It is a European paper by European authors and anyone who has covered science in Europe for the last 25 years, from vaccines to food to energy, know that they will often conflate one thing with a mass issue. They could be just getting correlation arrows wrong and COVID-19 damaged a lot of people and the effects are still being felt. This happens all of the time and Europe is the worst about it, perhaps because France is the home of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which declared pickle juice and aloe vera carcinogens.
The problem with epidemiology is they fetish-ized statistical significance and it is shockingly easy to obtain. French men are less virile than they once were, activists claim, and blame modern pesticides when it could just as easily be that DDT had made French men more virile. Or Jean-Luc Godard films did. With epidemiology, it is easy for someone to correlate anything to anything, it is why meat both causes and prevents cancer while going vegan makes you healthier or lowers your lifespan.
Excess mortality and cumulative excess mortality in 47 countries of the Western World over the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. The linear excess mortality trendline is almost horizontal. Credit: BMJ Public Health from Our World In Data information
Instead of lowering lifespan, the use of vaccines may have increased it despite the damage done to many by COVID-19 that has continued to linger but the authors write with an air of truthiness that 808,392 excess deaths still occurred after COVID-19 containment was eased - and note that vaccines continued, which suggests they want to allege the vaccines were causal without saying so.
They toss around other absolute and relative risk confounding terms, like that the Pfizer vaccine has a "a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events" without noting that the serious events were in people who already had the big five co-morbidities that place everyone with them at greater risk, including of dying from COVID-19.
They could have died at a McDonald's or being in the radius of farms that grow organic food and with enough of a data set, you might be able to get statistical significance that organic food causes greater mortality. Because with enough rows and columns you can get statistical significance for your belief that coin flips are prejudiced against landing on hands. Or tails.
Epidemiology and the CDC were two routinely cited pillars of American science journalism stories that were exposed as being shockingly unprepared for helping with actual harms. Certainly we want to continue to look at post-market data to see if there is a real problem, but this kind of EXPLORATORY paper being touted by newspaper as "science" just muddies the water.
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