One would think that a pandemic year would show a sharp increase in mortality—that is, deaths beyond the expected number. And you would also think that when a safe and effective vaccine was available for said pandemic, mortality would then decline and the death rate would return to a normal trendline in harmony with pre-pandemic expectations.

But that’s not what happened in 2020 and 2021. Oddly enough, it was just the opposite. In 2020—the year of the pandemic, the year of lockdowns and universal face mask requirements, the year of isolating grandma and shuttering small businesses, the year without a vaccine for COVID-19—the increase in mortality in the U.S. was slight, about the same as when there is a bad flu season (although, perhaps ironically, flu deaths were markedly down in 2020), and it was mostly among those in the highest age brackets.

In 2021, however, the year of vaccine marketing and promotion—not to mention workplace vaccine mandates—mortality rose sharply among the young. The Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute release a report including data from 20 U.S. insurance companies that showed a dramatic increase in mortality beginning the third quarter of 2021 and carrying through to the first quarter of 2022, when the most recent data for the study were collected.

Unlike with COVID-19, which was lethal almost exclusively to the elderly, the hardest-hit age group in the third quarter of 2021 were those between 35- and 44-years-old. That group experienced twice the number of deaths expected for the quarter. But even across the entire range of 25- to 64-year-olds, deaths were well over 50 percent more than expected. The fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 got a little better, but both quarters continued to show far more deaths (25–to–56 percent more) than expected in those age ranges.

Scott Davison, CEO of the $100 billion Indiana-based insurance company OneAmerica, said his organization saw a 40-percent year-over-year increase in mortality among the the 18–to–64-year-old group. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business—not just at OneAmerica,” he said. He added that even a 10 percent increase above expected mortality would be a “once-in-200-year catastrophe.”

Edward Dowd, a former BlackRock portfolio manager, conducted an independent study using all-cause mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He, too, identified a sharp rise in mortality in the third quarter of 2021, as reported by The Epoch Times. Dowd calculated an 84-percent increase above the expected number of deaths for the 25–to–44-year-old age group. He also went further than the SOA report in drawing attention to the fact that the spike in deaths occurred in the third quarter of 2021, when, on Sept. 9, President Joe Biden announced his vaccine mandate for businesses with over 100 employees.

Of course, the vaccines had first been introduced in the waning hours of 2020, but it wasn’t until Mar. 22, 2021 that even one-fourth of the U.S. population had received at least one dose; by the start of the now-infamous third quarter, it was a little over half, and by the quarter’s end, nearly two-thirds of the population had received at least one dose.

It’s not just in the U.S. that deaths rose during 2021. In Germany, two university professors—a sociologist and a mathematician—used data from the German Federal Statistical Office to track all-cause mortality over the last two years. Their report, “Excess mortality in Germany 2020-2022,” shows that in 2020, the year of the pandemic, there was a very slight uptick (less than 1 percent, overall) in excess mortality, primarily among the elderly. But in 2021, the year of vaccination, there was a rise in excess mortality as high as 9 percent in every age group except those below 14 years old.

The German study also tracked stillbirths between the same two years and found the same results: a sharp rise from 2020 to 2021. The study’s authors pointed out that whatever started causing Germany’s excess deaths and stillbirths in 2021 did not begin until April of that year, just as the country initiated its extensive vaccination campaign.

In Australia, it was not 2021 but 2022 that saw a sharp rise in deaths—at least in Victoria, a province with 95 percent of its adult population vaccinated. Nevertheless, August of 2022 saw a 27-percent increase in monthly deaths against the average of the previous five Augusts, as the investigative journalist Alex Berenson reported.

Given the statistics, it’s fair to wonder whether the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which are designed to enable the recipient’s body to manufacture the spike protein, are causing this spike in deaths. Highly renowned medical doctors Ryan Cole and Peter McCullough—among dozens, if not hundreds, of others—have spoken openly and repeatedly about how they believe the spike protein causes clotting, and therefore myocarditis, especially in young men.

Maybe that explains why so many athletes, in their physical prime, have been collapsing with heart problems during games. Many of them don’t get up again.

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), managed by the CDC, has been around for 30 years as a method of monitoring injuries and deaths resulting from vaccinations. As of Sept. 30, 2022, VAERS had received 31,330 reports of deaths from COVID-19 vaccines. Thirty thousand deaths in a year-and-a-half may not seem like a large number, given how many millions have received the COVID shots, but it’s actually just a sign of a much larger number. VAERS is a voluntary system, wherein the individual reports can be entered by medical personnel or by victims of adverse events. Most people aren’t aware that the database exists, and those who are aware usually do not want the hassle that is often involved in filing a report.

As a result, the reports in VAERS represent a small fraction of the actual number of injuries. A Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study from 2010 concluded that 1 percent or less of all adverse events are actually reported to the system. More recent estimates by statisticians studying the COVID vaccine data suggest 1.5–to–2.5 percent of adverse events are reported to VAERS.

What we know for sure is that reports to VAERS of injuries and deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines exceed reports to the same system for all other vaccines combined over the last 30 years! That includes the influenza vaccines, which have been given out in similar mass scale.

The truth about the COVID vaccine and the rise in deaths matters, even as the pandemic subsides. Otherwise a similar agreement between the pharmaceutical companies and the government, sacrificing public health for the sake of profit and in the name of an emergency, might happen again.

—Michael Larson