Set theory for vaccinated people: Anyone who rants about 14 million people saved is an idiot.

“Millions saved” – the phrase is uttered by politicians as if they themselves had just turned water into wine. Sorli (2025) takes the favorite data powerhouse of the saved – Our World in Data – and publicly adds up what every third-grader's brain can comprehend: In 2020, around 6.3 million additional people died, and in 2021, after the start of vaccinations, another 6.08 million died on top of that – and that's not “minus 14 million saved”, but plus 96.5 percent excess mortality compared to the supposed pandemic year.

The paper bears the sober title "The Discrepancy Between the Number of Saved Lives with COVID-19 Vaccination and Statistics of Our World Data," published in J Clin Trials, Special Issue S32:001 ( PDF , commented on DrBine's Substack ). Method: Elementary school math plus set theory. Point: The supposedly life-saving injection didn't save any lives; it filled the cemetery.

A source against which even the redeemed must not flinch.
Sorli isn't arguing from the perspective of the "lateral thinkers," but from within the belief system itself. Our World in Data is the dataset used to illustrate the pandemic liturgy ad nauseam – including lockdown justifications, mask mandates, and 2G invocations. Anyone who suddenly declares this source a conspiracy theory is precisely shooting themselves in the foot. Until 2020, the global death toll remained consistently around 56 to 57 million per year. Then came the outlier in 2020: around 63 million, an increase of 6.3 million. Whether it was the virus or people who starved to death during lockdowns in poorer countries – the paper deliberately leaves this question of blame open. More deaths, measurable, a fact. Anyone wanting to refute Sorli's argument would therefore either have to label Our World in Data as fake news or retroactively invalidate their own pandemic narrative of recent years – neither of which a health minister would readily endorse in a Sunday speech.

2021 – the year the miracle failed to happen
Pandemics have a characteristic that even Modeler-Apostle You can't simply ignore the fact that the numbers are declining because more and more people are becoming immune. The death toll in 2021 should therefore be at most the same as in 2020, and with a vaccine, even significantly lower. The reality: In 2021, around 69.25 million people died worldwide, 6.08 million more than in the pandemic year of 2020. Not less. Not the same. More. Sorli calculates this soberly: a 96.5 percent increase compared to the previous year's excess. The claim that vaccination reduced global mortality by 63 percent is a calculation error of 159.5 percentage points – larger than some inflation rates in a banana republic. As a reminder: 2020 was portrayed as a once-in-a-century crisis, with images of incidence rates from Bergamo and daily press conferences filled with alarmist pronouncements.

Set theory for first graders
Here comes the part that should make the vaccinated fact-checkers break out in a cold sweat. Sorli defines the world population in 2021 as the set HP. Three subsets: B represents births (133.45 million), D the deaths (69.25 million), and SL the "lives saved by vaccination" (14 million, according to political liturgy). If these 14 million were real, the death toll in 2021 wouldn't be 69.25 million, but 55.25 million. But it isn't. The set SL has no bijective equivalent to physical reality—in plain terms: The 14 million "saved" people don't exist anywhere except on the slides of pharmaceutical conferences and in the WHO's Sunday sermons. They were never born, they were never sick, they were never cured. They are an Excel spreadsheet phantom with a press release.

Where the miracle actually comes from
The magical figure of "14 million" doesn't come from a census of the resurrected, but from a model. Watson and colleagues published this in 2022. Lancet Infectious Diseases An estimate based on hypothetical scenarios without vaccination, combined with the most optimistic efficacy assumptions Imperial College could conjure from its research lab. Inputs freely chosen, outputs guaranteed to be positive. This model then circulated through press releases, political speeches, and fact checks as if it were a factual finding. It isn't. It's a computer animation with peer review and a marketing budget.

37 countries, one direction
If anyone thinks the global figures are too broad, Sorli zooms in. In 37 countries, vaccination rates were compared with mortality rates – day by day, country by country. One would expect a positive correlation with the promise of salvation: more shots, fewer deaths. The opposite is observed. The correlation is negative in all 37 countries, illustrated by the example of Slovenia. Higher vaccination rates, more spikes in deaths. Slovenia is not an exotic, isolated case, but an arbitrary representative from a group in which not a single counter-example could be found. The scientifically precise term for this is "negative causal relationship between vaccination rates and mortality." The honest term is different – ​​but no peer-reviewed journal in the world uses it.

The belief system remains
Sorli formulates his judgment objectively. Theoretical models without statistical substantiation are a "methodological fiasco of health science." What he doesn't say can be inferred: This was no accident. The "Lives Saved" models were designed from the outset to produce a desired outcome. Anyone who calculates based on assumptions instead of counting corpses can conjure up any miracle, including bread and fish in pill form. And yet, not a single health minister in the world will get up tomorrow and say, "We made a mistake." Instead, the next booster season will be declared in the spring, a new threat assessment will be communicated from Brussels in the summer, the next variant will be born in the fall—and no one will ask again about the 14 million people who were lost somewhere between the model report and the evening news.

Fourteen million "saved" lives that never existed are no longer science, but theology with an Excel spreadsheet. Anyone who still believes politicians claiming to have "saved millions of lives" probably also believes that bread and fish were valued at KPMG on the balance sheet date. And when the next miracle serum is hyped tomorrow, every schoolchild already knows where to count the dead—in the cemetery, not in the manufacturer's press release! The "lives saved" models aren't statistics, but a creation myth with a corporation pulling the strings. Anyone who tacks on a booster recommendation on the seventh day, when the creation story is supposed to be at rest, has definitively sealed the pact between science and pharmaceutical marketing. And as long as authorities give more weight to phantom models than to raw data from registry offices, health policy is nothing more than a creed with an IBAN number and a quarterly dividend! Anyone who grants more credibility to model-based rescues than to a count of actual corpses has definitively replaced science with liturgy. The real scandal lies not in a bad paper, but in the fact that governments, authorities, and mainstream media outlets passed on the "14 million" figure for years without ever checking it against the simplest arithmetic operation in the world. And as long as the sandbox level of a single physicist is sufficient to derail three years of global health policy, we should be asking less about whether the injection worked—and more about who this whole thing was supposed to benefit.