Death and COVID. It's personal.
The COVID vaccine's toll
2024 was not a good year; too many funerals.
The last one was for my mother-in-law, Betty.
It was completely unexpected.
At 4 pm on a Sunday in November, she called to say she wasn’t feeling well. She had woken up that morning with cold sweats and a tight chest. But she thought it wasn’t too bad, so she had decided to rest for the day rather than bother us.
We quickly took her to the emergency room. She walked to the car. She walked into the hospital. They immediately took her blood and got her oxygen, and the rush to diagnose and treat began.
She died ten hours later in the intensive care unit.
Why death and COVID?
The diagnosis was myocarditis. The initial blood results showed massively elevated troponin levels, many thousands of times the normal range.
Troponin is a protein found only in heart cells; high levels in the blood indicate damage to those heart cells, as it leaks out of the cells when they are damaged.
We were initially told that this test indicated the damage was severe and irreversible, and that she would never fully recover. But positive signs hours later had us hoping for a recovery. But she died at 2.30 am in the intensive care unit when her heart decided to stop rather than return to a normal rhythm.
It was a rollercoaster that night.
The shock of such an event makes you think back to what you could have known earlier.
How could such a severe heart condition go unnoticed? Sure, a week earlier she came down with a cold. But it wasn’t severe. Maybe her pains earlier in the year that she thought were indigestion were actually heart damage that never recovered?
The worst part was returning to her apartment and finding, in a box of recent letters, her latest vaccination certificate. She had travelled abroad a couple of times in recent years and needed a COVID-19 vaccine to do so. She trusted what she was told. “Safe and effective” and all that.
She had five of them altogether—two each from AstraZeneca and Pfizer, and one from Moderna. The most recent was 12 months before she died.
We know now that myocarditis is a side effect of these vaccines.
What are the chances that these vaccines had nothing to do with her death?
I keep thinking about a counterfactual world where we never panicked about COVID and just treated it like the flu, as we should have. Would Betty be alive today?
I’m pissed off.
The COVID years were a fight for sense rather than panic. I was routinely insulted for cautioning against vaccinating children with the new and relatively untested COVID vaccines for what was a relatively minor illness.
My sensible position then, for which I was abused, has become the official position in 2025.
I did my best to explain that COVID’s 3,000-fold difference in risk by age is enormous, and the simple retort that “yeah, but it’s still a risk” doesn’t cut it when crafting policy where life-and-death trade-offs must be made.
But who would listen to some random economist?1
Some readers may feel a deep sense of dread reading this. Not because of my family’s loss, but because if what I say is true, it means a complete reset of your understanding of the world.
Our collective actions did not save us from impending doom. The COVID years were not a victory.
Instead, our actions cost everyone dearly in terms of their health, well-being, and economic prosperity.
I recently discussed these costs with Professor Paul Frijters of Academia Libera Mentis in this podcast conversation.
FET #51: Paul Frijters on the CORONA PANIC DEBACLE after FIVE years
Paul Frijters runs Academia Libera Mentis from a castle in Belgium. After a distinguished academic career in Australia and Europe, he is creating an academic oasis in the Ardennes for thinking, learning and growing.
The evidence for the vaccines being far less effective and far riskier than thought is quite clear.
I’m sure many of you know people with vaccine injuries.
We see, for example, search interest in myocarditis, blood clots, and other injuries spike in early 2021, when the COVID vaccine rolled out, and not before this, when COVID itself was spreading.
The chart below shows the Google Trends search interest. Australia’s COVID vaccine rollout began in February 2021. The age-standardised rate of deaths spiked in 2022 in Australia and globally.
Can this be explained away?
We have quietly admitted these health costs to the vaccines.
Some countries banned or made it extremely difficult for children to get a COVID vaccine as early as 2022. The AstraZeneca vaccine was withdrawn from sale in 2024. Australia, like other nations, created a compensation scheme for COVID vaccine injury victims, with many thousands applying.
You might wonder why an economist is so obsessed with this topic—leave it to the experts!
That’s something I’ve heard quite a bit.
It just so happens that economists are the experts at evaluating social trade-offs. That is the core foundation of the discipline.
Sure, the vaccine risks appear low when you divide by millions of doses, but so too were COVID risks across millions of people. It is the relativity of risk that dictates whether our policy actions have net benefits or net costs.
A low-risk activity repeated millions of times means bad things will happen. That’s why we spend billions on our medical system and on our roads, to prevent low risks of death and injury from inevitably happening across the millions of us using the roads.
I’m at a loss.
Until now, I felt like I could be the objective observer, pointing out the statistics and the economics, hoping that it would achieve something positive.
But now? It’s personal.
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Here’s a summary of my COVID-era articles and experiences.
