Why COVID-19 Vaccination Cannot be Ruled out as an Explanation for All-Cause Excess Mortality in the Pandemic’s Aftermath: A Population-Level Study of over 3000 US Counties with over 320 Million People

Background/Objectives: Research has shown consistent excess all-cause mortality since the COVID-19 pandemic, but without a clear explanation. In parallel, research has shown side effects from COVID-19 vaccination and increased deaths. Therefore, one cannot rule out COVID-19 vaccination as an explanation for the excess mortality. Methods: US county-level data were used to model 2022 and 2023 all-cause excess mortality as dependent variables and per capita COVID-19 vaccine uptake by the end of 2021 and 2022 as independent variables. I included lagged dependent variables as controls. The data includes over 3,000 US counties with over 320 million people. Re-sults: A one-unit increase in per-capita vaccination uptake was significantly associat-ed with a .033 (95% CI: .021–.045) increase in 2022 all-cause excess mortality, and sig-nificantly associated with a .027 (95% CI: .021–.033) increase in 2023. Average vaccine uptake was associated with 4.39% (95% CI: 2.78–6.00) higher mortality in 2022 com-pared to assuming zero vaccine uptake, and 137,900 (95% CI: 89,537–186,262) addi-tional deaths. For 2023, there were 5.16% (95% CI: 4.01–6.31) higher mortality and 151,543 (95% CI: 119,397–183,690) additional deaths. Conclusions: COVID-19 vaccine uptake was significantly positively associated with all-cause excess mortality. Given the time asymmetry between vaccine uptake and all-cause excess mortality, the inclu-sion of lagged dependent variables as controls, the large number of observations, and the strongly significant effects, the study has strong internal validity. I.e., vaccine up-take has genuinely caused increased mortality. Also, the study has strong external va-lidity since it covers almost every US county.