A high-profile study claiming COVID-19 vaccines contributed to excess deaths across dozens of countries has been retracted by BMJ Public Health, which cited “misinformation” in how the paper framed its findings, reports Laura Simmons, health and medicine editor of IFL Science. The retraction lands weeks after the study’s lead author testified before a US Senate subcommittee, using the same data to suggest a vaccine-cancer link.
The original paper, published in March 2024 by corresponding author Dr. Saskia Mostert and colleagues at the Princess Máxima Centre for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands, tracked excess mortality across more than 40 countries from January 2020 through December 2022. It reported over 1.2 million excess deaths in 2021 and 800,000-plus in 2022, and speculated that “COVID-19 containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines … may have detrimental effects.” That single line turned a mortality-tracking paper into a rallying point for vaccine skeptics.
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Why the Journal Pulled It
In its retraction notice, BMJ Public Health cited “misinformation in the discussion regarding the possible causes of excess mortality,” plus broader “concerns about quality, originality and messaging.”
Actuary Stuart McDonald, who audits pandemic mortality claims, put it bluntly: “The relationship between COVID deaths and excess deaths in the countries shown is so strong that we really ought to be able to stop there.” He found the opposite of what the study implied — countries with higher vaccination rates tended to have lower excess deaths. As he noted, “The association is in the opposite direction to what’s insinuated in the article.”
Mostert disputes the retraction, saying she “did not claim certainty regarding the causes of excess mortality,” and describes the backlash as “psychological manipulation,” “fear propaganda,” “censorship,” and “suppression.”
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The timing is notable. On June 3, 2026, Mostert testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at a hearing titled “Plausible mechanisms of COVID-19 injections causing cancer and attacks on scientific publications,” leaning on the now-retracted study. Dr. Julie Gralow, Chief Medical Officer of the Association for Clinical Oncology, has countered that mRNA vaccines do not cause the genetic mutations such claims depend on.
Retraction doesn’t erase influence. This paper spent two years fueling vaccine hesitancy and reached the US Senate before editors caught up with the science.
