Rep. Brad Wenstrup, DPM Chairman, Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic U.S. House of Representatives
Dear Chairman Wenstrup:
Congratulations on the completion of your Covid-19 report. You and your team covered an extraordinary amount of diverse material, correctly diagnosed the likely SARS2 origin, and exposed the failures of lockdowns, school closures, fiscal and monetary profligacy, mandates, gain-of-function research, and much more.
I write to draw your attention to one brief section on vaccines and invite you to correct the record. The short but crucial claim upends the truth and scrambles the entire narrative of the pandemic.
The Unsupported Claim
In the Table of Contents, one heading reads, “A. Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives….301.” On page 302, the report states, “However, there is little doubt that the rapid development and authorization of COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.1169” The claim is also repeated in the cover letter: “The vaccines, which are now probably better characterized as therapeutics, undoubtedly saved millions of lives by diminishing likelihood of severe disease and death.”
This extraordinary “millions saved” assertion cites one report, at footnote 1169. But the Committee conducts no analysis. The cited report, moreover, is one of the most wildly preposterous pieces of propaganda from the entire Covid episode – a high bar.
The unfortunate truth is that in the U.S. and across high- and middle-income nations all over the world, health in 2021 and 2022 was far worse than in the initial pandemic year of 2020.
After the vaccines were introduced, both Covid deaths and non-Covid deaths – and thus all-cause deaths – soared. (See Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2023.)
Excess mortality and morbidity remained elevated in 2023 and 2024. Low- and low-middle income nations, who deployed far fewer vaccines, suffered far fewer Covid deaths and less excess mortality. These high-level facts alone undermine the “millions saved” narrative. But I’d like to show in detail why the claim of “millions of lives saved” is so very wrong.
The report from the Commonwealth Fund cited in footnote 1169 has achieved broad circulation, to be sure.1 It is, however, not based on any real-world evidence. It is merely a spreadsheet confection, based on several assumptions which are both undisclosed and, in any case, entirely fanciful.
Commonwealth merely asserts the vaccines are highly effective and then extrapolates. It does not specify the “VE” effectiveness number or justify it based on any real-world data or analysis. Commonwealth does not publish its inputs or parameters, let alone its code. This makes a deep evaluation impossible. But we can still refute it based on a general understanding of their approach.
Commonwealth’s headline grabbing conclusion is based on a guess pulled out of thin air: If the vaccine is, say, 75% effective at preventing Covid deaths, and if 100 people die from Covid, then, Commonwealth asserts, the vaccine must have saved 300 people (300/400 = .75). If one million die from Covid, then the vaccines must have saved three million people. If 100 million die, 300 million saved. The model is nonsensical. No matter how many die, approximately 3x are saved. It never contemplates its assumption of effectiveness might be wrong, let alone wildly off the mark.
Obviously, the world is far more complicated. Commonwealth says it incorporates more factors, such as “age-stratified demographics, risk factors, and immunological dynamics.” But it doesn’t show its work. It only tells the results.
Negative Effectiveness
Regardless, we can reasonably presume Commonwealth’s estimate of vaccine effectiveness is the model’s most important factor. Commonwealth, however, not only misses the mark in its central variable but likely uses the wrong sign.
Why? Because voluminous research suggests the Covid vaccines suffer “negative effectiveness.” They are worse than nothing. One of the most famous and authoritative studies in this regard comes from the Cleveland Clinic. One of the nation’s leading health systems followed its 51,000 employees during 2021-22, and the results were astonishing: Cleveland Clinic’s unvaccinated employees suffered far fewer Covid infections than its vaccinated employees.2
Those who had received one vaccine dose suffered more infections than those with zero. The pattern continued all the way up the dosage ladder (see stair-step chart nearby). Two doses was worse than one; three was worse than two; and four or more was worse than three. In fact, those with 3 or more doses were more than three times as likely to contract Covid as the unvaccinated. A brand new Japanese study found the same thing: the vaccinated were more than twice as likely to be infected.
We had already witnessed this pattern in Israel and the United Kingdom. In the fall of 2021 through the spring of 2022, when the UKHSA was issuing detailed weekly reports, vaccination was closely correlated with far higher infection rates.
