28% Personally Know Someone Who Died From COVID Vaccines

More than a quarter of Americans know something that isn't true.

Memeorandum pointed me to a Rasmussen poll summary showing “More Than 1-in-4 Think Someone They Know Died From COVID-19 Vaccines.” Granting that Rasmussen’s polling tends to have a modest Republican skew, the starkness of the result is nonetheless interesting.

The press release’s summary of the topline findings:

Nearly half of Americans think COVID-19 vaccines may be to blame for many unexplained deaths, and more than a quarter say someone they know could be among the victims.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that (49%) of American Adults believe it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths, including 28% who think it’s Very Likely. Thirty-seven percent (37%) don’t say a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects, including 17% who believe it’s Not At All Likely. Another 14% are not sure. 

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults say they personally know someone whose death they think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, while 61% don’t and another 10% are not sure.

The summary invites readers to look at the poll questions themselves. Here they are, in their entirety:

  • Have you received a COVID-19 vaccination?
  • How likely is it that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths?
  • Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?
  • Which is closer to your belief, that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, or that people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories?

None of these strike me as leading or otherwise problematic.

Here’s how responses break down:

Have you received a COVID-19 vaccination?

  • 71% yes
  • 26% no
  • 3% not sure

How likely is it that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths?

  • 28% very likely
  • 21% somewhat likely
  • 20% not very likely
  • 17% not at all likely
  • 14% not sure

Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?

  • 28% yes
  • 61% no
  • 10% not sure

Which is closer to your belief, that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, or that people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories?

  • 48% there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines
  • 37% people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories
  • 15% not sure

The crosstabs are available at the link. But the press release’s summary gets to the most obvious question:

More Democrats (85%) than Republicans (63%) or those not affiliated with either major party (64%) have been vaccinated against COVID-19. More Republicans (60%) than Democrats (44%) or the unaffiliated (43%) think there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. However, there is less political difference in the number who suspect someone they know might have died from vaccine side effects – 33% of Democrats and 26% of both Republicans and the unaffiliated.

It will surprise none of you that Democrats are significantly more likely to be vaccinated and Republicans are significantly more likely to be concerned with vaccine safety. That Democrats are more likely to say they know someone who may have died from side effects, though, is therefore a head-scratcher. But it’s worth noting that analysis of subgroups is trickier given a higher margin of error. (The survey had 1000 respondents, which is quite robust for a general sample. But the subsamples are obviously much smaller.)

Forty-six percent (46%) of whites, 48% of blacks and 57% of other minorities believe it is at least somewhat likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.

That doesn’t surprise me at all. For a variety of reasons, racial minorities are going to be more suspicious of things promoted by the government.

Younger Americans are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and 35% of adults under 40 believe someone they know personally might have died from vaccine side effects, compared to 28% of those 40-64 and just 14% of Americans 65 and older.

Again, this is the reverse of what I’d have guessed given that older Americans skew Republican and are more likely to watch Fox News, etc. My guess is that, because that group is so heavily vaccinated, they simply have more lived experience with the vaccine’s effects.

Slightly more men (52%) than women (47%) think it is at least somewhat likely that a significant number of unexplained deaths may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

That doesn’t surprise me, since men are more likely to be Republican.

Married adults are more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 than their unmarried peers, but more married (33%) than unmarried (23%) Americans think someone they know personally might have died from vaccine side effects.

Presumably, this overlaps with the age data: marrieds are likelier to be older.

Voters with annual incomes below $30,000 are most likely to think there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, while those with incomes above $200,000 are most likely to believe people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories.

That’s the least surprising finding of all.

Oddly, this made it into the survey’s headline:

The documentary Died Suddenly has been criticized as promoting “debunked” anti-vaccine conspiracy theories but has been seen by some 15 million people.

I don’t know that I was even aware of its existence but, first, 15 million people is a rounding error [in explaining a phenomenon in a nation of 330 million] and, second, those inclined to watch such a thing are surely predisposed to conspiracy theories.

FILED UNDER: Health, Public Opinion Polls, , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Scott says:

    And this is why we can’t have nice things.

    What really gets me about surveys like this is the tendency to report people’s beliefs as equivalent to actual facts about the world. I don’t know how many surveys I’ve seen where the public believes a thing and my response has to be: I don’t care what they believe, what are the facts?

    8
  2. Michael Reynolds says:

    About 70% of Americans believe in angels.

    People are idiots. We could educate kids to be able to distinguish truth from nonsense, but not in a country where 80% believe in god. We are deliberately refusing to teach kids how to spot bullshit lest they spot bullshit.

