Social media users shared a video falsely claiming that clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines did not take place.
The video features a conspiracy theorist banned from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in 2020 for violating policy on misinformation (here, here).
The individual says: “What about the trials, which did not take place? Ladies and gentlemen, the trial is about rolling out the vaccine falsely. There were no trials, you are the trial. ‘(here, 1:52). This is false.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer BioNTech vaccines, which are available in the UK, have undergone clinical trials (here) to prove their safety and efficacy. During the trials, half of the volunteers were given the vaccine and half received a placebo-dummy treatment (here).
Pfizer’s phase three clinical trial began in late July 2020 and the results were published in December 2020 (here). According to Pfizer’s website (here), 46,331 entrants are enrolled in 153 locations around the world in Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and the United States.
According to Oxford-AstraZeneca clinical trials, there were 23,848 people across the UK, Brazil and South Africa between April and November 2020, according to a report by the Oxford Vaccine Group in the medical journal The Lancet (here, page 1) has been published.
A record of both trials can be viewed on ClinicalTrials.gov, an online resource created by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (here) and (here).
Reuters also reported on Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s clinical trials (here, here) and (here).
Clinical trials for other COVID-19 vaccines continue, including those by Janssen (here), Novavax (here) and Moderna (here).
VERDICT
Untrue. Clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines were conducted before they were approved by governments and introduced to the public. Pfizer’s trial enrolled more than 45,000 participants around the world and Oxford recruited more than 23,000 people in the UK, Brazil and South Africa.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.