By: Rahul Adhikari
December 12 2022
False: Official data from EU proves thousands of people are dying every week due to COVID-19 vaccination in Europe.
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Fact-Check
The Verdict False
Excess mortality data from Europe was misreported as deaths due to the COVID-19 vaccine. There is no official data that proves the claim.
Claim ID 87ee8184
Context
A post claiming that official data from the European Union confirms that thousands of people die every week due to COVID-19 vaccination in Europe is circulating on Instagram. The post featured a screenshot of an article by the anti-vaccine website The Exposé, with the headline, "PfizerGate: Official EU Data proves Thousands are dying every week due to COVID Vaccination with Europe suffering 300k Excess Deaths in 2022, making it a record-breaking year in terms of Deaths."
The Exposé is a known conspiracy website. According to a Logically investigation, the website promotes a standard portfolio of COVID-19-denialist, anti-vaxxers, and Great Reset myths framed as breaking news.
In Fact
The Exposé cited data from EuroMOMO to establish the argument that people are dying due to COVID-19 vaccine in Europe. EuroMOMO is a project that collects data on mortality from 29 European countries to detect and measure an excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats. According to its website, EuroMOMO has been supported by and worked closely with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe. The website provides data on excess mortality rates, including graph-based data for different age groups. The data shows that since 2019 after the pandemic began, there has been a surge in excess deaths.
The article compared excess deaths of all age groups in their report for a specific time frame. The article mentions Europe recorded 74,684 excess deaths between week 20 and week 44 of 2020, compared to 161,403 excess deaths between week 20 and week 44 in 2022. It has also cited excess mortality for different age groups. To prove their statement, The Exposé misreported excess mortality data as death related to COVID-19 vaccine. It falsely claimed the excess deaths as vaccine-related casualties.
The data on EuroMOMO gives an approximate estimate of the excess deaths related to influenza, pandemic, and other possible public health threats. It does not provide data on deaths caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. The website forewarns that the "cumulated excess mortality outputs for the COVID-19 pandemic period may be unreliable due to some model issues."
The article also claimed that Europe suffered "300k excess deaths in 2022, making it a record-breaking year in terms of death." This claim is based on the data up to week 44 of 2022. The statement is true. However, the 2022 excess mortality curve declined in the next few weeks. According to the latest data, the excess mortality rate in week 47, 2022, is 318,780 compared to 311,624 in 2021 and 327,723 in 2020, making it the year with the highest mortality.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on August 23, 2021. The data from Europe shows a spike in excess deaths since the pandemic started in 2019. The curve maintained the spike in excess fatalities compared to the pre-pandemic scenario. It is evident that the number of excess deaths started surging even before the vaccine was approved. The Exposé made false assumptions about vaccine-related deaths and published the article without concrete evidence.
The article also mentions a former trending narrative called "Pfizergate," which raised questions about the data integrity, regulatory oversight, and patient safety of the Pfizer vaccine's clinical trial back in 2021 to imply that vaccines are unsafe. However, on January 1, 2022, the European Commission issued a statement clarifying that the deficiencies questioned in the investigation by the British Medical Journal did not jeopardize the vaccine's safety, effectiveness, and quality and that it was safe to use.
Earlier, The Exposé claimed that European data confirms that COVID-19 vaccines are killing European children. Logically debunked the claim and proved it as false.
The Verdict
EuroMOMO data cited in the article in question doesn't prove that thousands of people are dying in Europe because of the COVID-19 vaccine. Excess mortality data has been misreported as vaccine-caused deaths. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.