    16
  3. Kurtz says:

    I wasn’t aware of Died Suddenly until late last night. I was trying to figure out why some people were attributing Bills Safety Damar Hamlin’s on-field cardiac event to the vaccine and I saw the hashtag.

    These people ‘know’ that he is fighting for life because of the vaccine despite pretty much no publicly available information about his condition. They were claiming this pretty much while he was being resuscitated on the field.

    Shameless.

    7
  4. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    I was curious about all this after seeing all the comments on Twitter blaming the vaccine for Hamlin’s incident during the Bill’s game yesterday.
    This is the best and most current info I found.
    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
    Here’s another very current analysis (dated today).
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z
    Although these don’t say how many people have died as a direct cause of the vaccine it’s pretty obvious to sentient beings that 28% of the country DOES NOT know someone who died from the Covid Vaccine…those deaths being extremely rare.

    3
  5. Kylopod says:

    @Scott: In one of the other threads today, I started to write the phrase “believe in climate change,” then I caught myself and changed it to “accept that climate change is real.” There are some highly prevalent conventions in describing topics like climate change, evolution, or the 2020 election (among other things), where the word “believe” is often used where it really isn’t appropriate. I don’t “believe” that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, I know it is. When something is factually true, then the only possibilities are that you know it, you’re ignorant of it, or you’re denying it. “Belief” should have no place in the discussion, except in the sense that a person’s beliefs may lead them to refuse to accept the truth. I wish the media was more precise about this.

    6
  6. Kylopod says:

    @Kurtz: I’ll reprint what I wrote last night in response to this, over at Political Wire:

    One thing is certain: Most humans are piss-poor at making logical inferences about causal relationships between events. It’s built in our nature to see patterns where none exist. It makes people deeply vulnerable to disinfo and conspiracy theories. The only way to escape this trap is to understand how unreliable our own intuition and “common sense” can be, yet a lot of people can’t take that step because they see it as an attack on their personal autonomy and ability to think for themselves–which ironically makes them perfect bait for hucksters of various kinds.

    6
  7. Scott says:

    @Kylopod: I do the same thing. Trying to forswear using the term belief when referring to facts and knowledge.

    1
  8. steve says:

    I dont know anyone and have admin oversight of 5 ICUs. The numbers these people come up with are so high that our ICUs should be flooded. They are not. There are deaths but they are rare. The one area of special concern is myocarditis though this is rarely fatal. The risk is higher, especially with Moderna, for young males 18-29. The risk is still lower than having covid but if a young male has underlying cardiac issues its something to take into account.

    https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/myocarditis-after-mrna-covid-vaccine-risk-real-rare-young-men

    Steve

    4
  9. MarkedMan says:

    15 million people is a rounding error

    Did you mean to say some other number there? I’m sure that WR and the rest of our popular-media crew would be very happy with audiences of 15M

  10. MarkedMan says:

    Stuff like this was why I probably came across as defensive of the CDC and the Biden Administration during the pandemic. A lot of the complaints against them really boiled down to, “sure they have presented all this information but people don’t believe it, so they must be f’ing up!” Walk into any supermarket and look at the shelves full of supplements. There is a virtual tidal wave of evidence that a) most of those don’t contain what it says on the label, and b) even if they did, they won’t do what they say they do, but those shelves just keep getting bigger.

    1
  11. James Joyner says:

    @MarkedMan: I’ve added a parenthetical to clarify that I meant it in the context of influencing the opinion of a country of 330 million.

  12. Matt Bernius says:

    Shortly after Damar Hamlin’s tragic collapse and heart attack last night at the start of the Buffalo/Cincinnati game, antivax people/bots on Twitter were already blaming it on the C19 vaccine.

    There’s always fringe money in the banana sta… I mean telling people what they want to hear.

    2
  13. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    A big problem is that the anti-vaxxers are relying on VAERS for their data and using it to mislead people. VAERS is a publicly available, searchable database of reports that have not been verified. It simply contains whatever people have voluntarily reported. Moreover, the CDC and FDA do not restrict what people can report, as long as it happened at some point following a vaccination.
    So VAERS is the equivalent of a crime tips hot line. Anyone can report anything. And then the CDC reports that data in a transparent manner. But the only data VAERS reports is related to reporting. It doesn’t mean anything about the actual incidents. But if you pay attention the anti-vaxxers are using it to make their dubious claims.
    Here is a report based upon an OAN piece that used VAERS in just that way to make some pretty scary, and very sketchy, claims.
    https://bigleaguepolitics.com/report-at-least-769-recently-vaxxed-athletes-collapsed-last-year-during-competition/
    Of course the other problem is that 40% of Americans believe in ghosts and one in five say they have actually seen one. That’s a populace ripe for the fleecing.

