Monkey Business

A citizen journalist uncovers connections between the Covid shots, American pension funds and a worldwide obituary archive

(“Mon Key”, painting by csofand, used as his profile picture on Substack)

News reported by an independent researcher who writes on Substack under the name csofand indicates that America has experienced an unusual increase in mortality in the last five years. What’s more, public information about this increase is being altered and concealed. Csofand’s analysis of who benefits from the higher death rate explains why more deaths are still occurring and why these deaths are being covered up.

Csofand’s research is thoroughgoing and exhaustive, including wide-ranging references, generously detailed graphs and charts and vivid elucidation of reams of technical data. Yet there’s nothing dry or dense about his posts, which are expressed in a lively personal style replete with wry humor and accompanied by stunning historical as well as original artwork (including the curious monkey painting that csofand uses as his profile picture — see image above). This is seriously readable reporting.

Csofand tells his subscribers that after refusing the Covid shots mandated by his employer five years ago, he was forced to take early retirement from his longstanding job in a county-run library. Suspecting that the injections were killing and injuring many people, in early 2024 he began investigating overlooked sources of evidence which he hoped would alert the general population to the vaccine’s dangers.

The first such source he wrote about on Substack was the online obituary archive called Legacy. He was encouraged in this line of reporting by Mark Crispin Miller (NYU Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication), whose own Substack “News from Underground” deals frequently with Covid vaccine-related deaths (Mark Crispin Miller). As csofand’s February 2, 2025 post remarks, “Mark took the time to listen to my [Legacy-related] evidence … and helped me get my first post on substack publicized.”

In a post that appeared on February 19, 2024 csofand explains the Legacy site’s purpose:

Legacy.com is the self-described “world’s largest” archive of obituaries you can access as an ordinary citizen. It has been around since 1998 and currently it lists an average of roughly two million death notices per year … As a non-official, non-governmental database, we mine in its logs what is essentially an oral history — what families say about themselves and those they lost. It is messy and inexact in its searchable clues, but if we step back a bit, we might catch a glimpse of something that happened.

In Legacy’s archive he found some astonishing numbers. Even more astounding was how the numbers changed over time in ways that seem impossible. Comparing the number of obituaries in the years 2020 and 2021, for example, revealed that the official story — where unprecedented deaths from Covid-19 were reversed a year later by the life-saving vaccine — was backwards:

The total number of obituaries posted for the first pandemic year of 2020 was 2,071,903. (The year that broke the record in July for deaths.)

The total number of obituaries posted for the year of 2021 was 2,656,094. (The year that had been blessed with the miracle vaccine.)

Focusing on a single exemplary month halfway through each of these years showed a jump of 100,000 deaths:

07/2020 141,470

07/2021 240,656

From one year to the next, in the same month on the calendar, there is a difference [increase] of 100,000 obituaries.

When he narrowed his search to various age groups, from youngest to oldest, he found to his surprise that there was no numerical distinction: the substantial rise in 2021 mortality (compared to 2020) was equal in all age cohorts, which defies the expectation that most deaths would occur in the oldest demographic.

As he continued his research, things turned surreal: the data he had collected began to crumble and disappear. On September 27, 2024, he compared his earlier screenshots to Legacy’s current figures for yearly deaths:

One such statistic I logged in February was the total number of obituaries per year from 2015 to 2023. As I compared those numbers to the ones I find today I was shocked.

NEARLY TWO MILLION DEATHS HAD SIMPLY DISAPPEARED …

Look at the figures just for 2021 and 2022.

HALF A MILLION DEATHS IN EACH YEAR WERE ERASED.

Two days later, on September 29, 2024, he zeroed in on a single day on which more than two million obituaries evaporated overnight:

Legacy.com erased 2,316,410 deaths between June 6th and June 7th of this year [2024].

In an effort to salvage the lost information, and to prove his credibility, he turned to the online research archive known as the Wayback Machine, as he wrote on October 27, 2024:

My past reports, and the numbers they contain, have become non-reproducible using Legacy.com’s search feature. As such, I have had to find another way to show that I am not a liar about these things I am now saying. My main tool in doing that is the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine.

