Source: Sonia Elijah Investigates, Substack, November 21, 2025
Source: Regional patterns of excess mortality in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic: a state-level analysis
As the world grapples with surges in all-cause mortality, a disturbing pattern emerges: governments and health agencies are pulling every lever to keep the data under wraps.
My latest investigation into the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) stonewalling of vaccine-death records—upheld just weeks ago by a tribunal—lays bare a deliberate data blackout. However, across the Channel, a bombshell German study, published on 12 November in Royal Society Open Science, provides the “smoking gun” that UK officials seem desperate to avoid: higher COVID vaccination rates correlate with sharper rises in excess deaths.
Gold-Standard Actuarial Methods, State-by-State Precision
Professors Christof Kuhbandner (University of Regensburg) and Matthias Reitzner (Osnabrück University) used the exact same actuarial techniques that life-insurance companies rely on to calculate expected deaths. They applied these methods separately to each of Germany’s 16 federal states across three cleverly defined “pandemic years” (April 2020–March 2021, April 2021–March 2022, and April 2022–March 2023). This April-to-March framing avoids the distortions caused by calendar-year cuts that arbitrarily split deadly winter waves in half.
Three Distinct Phases of Excess Mortality
Year 1 (2020/21)
National excess: +2.3 %
Huge regional variation. Eastern states (Saxony +14.6 %, Thuringia +5.3 %) saw significant excess mortality; northern and western states barely registered.
Year 2 (2021/22)
National excess: +2.7 %
Regional pattern almost identical to Year 1 – suggesting the same drivers were still at play.
Year 3 (2022/23)
National excess: a shocking +7.8 %
Regional differences largely flattened, but the states that saw the biggest jumps in excess mortality were precisely those that had pushed vaccination hardest the year before.
The Vaccination Paradox
According to the study’s findings: “A strong positive correlation emerged in the third pandemic year, federal states with higher vaccination rates exhibited significantly larger increases in excess mortality from the second to the third pandemic year.”
In the third year, the correlation between a state’s full-vaccination rate and the increase in excess mortality from Year 2 to Year 3 was a jaw-dropping r = +0.81 (p < 0.0001). Even after controlling for: prior excess mortality, age structure, GDP per capita, poverty rate, proportion of care-home residents, and every plausible time-invariant confounder.
States with the highest vaccination coverage (Bremen 88 %, Saarland 86 %, Schleswig-Holstein 83 %) suffered the most dramatic worsening in 2022–23. Eastern states with the lowest uptake (Saxony 59 %, Thuringia 63 %, Brandenburg 68 %) saw far smaller increases or even relative stabilisation in excess deaths.
Reported COVID Deaths Plummet While All-Cause Deaths Explode
In the first two pandemic years, excess mortality tracked reported COVID deaths closely across states (r ≈ 0.8–0.9). By Year 3 that relationship had vanished entirely. Official COVID deaths collapsed, yet all-cause excess deaths skyrocketed— the classic signature of a new dominant mortality driver emerging in 2022.
Every Official Alternative Explanation Fails
- Long COVID? States with the highest cumulative infection rates up to 2022 had lower excess mortality in 2022/23.
- Lockdown stringency? Zero protective correlation in any year.
- Institutional trust? It predicts worse outcomes, but only because it drove higher vaccine uptake – the entire effect is mediated through vaccination rate.
The Authors’ Devastating Conclusion
“Higher vaccination rates correlated with larger increases in excess mortality and with smaller declines in COVID-19 deaths and case fatality rates, even after adjusting for prior mortality levels and time-invariant confounders. This robust finding underscores the need for urgent investigation into potential unintended effects of vaccination or other previously neglected mortality drivers.”
This German state-of-the-art actuarial method-based study is the clearest, most rigorously controlled ecological evidence published so far. In 2022–2023 something catastrophic struck mortality in Germany, and two-thirds of the variation in how badly each region was hit is explained by how aggressively that region vaccinated its citizens the year before.
Regulators, public-health bodies, and mainstream media can no longer pretend these patterns do not exist. The German state-level data are now in the open, peer-reviewed, actuarially bullet-proof, and publicly available for anyone to verify.
