In this episode of my interview with John Beaudoin, we look at the CDC’s mortality data from 2018 to 2023 to find out how many people died in 2020, the first Covid year and the last Covid vaccine free year, and compare those deaths with the ones in 2021.
According to US official mortality data, the largest increase in death happened between 2019 and 2020: All-cause mortality increased by almost 19%, from ~2,855,000 to ~3,384,000 deaths.
That’s approximately half a million excess deaths in 2020:
As those who watched my recent interview with Ken McCarthy know, almost none of these deaths were caused by Covid but by deadly hospital treatment protocols that Covid patients were subjected to. These protocols were issued as guidelines by the NIH and heavily incentivized by the federal health agencies with lavish reimbursements and extravagant bonus payments.
The frontline nurses that Ken interviewed for his book ‘What the Nurses Saw’ told him that they didn’t see a single patient die of Covid.
Beaudoin told me: “They killed a lot of people in the hospitals using the COVID treatment protocol and they called it COVID… in 2020, there was no vaccine. What were they killed by? it was mostly possible homicide, refusal to treat properly.”
Instead of treating Covid patients with steroids, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics, patients were given Remdesivir. And they were intubated. Almost none of them woke up again.
What happened to all-cause mortality in 2021, the year in which ~70% of the U.S. population received the toxic mRNA Covid shots?
In 2021, U.S. mortality data show only a slight increase of 2.4% over the 2020 deaths.
But, as Beaudoin points out during our interview, 2020 with its half a million excess deaths, is a complete outlier. Compared to the last pre-Covid, 2019, the increase is a whopping 21.3%.
However, in contrast to 2020, the 2021 excess deaths must be a mix of hospital protocol deaths and mRNA shot deaths.
But how many of the 2021 deaths are Covid vaccine deaths? And how many are hospital protocol deaths?
A VAERS data query for mRNA Covid vaccine deaths in 2021 surfaces almost 11,000 deaths:
Below are the VAERS query criteria:
And here are the results from January 10, 2026, when I ran the query:
11,000 deaths in 2021 alone. Almost 12,000 life threatening events. And more than 12,000 permanently disabled.
As you can see in the VAERS table above, the vast majority of mRNA Covid vaccine adverse event reports are listed under the event category ‘None of the above.’ How is that possible?
It’s because almost no fields on the VAERS form are mandatory - like, for example, the event category. Which is a great way to collect data while making it impossible for people to analyze them quickly and easily.
Luckily, we have Albert Benavides who made it his mission to clean up the VAERS data and surface hidden deaths. He read through huge numbers of VAERS reports and filled in many missing fields, like age and event category, from the descriptive text of the reports. See his website VAERSAware.
Below is a graph from Benavides’ website, where he shows deaths reported to VAERS by vaccine type. Close to 40,000 deaths have been reported so far from Covid vaccines since 2021 but many of them are reported from outside the United States (see more about that below).
As you can see, the Covid shots caused the overwhelming majority of vaccine deaths reported to VAERS since 1990.
Albert told me that the three main sources for hidden deaths are the following:
The follow-up reports that VAERS finally began publishing in installments in May of 2025.
For many years, VAERS published only the initial report and not any of the potential follow-up reports. Which means, that when, let’s say, a doctor submitted a report about a serious adverse event, it was listed as that for ever after.
If the person died sometime later of the adverse event and the doctor submitted a follow-up report, this report was hidden from the public.
There is now a huge backlog of such never before published follow-up reports that are being released in installments.
Unknown vax type deaths
Undercoding, e.g. deaths that are listed in the ‘None of the Above’ event category
Also important to know is that the almost 11,000 death reports in VAERS for 2021 consist of domestic AND foreign reports.
Albert sent me the graph below for all event categories in 2021, not only deaths. Foreign VAERS reports are shown in yellow, reports from red states are red, from blue states blue and reports of unknown US state origin are grey.
Judging from Benavides’ chart it looks like about a third of all deaths reported to VAERS came from outside the United States. Which would leave us with about 7,400 VAERS domestic death reports in 2021.
VAERS’ Underreporting Factor
VAERS is a passive vaccine adverse event reporting system with a significant underreporting factor. It’s unknown how large the underreporting factor is for death. Estimates for the overall underreporting factor range from 10 to 100. Many apply an overall underreporting factor of about 30.
However, the underreporting factor for death is probably a lot smaller than for non-lethal adverse reactions, especially when death happens within days or weeks of the injections.
Conclusions
Let’s get back to the excess deaths in 2021. It looks like the excess deaths in 2021 mean that the hospital protocol deaths not only continued unabated that year but even increased.
There were many cases of Covid in 2021 (at least when measuring a case as someone whose PCR test was positive.) And the NIH didn’t change its treatment guidelines in 2021 which means that the hospital treatment protocols also didn’t change that year.
Moreover, the third wave of Covid, the Delta variant, hit hard in the winter of 2021/2022. Beaudoin said: “The 21-22 winter was just brutal. They killed so many people in that third wave. They killed them in hospital protocols and COVID vaccines together.”
As stated above, compared to the year 2019, we have an increase in deaths of 21.3%. Which means that around 600,00 more people died in 2021 in the United States than expected.
Here is the graph again:
Nobody knows for sure how many of the excess deaths in that year were caused by the mRNA shots and how many by the hospital protocols.
Based on VAERS and Albert’s VAERSAware data, something like 8,000 domestic death reports might have been reported to VAERS in 2021.
If we apply a domestic underreporting factor of 3 for reported mRNA shot deaths, then this brings the number to 24,000 vaccine deaths in 2021 for the United States. This underreporting factor might be too high of course - or it might be too low.
We don’t know because querying the CDC’s mortality data results in absurdly low numbers of deaths caused by the mRNA Covid shots compared to the VAERS reports. See the table below that shows the results for a query asking for deaths coded with Y59.0, viral vaccines, from 2018 to 2025:
And no wonder the numbers are absurdly low, since, as John Beaudoin found out (see links in Resources), the CDC parser didn’t code many death certificates with the correct code.
In fact, the code that the WHO issued in January 2021 to be used exclusively for deaths caused by the Covid vaccines wasn’t used at all by the CDC. Moreover, doctors and medical examiners often filled out the death certificates incompletely. Few apparently dared to write on death certificates that the Covid vaccines caused death.
Now, if we deduct the estimated 24,000 mRNA shot deaths based on VAERS from the overall excess death number for 2021, we are still left with almost 600,000 excess deaths compared to 2019, higher than the approximate half a million excess deaths in 2020.
However, basing mRNA Covid shot deaths solely on VAERS, even when trying to correct for the underreporting factor, almost certainly underestimates excess deaths from the shots. And the reason is that the toxic Covid shots severely damaged people’s immune systems and made it harder for them to fight the disease, especially the Delta variant in the winter of 2021/22.
John Beaudoin: “More people died in excess from pneumonia in the third wave of Covid than in the first or the second. How does that make any sense? Because they wrecked their immune systems with a vaccine that goes into your bone marrow and your lymph and destroys your ability to create appropriate white cells that will attack a disease. It reprograms your immune system to fight something that doesn’t even exist anymore in society, an old variant of COVID.”
Almost everyone of those who died in the third wave most likely would have survived if they had been treated correctly. But once they entered the hospitals, doctors and nurses applied NIH’s treatment protocols that made the hospitals rich by killing their patients.
No wonder almost nobody wants to talk about this. But these crimes against humanity must not be buried. People must know and those responsible must be held accountable. If not, way more people are going to be killed next time.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
CHAPTERS
0:00:05 US Mortality Rate in 2020
0:00:53 Excess Deaths
0:02:02 Interpreting Death Data
0:02:29 Treatment Protocol Deaths
0:04:34 NIH’s Hospital Treatment Guidelines
0:05:02 Vaccine Impact on Mortality
0:06:23 Analyzing Death Data by Fiscal Year
0:07:27 The Third Wave of COVID-19
RESOURCES
They Weren’t Dying of COVID: A System Built to Kill | Ken McCarthy
The Code That Doesn’t Exist: How CDC Disappears COVID Vaccine Deaths | John Beaudoin
The Data Trick Masking a Surge in Kidney Failure Deaths | John Beaudoin
John Beaudoin: The Real CdC COVID: Facts for Regular People
Ken McCarthy: What the Nurses Saw
Albert Benavides: VAERSAware
John Beaudoin’s Substack
