The rollout of covid-19 vaccines in the US is on finally started to pick up steam, but as vaccination becomes more common, the antivax movement is pulling off the same old tricks. The latest troubling trend: Blaming the coronavirus vaccine for deaths, illnesses or injuries without any solid evidence.
Antivax organizations are already trying to misrepresent people who die or are injured after receiving the vaccine as evidence they are unsafe. Last week, Children’s Health Defense – founded by noted crank Robert Kennedy, Jr. –Posted an article suggesting that baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death on Jan. 22 was caused by the Moderna vaccine he received on Jan. 5. This week it has the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office reported that Aaron had died of natural causes at the age of 86. Health officials elsewhere have similarly had to spend time debunking viral claims of vaccine-related deaths.
As with so many conspiracy theories, there is some truth in the lies told by anti-vaxxers.
Vaccines, like any drug, have side effects. Usually, but not always, these side effects are noticed during clinical trials before they reach the general public. For example, shortly after the similar vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech were approved in emergency situations, there were isolated reports of allergic reactions to the vaccines, reactions that were not documented in clinical studies.
However, not all bad things that happen after you take a drug or vaccine – what scientists call a “side effect” – are side effects. People get sick for many different reasons, and often the appearance of annoying headaches or other symptoms after treatment is nothing more than a coincidence. That’s why it’s so important to compare groups of people who get the real drug with those who get a placebo. If some side effects are much more common in the treatment group than in the placebo group, then we can be pretty sure they are a real side effect.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Deaths are also an unfortunate part of reality, especially for at-risk groups such as the elderly, who are currently prioritized for covid-19 vaccines. People have died and will continue to die soon after they receive a covid-19 vaccine, but that alone is not strong evidence that the vaccine caused their deaths.
In the largest clinical studies to date, involving tens of thousands of people, common symptoms linked to the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines include injection site pain, headache, fatigue and muscle pain. Rare side effects have included an increased risk of Bell’s palsy, a temporary facial paralysis. But there was no evidence of an increased risk of death after vaccination. And both vaccines proved to be very effective in preventing disease from covid-19, which killed more than 2 million people in a year.
This does not mean that reports of death or injuries following vaccination should not be investigated by relevant health authorities and scientists (and in fact they are). An important part of scientific research is keeping track of health problems with the public that may be related to a new drug or vaccine, and sometimes new problems are discovered. But we must be wary of immediately blaming covid-19 vaccines for terrifying symptoms or tragic deaths, at least not without a fair amount of evidence to back up those claims. Likewise, media channels should not use sensational headlines when reporting on these cases.
Aside from the fresh and anecdotal reports, the real evidence for the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines seems encouraging. On Monday, Israel – arguably the best-performing country in the world in terms of human vaccination – released some of its early data on the course of the vaccination. The data, from the country’s state insurers, found it that it was extremely unlikely that residents would be diagnosed with covid-19 after their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Other data continues to demonstrate a very low risk of serious side effects such as anaphylaxis – with 10 cases out of 4 million people who received the Moderna vaccine – and no reported deaths related to these allergic reactions.