns actually reduced suicides among teens. Typically, teenage suicide rates go up during the school year and down in the summer. In 2020, suicides went down when we pulled kids out of school for covid.
2. There was a narrative that covid only kills very ill people, like nursing home residents who would soon die anyway. A covid skeptic told me in March 2020 that covid wasn’t a big deal — the covid death numbers were not meaningful because it was only sick people dying. If we had 100,000 covid deaths in 2020, that would just cull the herd of sick people, and then we’d have 100,000 fewer deaths the following year.
That also didn’t happen. We had 500,000 excess deaths in 2020 and then just as many in 2021. Non-covid deaths mostly didn’t go down. Cancer deaths, heart attacks, and strokes all stayed at high levels.
There were two diseases that went below baseline levels in 2021. Notice that deaths from Alzheimer's went down from 133,000 to 118,000. Deaths also went down for chronic respiratory diseases, from 151,000 to 140,000.
So there is a small kernel of truth here. Covid led some Alzheimer's sufferers to die early, and we’re now seeing less death from those diseases.
This is a small effect, though. Between those 2 diseases, we’re talking about 26,000 people. The number of covid deaths in 2020 and 2021 was closer to 850,000. Most of those 850,000 people were not terminally ill, they were not going to die in the next year. They died early from covid. Some Alzheimer's patients died in their last year of life. Some young people died with decades ahead of them. On average, covid victims died maybe 10 years younger than they would have otherwise.
3. The opiate crisis just keeps getting worse. We had 70,000 overdoses in 2019, 90,000 in 2020, and about 100,000 in 2021.
Overdose numbers were getting worse for years, before the pandemic started, but things quickly got worse after the pandemic started:
It’s complicated. Mostly, this is more deaths from fentanyl. I wouldn’t say this is people trying to kill themselves, since suicides didn’t go up. Maybe more people started using drugs because of the pandemic, because of stress or social isolation. More people did drugs alone and overdosed, without a friend to get them treatment for that overdose. Maybe more people started buying drugs online (from unknown sources, with unknown quality). The pandemic likely disrupted existing drug distribution networks, and new networks pushed more dangerous drugs, cut with fentanyl.
4. Violent crime got worse in 2020 and 2021. Murder rates started rising in the summer of 2020. My views on what caused this are kind of politically incorrect, I think “defund the police” was a bad idea. But other people have different theories for what’s gone wrong here. Some people have blamed the economy, the pandemic, or an increase in gun sales. A change in drug distribution networks could have increased violence. Letting prisoners out of jail for covid could have been part of the problem.
5. More people died from covid in 2021 than in 2020.
Some people say this proves that covid vaccines failed. The problem with that narrative is that most of 2021’s covid deaths were among unvaccinated people.
There was a big political divide among 2021’s covid deaths. Death rates were higher in red counties than in blue counties:
Some people have looked at this data and said, “Democrats already got infected early in 2020, so the numbers are lower now”.
That’s not the case. Cumulative total covid deaths are also higher in Republican counties, and have kept accelerating after vaccines were widely available:
How many of the 450,000 covid deaths were among the unvaccinated?
It’s hard to get exact numbers here, since every state keeps separate records. But we can take a rough guess.
About 200,000 covid deaths happened in early 2021 before vaccines were widely available.
CDC data finds that vaccinated people are about 10 times less likely to die from covid than unvaccinated.
Let’s guess that 80% of people are vaccinated in the groups most likely to die from covid.
That implies, of those 250,000 remaining covid deaths, about 70,000 were vaccinated and 180,000 were unvaccinated. With a 90% effective vaccine, about 160,000 of the unvaccinated deaths were preventable.
Forbes came up with a very similar estimate in mid-December, saying 160,000 Americans died by not getting vaccinated after they had a chance to.
That is, antivax misinformation killed somewhere around 160,000 Americans last year.
For a rough estimate of lives saved by vaccines, I’d take the 70,000 vaccinated deaths and assume their death rate would have been 10 times higher.
