The launch of covid-19 vaccines in the USA is finally starting to gain strength, but as vaccination becomes more common, the antivax movement is using its old tricks. The latest disturbing trend: blaming the coronavirus vaccine for death, illness or injury without any solid evidence.
Antivax organizations are already trying to misrepresent reports of people who died or were injured after receiving the vaccine as evidence that they are insecure. Last week, Children’s Health Defense – founded by well-known eccentric Robert Kennedy, Jr. –posted an article suggesting that the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron on January 22 was caused by the Modern vaccine he received on January 5. This week, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office reported that Aaron died of natural causes at age 86. Health authorities somewhere else Likewise, they had to spend time debunking viral allegations of vaccine-related deaths.
As with so many conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth in the lies told by antivaxxers.
Vaccines, like any medication, have side effects. Usually, though not always, these side effects are noticed during clinical trials, before they reach the general public. Soon after similar vaccines Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech gained emergency approval, for example, there were isolated reports of allergic reactions to vaccines, reactions that had not been documented in clinical trials.
However, not everything bad that happens after you take a medication or vaccine – what scientists call an “adverse event” – is a side effect. People fall ill for a variety of reasons, and often the appearance of a severe headache or other post-treatment symptoms is just a coincidence. That is why it is so important to compare groups of people who receive the real drug with those who receive a placebo. If some adverse events are much more common in the treatment group than in the placebo group, we can be sure that they are a real side effect.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Deaths are also an unfortunate part of reality, especially for high-risk groups, such as the elderly, who are currently being prioritized for covid-19 vaccines. People died and will continue to die shortly after receiving the covid-19 vaccine, but that alone is not strong evidence that the vaccine caused its 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 pain at the injection site, headache, fatigue and muscle pain. More rare side effects included an increased risk of Bell’s palsy, a temporary paralysis of the face. But there was no evidence of an increased risk of death after vaccination. And both vaccines were found to be highly effective in preventing covid-19 disease, which killed more than 2 million people over the course of a year.
This does not mean that reports of death or injury after vaccination should not be investigated by relevant health agencies and scientists (and, in fact, they are). A fundamental part of scientific research involves monitoring the public’s health problems that are potentially associated with a new drug or vaccine and sometimes new problems are encountered. But we must be careful not to immediately blame covid-19 vaccines for frightening symptoms or tragic deaths, at least not without a good deal of evidence to support these claims. Likewise, the media should not use sensationalist headlines when reporting these cases.
Leaving aside selected and anecdotal reports, the real-world evidence on the safety and efficacy of these vaccines appears to be encouraging. On Monday, Israel – arguably the country with the world’s best performance in vaccinating people – released some of its first data on how the vaccination went. The data, extracted from the country’s state insurers, found that residents were extremely unlikely to be diagnosed with covid-19 after their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Other data continued to show a very low risk of serious side effects like anaphylaxis – with 10 cases found in 4 million people who received the Modern vaccine – and no reported deaths related to these allergic reactions.