But in the following months, crucial sections of the Wayback Machine’s archive of Legacy pages turned out to be blank. Csofand’s efforts to contact the Wayback Machine’s staff regarding the absent information produced a couple of inconclusive replies but no useful results.

On November 11, 2024, the veteran independent journalist Debbie Lerman published a report on csofand’s Legacy research on her Substack, a story that was picked up a month later by Jeffrey Tucker’s prestigious Brownstone Institute (December 6, 2024).

Millions of Entries Erased Overnight from World’s Largest Obituary Database

Brownstone Institute

The explanation for the large number of deletions from Legacy’s site and the Wayback Machine remains unknown. Both csofand and Lerman speculate that the disappearance of the Legacy data might have been a routine elimination of duplicate records, or possibly an effort to obscure an increase in vaccine-related deaths. Csofand and Lerman contacted Legacy to ask why the records were removed but received only one, uninformative reply that did not specify a particular reason for the missing data.

Once Legacy’s obituary database and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine could no longer provide useful information, csofand looked for other resources to measure patterns of pandemic mortality. In March 2025, he began collecting all-cause mortality figures from all fifty states over the past decade, as catalogued by the CDC (or in some cases by the individual states). He combined these statistics with data from public pension funds that tracked how many contributing employees died each year. In a March 23, 2025 post, he explained that

Recently I tried my hand at another public records request. It was to [the state of] Washington’s public retirement system, asking for the number of its members that had died in each calendar year from 2015 through 2024.

Laboriously compiling, charting and interpreting this information for all US states required a year’s worth of work, usually presented in several posts per week, state by state. The payoff was the discovery of two distinctive, ominous patterns. The first pattern showed unambiguously that death rates following the introduction of mass vaccination in 2021 were higher than before the Covid shots were rolled out, which was consistent with the evidence of the Legacy numbers (Debbie Lerman wrote a second article about this phase of csofand’s work in a Substack post on August 7, 2025, here). And in almost every state the mortality remains elevated or actually increases in subsequent years. Csofand’s second finding was that the states whose pension funds were rated lowest in terms of solvency and financial performance had some of the highest death numbers from 2021 onwards. He described these conclusions in a February 3, 2026 post:

When I originally set out to look at all the USA pension reports (many months ago, now) it was simply to see if I could identify any likely physical harm that the covid “vaccines” had caused to those that were mandated to take them. This was done chiefly through looking at the members removed from the rolls statistics, coupled with any increases in the various categories for death benefits. That was pretty much it for most of my time reporting about these documents.

But not that long ago I started to notice something else contained in them. There was a reoccurring statistic that caught my attention … investment gains. Just as lots of members of these pension systems were officially dying off from “covid,” simultaneously the asset sheets were getting replenished with unheard of stock market gains. These two things were consistently popping up in tandem with the statistics from fiscal year 2021.

As I have immersed myself more and more in this work, over time I have simplified how I look at the first couple of years in the “pandemic.” For me it is like this: 2020 was the first year of “covid” without any vaccines, and 2021 was the first year with vaccines. And it has always struck me as very suspicious that you will almost always see more mortality numbers in 2021 than you will in 2020.

Of course my explanation for this is that the shots caused the elevated numbers of deaths. I still stand by that assertion … We haven’t really looked at the particular mortality numbers for 2021 versus the investment gains in these locations.

Let me illustrate csofand’s method with a representative example, the state of Pennsylvania, as presented in a post published February 28, 2026 (Pennsylvania). The first graph below shows the CDC’s all-cause mortality figures for the state from 2018 to 2023, which shows a dramatic spike in deaths starting in December 2020 (when vaccines were first made available to the public) and more jumps in subsequent years. These spikes far exceed the mortality numbers during 2020, which was the first full year of the pandemic, during which no vaccine was used (except in mid-late December).

