A Food and Drug Administration presentation on monitoring the safety of COVID-19 vaccines listed possible adverse events the agency might track. But an Instagram post misrepresents the document, falsely claiming it shows the vaccines are known to cause harmful side effects — including death.
Hall of Fame boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler “died on March 13 of natural causes,” according to a statement posted on his official website. In a Facebook post, his widow, Kay Hagler, wrote that his death was not the result of a COVID-19 vaccination.
A video stoking fears of the COVID-19 vaccines in the Black community is being promoted online. But the film repeats misrepresentations about vaccines, generally, and exploits historical cases of unethical medical conduct to suggest without evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.
In a 2010 TED Talk focused on developing new technologies to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Bill Gates briefly mentioned reducing the rate of population growth. A conspiratorial video circulating on Facebook misleadingly edits Gates’ talk to suggest his “wish” was to depopulate the planet through vaccines.
Efficacy is a measure of how well a vaccine performs in a clinical trial. It specifically refers to a relative reduction in infection or disease when comparing the vaccinated group to the placebo (or control) group.
For instance, both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were primarily evaluated for their ability to prevent symptomatic COVID-19, with the former having a 95% efficacy and the latter having a 94% efficacy in the clinical trial data submitted for the original authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.
Common side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines include injection site pain, fatigue, headache, muscle pain and fever.
Data from the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna trials also show the side effects included joint pain and chills. These reactions are more likely after the second dose of those vaccines, given several weeks after the first, and are more common and severe in younger people.
The full ingredient list for any authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website and in a variety of documents on the Food and Drug Administration’s website, including in a fact sheet for vaccine recipients that’s available in numerous languages.
Both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines contain messenger RNA,
No vaccine or medical product is 100% safe, but the safety of vaccines is ensured via rigorous testing in clinical trials prior to authorization or approval, followed by continued safety monitoring once the vaccine is rolled out to the public to detect potential rare side effects. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration inspects vaccine production facilities and reviews manufacturing protocols to make sure vaccine doses are of high-quality and free of contaminants.
More than half a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered in the U.S. and only a few, very rare, safety concerns have emerged. The vast majority of people experience only minor, temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, or muscle pain — or no side effects at all. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, these vaccines “have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S.
All of the authorized and approved vaccines are effective at preventing severe COVID-19.
Against earlier forms of the coronavirus, the vaccines were highly effective at preventing symptomatic illness. For example, clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines and the protein-based Novavax vaccine found each reduced the risk of getting sick by more than 90%.
Subsequent studies have demonstrated that the vaccines are effective under real-world conditions.