    1
  14. Mister Bluster says:

    @Michael Reynolds:..About 70% of Americans believe in angels.

    To read social media and other posts a fair amount of otherwise intelligent citizens think that karma (whatever that means) exists as some sort of supernatural influence on human life.

    1
  15. Kathy says:

    I’d say this is the stupidest belief to come off the trump pandemic, but compared to COVID being caused by G5 towers, or that vaccinated people spread spike proteins, or that vaccines change your DNA, this is positively reasonable.

  16. Neil Hudelson says:

    I don’t know. In 2021 my grandmother was a vibrant, healthy 99 year old. She gets the jab and just 13 months later she’s dead. Coincidence?!?!?!?

    13
  17. MarkedMan says:

    @James Joyner: Hmm, even in the context of 330M Americans (250M of voting age), 15M seems like a huge audience. That’s more than watched the last game of the World Series and just a little less than watched the Oscars.

    1
  18. James Joyner says:

    @MarkedMan: It’s a significant television rating. It’s unlikely to explain why 28% of 330 million people believe something.

  19. Kylopod says:

    @daryl and his brother darryl:

    But the only data VAERS reports is related to reporting. It doesn’t mean anything about the actual incidents.

    I should that even when a person is reporting with 100% accuracy what happened to them following a vaccine, it in no way establishes a causal connection.

    A few weeks after I got my first dose back in April 2021, I started experiencing an intense pain from the base of my neck down my arm. It lasted for several months. It then seemed to go away, and come back. When I finally consulted a doctor, he diagnosed it as radiculopathy, a condition that has multiple possible causes, but I soon figured out it was due to the setup of my computer at home, and the intense and somewhat repetitive typing I was doing for work.

    If I’d had a different set of preconceptions, I might have concluded that the vaccine caused the radiculopathy, and I might have put it in the VAERS database. My statements would have been accurate, but they’d be used in support of conclusions that aren’t warranted.

    When it comes to “vaccine deaths,” the inferences are even sillier. In the vaccine’s initial rollout in late 2020, the first people to get the vaccine were the oldest, sickest members of the population–so, naturally some of them died soon after. The anti-vax crowd pointed to that as proof that “the vaccines kill.”

    It’s the old post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy–X happens and then Y happens; therefore X caused Y. But it’s also highly dependent on people’s preconceptions. I don’t think that if one of these folks saw someone get the vaccine and then the next day there was, say, a lightning storm outside the person’s house, they’d conclude “the vaccine caused the lightning storm.” But if the person had a headache or something, they would say the vaccine caused the headache. So it’s partly confirmation bias on top of things. It’s the way most pseudoscientific beliefs about medicine spread.

    2
  20. Modulo Myself says:

    This is probably more about digging the hole which was started at the beginning of COVID. Anti-vaxxers are in a minority and they are not in a bubble. I suspect that most went down the Trump/Covid skeptic/Desantis-loving/Antivax rabbit hole in a public way. They alienated many of their friends and family and were proven dead wrong. So instead of admitting failure, they just keep on going with their beliefs.

  21. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Younger Americans are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and 35% of adults under 40 believe someone they know personally might have died from vaccine side effects, compared to 28% of those 40-64 and just 14% of Americans 65 and older.

    This surprises me not at all. The yutes always think they are bulletproof and will either live forever or till they reach 100, whichever comes first. Meanwhile all of us old fucks are all too aware of the fragility of our existence and know our futures might well be counted in days instead of years, never mind decades. Sure, they might watch Fcker Carlson every night to get their hate on for kids/lieberals/those people, but I wonder how many are willing to take medical advice from him?

    1
  22. MarkedMan says:

    @Kylopod: Isaac Asimov once observed that people often ascribe supernatural causes to things running into someone you hadn’t thought about in twenty years – until the day before, when they popped into your head. But they never factor in the other important things: how often do people pop into your head but you don’t run into them, and how many people do you run into on an average day. If you do the math, you may find that this happens about as often as statistics would predict.

    Put another way, the odds of a particular golf ball landing on any given blade of grass is infinitesimal, but it is definitely going to land on some blades of grass.

  23. Mu Yixiao says:

    @MarkedMan:

    Put another way, the odds of a particular golf ball landing on any given blade of grass is infinitesimal, but it is definitely going to land on some blades of grass.

    You’ve obviously never seen me golf.

    16
  24. MarkedMan says:

    @Mu Yixiao: Points for speed!