The second and third charts (below) show the financial performance of one of Pennsylvania’s largest pension funds (Public School Employees’ Retirement System, PSERS), from the years 2016-2025. Note the sum in the red box at the bottom of the column for 2021 (far right hand side of the first chart): all the numbers shown represent dollars in thousands — those in parentheses signify losses, those without parentheses represent gains — so that means there was a total gain of nearly 15 billion dollars in 2021, which the state itself describes as an “all-time high”. ¹

The numbers speak for themselves: extreme, sudden mortality coinciding exactly with the introduction of the vaccine and subsequent booster shots (the booster dates are given in csofand’s post), which in turn coincide exactly with record-breaking profits in a typical, large pension fund.

Csofand summarized his comparisons of 2021 mortality numbers with pension fund investment gains in over a dozen (and counting) representative states on March 25, 2026:

In the spring of 2020 there were some places in this country that saw very unseasonal increased mortality.

In the following year (fiscal year 2021) many of these same places had huge windfalls in their public employee pension plans due to historic investment gains [nearly 30% gains, amounting to billions of dollars per state].

These investment gains were happening simultaneously with additional increased member mortality into 2021 and beyond.

A look back at the solvency of these same state pension plans shows that many of these locations that had the strange 2020 spring death surge were in pretty bad financial shape in the years before the pandemic hit.

Now, my understanding is that retired employees represent a twofold liability for pension funds, in the first place because the retirees are no longer paying into the fund and in the second place because the fund is now paying the retirees by returning the former employees’ contributions (often plus interest), in addition to benefits paid by the former employer through the retirement fund.²

In this light, a retiree’s death relieves the pension fund of a considerable ongoing loss of capital. The sooner the retiree dies, the less financial burden the fund carries, and the more solvent and profitable the fund becomes.

Living beneficiaries, in other words, are a problem for pension funds. The solution to this problem reminds me of a phrase attributed to Stalin: “No man, no problem.”

I agree with csofand’s conclusion that there is almost certainly a connection between the unprecedented number of (vaccine-induced) retiree deaths and the equally unprecedented amount of pension fund profits at the same time.

As of May 2026, the Covid injections have killed nearly 40,000 Americans, according to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Recording System — but the real total is closer to 4 million, since reported deaths represent only 1% of the actual, unreported total.³

I used to think that the incentive driving the Covid inoculation campaign was purely monetary, since the shot’s manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna, made billions of dollars from their sale.

Later I began to realize that there was an additional motive: to reduce the planet’s population, since a smaller number of people — who are weakened and sickened from vaccine injuries — are easier for governments and international corporations to control. These days, thanks to the reporting of csofand and other intrepid, conscientious investigators like Lerman and Miller, I believe that both motives — profit and crowd control — are in play.

Sadly, this subject is still too controversial for most people to consider. I think csofand explains the reasons for this widespread reluctance to discuss the topic pretty well in a post he published on February 19, 2024:

The stakes are high … for each side, as we know. One side [which opposes the Covid vaccines] needs the vindication that the hardships they endured were worth it – the vilification heaped upon them from the other side was unfounded and here is the proof. And, that other side … that browbeat, coerced and ridiculed can’t afford to be wrong. For if they were in error, then they are complicit in whatever has happened, and is happening … and the ultimate horror that it may yet happen to them.

No, that is too painful a proposition.

So we just don’t talk about it.

I have brought csofand’s work to the attention of my readers in the hope that they will examine his evidence and talk about it with others on both sides of this issue.

1. October 8, 2021 state pension report cited in csofand’s post of 2-28-26

2. Csofand explains in his 5-7-26 post: “Death Refunds are from the employees’ own contributions [frequently with interest paid by the employer], and Death In Service Pre-Retirement Benefits come from the employer’s funds.” Both kinds of payment go to the deceased member’s surviving beneficiaries or estate.

3. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System Accessed 5-12-26. The site states that the VAERS “has been estimated to account for only 1% (read more about underreporting in VAERS) of vaccine injuries. OpenVAERS is built from the HHS data available for download at vaers.hhs.gov.”