We received this factcheck request via our website:

According to the message, a German Chief Pathologist found that the COVID-19 jab was the cause of death in 30-40% of the autopsies of recently vaccinated individuals. The claim, while convoluted seems to suggest that a significant percentage of vaccinations result in fatalities.

When we conducted a search on the context of the claim, we found several news sites that had reported on these findings. Interestingly however, there were no mainstream news sites that covered this report, with all the articles being published by alternative news sources. It is also worth noting that these sites claim to be reporting on ‘facts’ that the mainstream refuses to, with a strong emphasis on articles that promote a message of being opposed to vaccination (See below).

The articles describe the findings of Director of the Pathological Institute of the University of Heidelberg, Dr Peter Schirmacher. These findings state that 30 to 40 per cent of the people he examined died from the vaccine and that in his opinion, the frequency of fatal consequences of vaccinations is “underestimated.”

Looking at the original source of the findings, we found a report from Augburger Allegemeine or Augburg General, a regional German newspaper with their headline being ‘Chief pathologist at Heidelberg University urges more autopsies of vaccinated people’. According to the article, while the facts that 30 to 40 per cent of the people he examined had died from the vaccine is in fact true, the sample consisted of only people who had died within two weeks of receiving the vaccine, with 40 autopsies conducted in total.

Due to the low sample sizes used, the findings of Dr Schrimacher have been controversial, with his statements on the connection between deaths and vaccination being decried by other pathologists and immunologists as having no legitimate basis. However, the scientists opposed to Dr Schrimacher’s report do agree that more autopsies of vaccinated people should be conducted in order for the correlation between vaccines and vaccine-related deaths being debunked or proven.

To conclude, even though it is true that the vaccine was the cause of death in 30 to 40% of those recently vaccinated, the sample used was significantly biased and not representative of the general population, being 40 autopsies conducted among individuals who had died within 2 weeks of getting vaccinated. Taking this into account along with the fact that these individuals form an extremely small percentage of the vaccinated population in Germany, the link between vaccinations and death is currently unproven.