Do COVID vaccines increase your risk of death?

A video with Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse, touts a new study, saying it claims that people vaccinated with two or more doses of COVID vaccines are 37% more likely to die from any cause.

In any study, we need to look at how the study was done and its limitations, not just the results. The methods and limitations help us understand how well the results apply to the general population.

The study does not say, as claimed, that people vaccinated against COVID have a 37% higher chance of dying from any cause. Instead, it looks at how many people died from any cause in groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated people while trying to correct for certain biases that can affect the results.

The study tries to fix a common mistake in other studies called immortal time bias, which can make it look like vaccinated people are less likely to die just because of the way the study is set up. They did this by making sure they compared people fairly from the same starting point. The problem with this setup is that confounding factors were not considered, such as age, hypertension, diabetes, and cancer. In the sample, the youngest people were in the one-dose group, while the age increased with each subsequent dose. The rates of COVID infection increased as the number of doses increased because older people are at more risk for infection.

Also, COVID-related deaths were not considered.

One conclusion from the paper was that vaccinated people with at least one other health condition have a higher risk of dying from any cause compared to vaccinated people without other health conditions. The video misrepresents the study by making claims outside of the conclusion.