A Facebook video making false claims about the new coronavirus and authorized COVID-19 vaccines has been shared online.
The 13-minute clip was posted on February 10, 2021 (here) and contains numerous opinions and statements. This article deals only with the primary claims.
The individual in the clip says, ‘You gave the so-called informed consent to have a vaccine and they do not even know what they are putting in you, so how do you do that? You do not. ”(2.30)
He continues: “If you look and see that this virus has a survival rate of 99.96%, and you are now injecting yourself with joy with untested, unauthorized so-called vaccines that are not even vaccines.” (5.23)
First, the ingredients of authorized vaccines are known by the British government and available to the public. The ingredients of the Pfizer vaccine are available (here move to # 6), the ingredients of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are listed (here, turn to # 6) and the contents of the Moderna vaccine are explained (here, scroll to # 6). The role of various vaccine ingredients is set out here in the Vaccine Knowledge Project of the University of Oxford.
Second, the figure for COVID-19’s mortality rate is not significantly related. There is no definitive global mortality rate, as it is difficult to measure the total number of infections, as set out in this September 2020 Reuters article (here). Many experts believe that the coronavirus is likely to kill 0.5 to 1% of people infected, and although it may sound like a small number, it is very dangerous until a vaccine is available.
The World Health Organization (WHO) told Reuters in October last year: “If 0.01% of the world population dies from a disease, it means a large number of deaths (780,000 deaths, which estimates the world population at 7.8 billion ) “.
The spokesperson added: “We know that the vast majority of the world population is susceptible to COVID-19. This means that if we do not take steps to control its spread, the death toll from this disease will continue to increase ”(here).
Survival rates also vary by age group and health status. Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in September that the death rate for people over 80 was probably one in six, but that it could be as low as one in 10,000 for people under 20 (here). The picture is further complicated by the development of new strains that can be more deadly (here).
There are many different criteria for calculating the risk of COVID-19, and the University of Oxford’s project Our World in Data describes the complexity of data on excessive deaths (here), death risk (here) and other measures during the pandemic (ourworldindata.org/coronavirus). However, there is no denying that the new virus is life-threatening for many people, killing more than 121,000 people in the UK (here) and more than 2,340,000 individuals worldwide (covid19.who.int/) during publication .
Third, the approved COVID-19 vaccines have been tested and authorized. The process of how vaccines are developed, licensed and monitored is explained by the University’s University’s Vaccine Knowledge Project (here), the European Medicines Agency (bit.ly/2YLLros) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ) (here). In the UK, the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was approved on 2 December 2020 (here), the AstraZeneca vaccine follows on 30 December 2020 (here) and at the time of publication was the last vaccine approved, Moderna on Jan 8 , 2021 (here). Reuters has here, here and here addressed previous false claims about vaccination.
Finally, the claim that the government “offers so-called vaccines that are not even vaccines” refers to incorrect information claiming that only governments call the COVID-19 jabs “vaccines”. Reuters dismissed this false claim here.
VERDICT
Untrue. The speaker in this video discusses the mortality rate of the virus without giving the full context and makes wrong statements about the safety of vaccines. At the time of writing, the UK government has approved three rigorous COVID-19 samples after rigorous clinical trials and published the ingredients of these vaccines online.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.