Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#171

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

pygy_ wrote: post #102

zosima wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mod…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#172

Post by simonster » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

hannob wrote: post #31

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 dec…

The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#173

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #169

ceejayoz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't lying , in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie . They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.

Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction. Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven. What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit? If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move i…

> Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality…

Don't assume. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established."

> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?

He gets to restrict vaccines, which is a thing he's wanted to do for decades.

(And not just COVID ones; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-acip-vaccine-panel-hepatiti... happened this morning. Or the spurious claims about Tylenol and autism.)

What about this administration makes you think they care about having their false claims "shredded in 24 hours"?

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#174

Post by pama » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

zosima wrote: post #61

eddieroger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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 mod…

The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#175

Post by cogman10 » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

jquaint wrote: post #133

dalbaugh wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, I don't think any additional evidence will convince vaccine skeptics of the safety of mRNA vaccines

Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness. This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...

It seems like even that's not good enough. I have a few skeptics in my family and have had family members die from covid.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#176

Post by biophysboy » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

blindriver wrote: post #47

sa-code wrote: post #4

> 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

They define unvaccinated as anyone who wasn't vaccinated by Nov 2021. What if they got vaccinated afterwards?

This is specified as an exclusion criteria in the Supplementary.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#177

Post by bigrightmiss » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

so anyone who didn't get vaccinated before Nov. 2021 is considered unvaccinated? if they got the same dose the "vaccinated" group got on Dec 1st 2021 they're still... unvaccinated? and this is the control for this study? am i missing something? im sure there are a ton of valuable findings in this study, but that seems like a flaw.

also, this is only tangentially related, but why is everyone so keen to defend big pharma? i thought we were supposed to hate them? they made billions off vaccines.

remember martin shrkeli? he claimed he raised the price of a drug for a rare disease to make it commercially viable and he was crucified for it. less than 5 years later, a virus breaks out of a town with a lab dedicated to experimenting with (i.e. weaponizing) viruses and big pharma decided to convert to altruism when we needed them most? shrkeli's company made $65M in total off that (which a court ruled all of which had to be returned)... thats not even rounding error for pfizer, who sold $35B+ worth of mrna vaccines in 2021 alone.

if the guy who invented Daraprim came out and told us shkreli was a scumbag, we'd have believed him. but the mRNA guy comes out and he gets eviscerated. i get it, it's not 1:1, but still.

i'm not saying its all a hoax or a conspiracy, but "there doesn't need to be a formal conspiracy when interests converge". in the U.S., federal funding was given to anyone "treating" COVID. had COVID and got hit by a bus? that was a COVID death. and a check to the hospital from uncle sam.

earlier this year (MIT got duped)[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2GzdAGbxwinERSEt/a-widely-s...] by a second year student when no one critiqued his fraudulent AI research. its a reminder that skepticism is an important part of the feedback loop.

i don't think the vaccine killed 17M people, and i think there are definitely grifters on the skeptic side, but that doesn't discount skepticism as a whole. and i dont think this study vindicates anything completely either.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#178

Post by andreygrehov » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #168

andreygrehov wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. VAERS can absolutely be used to establish causality when followed by proper expert investigation (which is exactly its purpose as a signal-detection system). The IOM has relied on VAERS data to confirm causal links in 158 vaccine-adverse event pairs, including rotavirus vaccine and intussusception. Here, FDA career scientists conducted that follow-up: they reviewed 96 child death reports and…

Where is that expert finding published? As far as I have read about the ACIP decisions they didn't actually provide any real data to support this conclusion.

The FDA memo citing 10 vaccine-caused myocarditis deaths in kids came _after_ the Sept. 2025 ACIP vote. ACIP had already dropped routine vaccination for healthy kids 6 mo-17 yr and moved everyone under 65 to "shared decision-making" (high-risk only) [1]

The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.

Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo. In all honesty they should be fined for doing this.

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/acip-recommends-covid19-vacci...

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#179

Post by jansan » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

We should not forget, that in most countries people who were unvaccinated came under severe social pressure. They often lost their jobs or got banned from social circles. You were basically rendered an outcast by not being vaccinated. So taking the vaccine did not only affect your immune system, but also gave you a higher social status. And there are plenty of studies that show that a lower social status significantly impacts mortality, with lower status linked to higher death rates. This may explain the lower all cause mortality among vaccinated people.

Re: Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality

#180

Post by dionian » Fri, Dec 05, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #113

ekianjo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first. For instance, here is the e…

we could let people choose whether to participate, with informed consent. instead of getting them fired for not participating in the experiment.