Are excess post-COVID deaths collateral damage from public-health overkill?

A group of Dutch medical researchers has ignited a firestorm by calling for an investigation of the deaths caused by vaccine mandates and lockdowns imposed on the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

What’s wrong with that?

Everything, if you’re part of the global public health mafia and want to avoid questions about the mistakes you made and the lies you told.

We all saw Anthony Fauci squirming last week when he was forced to admit to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee that social-distancing rules — like the six-foot rule on which the lockdowns were based — were pulled out of thin air.

The Dutch researchers want answers.

They insist “every death needs to be acknowledged and accounted for,” including deaths caused by policy mistakes — the collateral damage from heavy-handed public health policies.

One conclusion is already crystal clear: Don’t entrust your life or health to the government.

The Dutch researchers examined data from 47 western countries, including the United States, and found that many months after the lockdowns began and vaccines were rolled out, death rates stayed higher than in pre-pandemic years. 

The lockdowns and vaccines weren’t stopping the virus, it turns out, but were apparently causing other deaths — a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Zeroing in on the United States, they cited double-digit increases in alcohol-caused fatalities and drug-overdose fatalities.  

A separate pair of researchers, Rob Arnott and University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan, reported the same.

During the pandemic, they found, US deaths from alcoholism, drug addiction, car accidents, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes soared, exceeding by 100,000 a year what would ordinarily occur. 

They pinned those “excess deaths” on government COVID-19 policies that drove people to addiction, overeating and other acts of despair.   

Even more tragically, those deaths of despair affected younger people, so each death meant many more years of life lost than when an elderly person died of COVID-19.

Young and middle-aged adults succumbed to alcoholism or drug addiction as they were laid off or watched their businesses and savings disappear because of the lockdowns. 

What’s worse, even when it became obvious lockdowns were failing, government health officials stayed their deadly course.

They put their egos over the public’s welfare.

The Dutch researchers’ stunning data showed that for children the virus posed a minuscule 0.0003% risk of death, probably less risk than crossing the street to get to the playground. 

Doctors like the Hoover Institution’s Scott Atlas urged policymakers to target the high-risk elderly, rather than to lock down the low-risk young — only to be demonized for questioning the Centers for Disease Control orthodoxy.

Had the public-health-industrial complex listened, children would have been in school learning, instead of home suffering learning losses.

Even now, as Dr. Joel Zinberg points out, children age 5 to 17 account for less than one-tenth of 1% of COVID deaths, but officials are still recommending vaccines for all schoolchildren.

Crazy.

The Dutch researchers touched off furious pushback with their suggestion that more investigation is needed into whether the vaccines themselves caused some pandemic-era and post-pandemic deaths.

In all likelihood, the vaccine is helpful for most adults, especially the elderly. But there are exceptions. 

Research in the journal Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics showed that men can incur a higher risk of cardiac-related deaths after taking the mRNA vaccines.

In hospital settings, common fatal conditions such as ischemic stroke and acute coronary syndrome might not be readily identified and reported as possibly vaccine-caused.

The Dutch researchers didn’t analyze any causal connection between vaccines and higher deaths.

But just suggesting further research into that issue provoked a nasty backlash.

That’s the public-health-industrial complex closing ranks.

No surprise. In August 2023, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association published an attack smearing 52 physicians for disseminating “misinformation”: The offending scientists disagreed with the CDC, which now has been proven wrong on almost every pandemic issue.

The global public-health establishment, including many journal editors and government advisers — the Anthony Faucis and Deborah Birxes of the world — don’t want us to look back.

Kudos to the Dutch researchers for raising questions and challenging public health orthodoxy. That is what scientists are supposed to do, the status quo be damned.

With bird flu and other threats looming, we need to demand the truth about what saved lives — and what killed.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.

Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey