Caution and preventive measures are still necessary, but there is no cause for panic.Continue reading
During the Covid-19 outbreak, there have been numerous reports of higher than normal death rates in Hungary. When the vaccines were introduced, there were already reports, especially on social media, that many people had died because of the vaccines. Hungarian economic site Portfolio has now investigated these claims to see if truly more people have died in Hungary because of the coronavirus vaccines.
Social media can be a real hotbed for various fake news, conspiracy theories, and rumours. It was on social media that the rumor that more people were dying in Hungary because of the coronavirus vaccination started to spread earlier. Moreover, Hungarian opposition politicians also took on these fake news claims and discouraged people from taking Eastern vaccines, such as the Chinese one.
However, this kind of news should be treated with caution, as there are more deaths during winter epidemics, and it is common for the number of elderly deaths to be higher at the end of the year and the beginning of the year than in other months, Index reported on the subject.
Portfolio looked at official statistics which showed that the autumn wave of the epidemic in 2020 saw far more deaths than usual. The situation was similar in 2021, when the two major epidemic waves caused many deaths in Hungary, but it should be added that it was no different in other countries around the world.
In 2022, it is worth looking at the data in the light of the availability of vaccines and vaccination statistics. It was rumoured that the spread of vaccines has led to many deaths in Hungary. However, according to Portfolio, the statistics show something completely different: according to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the number of deaths in 2022 was much lower than in the previous two years.
With the end of Covid-19, the number of deaths has fallen back to virtually the same level as before the pandemic, and there is no indication that it has increased significantly compared to the years before 2020. Portfolio‘s analysis therefore concludes that
the vaccines certainly did not cause mass deaths, and there is a good chance that they did not even cause sporadic deaths.
In other words, while many people died from coronavirus infection, the same cannot be said for vaccines, and there is no credible evidence for it either.
The analysis also showed that in 2022, 3.5% more people died than the average death rate in the five years before the epidemic. However, this increase is not significant and is mainly concentrated in the second half of the year. This may be due to the unfavorable trend in the number of coronavirus infections in Hungary in November, and the fact that several viruses are present at the same time during the current epidemic season, including a strong flu outbreak, which means a stronger than average epidemic situation.
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