In weeks 8-11 of 2022, for example, adults vaccinated with three doses suffered infection rates three to four times (3-4x) the unvaccinated.
Infections may of course not translate directly to deaths. But UK mortality data for the same period also contradict the notion that vaccination prevents large numbers of Covid deaths, or any Covid deaths at all. For weeks 8-11, 2022, 90% of Covid deaths occurred in the vaccinated, just 10% in the unvaccinated. For the seven-month period August 2021 through February 2022, the vaccinated accounted for 84.7% of all Covid deaths in Scotland.
These numbers are inconsistent with the assertion of any vaccine effectiveness whatsoever, let alone the very high level of effectiveness necessary to deliver the output of the Commonwealth model. The real-world numbers are consistent with zero mortality effectiveness, at very best, and possibly anti-effectiveness. (These data also refute a similar model from Imperial College, published in the Lancet, which claimed 20 million saved worldwide.)
Implausible Numbers
Let’s approach the “millions saved” story from yet another angle – the sheer implausibility of the gigantic numbers. The Commonwealth Fund issued two reports – one for 2021 and a second including 2022. We, in turn, wrote two articles analyzing their reports and an additional little essay which used a sports metaphor to show how zany and misleading computer models can be.
Here was our analysis of the first Commonwealth report, which claimed the vaccines saved more than one million Americans in 2021 alone:
One million is a lot of people! Total all-cause U.S. deaths for 2021 were 3,457,517. The failure to save a million people would have boosted total American deaths last year by an astonishing 31%.1
But does this “one million saved claim” hold up under scrutiny? Let’s take a look.
The claim comes from a January 2022 study by the Commonwealth Fund.2 The Commonwealth model estimates that between mid-December 2020 and November 30, 2021, Covid-19 vaccines spared the lives of 1.087 million Americans. Running their analysis through the end of December 2021 would have produced even more lives saved. So our critique, which only assumes they claim 1.087 million saved for the entire year, is conservative from our point of view.
To understand how extraordinary the one million saved claim is, we need to look at what actually happened.
In the diagram below, you can see Our World in Data’s chart, showing actual cumulative U.S. Covid-19 deaths – 350,555 in 2020 and 475,059 in 2021. You can also see our annotations in pink, blue, and gray. Despite the administration of 520 million vaccine doses in 2021, Covid took 124,504 more American lives in 2021 than 2020….
The “1.087 million saved” claim implies that without vaccines, 1.562 million Americans would have died from Covid-19 in 2021. This would have required a shocking acceleration in Covid-19 deaths – nearly 4.5 times the number who died in 2020. They assume that in a world where many of our most vulnerable citizens had succumbed to Covid-19 in 2020, where presumably we were getting better at treating the disease, four-and-a-half times more people were going to die in 2021. Does that seem plausible?
An Implausible Acceleration
Using the conservative 1.087-million-saved-in-2021 figure…consider what 1.562 million total Covid-19 deaths implies:
That’s an average of 4,279 Covid-19 deaths every day for the entire year.
Back in the real world, no single day ever reached that level.
Only seven days ever topped 4,000 deaths in the U.S.
All seven of these days occurred after the vaccine rollout began. (January 8, 12, 20, 27, and December 22, 2021; January 28 and February 4, 2022.)
Zero days pre-vaccine topped 4,000 deaths.
The model’s counterfactual peak during August-October 2021 generates unprecedented daily death rates over many weeks, more than double the very highest seen anywhere in the world – even for a day or two, let alone a multi-week period – from the beginning of the pandemic.
During this peak, the model generates daily death rates for several weeks four to six times higher than anything seen in the U.S. throughout the pandemic.
Total all-cause U.S. deaths for 2021 were 3,457,517. The 1.087 million claim implies, without Covid vaccines, the U.S. would have suffered 31% more total deaths from any cause, on top of the worst year ever.
