COVID-19 vaccine
© Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty ImagesA man is given a COVID-19 vaccine at La Colaborativa in Chelsea, Mass., on Feb. 16, 2021.
'Annual All-Cause Mortality Rate in Germany and Japan (2005 to 2022) with Focus on the COVID-19 Pandemic: Hypothesis and Trend Analyses' is a letter in the journal Medicine and Clinical Science by Hagen Scherb and Keiji Hayashi, comparing mortality trends across these two "highly industrialised countries, which have large and ageing populations in common". It's the first piece I know of to look closely at pandemic-era mortality trends in Japan - a country which provides a useful control on many fronts, because it took a relatively relaxed approach to non-pharmaceutical interventions, like many other Asian jurisdictions never saw much Covid mortality, and yet since autumn 2021 has a substantially higher vaccination rate than Germany.

This will shock you, but the results don't look great for the vaccines.

First, the less interesting part of their analysis, namely death trends in Germany:
covid vaccine death
The first year of the pandemic coincided with slightly elevated mortality firmly within the bounds of prior trends, while the years of mass vaccination, 2021 and 2022, saw an anomalous 48,617 and 66,528 excess deaths respectively. This is roughly equal to the official Covid death tally for these years, but the analysis of Kuhbandner and Reitzner (recently published in Cureus) indicates that the virus cannot explain nearly all of them. Both the timing and the age-stratified data strongly suggest that a substantial number must be related to vaccination.

Particular interest thus attaches to Japan as a comparison case:
covid vaccine death Japan
Whereas 2020 saw slightly above-trend mortality in Germany, it was a year of below-average deaths in Japan. 2021 was elevated but within-trend, while 2022 saw substantial excess mortality, well in excess of the deaths caused by the natural disasters of 2011. Nor can Covid explain these deaths; official Japanese virus mortality for 2022, which we know is substantially overstated in the Omicron era, amounts to only 38,870 deaths, a mere 32% of the excess.

What's very interesting about the pandemic is its highly variable influence on all-cause mortality across the globe, and how this contrasts with the vaccines, which seem to coincide with marked upward trends almost everywhere they were widely administered.

The authors observe that "the official fear-mongering forecasts... in 2020 from COVID-19 in high income countries did not come true, neither in Japan nor in Germany", but note that:
[I]t should be investigated to what extent the about 5-10% highly significantly increased mortalities in Germany and Japan in 2021 and 2022 might be due to the pandemic countermeasures, including the vaccinations with their possibly underestimated immediate or protracted side effects. ... From this point of view, it seems possible that a high vaccination rate has contributed to an increased all-cause mortality in some countries...
Elke Bodderas, who draws attention to this analysis in Welt, notes the profound official incuriosity surrounding these numbers:
What is the RKI [the German CDC] doing now? It's busy with many other things. It's very interested in "an investigation of the promotion of physical activity in childcare centres, schools and sport associations - in light of pandemic restrictions." In other areas too it shows great industry. Interesting news will certainly come from its telephone survey "on foodborne illness", or its general study on "health in Germany today" ...

Is there anyone in the RKI who worries that German intensive care units suddenly reported a 76% increase in embolic strokes in December, as hospital data of the billing portal Inek show? Or why Japan, which [Christian] Drosten praised as an "exemplary" country, saw such an outrageously high excess mortality in 2022 - more than twice as much as in the tsunami year of 2011?
No, not a single person anywhere in officialdom has demonstrated the slightest interest in these questions.

The entire success of our genius one-cool-trick pandemic measures exists in a hypothetical world. It is never anything we can see. Deaths in Germany were totally on-trend in 2020, but we're asked to believe they would've been catastrophic without lockdowns. They increased substantially with the advent of mass vaccination beginning precisely April 2021, but we're asked to believe even more would've died without the vaccines.

Complicit health authorities control a great many statistics, and they'll keep truly damning numbers under lock and key as long as they can. In the meantime, the most powerful proof that the vaccination campaign was anything but a success will remain the all-cause mortality reports, which is one of the few statistics that they can't hide. The total lack of interest in explaining these strange numbers speaks volumes.