By Gigi Foster, Paul Frijters, and Michael Baker at Brownstone dot org.

All Brownstone readers know that the Covid vaccines should never have been mandatory and should never have been prescribed to children or pregnant women, groups for which they were not tested. All of us have been alarmed to see stories of surprisingly many sudden heart failures, turbo cancers, and failed pregnancies in the days and months following the rollout of these shots.

How bad can it be? What is the worst estimate of the impact of the Covid vaccines on the count of living humans for which there is both some degree of empirical evidence and biological plausibility? Let us look into the heart of darkness and consider the worst.

Domain 1: Worldwide Excess Deaths

The principal source for global mortality data is the United Nations World Population Prospects, which at the time of writing had not been updated with a definitive number for 2024. We therefore only use data through 2023. Below we plot the total number of deaths in the world since 1950, and add to that a projection of the 10-year trend before 2020 through to 2023 (shown in the graph below as a red line).

The numbers reveal that yearly death counts change fairly smoothly over time, except when humans do something stupid like the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962, which corresponds to the previous big spike in world deaths evident on the graph and which has been estimated to have cost the lives of around 45 million people.

The (always positive) differences between actual deaths and expected deaths for each of the four years from 2020 to 2023 are depicted in the following graph.

The rounded total of excess deaths - relative to what would have been expected based on the prior 10-year trend - for these four years is 19.4 million people.

Of course, the excess in 2020 cannot be due to the Covid vaccines, so the 4.8 million excess deaths in 2020 would have to be attributed to a combination of the virus itself plus the lockdowns and related policy responses. The cumulative excess after 2020 of 14.6 million deaths could potentially, in the worst-case scenario (from the perspective of the vaccine manufacturers and pushers), be ascribed entirely to the vaccines.

However, we can plausibly assume that if it was the virus and lockdowns that collectively killed 4.8 million extra people in 2020, then at least 75% of them were frail and elderly people who would have died anyway, Covid or no Covid, in the years immediately following (in the US, 75% of deaths from Covid occurred in people aged 65 and over, and 93% were aged 50 and over).

If these deaths were simply brought forward by the virus and the lockdowns, then about 3.6 million people were not around to die who otherwise would have in the ensuing few years. In other words, we would expect a total of 3.6 million fewer deaths relative to the ten-year trend as our baseline counterfactual death count for the few years following 2020.

Applying this adjusted counterfactual by adding in these 3.6 million 'missing negative excess deaths' yields an excess death total that could plausibly be due to the vaccines of 18.2 million.

To our eyes, this is the maximum possible number of excess deaths that can be defended on the basis of these data as due to the vaccines, given that there was no clear reason other than the one explained above to expect the 10-year death-count trend projected from 2019 to overestimate deaths in the following years.

This estimate of 18.2 million lines up reasonably well with the hotly contested number of 17 million Covid vaccine deaths claimed by Denis Rancourt and coauthors in a 2023 study. There have been claims of up to 31 million deaths, but they are not likely if one believes the world death numbers published by the UN.

Could things be even worse than these statistics suggest, due to data fiddling? Authorities may well have intentionally hidden deaths from view in some regions, but this is difficult to imagine in rich countries with well...