Another Lancet paper, using a similar model, claims 20 million lives saved worldwide in 2021. The HART Group from Britain analyzed that paper here and gave one example of how bogus the model is:
“South East Asia also tells an important story. These countries are heavily vaccinated and yet with the latest Omicron wave they have experienced mortality amounting to 300, 400 or even more per million. This is the same order of magnitude as Europe experienced in Spring 2020, with the original variant and before vaccination. The claim that vaccinations prevent 80%+ of covid deaths does not fit with what is happening in the real world.”
Dr. Clare Craig tweeted a short video about the model’s inexplicable counterfactual death acceleration required to save 20 million people.
A normal person might assume that a successful vaccine would reduce deaths from the target disease. [In the diagram] below you can see a purely hypothetical scenario in which a semi-successful vaccine (green dotted line) softens the slope of deaths after the rollout. In this case, the vaccine reduces deaths in 2021 to around 175,000, or half that of 2020.
Instead, through the art of modeling, where counterfactual deaths are inflated beyond all plausibility, we are told that a 35% acceleration of U.S. Covid-19 deaths in the second year of a pandemic – with 520 million vaccine doses! – is a smashing success. Now that’s a bold assertion.
Remember, the latest estimate of Covid-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) for unvaccinated, never-infected people under 70 years old is 0.095%.
Here was a portion of our second article analyzing the second Commonwealth report, which covered 2021 and 2022:
Commonwealth’s update doesn’t correct obvious mistakes. Instead, it doubles down – literally – producing truly jarring hallucinations. Although 2022 was dominated by the milder Omicron variants, the update claims the vaccines saved 2.168 million lives – twice as many as claimed in 2021. The model also suggests, without the vaccines, Covid-19 would have killed 2.42 million Americans in 2022. That’s an astounding 6.9 times the number who died from Covid-19 in 2020. (As far as we can tell, the model does not contemplate any possible vaccine harms, which further reduces its plausibility.)
Consider that in 2019, the total number of deaths from all causes in the U.S. was 2.85 million. Total U.S. deaths in 2010 were 2.47 million. Commonwealth estimates that in 2022, absent vaccines, 2.42 million would have died of the milder Omicron variants alone, all other causes excluded.
Sanity Check: The Commonwealth Fund claims, absent Covid-19 vaccines, 2.42 million Americans would have died from Covid in 2022, when the milder Omicron variants dominated. That’s 6.9 times the number who died in 2020. With 520 million vaccine doses, moreover, 124,504 more Americans died of Covid in 2021 than in 2020.
Pharmacovigilance
On page 349 of the Committee report, the section heading reads, “The COVID-19 Vaccine, While Largely Safe and Effective, Had Adverse Events That Must be Thoroughly Investigated.” The section presents no evidence of safety or effectiveness. It does offer significant evidence of wide-scale harm but only scratches the shallowest surface.
The Committee report correctly cites the little-known V-Safe data, which had to be pried open via FOIA from a reluctant CDC. The brand new V-Safe program, an app launched specifically for the Covid vaccines, followed 10.1 million vaccine recipients. As the report acknowledges, an astonishing ~770,000 (or 7.7%) of them reported significant adverse events – those serious enough to demand medical attention. Extrapolating nationwide, if 250 million Americans received the Covid vaccines, we can estimate roughly 19.25 million of them may have suffered significant harm.
A conservative reanalysis by eminent scientists of the original Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials showed a one-in-800 chance of serious adverse events, which dramatically overwhelmed the vaccines’ probability of benefit. In other words, even before the vaccines were offered to the public, the data, not yet public, showed the risk-benefit calculation for most recipients was upside down. Public health officials didn’t tell us.
Real-world experience proved far worse than the carefully massaged and communicated trials. VAERS in the U.S., the United Kingdom’s Yellow Card system, and Europe’s Eudravigilance program all quickly began reporting harms extraordinarily large in number and astonishing in variation. Instead of alerting policymakers and citizens, however, public health officials inexplicably disavowed their own warning systems. Tragically, the vigilance systems were correct. The harms were real.