Without the vaccines, you might expect another 630,000 covid deaths.
6. It’s hard to find many vaccine deaths in the 2021 data.
Steve Kirsch claims 150,000 Americans were killed by covid vaccines. That’s not true. But it is very close to the number of people that antivaxxers like him have killed with misinformation.
Some people died from covid vaccines. Some people had blood clots or strokes or other non-fatal complications like myocarditis. Some 220 million people have been vaccinated. If there’s even a 1 in a million chance that the shot is deadly, then there would be 220 deaths. I’ve seen credible estimates that the number could be higher, maybe even as high as 1,000, mostly coming from a slightly elevated risk of strokes in the elderly.
630,000 lives saved for less than 1,000 dead seems like a pretty good trade-off. But I hope we can continue to evaluate the safety of these shots and improve them. I don’t want to risk myocarditis or stroke every time I get a booster shot.
Can we find any evidence of vaccine deaths in the 2021 data?
One approach would be to compare the numbers from 2020 to 2021. Only a few people were vaccinated in 2020, vaccinations didn’t start until December 14th. Lots of people got vaccinated in 2021.
If the vaccine caused a lot of heart attacks, you’d expect heart disease deaths would go up from 2020 to 2021. These actually went down, from 709,000 to 685,000.
If the vaccine caused a lot of strokes, you’d expect those would go up in 2021. They went down slightly, from 163,000 to 161,000.
There are only two large categories that went up, where you could hide a lot of vaccine deaths. There are more uncategorized deaths (the CDC labels these R00-R99). There were 23,000 more of these in 2021 than in 2020.
These are not vaccine deaths. They’re mostly deaths that happened at the end of 2021, that just haven’t been categorized yet.
If these were vaccine deaths, they would have happened back in early 2021, when everyone was getting vaccinated.
These aren’t delayed vaccine deaths, either. Any time you look at this category, it shows a recent spike, but then the deaths get reclassified over time. Here are some historical snapshots of the data:
Every few months, some new anti-vaxxer finds this signal and misinterprets it and thinks they’re a genius:
The other big category is the covid deaths. More people died of covid in 2021 than in 2020.
If the government somehow hid vaccine deaths by calling them covid deaths, it could sneak them into the data. We can also rule this out by looking at when and where the covid deaths happened. The excess deaths happened at the same time as covid waves, not when people were getting vaccinated.
An even simpler approach is to look at states (like Hawaii) that had lots of vaccinations but not a lot of covid. I’ll get into the details later.
Finally, 2021 simply had more deaths than 2019. There were 576,000 more deaths relative to before the pandemic. Only 454,000 of those were labeled as covid deaths.
What explains the other 122,000?
Part of this might just be the aging of the population. We can look at death numbers from before the pandemic. The total number of people who die in the US increases a bit, every year.
From 2015 to 2016, an extra 31,618 people died.
From 2016 to 2017, an extra 69,255 people died.
From 2017 to 2018, an extra 25,702 people died.
From 2018 to 2019, an extra 15,633 people died.
Maybe we could average that out and say that deaths normally increase 35,500 per year. So, from 2019 to 2021, the increase in natural deaths might be about 71,000 deaths.
Next, you’ve got an increase in unnatural deaths: about 29,000 extra drug overdoses and 5,000 extra homicides. So we’re up to about 105,000.
That still leaves 17,000 deaths unexplained.
The population could have aged a little more quickly during the pandemic, gotten unhealthy faster than in an average year. The average healthcare quality might have declined, since hospitals have been overwhelmed (heart disease deaths went up every time there was a wave of covid cases). There could have been 17,000 uncounted covid deaths. Or there could have been thousands of vaccine deaths, but most likely not as many as 17,000.
Any way you look at it, it’s easy to prove that there was not a 6 digit number of vaccine deaths (like Steve Kirsch’s claims of 150,000 or 300,000, or whatever retarded claim he’s making today). There’s no category big enough to hide that many deaths.
