Evaluating claim in "peer reviewed" Toxicology Reports article vaccines kill 5 for every 1 save

There a paper published in Toxicology Reports that included an analysis purporting to estimate causal vaccine deaths in the US claiming between 227,792 and 1,381,429 have died "from" the vaccine in the USA within 31 days of inoculation, suggesting the vaccines killed 5 for every 1 saved, and that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Here is the paper. Note that the senior author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of the journal, and listed as the editor who handled the peer review of this paper. This is unusual. Later they said he was mistakenly listed as the handling editor and it wasn't really him. Oops.

Like Kirsch's VAERs analysis critiqued in a previous blog post, their conclusions are completely driven by the assumptions they make on the background death rates and underreporting rate. However, their assumptions as detailed in his appendix are even more extreme than Kirsch's.

Implicitly assuming reporting rates to VAERs are constant as a function of the number of days since inoculation, the authors posit that the background rate of reported VAERs deaths not caused by vaccine can be estimated from the typical daily VAERs death reports >31 days after inoculation, and then assume that any reported deaths in the first 31 days above this number must have been caused by vaccine.

They subsequently double down on this assumption by using it to justify very high underreporting rates between ~125x and ~500x from which they extrapolate these numbers up to his enormous projected numbers. If events are more likely to be reported closer to vaccination, e.g. a death occurring the day after vaccination much more likely to be reported to VAERs than one occurring 2 months later, then this methodology will produce extremely biased estimates of purported vaccine-caused deaths.

It is especially strange they make this assumption given that elsewhere in the paper they acknowledge that deaths right after inoculation are far more likely to be reported than those much later in making a different point (see page 1675:)

Furthermore, they emphasize that these 225k to 1.4m deaths they concluded were caused by vaccines within 31 days of inoculation are only the tip of the iceberg, claiming many more deaths will happen months and years after inoculation. In fact, most of the paper focuses on these deaths they speculate will happen much later, laying out their concerns, but not providing any evidence that these things are actually occurring.

To my eyes, the paper read more like a commentary, filled with oft-repeated talking points from people who think that COVID-19 is not dangerous but that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are deadly so, than a research paper.

Also, like Kirsch, they never assess the plausibility of their assertions. If 225k-1.4m deaths were caused by vaccines within 31 days of inoculation, were is the evidence of this and how would it go unnoticed? Here are the excess deaths in the USA from ourworldindata

The majority of USA vaccinated residents were vaccinated between March 1 and July 31, a time during which excess death counts lower than any time since the beginning of the pandemic. How could this be if their claims were true? Tracking the excess deaths over time, we see they have spiked precisely at the times of high levels of confirmed COVID-19 cases and COVID-attributed deaths, including the April 2020 spikes and summer 2020 pre-vaccination spikes, and the winter 2020 spike that started pre-vaccination but was ongoing when the public vaccination commenced.

Could the winter 2020 spike be caused by misattributed vaccine deaths as they might claim? Well, this spike in excess deaths started increasing precipitously in November 2020 and reached its peak in early January, when vaccinations had just started, and then sharply declined in January and February as vaccinations of seniors and other vulnerable members of society were ramping up. And then this lull of the lowest weekly excess death numbers of the pandemic kicked in from March through July, the time period during which most vaccinated USA residents received their inoculations, before increasing again in late July and early August as the Delta surge kicked in (also a time with very low daily inoculation rates).

Where would all these hundreds of thousands or millions of purported vaccine-induced deaths be hiding?

To further illuminate this point consider that @hmatejx plotted excess deaths vs. vaccinations and covid cases over time for 100 countries in the world. Here is the USA.

The black line is all cause excess deaths, the blue line vaccinations, and red lines confirmed cases, rescaled to fit on the same plot.

It is clear that that the excess deaths have tracked closely with confirmed case counts, so in spite of imperfections in SARS-CoV-2 testing and reporting, and in COVID-19 death attribution, the order of magnitude seems right.

It is also clear that it is not possible that the vaccines have caused a substantial number of deaths, and highlights the cartoonish nature of Kirsch and Kostoff, et al.'s projections, and their clear implausibility.