Journal Retracts Paper Linking COVID-19 Vaccines to Deaths

BMJ Public Health has retracted a paper some — including a witness at a recent U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing — have used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths. The action comes more than two years after a researcher cited in the work flagged issues with the study.

Published May 6, 2024, the paper used the “Our World in Data” database and the World Mortality Dataset to look at COVID-19 related deaths during the height of the pandemic.¹ News outlets covered it, from The Telegraph — “vaccines may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” — to the New York Post, which quoted the paper’s statements about reported “serious injuries and deaths following vaccination,” a move it later corrected.

An expression of concern, placed on the paper about a month after it was published, attempted to quell these claims, noting the study “does not establish any such link.” The notice also announced an institutional investigation by the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands, where three of the four authors worked, including corresponding author Saskia Mostert.

Critics of the paper said it contained misquotes and omissions on vaccines and was “full of inappropriate insinuation.” Ariel Karlinsky, an economist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and cocreator of the World Mortality Dataset, contacted the journal starting in June 2024, requesting a retraction multiple times. Karlinsky felt the analysis misused his data and “copied whole blocks of text and mathematical notation” from his article.²

According to the August 11 retraction notice, BMJ Public Health retracted the paper for “misinformation in the discussion regarding the possible causes of excess mortality, and because the limited nature of the original work by the authors was not sufficiently described.”

In 2024, the Princess Máxima Center investigated the involvement of two authors, Minke Huibers and Gertjan Kaspers, but did not look at Mostert’s work on the study because she was “not able to cooperate with the investigation,” the report reads.

The anonymized version of the report summary dated January 2025 was published alongside the retraction and concluded that while the authors’ actions did not constitute misconduct, Kaspers and Huibers exhibited “carelessness, ignorance and negligence.”

The report also found the article “pays disproportionate attention to the possibility that introduction of corona measures and vaccination might have caused excess mortality, whilst largely ignoring alternative explanations” and “misleadingly and unilaterally cites literature that supports its own arguments.”

According to the detailed retraction notice, which is over 700 words long, Kaspers and Huibers requested the retraction alongside their institution “due to concerns about misinterpretation of the paper by others and subsequent public health risk,” but did not agree with the journal’s determination the paper contained misinformation. Emails to both researchers returned out-of-office notifications.

In a June 2024 announcement that has been removed but is archived here, the Princess Máxima Center said it was “emphatically” distancing itself from the publication and said they “strongly support vaccination.“

Jan Hoeijmakers, chair of the scientific integrity complaints committee at Princess Máxima Center, did not respond to our questions about specifics of the investigation or our request for a copy of the full report.

Lead author Mostert resigned in 2024 after the Princess Máxima Center announced it would be investigating the paper, she said at a hearing on June 3 before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee subcommittee on investigations on “Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research.” In her testimony, which was largely focused on the BMJ Public Health paper, she said the authors “did not claim certainty regarding the causes of excess mortality. Rather, we asked attention [sic] for three major events that were non-existent before the pandemic: COVID-infection, containment measures, and COVID-vaccines.”

The press office for U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, chair of the subcommittee on investigations, did not respond to our request for comment regarding the retraction of the paper.

Mostert argued governments and media implemented fear and propaganda tactics to reduce “tolerance for reason and dissenting voices” during the pandemic and claimed the investigation into her paper violated academic freedom and constituted censorship.

She also said institutional responses like that from the Princess Máxima Center “are increasingly used as ‘official channel’-tactics to discredit, intimidate, isolate and silence those raising unwelcome scientific questions,” leading to her resignation.

Also in her testimony, Mostert said she proposed a revision to the published paper that “included a section on vaccine effectiveness in reducing mortality,” but the suggestion was “ignored by the journal.” She also claimed the original section on containment measures and vaccines was “much shorter in the original version of the paper,” but reviewers “asked us to either delete the text or provide more evidence. As there is evidence available, we included it.”

The BMJ Public Health retraction notice acknowledged the submission, but said the change would be “insufficient.”

Mostert wrote to the journal on behalf of herself and the study’s fourth author, Marcel Hoogland, that they disagreed with the decision to retract. Hoogland was listed as an independent researcher based in Amsterdam on the now-retracted paper. Mostert’s most recent article, published in February in JCO Global Oncology, lists her as an unaffiliated researcher.³ Requests for comment sent to two email addresses bounced back as undeliverable.

The article has been cited 21 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Altmetrics for the article put it in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by the site. It joins our list of nearly 700 retracted COVID-19 papers.

The retraction is hardly the first of a paper linking COVID-19 vaccines to excess deaths. For example, earlier this year, a lawsuit failed to block the retraction of a paper linking heart-related deaths to the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2024, Cureus retracted a paper on the “extensive” harms of the vaccine.

Karlinsky, whose estimate model was cited in the now-retracted paper, said he respected the Princess Máxima Center’s “swift action and internal investigation and request to retract on the matter, but disagreed with their finding that no plagiarism or malice occurred.”

He told us he suspected the retracted paper plagiarized his work, using a tortured phrase as an example: There was “no other way to explain how ‘compromise between flexibility and simplicity’” in his paper “was tortured to ‘a trade-off between suppleness and chasteness,’” he said. Tortured phrases can indicate plagiarism.

Karlinsky also called the BMJ Group’s response “quite bad.” The journal was “not touching on the fundamental issues and making themselves look good in this, where they really weren’t,” he told us.

He was particularly critical of how long the retraction took. Karlinsky submitted a commentary in June 2024 criticizing the work, which was rejected without review a month later, he told us.

The Princess Máxima Center shared the investigation report with the journal at the end of 2024, according to the retraction notice. “The time to investigate this paper was lengthy because the journal first awaited the formal official outcome of the institutional report,” which was shared in May 2025, the notice reads. After receiving the report, the journal attempted to contact Mostert again “for her perspective on key issues,” it states, before making its final decision.

“The fact that [the journal] prides itself on having waited until they hear back from Mostert is, in my opinion, ludicrous,” Karlinsky said, noting the move prolonged the investigation. “This is like letting a murder suspect get away with it because he’s refusing to come to the police station.”

Update, August 12, 2026, 12:30 p.m. ET: This story was updated with a new link to the June 2024 statement from Princess Máxima Center, which the institution tells us was moved, not removed.

This article was authored by Avery Orrall, and it was first published at Retraction Watch.