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Evidence shows that COVID-19 vaccines don’t increase the risk of death, contrary to claim by financier Edward Dowd - Science Feedback
Full Claim
“We’ve created a new term called sudden adult death syndrome that just kind of mysteriously came into being in 2021”; “His thesis points at the Covid Vaxxines as the causal factor” of excess deaths
Review
In a video published on 4 January 2023, businessman and podcaster Aubrey Marcus interviewed Edward Dowd, a former investment portfolio manager at BlackRock, regarding his book “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022”. The website of the book’s publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, shows that the book discusses Dowd’s belief that excess deaths in 2021 and 2022 were caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Skyhorse Publishing has been noted for publishing content from individuals opposing vaccines and conspiracy theorists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Judy Mikovits.
During the interview, Dowd claimed that “global governments and health authorities [are not] talking about it”, that “there’s a cover-up”, which he suggested was due to the vaccines’ side effects. He also claimed that sudden adult death syndrome had been created “mysteriously” in 2021, and that it was being used to “whitewash this and make it normal”, presumably referring to the excess deaths.
Dowd’s website “They Lied, People Died”, which promotes the book, lays out the basis for his claim in more detail. This rests chiefly on the observation of a spike in excess mortality in young people aged 25 to 44 in the U.S. during 2021 and 2022, which according to Dowd, followed vaccine mandates and boosters. He also claimed that the excess deaths weren’t explained by COVID-19 because “In 2021, Covid strains were already mutating and becoming less virulent”.
This review examines the evidence presented by Dowd and shows that his claim isn’t founded on sufficient evidence. In fact, the existing evidence, including COVID-19 cases, deaths, and vaccination status, shows that COVID-19 vaccines aren’t associated with a greater risk of mortality.
Excess deaths are likely due to COVID-19 directly or indirectly; unvaccinated people have a greater mortality rate than vaccinated people
If we juxtapose a graph of COVID-19 deaths alongside Dowd’s own graph attributing spikes in excess deaths in people aged 25 to 44 to vaccine mandates and boosters (found on his website), we can see that spikes in excess deaths largely mirror spikes in COVID-19 deaths, a sequel of the Delta and Omicron waves seen in 2021 and 2022 (see Figure 1 below). This strongly suggests that the spike in excess deaths were the result of COVID-19.
Figure 1. Daily COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. (top); source: Our World in Data. Graph showing excess deaths in the U.S. (bottom), source: Dowd’s website. |
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