A controversial 2024 study that some vaccine skeptics used to argue that millions of people likely died as a result of COVID vaccines has been retracted over misinformation and issues with the research.
The article was originally published in the BMJ Public Health in May 2024. It analyzed data from 47 Western countries and concluded that there had been more than three million excess deaths between 2020 and 2022, a statistic known as excess mortality.
“Overall, the journal concludes that the discussion of causes of mortality is imbalanced, lacks rigour, and includes misinformation,” the BMJ stated in the retraction notice.
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The study did not specifically cite vaccines and lockdown measure as the reasons for the deaths, but the authors noted that COVID vaccines that were deployed to save lives also appeared to be responsible for a large number of “suspected adverse events.” At the time of publication, the findings were taken by some prominent vaccine skeptics and critics of governmental pandemic responses—including several Republican lawmakers in the U.S.—as proof that the science and policies around COVID were flawed or even nefarious.
The results also immediately garnered skepticism in the weeks following publication. A month after the study appeared in the journal, the BMJ began an investigation into its quality, as did the Netherland’s Princess Máxima Center, a pediatric hospital, where three of the paper’s four co-authors then worked. One of them, corresponding author and now independent researcher Saskia Mostert, testified before a U.S. congressional subcommittee about the report’s findings in June 2026.
At that hearing, Mostert told lawmakers that she and her co-authors encountered “blind and irrational fury” after the paper’s publication, and she said she had resigned from the Princess Máxima Center after it opened its scientific integrity investigation. She alleged the negative response was used a means to “discredit, intimidate, isolate and silence those raising unwelcome scientific questions.” Mostert also said that she had been willing to make edits to the study to address the journal’s concerns but that her revision was “ignored by the journal.”
In its retraction notice, the BMJ stated that Mostert’s proposed edits would have been “insufficient.” The journal also said Mostert wasn’t available to cooperate with the investigation held by the center and initially could not be contacted by the BMJ before she later told the journal’s investigators that other researchers had done most of the work. The Princess Máxima Center’s report detailing its own findings “concluded … that the article pays disproportionate attention to the possibility that COVID-19 containment measures and vaccination might have caused excess mortality,” according to the BMJ’s retraction notice.
“That excess mortality occurred, however, was known and not newsworthy,” the center wrote in its report. “Despite the fact that the authors do not investigate the causes for excess mortality, the introduction and discussion of the article are largely focused on how to explain the excess mortality.”
The center’s report also alleged that the study’s authors cherry-picked data to support their arguments and ignored data that opposed them.
Scientific American has reached out to two of the study’s co-authors, pediatric oncologists Minke Huibers and Gertjan Kaspers, for comment.
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