    1
  25. steve says:

    I have been aware of VAERS for many years. Heck, it was the friend of a friend who became famous (in the medical world) for reporting that a vaccination turned him into the Hulk. Its sort fo part of my job to understand VAERS. However, when I try to explain it to friends, family someone on a blog it doesnt matter that I know about VAERS 30 years before they did and they only learned about it from some anti-vaxxer on a Youtube. I am still wrong. I can cite them stuff from the VAERS site, form older studies pre-covid looking at the value and problems with VAERS but it just doesnt matter. They will only believe people in their own tribe. This is not something that you can change by educating people, or at least not by any method I know.

    Steve

    2
  26. grumpy realist says:

    I wonder how many people skimmed over and interpreted that third equation as “knowing someone who died of COVID-19”?

    (My own incidence of post hoc ergo propter hoc was getting both a COVID-19 booster and a shingles vaccine last week, then feeling like absolute crap for the next two days. I chose to blame this on the shingles vaccine, not the COVID-19 booster, mainly because this is my 4th COVID shot and I’ve had very little reaction to the other three.)

    4
  27. Kathy says:

    Let’s run some numbers.

    According to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker 73.6 of the US population has been fully vaccinated* (ie two doses). Assuming a population of 330 million, that’s 242.8 million poeple.

    According to the census, there are about 258 million adults.

    So, if 28% of adults knows someone who was killed by a COVID vaccine, and assuming all respondents know 3 people in common who died that way, we divide 28% by 3 and get 9.33%. Thus 9.33% of all adults know someone who died from a COVID vaccine.

    9.33% of 258 million is (drumroll) 24,071,400 who claim to know at least one person who died of a COVID vaccine.

    Where are the bodies?

    *This sounds so quaint now.

    2
  28. MarkedMan says:

    @Kathy: Maybe they all know the same person? I mean, how many people know that Ariana Grande’s Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s balls were HUGE after the vaccine? And that’s just one guy..

    1
  29. Jen says:

    @grumpy realist: I think I’ve said this here before, but as a kid who grew up overseas, I have a very robust shot record, and I don’t remember ANY shot flattening me quite like the first shingles vaccination (second one was just the standard sore arm).

    1
  30. Hal_10000 says:

    This is Rasmussen doing a market survey for the anti-vax liars. It’s pathetic to watch them go down this route of barbarism.

    7
  31. Monala says:

    I sometimes read the stories on the Sorryantivaxxer website. This website chronicles the the stories of loud and proud anti-vaxxers who later come down with Covid, and often die. Because I’ve read so many of these stories, I know that the folks featured often share the same copy and pasted stories on their social media. Those are as follows: 1) I know someone who stood in line for a Covid test, changed their mind about getting it, and later, got a phone call telling them that they had Covid. (i.e., the tests are fake). 2) I know someone who had a family member who died, or I had a family member who died, and even though they died of cancer or heart disease or a car accident, their death certificate was marked as Covid. (i.e., the medical system is corruptly claiming COVID deaths to get paid for it) 3) I know someone who got the vaccine and ended up in the hospital or died from it. (i.e., the vaccines are harmful).

    Now if you’re like me and have read a lot of the stories, you know that these people are sharing the same copy and pasted stories over and over. However, if you’re not aware of this and somebody you know shares a story like that that about their friend or family member, who was told they had Covid after not testing, or whose death certificate was marked as Covid even though they didn’t have it, or who was injured or died from the vaccine, and you trusted the person sharing, why wouldn’t you believe it? So some of these people answering in the affirmative might be people who know someone who is shared a story like that.

    4
  32. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    @Kylopod:
    Right. Exactly.
    Another dynamic…it does appear the vaccine causes Myocarditis in a very small number of people. So there’s your smoking gun, right? But the Covid virus itself causes a much higher number of cases of Myocarditis. No one in the anti-vax bubble seems able to comprehend this level of complexity.

  33. grumpy realist says:

    @Jen: I don’t remember the first shingles shot (which I took just before COVID-19 hit) giving me anything more than a somewhat sore arm for a day but this second shot…..OUCH. Sore arm almost immediately, horribly sore back and neck, felt like the flu and a mild fever….I curled up with a hot water bottle and a blanket while working at the computer and made sure I got 10-12 hours of sleep each night but it took me two full days to fully recover. (Warning–make sure you have some form of pain-killer around before you get vaccinated. I forgot, and was too miserable to pick some up.)

    I looked up medical reports and it looks like a lot of people have more problems with the second dose than the first. Vindictive little bastard of a virus.

    1
  34. Gustopher says:

    Football dude prompted my brother to start sending me stuff about all the young people suddenly dying and how it must be the Covid vaccine.

