Excess deaths for 2022 still show no signs of covid vaccine deaths
An analysis of what killed people in 2022.
There’s endless talk on Twitter and Substack about excess deaths, and ominous hints that the covid vaccines are to blame.
I analyze excess deaths in the United States once a year, looking for trends. Here’s the 2021 post, and one that discussed 2020.
There is some good news this year. Deaths from all causes are down, and covid deaths are down:
This year’s data shows us a few things:
1. The biggest story is still the covid deaths.
There were 374,000 more deaths in 2022 than in 2019.
We could call that the number of excess deaths. 241,000 were from covid, 133,000 from other causes.
Compared to 2019, the excess deaths came from:
241,000 from covid
29,000 from heart disease
30,000 from overdoses
13,000 from strokes
5,000 from nephritis
5,000 more murders
45,000 more uncategorized deaths
-14,000 less Alzheimer’s deaths
-6,000 less COPD deaths
That adds up to 107,000 non-covid excess deaths.
It’s not quite big enough to explain the 133,000 difference.
The table above only shows major categories of death. To find the rest we have to look at less common causes of death, and that data isn’t available yet for 2022. But we can take a guess, from looking at 2021:
Let’s assume the numbers are the same in 2022. Then compared to 2019, we have an extra:
12,000 from cirrhosis
6,000 from hypertension
3,000 from Parkinson's
8,000 from car crashes
5,000 from falling
Now we’re at 141,000 excess deaths when we’re looking for 133,000.
Maybe these categories changed a bit from 2021 to 2022, or some other categories fell, to balance things out.
Either way, we now know roughly what all the non-covid excess deaths came from. There are no other big mystery categories.
The rise in uncategorized deaths isn’t mysterious, those are just deaths from near the end of the year that haven’t been categorized yet. I discuss these more, later.
Excess deaths are a bit more complicated than just comparing to 2019. The average person in the US gets a bit older each year, so deaths go up:
The numbers should be higher in 2022 than in 2019. By about 85,000.
But there are other factors. A million people died from covid already, so excess deaths should go down. And people may have gotten less healthy during the pandemic, for various reasons.
At this point in the pandemic, it’s harder and harder to know what the baseline should be.
2. Omicron was worse than many people predicted.
At the end of 2021, many people told us that Omicron would be mild, compared to Delta. Some people described it as “nature’s vaccine”, including some doctors, professors, and senators.
So, of course, Omicron went on to kill more people than Delta. At the peak in January, it was the #1 cause of death in America. Nature’s vaccine killed more than 3,000 people every day.
In January, Omicron was actually the leading cause of death for everyone over 45, the second most common cause for everyone over 25, and the 3rd most common for children:
Omicron was milder than Delta, but Delta was worse than the original Wuhan strain of covid.
One study concluded that Omicron was only 6% milder than the Wuhan strain of covid. Other studies have come up with different estimates, some think it’s milder than that, but most agree it’s not just the flu.
Omicron cases were milder for people who were vaccinated or who had prior immunity from getting covid before. If you caught Omicron, unvaccinated, without prior infection, it was still bad.
The good news is that we haven’t had any big waves of excess deaths since January. As far as excess deaths go, the first Omicron wave might have been the last mass casualty event of the pandemic:
3. Endemic covid will probably be worse than endemic flu.
Covid didn’t go away after the Omicron wave, but excess deaths are way down. At this point, most people are either vaccinated or previously infected and have some level of immunity.
Since the first Omicron wave, covid has killed an average of 330 Americans every day. If that keeps up, it will kill 120,000 every year, forever. That’s not great, it’s more than twice as bad as influenza and pneumonia deaths in a typical year.
But it might not be a big thing for young and healthy people to worry about.
Maybe we can get that number down with more consistent boosting of elderly people, and more use of paxlovid or other drugs.
It’s not certain if covid will continue to get milder. Viruses can also mutate to become more deadly. Omicron lacks one key mutation (P681R) that Delta had. At some point in the future, Omicron might gain that mutation, and we’ll see more than 120,000 deaths per year. Maybe a worse strain of endemic covid could cause 200,000 deaths per year. Maybe repeated infections will keep giving better immunity, or maybe covid treatment will improve. In the best case, the annual death toll could go back under 100,000.
Either way, this is going to be a permanent problem. The world with covid will simply be worse than it was before covid started.
4. Vaccines still worked, during the Omicron wave.
The CDC graphs the death rate by vaccine status:
During the peak of the Omicron wave, you were much more likely to die from covid. The benefit is a bit less, today. Over time, you’d expect these lines to get closer together, because everyone will have some immunity from either infection or vaccination.
Getting the latest booster helps a little, it cuts the rate of death in half:
But the absolute benefit is lower. Getting vaccinated the first time cuts your risk of death by 80% relative to being unvaccinated. Getting the updated shot cuts it by 90% compared to no vaccine.
Most of the benefit comes from the original shot. Each additional shot has the same risk for less reward.
5. Cancer deaths are the same as before the pandemic.
You might hear differently on anti-vax Twitter:
Anti-vaxxers say that their family and friends are all dying of cancer and “turbo cancer”.
But it doesn’t show up in the numbers:
Cancer is almost exactly the same.
Heart disease deaths are up since 2019, but they’re lower than in 2020 (before the vaccines were widely used).
Heart attacks go up whenever covid deaths go up:
We can try to calculate the “excess heart disease deaths”, and scale the graphs to line up. Now things match up even better:
Those excess heart disease deaths might be caused by undiagnosed covid, which causes blood clotting and cardiovascular stress.
It might also be that hospitals get overwhelmed by covid and get worse at treating heart attacks.
The same thing happens with many other categories. There were some excess strokes during the omicron wave in January:
Many of the non-covid excess deaths are still caused by covid.
6. There was no increase in suicides.
Those stayed the same through the whole pandemic. Some people warned that lockdowns would kill more than covid, but it didn’t happen.
It’s been the same in other countries. There was no increase in suicides in Canada. Despite Australia’s strict covid lockdowns, there was no increase in Australian suicides.
Many worried about the effects of lockdowns on children, but the spring 2020 lockdowns actually reduced suicide 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.
Homicides did go up in 2020, starting around memorial day. Those still haven’t gone back down.
7. The opiate crisis is worse than in 2019.
Overdose deaths have been going up for years, but things really picked up during 2020:
There’s maybe some hope that things are getting better since 2021, but not by a lot.
I’m not sure whether you can blame the pandemic or the lockdowns for these overdoses. The same thing didn’t happen in every country. Australia had covid lockdowns, and overdoses went down 16%:
But Australia didn’t have a huge, growing opiate crisis for the last 20 years.
Overdoses did go up in 2020, in parts of Canada:
To have an overdose crisis, you need lots of people taking fentanyl. Having a pandemic on top of that might make it worse. Or maybe the pandemic messed up drug distribution networks, and more people sold fentanyl instead of heroin. I’m not sure. The question deserves its own article.
8. Excess deaths mostly track covid deaths.
We’ve had waves of covid deaths, throughout the pandemic. If you graph these against the excess deaths, they line up nicely:
The graphs line up really well for 2020, not quite as well for 2021, and 2022 looks like it has a lot of unexplained excess deaths.
Why don’t they line up, for 2022? Are we under-counting covid deaths? Is something else killing people?
I think the actual answer is something else — excess deaths are “total deaths minus expected deaths”. The number of expected deaths is just a guess at this point in the pandemic. I think the CDC guessed wrong.
Here’s a graph of what’s actually happening versus what the CDC predicted:
The blue line is the actual number of people dying each week. The yellow line is the CDC’s expectation. You can see that they made the expected number of deaths lower for 2022 than for 2021.
This is even clearer if we look at only the non-covid deaths, compared to the prediction:
Normally, things change a little bit each year, the population gets a bit older, things are fairly predictable.
Between 2020 and 2021, we had about 860,000 people die of covid. So, the expected deaths should go down. If those people all had less than a year left to live, then the expected deaths should go down by 860,000. If they had an average of 10 years to live… maybe the expected deaths would go down by 86,000?
Since the CDC guessed the wrong baseline, that might mean that covid deaths had more life left than we thought.
Or, the excess deaths could have gone up for these reasons.
People have been drinking more and doing more drugs. Drug overdoses and cirrhosis deaths explain about 40% of the non-covid excess. Increased murders and car crashes explain another 10%.
The other 50% is harder to pin down.
People get older every year:
Accounting for aging, we should have 85,000 more deaths than in 2019.
So:
aging 85,000
fentanyl 30,000
alcohol 12,000
car crashes 8,000
murder 5,000
That gets us to 140,000. That fully explains the non-covid difference between 2019 and today.
A million people died from covid, so excess deaths should go down. Perhaps by 86,000?
But, in that case, something else made it go up by about 86,000.
Some of that is the covid correlated heart attacks and strokes.
But, we’ve also had a bunch of people get sick from covid, and their health got worse. A million died, but a few million were hospitalized without dying. Their health got a lot worse. People who didn’t get hospitalized still took a hit. So, expected deaths should go up.
People have also been stressed, they exercised less and gained weight. People’s health likely got worse because of that.
It’s possible that our healthcare system got a little bit worse at saving lives. If it’s only 3% less likely to save your life, that’s a difference of 100,000 deaths.
We’ve also vaccinated everyone. If the vaccines are dangerous, like some people think, then expected deaths could go up.
It’s not simple to distinguish between each of those explanations.
I think it’s probably not the vaccines, for a few reasons.
9. Excess deaths don’t line up with when vaccines were given out.
Most of the vaccines were given out during 2021:
Excess deaths were low while the vaccines were given out.
And then the first round of boosters came out in the fall, and excess deaths were also low, that was between the Delta and Omicron waves.
The vaccines don’t kill you, at least not right away.
Most people that get vaccinated just feel bad for a few days and then get on with their lives.
What we need is a control group, that got vaccines but didn’t get covid.
10. We have a control group.
What we really need is a control group of people that took the vaccine but didn’t get covid. If the vaccine is deadly, it should be deadly everywhere.
There are foreign countries that work as a control group, like Australia:
Australia had few covid deaths and few excess deaths in 2021. But they still used the vaccines. So, the vaccines aren’t deadly.
For US data, the closest thing we have to a control group is Hawaii. They had the least covid deaths of any state in America, didn’t have much covid transmission, and had very few excess deaths.
Deaths in Hawaii don’t show much seasonality, compared to other states.
Since we’ve seen how complicated it is to calculate excess deaths, I tried a very simple method. On average, 230 Hawaiians died every week in 2020. I subtracted that for every week to get excess deaths, and compared it to covid deaths:
There are 2 waves of excess deaths, when delta and omicron made it to Hawaii. There’s a smaller blip in 2020 when an earlier strain arrived.
There are no excess deaths in Spring 2021, when people got vaccinated.
So the vaccines definitely don’t kill people right away.
Is it possible they make people less healthy, over time?
In my graph, it looks like all cause deaths are rising a little bit over time, in Hawaii:
The population is aging. Deaths should rise a little bit, every year.
So I tried getting some older data. I got 2017 to 2022, and I only looked at the non-covid deaths:
There is a subtle upward trend. Maybe the trend increases in 2021. It’s a bit too noisy to say.
11. Is there still any case to be made against the vaccines?
The only thing we have left is a very unsatisfying conspiracy theory.
At first it was: the vaccines kill people right away.
Then, it became: you’ll die in a few months.
Then: the vaccines cause “turbo cancer”.
Those are all easy to disprove.
Now, the best we have is: “maybe the vaccine will increase your risk of dying, slightly, 2 years later, if you’re already old and unhealthy”.
As time goes on, I’m sure that anti-vaxxers will keep pushing this timeline out and saying the bad effects of vaccines are yet to come:
12. What about the uncategorized deaths?
In 2022, there were 80,000 of these, as compared to 35,000 for 2020 and 2021.
That’s not suspicious, though. That’s how this data always looks — it takes a few months before every death gets counted and categorized.
Last year, I wrote an excess deaths post at the end of March. At that time, there were 60,000 uncategorized deaths for 2021. As of today, there are only 35,000 uncategorized for 2021. Many of those were subsequently blamed on heart disease, but some went to covid or lots of other categories:
Uncategorized deaths are almost 80,000 for 2022, as opposed to 60,000 when I wrote last year’s post. That’s probably because I’m writing this post 2 months earlier in the year than I did last year.
These aren’t 80,000 secretly hidden vaccine deaths. But some people have previously tried to pretend that uncategorized deaths are all vaccine deaths.
There’s a big advantage that conspiracy theorists have over anyone trying to be honest — they can make up whatever they want, as fast as they want. If a football player has his heart stop, they can immediately pretend that the covid vaccine killed him. They can pronounce him dead, while he’s still in the hospital. When he goes on to survive, they can say he was replaced by an actor.
I have to wait 6+ months after the year ends just to get accurate data to work with. That means that 2022’s numbers are still approximate.
The data for most of the year is accurate, but it will still change a bit at the end of the year.
We can still use it to see trends.
13. What about sudden deaths?
A popular anti-vax movie in 2022 claimed that people were dying suddenly, showing videos of people collapsing in public.
A little bit of investigation showed that most of the videos were of people that fainted and didn’t die. Some of the videos were even from 2020, before the vaccines were available.
The movie featured a video of blood clots being removed from a body. It turns out the footage was stolen from a surgery video in 2019, so it was totally unrelated to covid or vaccines.
For statistics on sudden deaths, we could maybe look at heart disease deaths for young people. Here are the numbers for men aged 18–39:
Heart attacks are up, for young men. But they went up when the pandemic started, not when vaccinations started.
14. What about people dying from myocarditis?
The vaccines have given a few thousand people myocarditis, mostly young men. In a handful of cases that’s even been fatal, I think it’s less than 10 confirmed deaths in the US.
Can we graph myocarditis deaths to look for more?
I’ve only found this data through the end of 2021. But 2021 is when most young people got vaccinated, so this is good enough to see the trends:
You can’t see any trend of vaccines killing people. If they do, myocarditis deaths without Covid would have spiked in 2021. Covid also sometimes gives people myocarditis. You can see those deaths in the data.
15. What about people dying from strokes?
The CDC has noticed a possible increase in strokes for people aged 65 and over who got Pfizer’s bivalent booster.
We don’t know if that’s real. The CDC didn’t see the same thing for Moderna. It showed up in some vaccine tracking systems and not others.
But it could be real. We have some studies showing that the spike protein causes blood clotting, so maybe the vaccines could increase stroke risk. Some previous studies have noticed an increase in strokes after people get covid vaccines.
One study found that the odds of dying this way are about 1 in 280,000.
The exact numbers are hard to pin down, since the numbers are so small. We’re talking about 3 people dying out of every million that were vaccinated. The people dying this way are elderly, more likely to die from many things. There are differences in health between people who choose to get vaccinated and those that don’t.
Let’s just assume that study got everything right and use their number.
145 million vaccine doses were given out in 2022.
That would imply that 500 people died of a stroke after getting a covid shot. Most of them would be aged 65 and over, with a much higher risk of dying from covid if they didn’t get the shot.
Let’s use that as our final score for the year:
Pfizer’s vaccine might have killed 500 people.
Nature’s vaccine killed 241,000.