Physicians have now published more than 3,900 peer-reviewed case reports and case series detailing how the modRNA shots caused a vast array of devastating cardiac, vascular, neurological, renal, respiratory, skin, blood, cancer, lymphatic, and autoimmune conditions, in addition to innumerable immune dysregulations. For each published report, a thousand or 10 thousand similar cases likely go unpublished. In this extensive video, including 60 slides, my colleagues and I explain the numerous biological mechanisms by which the modRNA vaccines – which, it must be emphasized, are a radically new technology – cause such widespread and varied harms.
Autopsies reveal the modRNA vaccines can devastate tissues and organs throughout the body, including the heart, aorta, brain, lungs, kidneys, adrenal glands, testes, ovaries, liver, skin, prostate, spleen, and, perhaps most extensively, the blood vessels and capillaries, where clotting and endothelial damage can impact every part of the body.
In new research, John Beaudoin, an electrical engineer from Massachusetts, obtained millions of state death certificates and found numerous clear signals of Covid vaccine-related deaths. The most remarkable single effect, which is consistent across every U.S. state, may be acute kidney injury (AKI, also called acute renal failure, or ARF). Beaudoin’s data show the Covid vaccines in the U.S., from 2021 to 2024, are associated with nearly 212,000extra cases of fatal sudden kidney failure.
Mortality
Pfizer’s own regulatory filing to the FDA showed that by the end of February 2021, just 12 weeks into the vaccine rollout, its shots may have already killed 1,223 people and caused some 42,000 serious adverse events (see Table 1 on page 7). In any other case, such alarming data would have led the FDA (or the company) to halt distribution immediately. By mid-spring 2021, VAERS, which undercounts adverse events and deaths by large multiples of 10-40x, already registered 4,000 deaths. The real number of vaccine-caused deaths in the U.S. by that first spring thus likely exceeded 40,000.
Now, years later, global data tells a clear story. Far from the claim of “millions of lives saved,” Covid vaccines are instead associated with an unprecedented surge in mortality and morbidity in high- and middle-income nations across the world.
In diverse highly-vaccinated nations such as Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Singapore, Ireland, Israel, and many more, mortality and morbidity rocketed upwards in 2021 and 2022, and remained elevated in 2023 and 2024. See, for example, these surveys of global excess mortality:
Our own nation showed a similar deterioration of health post-vaccine. Despite 520 million vaccine doses administered in the U.S. in 2021, Covid deaths accelerated by 35% compared to the initial pandemic year of 2020. Despite weathering 2020 with relative success, beginning in 2021 young and healthy people suffered surges in both Covid and non-Covid mortality. Life insurance executives expressed alarm at shocking death rates among healthy, working, relatively prosperous, young and middle-age Americans, most of them vaccinated. The Society of Actuaries reported that in 2022, white collar U.S. workers continued to suffer higher mortality anomalies (19% above expected) than gray and blue collar workers. See:
Beginning in 2021, the disability roles in the U.S. and UK also exploded. Before the pandemic, U.S. labor force disabilities averaged around 6.3 million. During the first year of Covid, they fell to around 6.0 million. But then in 2021, disabilities jumped and kept rising to 8.751 million in November 2024. That’s a 39% increase in under four years.
The United Kingdom reports a similar disability surge. Its Personal Independence Payments (PIP) system offers highly detailed information on adjudicated disability payments.3 The number of cases began a rise of more than 50% in 2021, mirroring almost exactly America’s disability experience.
In Summary
Summing up the evidence from a wide array of sources – micro-biology, vigilance, autopsies, case reports, life insurance, disability, state death certificates, and epidemiology from across the globe – we arrive at a very rough estimate: the modRNA vaccines are associated with direct non-Covid deaths of between 500,000 and 800,000 in the U.S. and between three and five million around the world. (Indirect deaths attributed to Covid could boost these figures far higher via difficult-to-estimate effects such as variant immune escape, which extended the pandemic; immune tolerance and imprinting; and vaccine enhanced disease.) Regardless of whether they caused deaths directly or amplified Covid’s infectiousness and lethality and extended its timeline, the vaccines overall might very roughly be associated with five million, and up to 10 million, deaths worldwide.
This real world data is consistent with the original Pfizer trial, where, compared to the control group, more people who received the vaccine died. Unfortunately, there is little to no evidence the modRNA vaccines saved any lives. It is possible some individuals benefited, but it’s not demonstrated, as your own report implicitly acknowledges.
