How common is death after COVID vaccination?

Poll results can be skewed or biased in a few ways. First, only people who are interested in answering for one reason or another are going to answer, which leads to participation bias or nonresponse bias, amongst other forms of bias. People with particular experiences are also the most likely to respond to certain surveys. In this case, it may be that people with strong feelings about COVID vaccines are the most likely to respond to the survey.

The survey question in this case doesn’t ask for verification on cause of death, so they aren’t asking if someone knows anyone whose official cause of death was the vaccine. The question asks if the respondent believes they know someone whose death was caused by a vaccine. As we know from looking at social media, many of those beliefs aren’t based on any medical fact, but rather on misinformation and misunderstanding.

The concern with this poll isn’t that vaccines are causing deaths, but that there is enough misinformation still perpetuating that those who are responding to these polls believe these vaccines are causing these deaths.