In the “Europawahlprogramm 2024” (European Election Program 2024) of the German political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), alleged dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines are highlighted. The program claims a direct connection between these vaccines and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. This claim turns out to be false.
“Due to (…) an alarming excess mortality, (…) we demand the halt of the approval of mRNA and vector-based COVID injections (…),” argues the AfD against COVID-19 vaccinations, calling for their cessation. This perspective finds particular resonance in anti-vaccination circles and among conspiracy theorists. But how did this statement come about?
It all started with a press release from the Federal Statistical Office on October 12, 2021. This release reported increased death rates in the German population, which could not be explained by the reported COVID-19 deaths alone. Retrospectively, an increase from 2019 (939,520) to 2020 (985,572), and from 2020 to 2021 (1,023,687), can indeed be observed. This created a knowledge gap that various explanatory approaches tried to fill.
Especially important in this context is a note by scientists Rolf Steyer and Gregor Kappler, who, on behalf of Member of Parliament Ute Bergner (Free Democratic Party, Thuringian State Parliament), examined the statistical relationship between vaccination rates and the suspected excess mortality. They only investigated a possible correlation and did not assume any causality. In science, the strength of the relationship between two variables is indicated by the correlation coefficient, which ranges from -1 to +1. The value in this paper is +0.31, indicating a weak correlation. Thus, it is not surprising that both scientists have since distanced themselves from their work, which is not a scientific study.
The study by psychologist Christof Kuhbandner from the University of Regensburg and mathematician Matthias Reitzner from the University of Osnabrück also fueled anti-vaccination suspicions. Their study, “Estimation of Excess Mortality in Germany During 2020-2022,” names COVID-19 vaccinations as a possible trigger for increased mortality. The scientists question how mortality could rise despite vaccination, as the opposite is normally expected. The study shows that with the increase in vaccinations, the death rate also rose, but it completely ignores the fact that an increase in infections was also observed during the same period. Jonas Schöley, a research associate at the Max Planck Institute, explained in an ARD interview that there were more factors than vaccination numbers that differentiated the years 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Schöley was proven right because, in a later study by the The Barmer Institute for Health System Research (BIFG) in 2023, the work of Kuhbandner and Reitzner was completely refuted. Instead, it became clear that over three-quarters of the excess mortality was associated with a prior COVID-19 infection. The BIFG assumes that previous data collection was simply incomplete, as it focused only on infections with laboratory confirmation and therefore could not establish a connection between COVID-19 and the deaths.
Even though there were a total of 1,802 suspected cases of the COVID-19 vaccine as the cause of death from December 2020 to September 2021, only 48 deaths have been definitively attributed to the vaccine after examination.
Conclusion
Judging by all these points, the AfD’s statement is false. The suspected connection between COVID-19 vaccinations and an increased death rate is merely a spurious correlation that has been suggested in various officially debunked works.
RESEARCH | ARTICLE | Benian Özdüzenciler, Hochschule der Medien, Stuttgart, Germany
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