Stanford led study: at least 20,000 global deaths from COVID jabs
New COVID Vax Paper Breaks with the Narrative
By trialsitenews , republished by permission
TrialSite Staff | Making Biomedical Research Evidence Accessible to All
Dec. 23, 2025, 5:30 a.m.
In a high-profile analysis published in JAMA Health Forum, a team from Stanford University, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and the Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS led by John P. A. Ioannidis set out to answer one of the most contested questions of the pandemic era: How many lives did COVID-19 vaccination actually save worldwide? The study estimates that COVID-19 vaccination averted approximately 2.5 million deaths globally between 2020 and 2024, with a wide uncertainty range of 1.4 to 4.0 million, and saved about 15 million life-years, though results depend heavily on modeling assumptions. Nearly 90% of deaths averted occurred in adults aged 60 years and older, while children, adolescents, and young adults contributed a negligible share of the total benefit. Compared with earlier pandemic models, these findings suggest a far more limited, age-concentrated mortality benefit, particularly during the Omicron period and among those vaccinated before first infection.
A Quiet but Explosive Admission
Dr. Ioannidis and colleagues make an unusually candid concession for a high-profile vaccine-benefit paper: they do not separate deaths averted by vaccine effectiveness from deaths caused by vaccine-related harms. In fact they explicitly acknowledge that randomized trial data are insufficient to quantify vaccine-associated mortality and that estimates derived from registries and observational sources carry “substantial uncertainty.”
This is not a minor caveat—it is a structural limitation of the analysis. The authors further note that, depending on ethical framing and risk aversion, a death caused by an intervention may not be considered equivalent to a death averted by it, particularly when harms cluster in specific subpopulations.
To put bounds around this uncertainty, the authors turn to eAppendix 2 (Supplement 1), where they restrict analysis to widely recognized and accepted fatal adverse events: thrombosis with thrombocytopenia after adenovirus-vector vaccines, myocarditis following mRNA vaccines (primarily in younger males), and deaths temporally associated with vaccination in highly debilitated nursing-home residents.
Using global administration data (~13.64 billion doses) and conservative risk assumptions, they estimate roughly 20,000 vaccine-associated deaths worldwide, while an independent extrapolation from Qatar’s national mortality review suggests a broader range of approximately 16,000 to 48,000 deaths.
Compared with the study’s central estimate of ~2.5 million lives saved, this supports the authors’ statement that vaccine-related deaths were “probably” about two orders of magnitude lower than benefits at the population level.
The critical word is “probably.” The authors explicitly state that these adverse-event death estimates carry “very large uncertainty” and emphasize that the margin between benefit and harm may be substantially smaller—or even reversed—in specific subgroups where risks are concentrated and benefits are limited, such as younger males or frail elderly residents.
In effect, the paper concedes that while COVID-19 vaccination likely reduced mortality overall, net benefit was neither uniform nor guaranteed across populations. A bombshell acknowledgment—confined to the supplement rather than the abstract—directly challenges any absolutist claim that vaccine harms were negligible or irrelevant and represents a rare moment of methodological and ethical candor in the COVID-19 vaccine literature.
Please continue reading on Dr Malone's substack at:
What the Study Did—and Did Not—Do
=============================================================================================
