Did life insurance payouts increase dramatically after the COVID-19 vaccine was introduced, implying a connection to a mass murder plot masterminded by the World Health Organization (WHO)? No, that's not true: The numbers used in this video on TikTok are misleading. After the COVID-19 vaccine became widely available in 2021, life insurers in the United States did report a rise in total disbursements; however, this increase was not directly related to death-benefit payouts. U.S. death-benefit payouts actually decreased in the year after the vaccines were introduced, industry numbers show.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on November 1, 2023, under the title (translated from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff) "Exposing the WHO in the European Parliament. a criminal cartel that's reducing population for the sake of profit. Dr David Martin". A narrator presents excerpts of a presentation by anti-vaccine activist David Martin at a forum hosted by members of the European Parliament on September 13, 2023. After Martin declares that the WHO, along with drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna, "were given the authorization to begin the process of killing human beings" with vaccinations, the narrator says at the 3:40 mark (translated from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff):
Well, based on life insurers' damage claims, society was healthier in 2020, at the time of the 'deadly' pandemic, than after they started giving out the 'safe' vaccine. In 2021 and 2022, damage claims shot up.
As the narrator speaks, a screenshot of a dataset appears showing that total life insurance payouts jumped from $744.4 billion in 2020 to $790.9 billion in 2021 and $797.7 billion in 2022.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Nov 15 13:45:56 2023 UTC)
The table that appears onscreen was copied from a report published on the website of the Insurance Information Institute (III), a U.S. industry organization. It accurately shows that U.S. life insurance payouts rose from 2020-22 -- but omits the part showing the different disbursement categories responsible for the increase.
The full version of III's dataset reveals that death-benefit payouts actually decreased from $97.2 billion in 2021 to $88.8 billion in 2022. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on December 11, 2020, and green-lighted Moderna's vaccine a week later. In other words, net death-benefit claims dropped by 9 percent in 2022, the year after the shots became broadly available to the U.S. public.
The main reason life insurers spent more in 2022 than in 2021 was because they boosted their aggregate reserves -- funds set aside in anticipation of future liabilities -- to $116.2 billion from $80.9 billion, III's table demonstrates.
It is accurate that U.S. excess death numbers surged in 2021 relative to 2020, despite the availability of vaccines, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Scott Davison, CEO of U.S. insurer OneAmerica, said mortality rates jumped 40 to 46 percent among working-age people with life insurance during the third quarter of 2021 (see Davison's comments at the 35:48 mark of an online press conference on December 30, 2021.)
However, at the 34:58 mark, Davison made it clear that he did not blame vaccines:
What we're seeing is that people get COVID, they kind of recover, and then they die from some sort of disease mechanism that was impacted by the fact that they got COVID in the first place.
Davison mentioned in an Associated Press article published on January 10, 2022, that 65 percent of excess deaths in the third quarter in the U.S. were "directly attributed" to the COVID virus, based on CDC data. Additionally, some excess deaths resulted from people delaying medical care during the pandemic, and others succumbed to the indirect consequences of COVID infection.
According to a Wall Street Journal article published on February 23, 2022, Frank Svoboda, co-CEO of U.S. insurer Globe Life, supported Davison's explanation of the factors behind the elevated death rates in 2021:
The losses we are seeing continue to be elevated over 2019 levels due at least in part, we believe, to the pandemic and the existence of either delayed or unavailable healthcare.
The WHO urges people to get vaccinated against the COVID virus. Medical research has verified Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna's shots as safe and effective.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on David E. Martin's claims about COVID can be found here. Fact checks on Hungarian claims about WHO vaccine policy can be found here.
