@adam-l

This settles the debate

Outcome - All-cause death Death from any cause was considered the main outcome in each analysis. Date of death was retrieved from the National Population Register

I have some thoughts about this study but that one line alone raises some serious questions about your conclusion. This study appears to have nothing to do with assessing covid deaths based on vaccination status but rather and up to and including if you got killed by a bus or a murder.

Most countries worldwide have experienced excess mortality that coincides temporally with the COVID-19 mass vaccination campaigns. This has led to speculation on the potential long-term effects of the vaccines on mortality risk

The study appears to be aimed entirely at dispelling the notion that the vaccine killed people in excess manners, rather than that it reduced covid deaths specifically.

The study does nothing to incorporate any other incidental covariates. For example, if most of the people who sought vaccines tended to be college educated and higher income brackets and with Jobs that mandated they receive it, they would naturally be in socioeconomic brackets or otherwise where deaths are already less common.

Conversely, if people that largely avoided it tended to be more rural or generally avoiding health care when faced with any illness, you would expect to see their all cause deaths to be higher anyway.

County of residence

This appears to be the only covariate variable at all that might even be relevant to where they live.

This study is remaining short on any meaningful covariates and uses a regression model which is for drawing correlation statistics and is not nearly as robust as a controlled experiment.

There was a total of 132 963 deaths during follow-up, with 116 589 (88%) occurring among those 65 years or older.

Age is already a remarkable risk factor and the heavy skew towards elderly deaths does very little to address the idea that excess vaccine deaths are being examined here. Age related death is a glaring spoiler in this study.

Confidence intervals

This is probably the most damning part of this study and why it is far from "settled" debate. I could not find a single p value in this study in the results even with search. The authors only provide confidence intervals, which are relevant in p values (significance testing) but no p values to be found.

There are likewise absolutely no effect sizes reported in this study. They provide no level of statical strength for their findings. It is impossible to determine if any of the significant effects they found (indicated by confidence intervals that do not cross the value of [0.00, 0.00] on either side of the brackets was small, medium or large.

They appeared to use the entire adult population of Norway, which is a massive sample. It is statically advised to not use participant counts above 10,000 because with an N count of that high you are guaranteed to find a statically significant difference among group.

The lack of an effect size to indicate the strength of any of their findings, the spoiler covariates, and lack of meaningful covariates accounting for reliable indicators of all cause deaths such as substance use, socioeconomic status, etc, make this study highly error prone and very much up for debate