COVID-19 vaccines have saved, not killed millions

“COVID-19 vaccines have saved, not killed, millions”

as taken from

Fact check usatoday.com, Joedy McCreary, November 8, 2023

‘It’s just completely impossible.’

The claim originated in a Dec. 2 Slay News article cites leaked official data to assert that more than 20% of vaccinated New Zealanders have died.

COVID-19 became widespread in New Zealand for the first time in 2022 with the arrival of the highly infectious omicron variant, and 3,361 deaths in New Zealand have been directly attributed to COVID-19, Te Whatu Ora leader Margie Apa told New Zealand news website Stuff.

But just four deaths in New Zealand have been potentially linked to COVID-19 vaccines, Apa told Stuff.

The math simply disproves the claim.

Nearly 4 million people in New Zealand have received two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine as of Dec. 1, according to public health agency Te Whatu Ora. For the claim to be true, at least 800,000 of those vaccinated people would have had to have died.

From the start of 2020 through June 2023, there were about 125,000 total deaths attributed to all causes, according to Statistics New Zealand, the country’s government data agency.

Fact checkPost exaggerates global deaths, then blames them on the COVID vaccine

  • “For 20% of them to die is just completely outrageous and impossible if you look at the total deaths for the country,” Jeffrey Morris, the director of the biostatistics division at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, told USA TODAY.

“It’s just completely impossible.”

  • There is no evidence the vaccines are behind any rise in deaths. Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in an email to USA TODAY. He pointed out elderly people are more likely than younger people both to die and to be vaccinated.
  • Dr. David Weber, an infectious disease expert at the University of North Carolina, agreed that there is no evidence of a causal link.

“Almost everyone in New Zealand is now immunized, and so most of the deaths will occur in immunized people,” he told USA TODAY. “But that doesn’t mean that being immunized is not protective.”

Three knowledgeable healthcare medical doctors comment on the Slay News story telling. It is not even a good story.