This afternoon, a gossip from the big city published an article online with the following headline – which I just want to say beforehand is extremely misleading and no cause for concern:
In fact, we do not know why this 21-year-old student from the University of Cincinnati passed away unexpectedly – as the piece in the New York Post itself notes in the fourth paragraph: “There is no evidence that his death is related to the Johnson & Johnson shot. But – I probably do not even need to tell you – it should not have taken four paragraphs of the blog text to get to that point. The piece should not have been tweeted with a smiling photo of the young man, and next to it an equally large photo of a J&J vaccination bottle. And this definitely should not have had that heading.
I can not say that I was surprised that the New York Post chose the headline today, because they did the same thing a month ago, with one that reads: ‘Italy opens manslaughter case after teacher dies hours after receiving AstraZeneca vaccine has.’ In this case, only six paragraphs are needed to get to the line: ‘Officials have insisted that there is still a direct link between [the teacher’s] death and his shot. “In fact, the point of the homicide investigation mentioned in the headline is to locate the suspect. criminal cause of his death.
At least in the case of this similar headline below from March, the first line of the story has the caveat: “health officials have not confirmed that her death was linked to the shot.”
According to the local health officials quoted in the story, one may ask: ‘If’ another cause of death has yet to be determined ‘, and there is no compelling reason why the vaccination is given maybe actually linked to death, why drive it at all? This is a bit of a rhetorical question – the authors of these reports write several stories daily, and the combination of deaths and vaccines is clearly irresistible. And I do not mean to say that all the coverage of the Post’s vaccine is like that – there were also really clever things like a recent statement stating that the risk of blood clots by COVID-19 itself is much higher than that of any vaccine . And yet it seems that someone who dies without a clear cause and was recently vaccinated against COVID-19 is, according to the editorial view, a quick headline that shares the two facts, even if there is no medical evidence at all to think that they are related – and even if it undoubtedly fuels the vaccine skepticism that will cost lives in the right way.
It’s not just a shameless gimmick for eyeballs that has essentially refined the Post into an art at this point. It is actively dangerous. There is no scientific or journalistic purpose to these death stories. With about 3.35 million shots going into the arms every day, bad things are likely to happen to people who just happened to get a shot; this is not news. Meanwhile, people are dying every day from COVID – 912 in the United States on Thursday – a fact that we are all so numb at this stage of the pandemic that it is hard to tell that we have reached a new milestone in hundreds. thousands of deaths to break through the noise.
And these headlines are especially crazy due to the fact that vaccines, can may in extremely rare cases possibly be associated with life-threatening side effects. If health officials suspect they may be – as was the case this week with the J&J vaccine and blood clots – we need to be able to talk about it in a sensible, rational way. We do not need headlines like today’s about the case of the 21-year-old who further contributes to fears of vaccines. If things go wrong, we do not need a news audience that might be skeptical about vaccines, thanks in part to headlines like these:
