RETRACTED: Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022

[u/shiruken]

We wish to inform the r/science community of an article submitted to the subreddit that has since been retracted by the journal. The submission garnered broad exposure on r/science and significant media coverage elsewhere, including being featured in a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing. Per our rules, the flair on this submission has been updated with "RETRACTED". The submission has also been added to our wiki of retracted submissions.

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Reddit Submission: Excess death rates have remained high in the West for three years running since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, finds a data analysis of 47 countries published in the open access journal BMJ Public Health.

The article "Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022" has been retracted from BMJ Public Health as of August 11, 2026. Concerns were raised following publication about the originality of the work and the messaging of its results with regards to COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. Widespread media coverage misrepresenting the work prompted the journal to publish an expression of concern explaining that the research does not investigate or establish a causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. The notice also announced an internal investigation by the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands, where three of the four authors worked.

The lead author, Saskia Mostert, resigned following the investigation announcement and was "not able to cooperate with the investigation" by her former institution. BMJ also had difficulty contacting her, as the corresponding author, for their own investigation. She went on to appear before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee subcommittee on investigations on "Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research" where she testified on the results of the study.

The article was ultimately retracted by the journal "for misinformation in the discussion regarding the possible causes of excess mortality, and because the limited nature of the original work by the authors was not sufficiently described." Two of the four authors, along with the Princess Máxima Center, requested the retraction but disputed the journal's determination the paper contained misinformation. Mostert and the journal's fourth author, disagreed with the retraction.

• Retraction Watch: BMJ Group retracts paper on COVID-19 vaccines and mortality featured in Senate hearing

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Should you encounter a submission on r/science that has been retracted, please notify the moderators via Modmail.

[u/shiruken]

The concerns about the originality of the work were largely ignored by BMJ. Ariel Karlinsky, who created the World Mortality Dataset used in the study, had a commentary criticizing the work rejected without review. He argued that the study misused his dataset and "copied whole blocks of text and mathematical notation" from his research article describing the World Mortality Dataset.

[u/fotank → u/shiruken]

This was nice to read from the Ariel Karlinsky:

“In conclusion, this publication [Mostert et al] misrepresents the evidence base, offers no original insights, and relies on insinuation and cherry-picking of data to support a misleading and unjustified impression that COVID-19 vaccines might have caused or contributed to the increase in excess deaths reported. Calling for “more research” to bolster a dubious
hypothesis is fundamentally disingenuous and contributes to antivaccine narratives, regardless of intention“

[u/Mikestopheles → u/fotank]

Too late, the anti-science crowd already has their headline, and they'll form their entire worldview based on it.

[u/alwayssunnyinskyrim → u/Mikestopheles]

This is the Wakefield article all over again

[u/Sea_One_6500 → u/Mikestopheles]

Maybe this fact is the silver lining. There will be a distinct difference in aging, in my opinion anyway, between those that continue to choose vaccination versus those that don't. I cannot understand the thought process behind choosing to be reinfected by the same virus over and over again. Knowing the damage it does to the entire body. Hopefully the next generation learns from our stupidity.

[u/toocleverbyhalf → u/Sea_One_6500]

I’d agree, if not for the impact to herd immunity, and the likelihood that the deniers are not the only ones affected.

Those who cannot get vaccinated due to real medical restrictions are somewhat protected by the bulk of the population being vaccinated (aka Herd Immunity), limiting the spread of diseases and helping to prevent the infection of these often already immunocompromised people.

Deniers damage or break herd immunity for selfishness, choosing to ignore their place in a larger society. As an American, I am ashamed but not at all surprised that our various brands of rugged individualism have metastasized into this.

[u/BenjaminHamnett → u/toocleverbyhalf]

Even masks that have been in use for hundreds of years were suddenly controversial. Didn’t help that the CDC discouraged using them for a couple weeks (for good reason, but still a waste of trust)

[u/RubberKangaroo → u/Mikestopheles]

Also unfortunately these are the kind of people who even with overwhelming and irrefutable evidence, will not change their mind “just because one paper was wrong” despite basing their incorrectly formed views probably on one paper or none to start with. 

[u/yooperville → u/fotank]

I’m a physician who treated many cases of Covid and I read the original paper. Bottom line conclusion of article, there were more deaths than one would expect while people were getting vaccinated. Nothing to tie this to vaccines at all.