    When more than half the country has gotten the full virus rather than a fragment of the spike protein, I think there’s another more obvious potential cause that needs to be ruled out for all those excess deaths. Assuming the rest of the virus doesn’t just hang out for decoration, that is.

    He also claims to know 4 people who had heart attacks a few months after getting the vaccine. He’s in his late 50s, aka heart attack season.

    People are incapable of thinking.

    He reminded me that he took a lot of classes in statistics, and I reminded him that taking the same class over and over until you pass doesn’t count as “many classes.”

    Anyway, he’ll be back to his fixation on the Clovis people in a day or so, or how the Iroquois were cannibals who spoke some Viking language.

    2
  35. Gustopher says:

    @steve: I like the VAERS database being so public and unfiltered.

    Showing someone who claims it is perfectly accurate and well vetted data about Covid vaccine harm the entries of how someone reports their prison sentence as a vaccine side effect can wobble their faith in it.

    Even my idiot brother doesn’t blindly believe everything in it anymore.

  36. Liberal Capitalist says:

    28%.

    It’s always the “loyal 28%” that the GOP counts on.

    No matter the poll, that low number always seems to come up.

    If you want to explain the bottom of the barrel of America, it would likely be… 28%

    1
  37. steve says:

    They asked the guy who reported he turned into the Hulk to delete it when they figured out he was a doctor, but I think if VAERS is to be useful we want everything and anything reported. That is how we would catch an unexpected problem. The price for doing that is that we know a very large percentage will be nonsense. Makes for a lot fo work in follow up to find out what is real and what is not but its safer that way.

    Steve

    1
  38. MarkedMan says:

    @Gustopher:

    Anyway, he’ll be back to his fixation on the Clovis people in a day or so, or how the Iroquois were cannibals who spoke some Viking language.

    Is that really a thing? FWIW, you don’t have to go too far back before you find cannibalism in many ethnic groups, at least of the eat-the-heart-of-my-enemy variety. I’m of Irish descent and my ancestors were still painting themselves blue and eating each other in the last millennium. Im pretty sure the Saxons were too.

  39. de stijl says:

    I know someone who died from actual Covid. And it wasn’t some 70 something geezer, either.

    She was mid to late 40s and probably the most vital person I had ever met. When my mother died she saved my butt.

    These 28% fools can fuck right off.

    1
  40. James Joyner says:

    @grumpy realist: @Jen: I got my first shingles shot the same time as my 4th covid (the bivalent). Usually, the Covid shot gives me mild flulike symptoms, especially fatigue, that I sleep off. This time, I had none of that but got really bad shivers around 8 hours in that I slept off. So, I attribute it to the shingles shot. They gave me a wide window for the second dose, which I really should get soon.

  41. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    @James Joyner:
    Interesting…my GP wouldn’t give me the shingles vaccine and the 4th Covid at the same time. Perhaps overly cautious. Perhaps not?

  42. Matt Bernius says:

    @James Joyner & @daryl and his brother darryl:
    FWIW, my wonderful wife made the unwise decision to get the Covid booster, the shingles vaccine, the flu vaccine, and the pneumonia vaccine all at the same time and had a bad reaction. She’s still frustrated that the nurse didn’t warn her against taking all four at once.

    After talking with a bunch of medical folks the consensus was (1) that was a really bad idea and (2) that the shingles vaccine seems to have a multiplying effect on other vaccines.

  43. Matt Bernius says:

    Following up from yesterday’s comment about anti-vaxers cashing in on the freak accident that happened to Damar Hamlins, the excellent Nicholas Grossman has a good piece up about it over at the Daily Beast.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-anti-vaxxers-pounced-on-damar-hamlins-collapse?ref=home

  44. Ha Nguyen says:

    This is so frustrating. My sister and brother-in-law – who are doctors for gnu’s sakes! – believe wholeheartedly in this nonsense. That the covid vaccine cause heart attacks and they refuse to get it.

    In fact, my brother-in-law who is miserable at his current work location and hates the administration, refuses to look for a better job because he fears that the new place would force him to take the vaccine. So, he prefers to be miserable and unvaccinated rather than happy and vaccinated.

    Bah, humbug!

    1
  45. brianhd71 says:

    One thing is for sure. The vaccine sure as hell doesn’t work on Covid 19. The sheer numbers prove that. Is it harmful to have it? Why find out? It’s simply a big giveaway to the pharma lobby. I’m not putting my health at risk to enrich them.

  46. Ken_L says:

    The only significant cross-tabs are the ones finding respondents who have not been vaccinated comprise the overwhelming majority of respondents who believe all the terrible things about the vaccines. In other words the “poll” is nothing but an exercise in confirmation bias.