The introduction of covid-19 vaccines in the USA is finally start to pick up steam, but as vaccination becomes more common, the antiviral movement pulls the same old tricks. The latest disturbing trend: blame the coronavirus vaccine for deaths, diseases or injuries without any solid evidence.
Antivax organizations are already tried to misrepresent reports of people who die or get hurt after receiving the vaccination as proof they are unsafe. Last week, Children’s Health Defense – founded by renowned crank Robert Kennedy, Jr. –mailed an article suggesting that baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death was caused on January 22 by the Moderna vaccine he received on January 5. This week, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office report that Aaron died at the age of 86 of natural causes. Health officials elsewhere also had to spend time abolishing viral claims of vaccine-related deaths.
As with so many conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth in the lies that anti-vaxxers tell.
Vaccines, like any medication, have side effects. These side effects are usually noticed during clinical trials before reaching the general public. Shortly after the similar Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines received emergency approval, for example, there were isolated reports of allergic reactions to the vaccines, reactions that have not been documented in clinical trials.
However, not every bad thing that happens after you use a drug or vaccine – what scientists call an ‘adverse event’ – is a side effect. People get sick for many different reasons, and the appearance of a nasty headache or other symptoms after treatment is often nothing more than coincidence. That’s why it’s so important to compare groups of people who get the right remedy with those who get a placebo. If some side effects are much more common in the treatment group than in the placebo group, we can be fairly sure that they are a real side effect.
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Deaths are also an unfortunate part of reality, especially for high-risk groups such as the elderly who are currently being prioritized for kovid-19 vaccines. People are dead and will continue to die shortly after receiving a vaccine containing covid-19, but this alone is not good evidence that the vaccine caused their death.
In the largest clinical trials to date, involving tens of thousands of people, common symptoms linked to the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, included injection site pain, headache, fatigue, and muscle aches. Rare side effects include an increased risk of Bell’s paralysis, a temporary paralysis of the face. But there was no evidence of an increased risk of death after vaccination. And it has been found that both vaccines are very effective in preventing covid-19 diseases, which have killed more than 2 million people in the span of a year.
This does not mean that reports of death or injury after vaccination should not be examined by relevant health authorities and scientists (and it is). One important part of scientific research involves keeping track of public health problems that may be linked to a new drug or vaccine, and sometimes new problems are found. But we must be careful to immediately blame covid-19 vaccines for narrow-sounding symptoms or tragic deaths, at least not without a good amount of evidence to support the claims. Similarly, media should not be used sensationalize headlines when reporting on these matters.
Apart from cherries and anecdotal reports, the actual evidence for the safety and efficacy of these vaccines seems encouraging. On Monday, Israel – probably the country that performs best to vaccinate people – announced some of its early data on how vaccinations went. The data, from the country’s state-owned insurers, found that residents are highly unlikely to be diagnosed with covid-19 after their second dose of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Other information go ahead to show a very low risk of serious side effects such as anaphylaxis – with 10 cases found out of 4 million people receiving the Moderna vaccine – and no reported deaths were linked to these allergic reactions.