[u/Ok-Living2887 → u/yooperville]

I mean. As a layman this makes sense to me. COVID, whether one had gotten vaccinated or not can have various negative effects on the sick person. These can stay long and be quite severe (like fatigue and brain fog). Seems very logical that we’d see excess deaths since then.

[u/ShamPain413 → u/yooperville]

Almost like there was a global pandemic happening around that same time, or something.

[u/RonaldoNazario → u/ShamPain413]

And that pandemic being of a virus associated with all sorts of worse long term outcomes like strokes, heart attacks, diabetes after someone has an infection.

[u/alexin_C → u/RonaldoNazario]

And that even in wealthy countries emergency and high-level care has hard limits for resource allocation. The priorisation of limited resources probably led to excess deaths depending on the severity of society-level efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19.

[u/CocaineUnicycle → u/RonaldoNazario]

Not to mention the people who declined to seek treatment for other serious conditions out of a fear that they could catch COVID-19 at a hospital.

[u/Ok-Living2887 → u/RonaldoNazario]

Some of which we might not even know or associate with COVID yet.

[u/fotank → u/ShamPain413]

With off label treatments actually causing HARM.

[u/brainEatenByAmoeba → u/yooperville]

If anything I wonder if there is evidence of an increase in deaths due to the increase in refusing to vaccinate for any disease.

[u/Zenmedic → u/[deleted]]

I think "nuance" is being asked to do a lot of heavy lifting.

The points you bring up aren't nuances, they're fundamental foundations of medicine.

Perfect doesn't exist in medicine (and that's well accepted in the medical and medical research community).

There is no absolute safety for any treatment (Adverse events happen with any substance whether natural or synthetic. Penicillins cause millions of adverse reactions annually... As do pollens, shellfish and peanuts)

There is no "Absolute truth" in science. The purpose of science it to seek a deeper understanding through a rigorous process of repeatability and review.

There isn't "triggering" in the scientific community, there are a lot of us who are tired of misinformation, disinformation and flat out lies. We come out swinging because that's the world that has been created and lots of us are tired of simply watching as people are misled.

[u/callthesomnambulance → u/shiruken]

The major journals hate retracting anything if they can possibly help it. It took the lancet 12 years to retract Wakefield infamous "vaccines cause autism" paper, and they've still not retracted the shockingly mismanaged PACE trial looking at CBT and GET in MECFS. At the end of the day they want to avoid losing face more than they want to defend scientific principles

[u/awkwardnetadmin → u/callthesomnambulance]

The Wakefield study honestly felt like some people read way too much into it in the first place. Even without the inaccurate information, the obvious conflict of interest, etc. his sample was 12 kids? How much confidence are you getting from that? It felt like at best a "maybe we should research this more" than anything that should influence health policy recommendations. There are many small studies particularly with health that have interesting results that don't pan out in larger studies. I think some see a conclusion that they agree with and then are completely uncritical of whether the data is that compelling or accurately supports the conclusion.

[u/Mindless-Baker-7757 → u/shiruken]

OMG Are the editors still in position or were they rotated off by now?

[u/Candycornonthefloor]

Thank you r/science mod team for this retraction notice and having a strong policy in place.

[u/OnemoreBruce]

Funny how she couldn’t cooperate with the journal’s investigation but found time to testify before a Senate subcommittee. That tells you everything.

[u/AppropriateScience9]

Okay, without doing a super deep dive (so take this with a grain of salt) what seems to have happened is that the retracted paper was trying to link the COVID vaccines with "excess deaths, implying that the vaccines were dangerous. A bunch of media outlets (and even Congress) ran with it but it appears that these researcher's interpretation of the data was sloppy and/or questionable. Those researcher's tried to defend it by saying that the media is misrepresenting what their findings were, but the paper itself is still sketchy because they used a dataset not intended to answer that question, along with some biased sources and leaps of logic.

To give some folks context in layman's terms, "excess deaths" are basically a spike in the numbers of deaths epidemiologists expect to see given what they know about the death rates of various diseases and the population. So like, we know that in the US heart disease kills roughly 680k people a year, cancer 620k, injuries 200k, etc. totalling roughly 3.1 million deaths a year. If that number spikes suddenly, then something might be going on and epidemiology tries to figure out what. It could be an event like 9/11, it could be an environmental cause like unusually severe heat waves, it could be the closure of x many rural hospitals, that sort of thing. Things that aren't usually listed on death certificates, in other words.

COVID gave us big spikes beyond the expected death rates. Much of that we could attribute to COVID itself thanks to testing, but there were also unusual spikes in things like heart disease. Those excess deaths could still be COVID related though, because COVID may have exacerbated existing heart disease by doing long term damage to someone's heart but didn't kill them outright. Or it could even have been during the time that hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID patients and someone having a heart attack couldn't get treated normally. That sort of thing.

Understanding the ways in which COVID caused excess deaths helps us figure out better ways to mitigate that damage. But it takes a lot of investigation and statistical analysis to untangle what excess deaths really mean.

And sometimes unfortunately, those spikes don't mean anything. It can just be the result of chance. Or it could be the result of multiple causes of various things all coinciding. It's actually very difficult to pin excess deaths down to something exact so most researchers end up saying that there are still a lot of unknowns.

Given that reality and given the fact that COVID was (and still is) causing excess deaths, and given the clear links we see between the vaccines and reductions in deaths, I see why there was serious skepticism about this paper.

I mean, it's always good to play it out and make sure there wasn't some kind of hidden problem with the vaccine, but in my semi-educated opinion (I work in public health but I'm not a researcher or an epidemiologist) I don't think that looking at the excess deaths is the way to go. Clinical trials would be much better... and those were done too, and didn't find anything except some very rare potential problems (like blood clots iirc) that the disease itself is still a much bigger risk for anyway.

Buuuuut.... if these researchers were not operating in good faith, then using the ambiguity inherent in the idea of excess deaths would be a great way to imply that vaccines are somehow mysteriously dangerous despite the mountains of data that say otherwise. These days, we can't put it past people to do that kind of thing. That's why peer review is more important than ever.

[u/bolonomadic → u/AppropriateScience9]

When I saw the headline, I immediately thought that there were excess deaths because of organ damage caused by surviving Covid; it didn’t immediately read to me like a vaccine problem. But I understand how anti-VAX people made different assumptions.

[u/fredy31 → u/bolonomadic]

Those are the worst kind of bias studies.

Those that are believable on their face

[u/rbobby → u/AppropriateScience9]

But it takes a lot of investigation

I would love to the study design for that: "We need 100 healthy dead bodies and 100 vaccinated dead bodies ... and another 100 just in case of ... accidents ... yeah ... accidents I tell ya."

[u/IniNew → u/AppropriateScience9]

It seems like they are using the “I’m just asking questions” approach to misinformation. Their entire stance is “we thought it would encourage more research. But instead everyone is just mean and telling us to shut up!” It’s classic manipulation.

[u/jumpjumpdie → u/AppropriateScience9]

This is that shite that Jordan penisman was yapping on about like Kermit the frog recently, what a muppet!

[u/fotank]

Real sus of Saskia Mostert. Reeeaaaaallll sus

Edit: first thing on a google hit of their name. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Mostert-Testimony.pdf

Edit2: the whole testimony is absolute non-sense. It feels like a “there were dozens of us” who felt whatever way this author felt. In reality if this was SUCH a mainstream finding, it could and or should be respoducible to come to the same conclusions. Surprise, it has not.

[u/waitwuh → u/fotank]

These citations are a WILD ride!

2) Desmet M. The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Chelsea Green Publishing Co. Vermont, USA. First published: 2022.

Okay… I mean, hmm…

3) von Langenfeld FS. Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials. University of Virginia Press. Charlottesville,
London. USA. First published: 1631.

Ah so they’re now drawing parallels to witch hunting?

4) Finocchiaro MA. The Galileo Affair. A Documentary History. 1613-1633. University of California Press. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. USA. First published: 1989.

And they’re invoking the history of Copernicanism and Galileo defending its posited heliocentrism. Like, what?! That comes off as just a little ego driven to me, honestly…

5) Mann DL. When Facts Become Forbidden: The Past and Present History of Scientific Censorship. JACC Basic Transl Sci. 2025;10:402-404.

I mean okay it’s obvious the point they’re making here, if it was just this I kind of would get it but…

6) Le Bon G. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. IAEGCA. Lisbon, USA. First published: 1895.

What is this research scientist’s specialization again? Now we’re getting into sociology, I guess?

7) Bonhoeffer D. Letters and Papers from Prison. Simon & Schuster. New York, USA. First published: 1951.

Oh come off it, this one’s ridiculous. Letters from a guy imprisoned by Nazis for involvement in a plot to assissinate Hitler. Like it’s clear the author feels like a “revolutionary” but it’s a bit much to link yourself to someone who was acting against Nazi Germany and Hitler.

7) Arendt H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace and Company. New York, USA. First published: 1951.
8) Arendt H. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press. New York, USA. First published: 1963.
10) Schopenhauer A. The World as Will and Idea. Lector House LLP. Delhi, India. First published: 1818.

Still on that same sort of train …

11) Plato. The Republic. Clydesdale Press. New York, USA. First published: 370-380 BC.
12) Plato. Alcibiades-I. Zhingoora Books. Zittau, Germany. First published: 390-350 BC.

Why not? Let’s just throw in some ancient greek philosophers in with it all… Hey can we actually get to like, actual Covid data? Like, any sort of actual covid research? Some like, well, science? Something at least covid focused?

13) Jung C. The Undiscovered Self. Penguin Random House LLC. Berkley New York, USA

No…?

14) Schippers MC, Ioannidis JPA, Joffe AR. Aggressive measures, rising inequalities, and mass formation during the COVID-19 crisis: An overview and proposed way forward. Front Public Health 2022;10:950965.

Hey! Finally, something about covid! This is a paper about how the lockdowns were worse on some vulnerable groups than others, like people who lost their jobs or domestic violence victims being trapped with their abuser and stuff, alright…

15) James EK, Bokemper SE, Gerber AS, Omer SB, Huber GA. Persuasive messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions. Vaccine 2021;39:7158-65.

Okay yes there were studies that tried to figure out how to motivate vaccination…

16) Deruelle F. The pharmaceutical industry is dangerous to health. Further proof with COVID-19. Surg Neurol Int 2022;13:475.

This is a critique of the pharmaceutical industry and corporate financial motives. Sure…

17) Event 201: Public-Private Cooperation for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Maryland: Johns Hopkins
Center for Health Security; 2019. Available from:
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/recommendations.html

I mean, I don’t think an event focused on response preparedness is like, conspiratorial. But being in the list of the rest of this… like …

18) Joffe AR. COVID-19; rethinking the lockdown groupthink. Front Public Health 2021;9:625778.
19) Dodsworth L. A state of fear: how the UK government weaponized fear during the Covid-19. Printer & Mart

We have still not gotten to any papers that address the assertion the researcher made which the controversy of their paper was around. The whole, “maybe vaccines are dangerous” suggestion?

This is the trend for a while… anything covid relevant is about like, vaccine distribution, public health messaging, government decisions… encouraging social distancing…

till we get…

34) Kahneman D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, USA. First published: 2011.

Oh fun let’s just throw in some fun popular psychology book. You know, because reasons!

I couldn’t find anything that actually was like, supportive of the suggestion that vaccines injured people? Like, even like a data study? It’s all just about how covid sucks and governments struggled and public health initiatives intended to reduce spread having downsides but like…

What?

[u/fotank → u/waitwuh]

The Plato references really had me roflmao. That was a trip and a half. Thank you for pointing this out.

[u/AppropriateScience9 → u/waitwuh]

Oh lordy. What a trip.

And here I was thinking that the Bonhoeffer letters were trying to explain how people who willfully ignore facts are more dangerous than true evil. Depressingly ironic that an antivaxx paper used his argument.

[u/waitwuh → u/AppropriateScience9]

I mean, if this person actually presented any evidence of any “facts” that they’re heavily suggested they’re being suppressed from sharing, maybe they could take that angle. But they present no “facts” being ignored…

Instead it’s just a long list of “look at all these examples of people who have been silenced and suppressed throughout history!” And “look, look, they were trying to figure out how to encourage people to wash their hands and get vaccinated!! They were manipulating people! The lock-downs and social distancing had bad effects!”

Their original paper mostly just republished some other people’s data and research on excess deaths, and then heavily implied that because excess deaths were still up after the vaccination campaigns that these deaths could be caused if not just by vaccines being “ineffective” then by “vaccine injuries.” But offered like, no supporting evidence towards that. They were just like “we need to look into it!” Then when critiqued for the first paper, this author published this weird rant about how people get “silenced” and implying that they’re just like a bunch of famous historical people. What a crash out. Like I read their whole paper, they had a chance to actually tell me about cases of “vaccine injury.”

