This week, about 35,000 Minnesotans aged 65 and over will receive a dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
About 100 are likely to die within a month, the statistics suggest.
But not because of the vaccine. Because people die, especially older people.
There are still cancers, heart attacks and a myriad of other potential causes.
The challenge for public health officials is to prevent even some of these inevitable deaths from being taken as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous, or even murderous.
There is no evidence at this point that the Pfizer / BioNTech or Moderna vaccines – both of which were injected into the arms of millions of Americans – carry any risks, except for occasional allergic reactions that can be countered by common medications available at vaccination sites.
However, part of the public remains nervous about an entirely new vaccine that has not yet been subjected to any long-term testing – and can cause problems that scientists are not yet aware of. Some health officials, with the intention of inoculating a large majority of the public, fear that the nervous group may be the target of disinformation campaigns, especially by opponents of vaccination who cling to lies and often exploit a false appearance of cause and effect. when something follows another.
This is especially likely now that vaccines are being widely administered to older citizens, who, statistically speaking, are the most likely to die because of their age.
Michael Osterholm, who served on President Joe Biden’s COVID transition advisory panel, has been among those who have warned of the scenario since December.
“If a person dies and it hits the media, there’s a good chance that other people will see it and say, ‘Wait a minute, my grandmother died a week later too’. And then you have a lot of deaths, and all of them are real, but they weren’t because of the vaccine, ”said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Has begun.
START OF INCORRECT INFORMATION
When baseball legend Hank Aaron died on January 22, 17 days after being publicly vaccinated, antivaxxers, led by Robert Kennedy Jr., sought to connect the two, based on nothing more than the two events, in social media posts widely shared.
Both the team that administered the vaccine and the coroner’s office issued statements stating that Aaron died in his sleep for reasons unrelated to the vaccine.
Aaron was 86 years old. Based only on his age and sex, he had a 10 percent chance of dying in a year. On average, each year, more than 877,000 Americans over the age of 85 die, the vast majority of natural causes, according to federal mortality statistics from 2018 and 2019, the most recent years available – and before the pandemic. This means that, on average, in the 17 days since Aaron was vaccinated, about 41,000 Americans his age or older could die.
And in the coming months, every American of that age should be vaccinated.
Even traditional media, such as newspapers, can add to the confusion.
Late last month, TwinCities.com published an Orange County Register article about a 60-year-old California health worker who died four days after receiving his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Four hours after the shot, he developed serious breathing difficulties.
The story goes that he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and does not cite medical reasons to suspect the vaccine, but the headline said it all: “California health worker dies after second dose of COVID vaccine, investigations in progress.”
It was the fourth most read story on TwinCities.com of the month, driven by the overwhelming majority of people who shared it on Facebook.
ALL DEADS INVESTIGATED
In fact, all deaths that appear premature and within a short period of time after receiving the COVID vaccine are investigated to some extent by federal drug safety authorities. It is part of a series of standard protocols for vaccination programs that range from physician observations to reports from the general public.
“There are robust systems in place that are configured not just for COVID vaccines, but for all vaccines,” said Kris Ehresmann, head of infectious diseases at the Minnesota Department of Health.
The most common mistake that the general public makes is to come to the conclusion that, since a vaccine was given, everything that followed was the result of it.
“There will be a number of deaths that will occur, but the simple association in time, or temporal association, between events, is not equivalent to causation,” said Ehresmann.
This happened in the case of the California medical worker who died. The story quoted his wife as saying: “But when someone has symptoms two and a half hours after the vaccine, this is a reaction. What else could have happened? “
FALSE INFERENCES
“Yes, I saw it,” said Osterholm when asked about the story. “This is exactly what I was advocating.”
The same happened with autism: some children started to show their first symptoms of autism soon after being immunized, leading parents to believe that the vaccine caused the appearance – a notion that was excluded by the researchers.
Scientists now suspect that many of these events happened so close by coincidence: when you vaccinate enough people, chances are that a small number will have a health problem soon after, no matter what.
Osterholm likes to tell the story of a child who suffered a seizure in front of a nurse who was holding a needle, preparing to immunize the child, who was in the mother’s arms. The child had a condition not previously detected.
“If that seizure happened 30 seconds later, that mother could have assumed that the vaccine caused it – and could you blame her for thinking that?” Oserholm said.
SET OF NUMBERS
The breadth of COVID’s mass vaccination campaign – about 1 million Americans are being vaccinated daily – almost certainly means that a large number of deaths will occur after vaccination.
Here are some examples, based on Minnesota and national mortality data:
- There are almost 920,000 Minnesotans aged 65 and over, and almost all are prioritized to be vaccinated. Based on pre-COVID mortality rates, more than 39,000 are expected to die this year, about 108 a day, or between four and five every hour.
- If you vaccinate 100,000 Minnesotans between 65 and 79, statistically, you expect about 17 of them to die of a heart attack or other heart disease before the second dose comes, three weeks later. Twice that number would likely die of cancer, although cancer patients on the verge of death are not expected to be vaccinated.
- They are not just older people. If you vaccinate 10 million people aged 35 to 44 across the country, you expect about 240 to die from heart attack or another heart disease in a week.
- It is not just fatal events that can cause an alarm – but they should be expected. If 10 million Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 were vaccinated, about 735 could suffer a stroke in a week.
CRITICATED MEDIA
Osterholm and others who warned about the misinterpretation of such deaths suggested that public health officials need to be clearer with their messages so that the public is prepared – and that the media needs to do a better job of examining the news, especially in a a time when they can be disseminated on social networks among people already skeptical about vaccines in search of “evidence” that reinforces their skepticism.
Ehresmann said he believed the central message – that vaccines have been shown to be safe so far – is sufficient.
“We had not thought specifically about saying that we would expect a number of people to die anyway after vaccination,” she said. “I think for the public, the important message is that there are safety assessments that took place before the vaccination was approved, and these safety assessments continue, even after approval, so that we can be sure that we have the safest vaccines and effective affordable. “
Osterholm said that more can be done.
“The real fear is that more people will die because they didn’t get the vaccine because they are alarmed by all these stories.”