Excess deaths in Cyprus tied to COVID vaccine rollout, study shows

Cyprus saw a substantial increase in mortality from all causes in late 2021 and early 2022 following the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health found.

Researchers from Cyprus, the University of Liverpool and Harvard University found that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, total deaths in the island nation increased 34.1% and 11.8% respectively. During the first quarter of 2022, total deaths increased 30.7%.

Cyprus began its COVID-19 vaccine rollout in December 2020, but the peaks in monthly vaccination rates occurred in May 2021 and December 2021 and were followed by jumps in the mortality rates.

“We concluded that excess mortality occurs at unprecedented levels in Cyprus,” the researchers wrote. “Our findings raise serious concerns regarding the potential impact of the vaccination campaign and other causes on mortality.”

The authors published their findings in the Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health. Based on the association they identified, they said, “a detailed cause-specific investigation of such a significant excess number of deaths is warranted to explore the potential factors leading to this concerning and unexplained increase in population mortality.”

The researchers analyzed mortality data from 2016-2022, as reported by the Cyprus Ministry of Health to the European Statistical Office, or Eurostat. They also analyzed weekly data on COVID-19 vaccinations and related deaths collected during the pandemic by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

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Using that data, they determined average all-cause mortality rates and excess deaths over time, deaths reported from COVID-19 and total COVID-19 vaccines administered for Cyprus by age group.

They compared excess deaths before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and examined how those numbers related to the vaccine rollout.

Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., all-cause mortality researcher and former physics professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada who was not involved in the study, told The Defender:

“There’s clearly a temporal association here between vaccines and excess all-cause mortality. This association is robust, it’s unambiguous, it’s clear, it’s in the data itself.”

Rancourt’s team of scientists at the Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest has also conducted several studies that found strong associations between vaccine rollouts and excess mortality.

He said the mortality rates and the association with the vaccine reported in the Cyprus study are similar to what his team found in their own analysis of Cyprus, which is part of a larger study not yet published.

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However, to confirm what caused the deaths, Rancourt said, “You have to dig deeper as the authors correctly point out to find out what is really going on here,” Rancourt added.

Research also shows that the trends identified in Cyprus are consistent with broader regional and global trends, the authors said. Across the EU, the authors wrote, excess deaths increased in 2020 and continued through 2023, albeit at variable rates.

Cyprus, they noted, was one of the EU member states with the highest excess mortality — in 2022 it had the highest excess mortality rate in Europe, reaching 26.4%.

This was consistent with findings worldwide. For example, a study found the U.S. experienced substantial excess mortality during the pandemic. And the authors’ previously published research showed a substantial increase in mortality in Cyprus in 2021 compared to 2020, even when excluding deaths reported to be caused by COVID-19.

In their study, the researchers again found that when they excluded the reported number of deaths from COVID-19, the increase in all-cause mortality persisted. This finding is also consistent with other studies, the authors reported.

The authors said their study was limited by their inability to explore what caused the documented excess mortality. They blamed a lack of access to detailed death certificates, which haven’t been made available to researchers.

Many researchers have identified links between the toxicity of vaccine batches and adverse events, they noted. Rancourt and his team have linked the vaccine rollouts to unprecedented peaks in all-cause mortality in a study of 17 countries.