The launch of covid-19 vaccines in the US is finally starting to get steam, but as vaccination becomes more common, the antivax movement pulls the same old tricks. The latest disturbing trend: blaming the coronavirus vaccine for deaths, illnesses or injuries without solid evidence.
Antivax organizations are already trying to distort reports of people dying or being injured after receiving the vaccine as proof that they are insecure. Last week, Children’s Health Defense – founded by the well-known crank Robert Kennedy, Jr. –mail an article suggesting that the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron on January 22 was caused by the Moderna vaccine he received on January 5. This week, the Fulton County Medical Office reported that Aaron had died of natural causes at the age of 86 elsewhere similarly, he had to spend time disagreeing with the viral claims of vaccine-related deaths.
As with many conspiracy theories, there is a truth in the lies told by anti-vaxxers.
Vaccines, like any medicine, have side effects. Usually, though not always, these side effects are seen during clinical trials, before reaching 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.
Not every bad thing that happens after you take a medicine or a vaccine – what scientists call an “adverse event” – is, however, a side effect. People get sick for many different reasons, and often the appearance of a bad headache or other symptoms after treatment is nothing but a coincidence. That is why it is so important to compare the groups of people who receive the real medicine with those who have been given 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 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 a priority for covid-19 vaccines. People have died and will continue to die shortly after receiving a covid-19 vaccine, but that alone is not strong evidence that the vaccine caused their deaths.
In the largest clinical trials to date, involving tens of thousands of people, common symptoms Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines included injection site pain, headache, fatigue and muscle aches. 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 have been shown to be extremely effective in preventing disease from covid-19, which has killed more than 2 million people in one year.
This does not mean that reports of death or injury after vaccination should not be investigated (and, in fact, are) by relevant health agencies and scientists. An essential part of scientific research involves tracking public health issues that may be related to a new drug or vaccine, and sometimes new problems are found. But we should beware of immediately blaming covid-19 vaccines for scary symptoms or tragic deaths, at least not without a good amount of evidence to support these claims. Likewise, the media should not use sensationalized titles when reporting these cases.
Aside from the cherrypicked and anecdotal reports, real-world 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 vaccinating people – released some of its first data on how vaccination went. Data, extracted from state insurers in the country, found that residents were extremely unlikely to be diagnosed with covid-19 after their second dose of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Other data keep going to show a very low risk of serious side effects such as anaphylaxis – with 10 cases found in 4 million people receiving the Moderna vaccine – and no deaths related to these allergic reactions have been reported.