FULL CLAIM: Everyone who received at least one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine would "die within three to five years."
REVIEW
A Facebook post from January 2025 featured immunologist Dolores Cahill predicting mass casualties of people who received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. It received more than 319,000 views.
The post is an excerpt from Pandamned, a 2022 film by Dutch filmmaker Marijn Poels. In the clip, Poels interviewed Cahill, who claimed that everyone who received at least one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine would “die within three to five years.”
Cahill has repeatedly made false allegations about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines, as we and others have documented on multiple occasions. Notably, in December 2020, she predicted that older adults who received COVID-19 vaccinations would die within six months due to complications—a claim that did not materialize.
Her prediction in Pandamned is, at the very least, highly implausible based on available mortality data, as we’ll show below.
Cahill asserted that everyone who received at least one vaccine dose would die. This means that proving her wrong requires only a single counterexample—a country where this outcome didn’t occur.
We’ll use the U.S. to illustrate this given the availability of the country’s comprehensive vaccination and mortality data.
To start, we retrieved the number of individuals who received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose from data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and processed by Our World in Data. We then calculated the number of people who received at least one vaccine dose each month from December 2020 to December 2021.
It’s worth noting that while some Americans received adenoviral vector vaccines (manufactured by Johnson & Johnson), the vast majority were vaccinated with mRNA vaccines (manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna). Therefore, for the purposes of this analysis, the total number of vaccinated individuals serves as a reasonable estimate of the number of mRNA vaccine recipients.
According to Cahill’s timeline, each monthly group of vaccinated individuals would begin dying three to five years later. For example, those vaccinated in mid-December 2020 would begin dying in mid-December 2023, with all of that group expected to be dead by mid-December 2025.
A population could theoretically die off in many ways from vaccines—instant mass casualties, a gradual increase over time, or any other distribution. However, the simplest assumption is a constant mortality rate over the 24-month period between three and five years after vaccination.
Thus, if Cahill’s claim were true, we would expect each month’s first-dose recipients to contribute to a steady increase in the total number of deaths, with one-twenty-fourth of each group dying per month, starting after three years post-vaccination.
For example, in December 2020, 5,533,467 people received their first vaccine dose. If Cahill’s prediction were correct, one twenty-fourth of them (230,561 people) would have died in December 2023. Another 230,561 would have died in January 2024. This trend would continue until November 2025, at which point all five million plus people would be dead.
It’s important to note that this monthly death toll would increase over time as more vaccinated cohorts reached the three-year mark. For instance, January 2024 would not only see deaths from those vaccinated in December 2020 but also from those vaccinated in January 2021. Figure 1 illustrates these hypothetical additional deaths per month due to vaccine-induced mortality, based on Cahill’s claim.
Figure 1 – Hypothetical monthly deaths in the U.S. if the claim were accurate. The calculations are based on the monthly number of newly vaccinated individuals. We assumed that each cohort of vaccinated people would experience deaths at a constant rate over a 24-month period, starting three years after vaccination. As a result, each cohort would contribute one-twenty-fourth of its total size to the monthly death count during this timeframe. Data source: Our World in Data. Retrieved on 3 February 2025
As we can see, the overall monthly mortality in the U.S. would increase between December 2023 and July 2024. This figure would reach roughly five million deaths in March 2024, up to about eight million by July 2024.
However, when we look at the actual mortality data in the U.S. provided by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics from January 2023 onwards, we find that the mortality is between approximately 250,000 and 300,000 deaths per month (Figure 2).
Figure 2 – This figure shows the actual number of deaths per month in the U.S. from January 2023 to June 2024. The red section of the curve highlights the period when a significant increase in deaths would have occurred if the claim about vaccine-related mass casualties were true. However, this is not what is observed, as shown in the graph. Data source: CDC. Retrieved on 3 February 2025
Thus, existing mortality data doesn’t support Cahill’s claim. Mortality in the U.S. has been steady over time from January 2023 onwards, and hasn’t exceeded 300,000 deaths per month. These figures are far from the millions of monthly deaths that Cahill’s prediction would entail.
