The Growth in America’s Disabled Workforce – Causation or Correlation?

This article was last updated on January 30, 2024

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The Growth in America’s Disabled Workforce – Causation or Correlation?

In this brief posting, I will provide you with two graphics; one showing the growth in the number of disabled Americans over the age of 16 who are in the civilian labour force and the cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccines that have been administered in the United States during the pandemic.

First, a graph from FRED showing the significant growth in the number of disabled Americans in the civilian labour force:

In March 2020, there were 6.418 million disabled American workers, a number which rapidly began to rise from 5.846 million in January 2021.  Note that the number of disabled American workers actually declined during the first phase of the pandemic when only natural immunity was available to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  After hitting a recent peak of 8.477 million in August 2023, by December 2023, this had retreated to 8.293 million, an increase of  2.477 million or 41.86 percent since January 2021.  This is an unprecedented increase in the number of disabled workers going back to mid-2008.

Now, from Our World In Data, here is a graph showing the number of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the United States since the mRNA vaccines were first rolled out in December 2020:

While one cannot say for certain that the COVID-19 vaccines have led to an increase in the number of disabled American workers, at the very least, it is interesting to observe that just as the vaccines were rolling out in early 2021, the number of disabled workers started to climb significantly and continued to do so until August 2023 when the number seems to have stabilized shortly after the number of vaccines administered levelled off.

I will let you draw your own conclusions from the data that I have presented in this posting.  Is it causation or just correlation?  Perhaps there is a link between long COVID and the growing number of disabled American workers, however, this too is difficult to prove since long COVID is a relatively unexplained and incompletely documented phenomenon.