Conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Monday floated the disproven idea that COVID-19 vaccines are contributing to higher mortality rates in the U.S. over the last few years.
“We deserve answers, and some would conjecture, ‘Hey, does this have something to do with the fact that we might have done a mass inoculation strategy?’” Kirk asked Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Kirk declined to elaborate on this claim, and instead lumped it in with entirely legitimate factors.
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“We know that there [were] deaths of alienation, suicide and otherwise. But there [are] no answers,” the Turning Point USA founder said, inaccurately. “No one’s talking about it.”
Kirk based his wild speculation on the findings of life insurance company OneAmerica, whose CEO, J Scott Davison, said last month that death rates have risen by 40 percent among people ages 18-64 when compared to pre-pandemic levels. The severity of this number, Davison said, is illustrated by how a 1 in 200-year catastrophe would cause only a 10 percent increase.
While the rise in fatalities is largely due to COVID-19, and people who contracted it later dying of a separate illness, Kirk peddled the debunked claim that the vaccines themselves could be the reason for the higher death rate. Carlson,, who’s made similar claims, didn’t push back at all on his guest’s assertion.
Last spring, Carlson insinuated that “30 people every day” die because of vaccines, citing an open-sourced database that PolitiFact notes has become a “breeding ground for misinformation.” That database, Carlson claimed, showed “fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events.”
“So what is the real number of people who apparently have been killed or injured by the vaccine? We don’t know that number,” Carlson said then, in the same vein as Kirk on Monday. “Nobody does and we are not going to speculate about it on the show. But it is clear that what is happening now, for whatever reason, is not even close to normal. It’s not even close to what we see in previous years with previous vaccines. Most vaccines are not accused of killing large numbers of people.”
