SAIMSARA Journal

Machine Generated Science • ISSN 3054-3991

COVID-19 Vaccine and Mortality: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

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Longevity

Issue 2, Volume 1, 2026

Editorial note
• Last update: 2026-03-23 20:51:23
What is this paper about
This review shows that COVID-19 vaccination was generally linked to lower mortality, especially in older and high-risk groups, but that protection decreased over time and improved again after booster doses. Read the full paper to see where the evidence is strongest, which groups benefit most, and where important safety and interpretation questions remain.
Additional notes
This review includes one retracted publication (Reference 1). Why we kept it is explained on our social channels — share your view: https://x.com/i/status/2036173849289695527

DOI: 10.62487/saimsara047981e6

Abstract: This paper aims to synthesize current evidence regarding the association between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality, evaluating vaccine effectiveness (VE) against COVID-19-specific death, all-cause mortality, and the influence of clinical comorbidities and waning immunity. The review utilises 966 original studies with 32894695 total participants (topic deduplicated ΣN). The evidence map strongly suggests that COVID-19 vaccination was associated with lower mortality across general populations, hospitalized cohorts, and many clinically vulnerable groups, with primary-series protection against COVID-19 death often reported in the 80-97% range and an estimated 19.8 million deaths averted globally in the first year of rollout. A recurrent pattern across the literature was waning of mortality protection after roughly 3-6 months, alongside restoration or enhancement of protection after booster doses, including fourth-dose and bivalent-booster benefit in older adults and long-term care populations. The mapped evidence also indicates that large surveillance studies did not show increased all-cause or cardiac-related mortality after vaccination, while rare fatal adverse syndromes such as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia remained uncommon but clinically important to recognize early. Clinically, these findings support continued prioritization of booster strategies for older adults, immunocompromised patients, and people with major comorbidity, while maintaining surveillance for rare serious adverse events and residual risk in frail populations. Because much of the evidence remains observational and vulnerable to healthy vaccinee and related biases, future research should focus on better-controlled comparative studies with standardized mortality outcomes and clearer evaluation of durability across variants, products, and high-risk subgroups.

Keywords: COVID-19 vaccination; Mortality rate; Vaccine effectiveness; mRNA vaccines; Booster doses; All-cause mortality; Non-COVID-19 mortality; In-hospital mortality; Bivalent boosters; Excess mortality

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Reference Index (179)