Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality
116 comments
·December 5, 2025hannob
eddieroger
Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).
zosima
The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
lesuorac
Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
DebtDeflation
A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
pygy_
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
a_cardboard_box
Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.
groestl
A common pattern you'd find in reliable research papers is that authors tend to understate their findings, which in practice strengthens the impact of their conclusions.
purpleflame1257
It's interesting that they leave things at 18-59. Do they later stratify into 18-28, 29-38, 39-48, 48-58?
ceejayoz
Looks like they do, yes.
> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.
ceejayoz
Eh, it's an important point. "It made COVID things much better, and it didn't make other unrelated things worse."
hervature
Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.
ceejayoz
Read again.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
exceptthisthing
Because this whole paper is bullshit and is a bias confirmation report
It assesses persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"
That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?
gus_massa
It's a good observation, but I expect that even considering only people alive in 1950, survivors of the Hiroshima bombing or concentration camps (or a few other events), still have long term problems that increase mortality.
drcongo
It's a shame that sibling comment got flagged to death, it was hilarious!
SketchySeaBeast
I honestly wonder if it's better to flag and downvote into oblivion rather than to engage in good faith. The sibling didn't seem like they were trolling, just misguided, and shutting down discussion doesn't allow for any reflection.
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
dalbaugh
Unfortunately, I don't think any additional evidence will convince vaccine skeptics of the safety of mRNA vaccines
laichzeit0
Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
Palomides
doing a double blind study of a vaccine that seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease seems morally questionable
snowwrestler
Especially since every COVID vaccine available to people today already went through at least one double blind study.
arp242
Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
ekianjo
> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
turnsout
Are there really antivax people that would know the word "covariate?" That's gotta be a small Venn diagram overlap.
jchw
Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.
andreygrehov
FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis [1].
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
ceejayoz
FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to a long-term anti-vaxxer at the helm of HHS.
wnevets
RFK Jr's FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.
andreygrehov
Are they lying about the deaths? I'm not following.
bilekas
Exactly this. Science and evidence is not high on the list of priorities for most skeptics.
drcongo
The comments from @exceptthisthing here perfectly illustrate the comprehension and reasoning levels of the vaccine sceptic.
stackedinserter
I give you this pill that makes you suffer for a year, but you will not die in 4 years. If it's safe to you, then alcohol and smoking are safe too.
Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
add-sub-mul-div
Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.
exceptthisthing
[flagged]
ekianjo
[flagged]
jmye
“Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!”
You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.
gaborcselle
One thing I don’t get: the study excludes the first 6 months after vaccination to avoid immortal-time bias. But if people died right away due to the vaccine (hypothetically), wouldn’t this design exclude those deaths?
sa-code
> no increased risk of all-cause mortality
> study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals
These are the important bits for the non medical folks
lentil_soup
And this bit:
"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
gwerbret
> These are the important bits for the non medical folks
Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."
blindriver
They define unvaccinated as anyone who wasn't vaccinated by Nov 2021. What if they got vaccinated afterwards?
jmye
What specific impact do you think that would have on this study? Do you think vaccines prior to Nov-2021 were safe and they were unsafe after? Do you think short term results, captured after Nov-2021 are more relevant than inclusive results prior?
zosima
This is rather weird. Mortality in immediate connection with the vaccine (index time) would not have been captured here. I would hesitate to draw any conclusion from this paper.
> For all individuals, vaccinated or not, follow-up time zero began 6 months after the index date.
jandrese
I have to admit I checked the author on this paper. No surprise it is from outside of the US. It's hard to imagine a US institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.
I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
colingauvin
>Vaccinated individuals were older than unvaccinated individuals (mean [SD] age, 38.0 [11.8] years vs 37.1 [11.4] years), more frequently women (11 688 603 [51.3%] vs 2 876 039 [48.5%]) and had more cardiometabolic comorbidities (2 126 250 [9.3%] vs 464 596 [7.8%]).
This is interesting because of "supposed" cardiovascular effects of the vaccine that many folks were worried about. Even more confounding is the gender differences. You'd think skewing women would skew away from cardiovascular issues.
An alternate interpretation is that the at risk cardio unvaccinated died of COVID for some reason.
Scaevolus
> First, individuals who choose vaccination may differ from those who do not, potentially introducing confounding bias.
It's very hard to interpret this data given the massive confounder of "antivaxxers are suspicious of healthcare and take more risks".
athrowaway3z
I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Your cite reads to me like a statement on the available data, which is interesting in its own ways but can be corrected for when it's irrelevant to the hypothesis.
theptip
The increase in myocarditis from the vaccine is well-documented. (And very small.)
COVID causes myocarditis too (even for young people unlikely to die from COVID itself), at much higher rates. So you only need a 20% chance of contracting COVID for the vaccine to be net positive in the least obviously positive age group.
lesuorac
Honestly, the thing I find more interesting is the "Social Deprivation Index" where vaccinated individuals were 21% "most social" and 19% "least social" while unvaccinated individuals were 15% "most social" and 27% "least social".
There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.
websiteapi
is it not possible that the kind of person who would've had negative side effects from an mrna vaccination already died from covid itself prior to wide rollout? presumably anyone who had any sort of minor illness during covid would be predisposed to get the vaccine, whereas anyone both lucky enough to be spared of that and ignorant of the vaccine would have their own illness due to the way this was designed. in addition anyone who for whatever reason didn't want to get the vaccine who didn't at this point would actually be uniquely at risk due to the combination of likelihood of getting covid plus disposition for an anti-health attitude.
I feel like you could have the same conclusion if you had groups that were people who go to the doctor vs people who do not in the same time period
they go into this themselves:
> It seems reasonable to assume that by early November 2021, 3 months after the introduction of the mandatory health pass39 (delivered when fulfilling one of these conditions: a negative COVID-19 test result, proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or a certificate of recovery from a COVID-19 infection) to enter and exit France as well as to access restaurants, theaters, and nonurgent hospital consultations, the majority of unvaccinated individuals were reluctant to get vaccinated.
> A study aimed at characterizing patient hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccination showed that categorical refusal of vaccination was associated with prior noncompliance with vaccination recommendations, a lower educational level, and a less severe perception of COVID-19.41
in any case i've yet to see a slam dunk study showing any negative effect of vaccination.
misiti3780
Does this mean Brett Weinstein was wrong when he said it caused 17M deaths ???
ceejayoz
The guy who says HIV is caused by poppers?
basisword
Findings: In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months. Findings In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months
blindriver
They define unvaccinated as anyone in the study who didn't get their first dose by Nov 2021. That feels like a pretty tight window to me. I don't think they checked to see if those "unvaccinated" people got vaccinated during the 4 year followup, especially given the mandates that forced people to get them.
ceejayoz
That's a year into its availability in France. Anyone who didn't have their first dose by then probably wasn't getting a dose.
You can see that in this chart (click the 5Y range): https://ycharts.com/indicators/france_coronavirus_full_vacci...
It's the full vaccination rate; as of Dec 1 2021 it was 69.89%. A month later (i.e. those Nov folks are getting their second dose) it's 74%; latest number on the chart is 78.44%.
rob_c
> That's a year into its availability in France. Anyone who didn't have their first dose by then probably wasn't getting a dose.
You are aware of the "incentives" offered by the French govt?
Such wonderful options as the ability to go the shops without being arrested that came with, "take the mandated medicine".
ceejayoz
That's entirely irrelevant to "what date do we pick as the cutoff for this research?"
From the chart, they picked a very reasonable spot to draw said line.
sixQuarks
This is crazy, I knew there would be BS like this in the study
I found the intro very confusing, tbh.
Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.