Propaganda isn't rea--

There is no way that this is a randomized controlled trial. I'm nearly 100% sure your hypothesis isn't supported by their data. Or the framing is so ambiguous it doesn't actually mean what people think it means. First, it assuredly is not a causal relationship. That is, if you're debating to get the vaccine or not, deciding to get it so you'll have a lower death rate from other causes is clearly fallacious logic. This means it is not actionable. Instead, at best it is a kind of relationship like "tall people are richer on average". Interesting to know, but you're in whatever group you're in already and it's either impossible to change groups or the group membership is just a proxy variable that is correlated with the real causal driver. Second, the mechanism of higher intelligence and higher vaccine rate -> better choices in general and therefore a lower death rate _could_ be possible, but there are too many confounders here, and they would obviously be much stronger. The obvious ones are geography and age. In general, the elderly are at a greater risk of covid and have a higher death rate and a higher vaccination rate. But they also die at a much higher rate of any other diseases! Those <18 have a much lower death rate of all causes (maybe 100x less or so than somebody 80+) but they have a much lower vaccination rate. I'm sure this effect is much stronger than the effect about intelligence you hypothesize. Another confounder would be country. Vaccination rate in Africa is low and but the death rate from all causes is extremely high. Obviously that has everything to do with lack of availability and problems they have there in general. So which populations are we comparing? Within a single country? Within a single age group? Did the researchers "control" for these confounders? If they didn't do this, all they're really measuring is the average age of the vaccine group vs the unvaccinated group or one country vs another. And if they did, then there are probably at least another half a dozen of these too that should be considered, tested, and controlled (e.g. income, religious affiliation, urban vs rural, physical health.) In conclusion, these kinds of "studies" are bullshit. We all know it. It's why there is a replication crisis in the social sciences and medicine. When you spend some time thinking about all the things wrong with the data, population selection, etc it becomes clear it's pretty irresponsible to draw much of any conclusion from it and certainly not a any grand conclusion that holds in general.