It’s hard to use this data to prove that there were no vaccine deaths at all. There could be 1,000 or even 10,000 vaccine deaths hidden somewhere in the data without it being obvious.
7. Looking for vaccine deaths is easier when you have a control group.
Here are the death rates for Hawaii, which mostly avoided covid:
There were 626 extra deaths in 2021 relative to 2020, a 5.1% increase.
263 of those were listed as covid.
363 were from something else.
We can graph when the excess deaths happened. It looks like most just happened when Delta hit Hawaii in August:
Other than that, I’d say the graph just looks like random noise.
There were 93 extra stroke deaths in 2021, 11% more than in a normal year. Did those happen right when people got vaccinated in early 2021? It doesn’t look like it:
Also, if the vaccine did cause an 11% increase in stroke deaths, you would see that in every state. That didn’t happen. Strokes in the US went down, overall. If the vaccine is deadly, it has to be deadly everywhere.
There is no clear signal of vaccine deaths, no big spike in overall deaths, no category of deaths that increases.
We can’t rule out that some people in Hawaii died from getting the vaccine. We can only say that it wasn’t a large number. Vaccines are much less dangerous than covid.
8. What’s happening in Indiana?
Here are Indiana excess deaths graphed versus covid deaths:
Most excess deaths in Indiana are covid deaths. The curves don’t line up perfectly. That could be random noise. Maybe there are some unexplained deaths in September/October 2021.
We can also look at the timing of when people got vaccinated in Indiana:
Peak vaccinations were around April 2021 (excess deaths are lower than covid deaths) and again around January 2022 (no unexplained excess deaths). Vaccinations are at their lowest around September 2021, which is the one month where we have unexplained excess deaths.
So… if these excess deaths in September are vaccine deaths, it’s pretty weird that they happened when the least people were getting vaccinated.
We can also break down Indiana deaths by category:
There are no major categories that went up in 2021 relative to 2020, after the vaccines rolled out. Heart disease, cancer, and strokes didn’t change. Alzheimer’s deaths and chronic respiratory disease deaths went down a bit, the same as in the rest of the US (covid killed some of these patients already in 2020).
The only categories that did go up were covid deaths and drug overdoses.
Indiana has no mysterious excess deaths, only a lot of covid deaths.
To be clear, the article does claim that deaths went up between ages 18 and 64. So if we really want to dig into it, we need to look specifically at those age groups.
An Indiana state website breaks down the vaccine death numbers by age. I downloaded the data and added them up for September and October.
Covid is mostly a disease of the elderly, but it does kill some young people. It actually killed more people in Indiana in their 30’s than in their 40’s, during September and October. Maybe less people in their 30’s got vaccinated. Maybe younger people were less cautious about catching the virus.
We can compare these to the number of people that died in a normal month, before the pandemic:
The age groups don’t line up exactly. But, for a rough estimate, let’s take 36 covid deaths in the 20–39 age range and divide that by 65 normal monthly deaths in that age range (25–44). That’s a 55% increase in young people dying, just from covid alone.
The original article talked about a 40% increase in deaths among young people. Those young people died from covid.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, you can listen to the CEO of that insurance company, OneAmerica, talking about all this.
He talks about it starting around 20 minutes into this video. At 22:50, he says he’s decided to require all his employees to get vaccinated. 25 minutes into the video, he says he’s going to raise insurance rates for counties with low vaccination rates because too many people there are dying from covid.
That’s right, he wants to raise insurance rates for unvaccinated people because too many of them are dying of covid.
And guys like Kirsch and Malone told you this proves that vaccines are scary, and you shouldn’t get vaccinated. They think you’re too stupid to actually go look at the data or watch the video for yourself. Maybe you even paid them $5 to read those articles. You should have kept that $5. Your premiums are going up because too many people didn’t get vaccinated.
I hope you enjoyed your time in Indiana.
