Here in the grand theatre of post-pandemic revisionism, few props have been waved more triumphantly than the claim that COVID-19 vaccines saved "millions" of American lives. Picture the scene: Congressional hearings where Peter Hotez, Ph.D., testifies with the fervour of a televangelist, citing models that tallied 3.2 million deaths averted, 18.5 million hospitalisations dodged, and a cool $1.15 trillion in medical bills vapourised by November 2022. Legacy media amplified it like a stadium PA system, Vox charting the "extraordinary success," The Lancet pegging 14.4 million global lives saved by December 2021. It's the feel-good finale to a horror show: Science 1, Virus 0.
But what if the scoreboard was rigged from the start? Enter Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., two all-cause mortality sleuths from Canada's Correlation Research in the Public Interest. Their fresh October 2025 preprint doesn't just poke holes, it dynamites the foundation, arguing these "fantastic and unverifiable" tallies rest on counterfactual models so implausibly timed they border on farce. As Rancourt quips on his Substack, it's "politics by science": Plug in Big Pharma's efficacy gospel, crank the dial, and voilà, millions saved, no receipts required. Let's dissect this challenge with the scalpel it deserves: Part autopsy, part satire, all scepticism.
At its core, the pro-vaccine chorus sings from the hymnbook of counterfactual modelling, a fancy term for "what if we rewind the tape and erase the shots?" These aren't crystal balls; they're simulations projecting alternate realities where no jabs were jabbed. To tally "lives saved," modelers like Meagan Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., start with contagion dynamics: How many infections would have rippled without vaccines? Layer on infection fatality rates (IFRs), tweak for variants, and subtract the "would-be dead" from the actual toll. Fitzpatrick's 2022 blog-turned-citation classic fed Hotez's testimony, assuming clinical trial efficacy rates north of 90%, numbers Rancourt and Hickey brand "contrived, questionable, and non-transparent." Why the shade? Those trials, rushed under Operation Warp Speed, measured relative risk reduction in controlled cohorts, not absolute real-world carnage. Critics like Yaakov Ophir, Ph.D., in a September 2025 International Journal of Applied Biology and Pharmaceutical Technology takedown, echo the duo: Step-by-step, the chain unravels, overstated efficacy cascades into ballooned infection projections, birthing death tolls that defy gravity.
Rancourt and Hickey's killer app? They don't just gripe, they reverse-engineer the models' time evolutions, graphing the "excess all-cause mortality" those hypotheticals demand. Spoiler: It's a horror show of coincidences. Accept Fitzpatrick's inputs, and you'd need the virus to mutate into a five-fold virulence monster twice in 2021, right on the heels of the initial rollout (doses 1+2, early 2021) and boosters (late 2021-early 2022). Why? Because real-world excess mortality didn't dip post-vax; it flatlined from 2020's peaks into 2021-22, per CDC and WHO data. No heroic plunge in deaths, no "saved" surge, just steady grim reaping. To square the circle, the models posit spontaneous death waves that make the Black Plague look like a flu season. As Rancourt dryly notes, "You'd have to believe these incredible coincidences where the pathogen suddenly became more virulent." Satirically? It's like claiming your new diet cured obesity because, counterfactual-style, you'd have ballooned to elephantine proportions just before starting kale smoothies, twice, conveniently. Or, in pandemic terms: The vaccines "saved" millions by averting apocalypses that never loomed, timed with the precision of a scriptwriter's Deus ex virus.
This isn't Rancourt's first rodeo debunking the narrative. His 2023 preprint shredded similar Nobel-prize-adjacent claims, showing models inflate savings by ignoring how high vax uptake leaves no clean unvaccinated control group; America's 70%+ jab rate turns comparisons into statistical mush. Hickey, his co-pilot, brings the mortality maths: Excess all-cause deaths (the gold standard, capturing everything from COVID to car crashes), reveal no vax-driven inflection. A 2022 Lancet analysis of raw mortality data concurred ambiguously: "The magnitude of the impact... was unclear." Even John Ioannidis, Ph.D., the Stanford meta-maestro often hailed as a vaccine sceptic, dialled it back in a November 2024 medRxiv preprint: 2.5 million global lives saved from 2020-2024, a tenth of Fitzpatrick's tally, using seroprevalence over pure modelling. Rancourt? He calls even that "severely overestimated," a polite way of saying "garbage in, ghosts out."
The rebuttals? Thin as a trial participant's consent form. Science Feedback's 2023 hit on Rancourt's "17 million killed" paper (a separate excess-mortality probe) flagged cherry-picked data and ignored confounders like lockdowns. Fair, but this lives-saved salvo? Crickets from Fitzpatrick's camp, no direct clapback in searches, just echoes of her UMaryland presser. On X, the buzz skews contrarian: Ophir's thread hailing the IJABPT paper nods to Rancourt/Hickey as allies in the "takedown," racking likes from McCullough's orbit. Mainstream holdouts cling to the models' halo; Commonwealth Fund touting Fitzpatrick's two-year "millions prevented" in 2022. Yet as Rancourt thunders, peer review's "corrupted": Top journals rubber-stamp pharma-pleasing sims while sidelining empirical autopsies. It's "worker bees" buzzing for masters, he says, outrageous, but substantiated by the revolving door of grants and ghost-writing.
Zoom out: This isn't just academic mud-wrestling; it's a trust implosion. False saviours warp policy, mandates justified by phantom millions, boosters peddled as panaceas amid myocarditis whispers. Rancourt and Hickey warn: "False claims... can have a disastrous effect on public health." Satirically? We've got a trillion-dollar victory lap on a virus that, per excess data, didn't need saving from itself. The real counterfactual? What if we'd leaned on measured mortality over modelled miracles, fewer divisions, more dialogue?
Bottom line: Rancourt and Hickey's quantitative punch lands hard, no reliable reason to buy the millions-saved myth. Vaccines may have blunted some edges (Ioannidis' lowball concedes that much), but the blockbuster claims? Implausible at best, invented at worst.