A video in which a research article is used to argue that mRNA vaccines cause people to be fatally attenuated for other diseases makes false claims about the study, according to the paper’s lead author.
The video, which has been viewed more than 140,000 times on Facebook, has the caption: “Why people might start dying a few months after the Gates vaccination”.
It begins with a screenshot of the summary of a 2012 article entitled ‘Immunization with SARS Coronavirus Vaccines Leads to Pulmonary Immunopathology on Challenge with the SARS Virus’. The paper is visible online here and here. The study investigated vaccinated mice that were later exposed to a live SARS virus.
The speaker in the video says: “What happened in this study is that the animal models, after being challenged, became very ill and that some of them died. So the last line of the summary says, ‘It warns against continuing to use a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans.’ ‘(Timestamp 1.06)
The recommendation for warning is indeed the final rule of the study’s conclusion, as published on the above link, but the lead author of the study, Prof Chien-Te (Kent) Tseng (here), told Reuters by email that the animals in the study did not die.
He said immunized mice “generate strong and highly protective antibody responses that fully protect immunized mice from deadly infection”.
He said that when the animals were exposed to the live virus, they developed eosinophilia (a large number of white blood cells), but, despite this, they found that mice survived the deadly challenge without noticing any weight loss. other signs of illness. ”
The speaker in the video further says through the video that the findings of the study apply to RNA vaccines (here Timestamps 0.18, 1.49, 2.43).
However, Tseng said the vaccines they studied in the 2012 article and the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 vaccines are ‘many different vaccine platforms’.
Tseng also said that although people should always be careful about the safety of new vaccines, they should not worry about his article.
He wrote: “I feel that our previous report raised the safety issue that has been taken seriously by various institutions, including the World Health Organization and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, among vaccine developers worldwide.”
VERDICT
Untrue. Animals vaccinated in the 2012 study referred to in this video did not die if exposed to a live virus, according to the study’s lead author.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.