In March 2025, viral social media posts shared a screenshot of an article’s headline claiming “Germany Confirms mRNA ‘Vaccines’ Killed More People Than Covid”. One example posted on Facebook accumulated more than 200,000 views at the time of writing.
The article in question was published on Slay News on 10 March 2025. It claimed that scientists in Germany confirmed that “excess deaths were caused by mRNA ‘vaccines’ and not Covid”. It added that “Covid mRNA ‘vaccines’ had weakened immune systems, making influenza infections significantly more deadly for the ‘vaccinated'”. A link in the article sent us to a study published in GMS Hygiene and Infection Control on 4 March 2025.
Slay News is an anonymous website that Media Bias/Fact Check classifies as a questionable source “based on the promotion of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, right-wing propaganda, poor sourcing, lack of transparency, failed fact checks, and blatant plagiarism”. Science Feedback previously fact-checked other claims by Slay News that falsely blamed COVID-19 vaccines for deaths based on flawed data analyses and misrepresented studies.
As on these previous occasions, the study cited in the Slay News article also didn’t support the claims made.
At no point did the study evaluate the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on excess mortality or attribute the excess mortality it observed to COVID-19 vaccines. The article completely misrepresents the objective and results of the study, which analyzed how COVID-19 and other factors contributed to excess mortality in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explain why.
What did the study do and what did it find?
The study was titled “Mortality in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2020–2023: higher excess mortality during an influenza wave in 2022 than during all COVID-19 waves altogether”. Using official population, mortality, and healthcare data, the study analyzed all-cause excess mortality in Frankfurt between 2020 and 2023.
Excess mortality is defined as a greater-than-expected number of deaths within a period of time, relative to the same period in previous years.
The authors adjusted the data for age and trends in population size, and estimated excess mortality for each year between 2020 and 2023 and for the specific periods of each COVID-19 wave (Figure 1). Then, the authors identified potential factors that might have contributed to mortality during those periods, including not only COVID-19 but also other factors like influenza and heat.
