COVID Deaths Vastly Outnumber Rare Vaccine Complications

SITUATION:

When COVID-19 vaccines rolled out under emergency authorization in late 2020, federal health officials projected high confidence in their safety. Outrage was spread by conservative pundits and right-wing social media influencers over public masking protocols and vaccine mandates at workplaces, schools and the military. This left many Americans wary the moment breakthrough infections and early side effect reports began surfacing.

The actual data counters those misgivings in a substantial way. COVID-19 killed 384,536 Americans in 2020 alone, according to finalized CDC data. For scale, that’s more than 3x the total American deaths of the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

Online, that wariness hardened into dramatic claims. Vaccines were falsely blamed for infertility, DNA changes, or the deaths of hundreds of thousands, often citing VAERS, a federal database that allows anyone to file an unverified report.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic before joining the Trump administration in 2025, brought that false scrutiny inside government itself.

Under his tenure, then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary opened a formal review of vaccine-linked deaths reported to the VAERS database. Makary left the post in May 2026, and the review’s full findings still have not been made public to this day.

THE TRUTH:

Two things can be true at once. COVID-19 vaccines carry an extremely small yet real risk of myocarditis or pericarditis, heart inflammation seen mostly in young men after a second mRNA dose. The condition is generally mild in presentation and typically resolves within days for most of the patients affected.

The most recent data, covering the 2024-2025 formulation, found just 2 confirmed cases among more than 221,000 vaccinated men ages 18-49 and none among the adolescents studied. For comparison, myocarditis from any cause, vaccine-related or not, occurs in the general population at a background rate of roughly 1 to 10 cases per 100,000 people a year.

That risk is dramatically lower than the risk posed by the virus itself. COVID-19 infection carries at least 11x the myocarditis risk compared to that associated with the vaccine, according to a large study published in the journal Circulation.

The COVID-19 vaccine itself has proven to be very effective at reducing infection and the risk of death. For example, a study of nursing home residents during the 2024-2025 season found roughly 69% fewer cases of COVID-19 infection among those current on their vaccinations.

There is no evidence the COVID-19 vaccine causes infertility, according to the CDC and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This is despite years of widely shared yet verifiably false social media posts and claims by unqualified conservative pundits insisting otherwise on the strength of a discredited protein theory that never held up to scrutiny.

Another false claim confuses mRNA with DNA. The mRNA in the shots never enters a cell’s nucleus, so it cannot alter a person’s genetic code at all.

Federal law requires providers to report any death following vaccination, regardless of cause. For example, if someone dies in a car accident driving home from the clinic, that death will get lumped into those statistics. The largest death-toll claims online rest on that basic fact alone, the same fallacy as claiming one-seventh of all deaths prove Tuesdays are dangerous.

The database’s own website warns visitors that its reports are unverified and cannot alone establish that a vaccine caused any death, a limitation the agency states plainly.

FactCheck.org and USA Today have both traced these same figures circulating widely on social media platforms, some making the false claim that 100,000 or more deaths were caused by vaccines. All were attributed to that same flawed statistical assumption that confuses correlation with causation.

WHY IT MATTERS:

The gap between what circulates online and what the data actually shows is both enormous and dangerous. Claims of 100,000 or more vaccine deaths overstate the confirmed toll by orders of magnitude, while the true scale of the deadliness of COVID-19 infection itself gets treated online as though it, too, were exaggerated.

Both errors point the same direction: away from the record. The confirmed death toll directly attributable to the vaccine is an extremely small number of verified cases, while COVID-19 alone killed 384,536 Americans in a single year, more than two wars combined.

That mismatch matters for anyone trying to make an actual decision about their own health or the health of their child. Weighing a real, rare risk against invented death tolls, or dismissing a genuinely lethal virus because a chart online confuses correlation with causation, leads to the same result: bad decisions that risk poor health at best and death in the worst case, all built on wrong numbers and false assumptions.

SOURCES:

• CDC, “Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine Safety,” https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/vaccines/covid-19.html
• CDC, “Safety Considerations for COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.cdc.gov/covid/hcp/vaccine-considerations/safety-considerations.html
• CDC, “Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE): Updated COVID-19 Vaccine (2024-2025 Formulation),” https://www.cdc.gov/acip/grade/covid-19-2024-2025-6-months-and-older.html
• FDA, “mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine-Associated Myocarditis,” https://www.fda.gov/media/153514/download
• CDC IDWeek study on nursing home vaccine effectiveness, 2024-2025 season, PMC, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12791558/
• FactCheck.org, “Benefits Outweigh Risks of Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccine, Contrary to Posts Misusing VAERS Data,” https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/scicheck-benefits-outweigh-risks-of-pediatric-covid19-vaccine-contrary-to-posts-misusing-vaers-data/
• USA Today, “COVID-19 vaccine data from VAERS misrepresented (again) to overstate risks,” https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-vaccine-data-vaers-181228427.html
• Pfizer, “The Facts,” https://www.pfizer.com/about/responsibility/misinformation
• The Hill, “COVID-19 vaccine deaths under FDA investigation,” https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5642530-fda-probe-covid-vaccine-deaths/
• CDC/NCHS, “Provisional COVID-19 Mortality Surveillance” (2020 finalized death count), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
• National Archives, “Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics,” https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics
• Congressional Research Service, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL32492
• American Heart Association, “COVID-19 infection poses higher risk for myocarditis than vaccines,” https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-poses-higher-risk-for-myocarditis-than-vaccines
• Science/AAAS, “Antivaccine activists use a government database on side effects to scare the public,” https://www.science.org/content/article/antivaccine-activists-use-government-database-side-effects-scare-public
• CDC, “COVID-19 Vaccines and VAERS” (EUA reporting requirements), https://www2.cdc.gov/vaccines/ed/covid/10_12.asp