Vaccine Skeptics Said That COVID Shots Would Cause Mass Death. We’re Still Here.

Millions, perhaps even billions of us who got ourselves vaccinated against COVID-19 should be dead by now, or if not yet, very soon. For years, prominent wellness influencers and other internet personalities have predicted that mRNA vaccines will lead to mass casualties. Infectious disease clinician Neil Stone has helpfully (and amusingly) compiled a number of such dire predictions.

First up, enjoy health hustler David Wolfe’s graphic from 2021.

Stone jauntily observes: “5 billion of us got Covid vaccines. Apparently we all have 2 months left to live. Better make the most of it!”

In 2021, Dolores Cahill, an immunologist at the School of Medicine of University College Dublin, notoriously asserted in an independent documentary that “everybody who has an mRNA injection will die within 3 to 5 years, even if they have had only one injection.” In August, Stone puckishly asked, “Anyone out there who got a Covid vaccine and is still alive?”

In August 2024, vaccine naysayer Steve Kirsch snarkily posted that “25% of people who got the COVID shot regret it. The others are dead.” Stone snarked back, “Anyone out there who has had the Covid vaccine, is not dead, and does not regret it? I’ll start. Me.” Me, too.

On August 23, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones expanded the amount of time that we vaccinated folks have left before we shuffle off this mortal coil when he posted that “27 peer reviewed Doctors stated that 100% of those who are vaccinated will die by 2028 due to the mRNA tech in the vaccine.” Stone drily observed, “Apparently 3 years left for me and 6 billion others. How shall we spend them?”

And let’s not forget perhaps the most absurd claim, this time from our current Health and Human Services secretary, who in 2021 called the Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Claims like these have been proven wrong time and again. Given the counterfactual nature of such estimates, it is hard to pin down just how many lives the COVID-19 vaccines globally saved. Estimates range from a high of about 20 million in the first year after vaccines became available to a low of around 2.5 million deaths averted by 2024.

If mass vaccine deaths are imminent, it is not evident in the global life expectancy trends. Since the rollout of billions of mRNA shots beginning in 2021, global life expectancy has risen from 70.9 years to 73.2 years in 2024. (Life expectancy fell during the pandemic from 72.6 years in 2019 to 70.9 years in 2021.)

Despite these dire warnings, President Donald Trump, who presided over Operation Warp Speed, the fastest vaccine rollout in history, got his COVID-19 booster shot earlier this month.