The launch of covid-19 vaccines in the US is finally starting to catch steam, but as vaccination becomes more frequent, the antivax movement is pulling on the same old tricks. The latest disturbing trend: blaming the coronavirus vaccine for deaths, illnesses, or injuries without any solid evidence.
Anti-fax organizations are I’m trying to distort reports of people dying or getting hurt after receiving the vaccine as proof that they are not safe. Last week, Children’s Health Defense, founded by well-known crank Robert Kennedy, Jr.published an article implying that the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron on January 22 was caused by the Modern vaccine he had received on January 5th. This week, the Fulton County Medical Office reported that Aaron had died of natural causes at the age of 86. Health officials elsewhere similarly, they have had to spend time rejecting vaccine-related viral death claims.
As with so many conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth in the lies that anti-vaxxers tell.
Vaccines, like any medicine, have side effects. Usually, though not always, these side effects are noticed during clinical trials before they reach the general public. Shortly after similar vaccines Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech obtained 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 taking a drug or a vaccine — what scientists call an “adverse event” —is a side effect. People get sick for many different reasons and often the onset of an unpleasant headache or other symptoms after treatment are just coincidences. That’s why it’s so important to compare groups of people who receive the actual drug with those who have received 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.
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Deaths are also an unfortunate part of the reality, especially for high-risk groups such as the elderly who are currently prioritized for covid-19 vaccines. People have died and will continue to die shortly after receiving a vaccine against covid-19, but that alone is not firm evidence that the vaccine caused their death.
In the largest clinical trials to date, which included tens of thousands of people, common symptoms Pfizer / BioNTech and Modern vaccine-related vaccines include injection site pain, headache, fatigue, and muscle aches. The rarest 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 very effective in preventing covid-19 disease, which killed more than 2 million people within a year.
This is not to say that reports of death or injury after vaccination should not be investigated by the relevant health agencies and scientists (and, in fact, they are). A key part of scientific research is tracking public health issues that are potentially related to a new drug or vaccine, and sometimes new problems are encountered. But we should be wary of immediately blaming covid-19 vaccines for seemingly frightening symptoms or tragic deaths, at least not without a fair amount of evidence supporting these claims. Similarly, the media should not be used sensationalized holders when reporting such cases.
Aside from the anecdotal and selected reports, real-world evidence on the safety and efficacy of these vaccines appears to be encouraging. On Monday, Israel, arguably the best-performing country in the world in vaccinating people, released some of its first data on how vaccination has gone. The data, extracted from the country’s state insurers, Found that residents are very unlikely to be diagnosed with covid-19 after their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Other data keep on to show a very low risk of serious side effects such as anaphylaxis (with 10 cases out of every 4 million people receiving the Modern vaccine) and no deaths related to these allergic reactions were reported.