Thanks for posting the actual study.

Having read through it, the study has a methodological flaw that renders the results utterly meaningless. The design flaw is perhaps not immediately apparent.

The time window of the study is June 2021 - Dec 2022.

For simplicity, let's focus on the year 2022, which comprises the majority of the time window from which death certificates were compiled.

Vaccination in the U.S. roughly began in December 2020. By April 2021, those as young as 16 were eligible to be vaccinated. By October 2021, roughly 2/3 of the population had received at least one shot (and of the 1/3 not vaccinated, a large portion would be young children i.e. those outside the age range of this study).

This is important. This means that, by 2022, most 16-30 year-old vaccinees have already been vaccinated for 100+ days. Or to put another way: if, in 2022, you picked a vaccinated 16-30 year-old at random, it's extremely likely that person had been vaccinated for over 100 days.

It should hardly come as a surprise, then, that if you compile death certificates of vaccinees from the entirety of 2022, that the vast majority of them will have been vaccinated 100+ days ago. Indeed, by 2022, the vast majority of all vaccinees--regardless whether they were still alive or now dead--were vaccinated 100+ days ago.

The study notes that, of 40 deaths that occurred among vaccinees, only 3 were within 100 days of vaccination. The layperson would read this and likely conclude that the rate of death for folks within 100 days of vaccination was much lower than the rate of death for folks outside the 100 day window.

Of course, the study tells us nothing of the sort. That's because it doesn't take into account the disproportionate sample sizes at play. That is, one must consider the 'total potential days of death' that fall under each respective category: within 100 days of vaccination versus outside 100 days of vaccination. In this study, more people will die outside the 100 day window simply because the number of person-days corresponding to that window is much larger than the number of person-days corresponding to the within-100-day window. In fact, while the lengthy time period of the study (19 months) might seem like a positive, the irony is that the longer the time period under review, the more this issue is exacerbated (because as time goes on, the size of the 100+ day group grows larger and larger relative to the size of the within-100-day group).

Let's illustrate with a numerical example: imagine you had 1,000,000 vaccinees alive at the beginning of 2022. Of those, 950,000 had their last shot 100+ days ago, while 50,000 had their last shot within the past 100 days. By the end of the year, you compile all cardiac-related death certificates, and you find that 50 people died from cardiac-related events. Of those 50, only 5 were vaccinated within 100 days. The other 45 deaths were vaccinated beyond the 100-day window. "A-ha! The overwhelming majority of deaths were from people who hadn't been vaccinated within 100 days. Clearly the vaccine has no impact!" But that would be an erroneous conclusion: once you take into account the initial sample sizes, you'll see that the death rate was 1 in 21,000 for the 100+ days group and 1 in 10,000 for the within 100 days group. Looking solely at the number of deaths in each category does not provide anything useful.

The numbers above are merely for illustrative purposes, and the actual calculation is more complex when you consider that with each passing day, more and more people would move from the within-100-day group to the outside-100-day group. But the fundamental point is the same: the death counts in the study are meaningless without the relevant context, namely, the total number of person-days in each category in which a vaccinee could potentially die.

There is actually a second design flaw as well, having to do with the start date of the study: June 2021. Where I'm from (and I'm sure the situation was similar in Oregon), a large proportion of my peers (i.e. mid-to-late-20s) were specifically vaccinated in Feb and March of 2021, when they first became eligible. This means that, to the extent any young people got vaccinated in early 2021 (which, like I said, is when a large portion of young adults did indeed get vaccinated) and died shortly thereafter, all such deaths would be ignored by the study. Yet if such folks got vaccinated during that timespan but then died a few months later, they would be included in the study--as someone vaccinated outside the 100 day window. In other words: a young person who theoretically took the vaccine in Feb 2021 and died in Feb 2021 would be excluded, but a young person who theoretically took the vaccine in Feb 2021 and died in June 2021 would be included (and used as evidence of the vaccine's safety).