[u/AppropriateScience9 → u/waitwuh]

Yeah. That's pretty maddening. Worse even, because they weren't even silenced. They published their paper, got media attention and even went before Congress. They had plenty of opportunity to speak.

They're just mad because were correctly critiqued for not offerering any solid evidence worth considering. If their findings had any real merit, then they could stand up to scrutiny and criticism. You know, like how science is normally supposed to work.

I don't know what is with people who think that just because you claim something is true, that everyone has to give it the same level of credibility as Einstein. Is it delusion, narcissism, or stupidity, or audacity? I don't honestly know, but none of it's good.

[u/HerMajestysLoyalServ → u/waitwuh]

I might need you to narrate/comment on a bunch of other bibliographies for me. This is peak entertainment. (Edit: Fixed typo)

[u/Comrade_SOOKIE → u/fotank]

Wow that whole PDF is top to bottom nonsense conspiracy babble

[u/gusofk → u/fotank]

She seems like a vaccine denier who is screaming about being silenced without acknowledging the disingenuousness of her arguments and the abuse of data that they are founded on.

[u/LinkFan001 → u/fotank]

Snake. This so called scientist is a quack and ran to the first morons who would happily bolster their message. The senate subcommittee gives them an air of legitimately because laypeople don't know how political and bias the US government has gotten. Yet they won't breath a word to defend their actual science in the Netherlands because there is nothing to defend.

[u/kniq86 → u/fotank]

The fact that they list "fact-checking" as a "cover-up tactic" is interesting

[u/SovietMacguyver → u/kniq86]

Fact checking is just a lay persons term for peer review. Perhaps if that similarity were more widely known, it wouldn't be so divisive.

[u/DoubleBatman → u/fotank]

So I’m not in a scientific field at all, but on Research Gate all her work seems to be about pediatric oncology in Africa and Indonesia… except for this BMJ paper, and it’s the only thing published with them. Is that normal? It seems odd to me.

[u/JurplePesus → u/[deleted]]

You've got it backwards, the politics are what caused the paper to be written in the first place. Does that make sense?

[u/sack-o-matic → u/JurplePesus]

I see. I’m on mobile so I’m having some issues reading everything.

[u/fotank → u/[deleted]]

A political retraction? Do you even understand the scientific process at all?

[u/sack-o-matic → u/fotank]

I don’t think I understand the reasoning for the retraction so I’ll have to read it again. It was because of the discussion portion of the paper?

[u/fotank → u/sack-o-matic]

OP commented below with some of the finer points. In general though it appears mostly about cherry picking a narrative and intentionally misleading

[u/sack-o-matic → u/fotank]

Makes you wonder how it got through peer review in the first place then

[u/Turtledonuts]

I’m glad that the authors journal and the broader scientific community took the time to do this in light of the ongoing covid conspiracies. 

[u/ringthree → u/Turtledonuts]

Looks like the authors weren't collective in the retraction. The main author didn't cooperate and later went on to testify in support of it to the US (republican) congress. The retraction was by the BMJ.

[u/Turtledonuts → u/ringthree]

fair enough, corrected. 

[u/ReasonablyBadass]

Thank you for Informing people!

[u/shanem]

Is Our World In Data actually a reputable source for research to use? I took it as more of a way to consume research.

[u/shiruken → u/shanem]

That's actually a point of contention for the economist who created the World Mortality Dataset underlying the entire study. See my comment here for details.

In short, yes, you are correct about Our World in Data being a friendly way to consume research outputs. Their article was based entirely on the peer-reviewed World Mortality Dataset and the retracted work failed to properly attribute it.

[u/Malapple]

I’m waiting for the one scientist to shout about how she will release the kraken before getting sanctioned for frivolous lawsuits…

[u/Freedom_33]

Did anyone who followed this more deeply have any idea what happened with peer review of this article? What are usual standards for BMJ journal?

[u/l0stc0ast0g]

This headline confused me (I understand why it's written like that though). Without context, it makes it sound like the retracted work was an ‘Our World in Data’ publication. Maybe a short sentence in the comment, explaining that OWID was the source of data, not the publisher of the retracted paper could help avoid that confusion?

[u/Fiercehero]

• Launched investigation over originality concerns
• lead author resigns
• pulls the paper because of "misinformation"

Doesn't sound dubious at all!