A large French study suggests that mRNA COVID-19 vaccination is linked with a substantially lower risk of death from all causes. The research indicates that young and middle-aged people who received an mRNA vaccine were about 74 percent less likely to die from COVID-19 itself and, notably, had a 25 percent lower risk of dying from any cause over roughly four years compared to those who were not vaccinated.
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Last month, a leaked FDA memo from the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) – later rejected by twelve former FDA leaders – claimed 10 deaths were allegedly caused by mRNA vaccines. The memo’s author, CBER Director Vinayak Prasad, offered no details that would let others verify the claim. Comprehensive safety studies on mRNA vaccines have consistently disputed such assertions, instead showing vaccines to be considerably safer than infection with the virus across age groups. In this context, the new French study, led by Laura Semenzato of the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products, stands out in two important ways.
First, the sample size is exceptionally large. In nations where vaccination status and health outcomes must be actively reported, assembling a vast dataset is costly. Some researchers resort to regional statistics to infer associations, such as higher death rates in areas with lower vaccination uptake, but these approaches cannot definitively prove that deaths occurred among the unvaccinated.
In this study, Semenzato and colleagues had access to the entire French health data system, where each resident has an identifier linking their vaccination status and medical outcomes. This enabled tracking of 28.7 million people, with 22.8 million receiving at least one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine between May and October 2021. Individuals vaccinated outside that window or who received non-mRNA vaccines (which were rare in France) were excluded.
Second, the researchers examined deaths from all causes over 45 months, rather than focusing solely on COVID-19 or shorter timeframes like six to twelve months, which has been common in prior work.
Some anti-vaccination advocates limit their objections to COVID-19 vaccines for younger groups. Semenzato’s study, by contrast, included individuals aged 18 to 59 as of November 1, 2021, meaning the findings are not disproportionately shaped by those at the highest risk from COVID-19.
Rawly, the data show that those who received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine had a 74 percent lower risk of dying from COVID-19 in hospital. Regarding all-cause mortality, 0.4 percent of the vaccinated cohort died over nearly four years, compared with 0.6 percent of the unvaccinated group.
Although these results do not validate Prasad’s claims and run counter to widespread misinformation that mRNA vaccines have caused massive deaths, they are not definitive on their own. If the two groups differed in meaningful ways—for example, if unvaccinated individuals harbored more severe preexisting health conditions—vaccination could appear more protective than it actually is.
In this dataset, the opposite was true: the vaccinated group was, on average, slightly older (by just under a year) and more likely to be women. At the time vaccines were administered, those vaccinated were more likely to have potentially dangerous cardiometabolic conditions (9.3 percent versus 7.8 percent among the unvaccinated).
The French records do not provide individual income data, but they do indicate residential location. People living in the poorest 20 percent of localities were somewhat less likely to be vaccinated, though the difference was modest.
After adjusting for these factors, the researchers concluded that receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a 25 percent reduction in mortality from any cause. Importantly, this broader measure includes deaths from events like car crashes or natural disasters, which vaccines would not plausibly influence. In the initial six months after vaccination, the gap was even larger: deaths among the vaccinated were 29 percent lower than among the unvaccinated.
It is possible that the observed mortality gap reflects more than direct vaccine protection alone. The reasons some people did not get vaccinated are not fully known, and factors such as education or exposure to misinformation could contribute to residual confounding. Disentangling the vaccine’s direct effect from these other factors remains challenging, but the very low death rates among the vaccinated make arguments that the vaccine poses life-threatening risks increasingly implausible.
The study appears in JAMA Open.
Would you view these results as compelling evidence of broader benefits from vaccination, or would you want to see additional studies confirming these findings in other populations and timeframes? Share your thoughts in the comments.