As the Committee report notes, the Covid vaccines should be considered “therapeutics.” Yet they were given mostly to healthy people, a substantial portion of whom were at little or no risk from the target disease. How can a product which confers little to no benefit for most but suffers at least a 7.7% risk of significant short-term harm, unknown but likely substantial medium- and long-term harms, and a one-in-several-thousand risk of death, possibly be considered “safe”? How can a product associated with explosions of the target disease and with historic jumps in all-cause mortality possibly be considered “effective”?
Brief section headings asserting major findings on a central topic without any supporting evidence or analysis, and in fact lots of evidence to the contrary, cannot be relied upon. The idea that the Covid vaccines “saved millions of lives” is one of the most common, but egregiously wrong, claims of the entire pandemic. Unfortunately, the epidemiological data and biological evidence from around the world suggest the Covid vaccines, instead of savings millions of lives, in fact cost millions of lives.
I applaud your tireless efforts and the high quality of the vast bulk of your report. Progress requires continual reappraisal of reality.
Many dozens of high profile news and commentary articles, in addition to scientific publications, have cited this Commonwealth report to make the “millions saved” claim. In perhaps the most recent instance, Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccinologist in Philadelphia, referred to the study in The New York Times, claiming the Covid vaccines “saved the lives of at least three million Americans.” “RFK Jr. Is a Vaccine Cynic, Not Skeptic.” January 13, 2025.
One likely reason for negative effectiveness is “immune imprinting,” also known as original antigenic sin (OAS). Essentially, the vaccine imprints your immune system with the previous viral variant, which leaves you more vulnerable to the next variant. Another effect which may also push toward negative effectiveness is “tolerance,” likely generated by a large rise in IgG4 antibodies and reductions in IgG1 and 3 antibodies. I covered both of these effects here. Some 131 studies now document the imprinting effect. (See, Erik Sass. “COVID ‘vaccine’ immune imprinting library.”) Dozens of major papers now show the IgG4 tolerance effect.
Excellent reporting. At this point we may need to enter the realm of psychology to explain the “Covid saved millions” blind spot of our elected representatives. They’re not ignoring the data in subservience to Big Pharma; they’re ignoring the data in subservience to the millions of their constituents who are too proud to admit that they were bamboozled, and that they were complicit in their own deception. The greatest evidence of this post-traumatic psychology among the Kool-aid drinking vaxxers is their conspiracy of silence. No one in my circle of friends and family who shouted “heil Fauci!” want to talk about it. It’s like it never happened! As a kid growing up 25 years after the allied victory in WWII we were still playing “army” in the street and watching movies and television shows cataloguing the heroic deeds of the Americans. But the response to the free world’s “victory” over what was billed as the greatest threat to humanity in the modern age? Crickets. The politicians are smarter than we might think. They know their constituents aren’t ready to face the truth because the truth that they must face is a truth about themselves, so for now it’s expedient to provide a myth to comfort the wounded, and maybe leave it to historians to sort it all out.
Excellent reporting. At this point we may need to enter the realm of psychology to explain the “Covid saved millions” blind spot of our elected representatives. They’re not ignoring the data in subservience to Big Pharma; they’re ignoring the data in subservience to the millions of their constituents who are too proud to admit that they were bamboozled, and that they were complicit in their own deception. The greatest evidence of this post-traumatic psychology among the Kool-aid drinking vaxxers is their conspiracy of silence. No one in my circle of friends and family who shouted “heil Fauci!” want to talk about it. It’s like it never happened! As a kid growing up 25 years after the allied victory in WWII we were still playing “army” in the street and watching movies and television shows cataloguing the heroic deeds of the Americans. But the response to the free world’s “victory” over what was billed as the greatest threat to humanity in the modern age? Crickets. The politicians are smarter than we might think. They know their constituents aren’t ready to face the truth because the truth that they must face is a truth about themselves, so for now it’s expedient to provide a myth to comfort the wounded, and maybe leave it to historians to sort it all out.
Thanks for doing this. Excellent effort. I hope it counts for something. All you can do is try, and this is a very good try