No Evidence of Link Between U.S. Infant Mortality Rate Increase and COVID-19 Vaccines

SciCheck Digest

A recent federal report shows a 3% increase in the U.S. infant mortality rate between 2021 and 2022, which is the first statistically significant rise in 20 years. The cause of the uptick is unknown, but there’s no evidence that it’s due to COVID-19 vaccination, as some social media posts baselessly suggest.

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A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2022, 5.6 infants out of every 1,000 live births died before they turned 1 in the U.S., a 3% increase over 2021. This returns the infant mortality rate, which has steadily fallen over the decades, to the 2019 level.

The data in the report, which compared birth and death records collected through the National Vital Statistics System, are provisional. The last time the infant mortality rate had a statistically significant year-to-year increase was from 2001 to 2002, when it also rose by 3%.

The  by significant increases in mortality for several categories measured in the report — in infants born to women ages 25 to 29; in