Covid Vaccine Deaths

Did two 7-year-old Australian children, Allison Coleman and Lachlan Leary, both die shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in the week the COVID vaccines were being rolled out in New South Wales to children in the 5- to 11-year-old age bracket? No, that's not true: Other than the social media posts that put the stories into circulation, there is no…

Do the number of fully vaccinated people who are hospitalized outnumber unvaccinated hospitalized in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW)? Yes, that's true: But simple ratios don't tell the full story. The figures are found in the COVID-19 weekly surveillance report by NSW Health published on January 20, 2022. The proportion of unvaccinated people who end up hospitalized…

Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading: COVID-19 is killing more people annually than the seasonal flu did in the years prior to COVID and the CDC has declared COVID more deadly. A meme from mid-2020 going…

Did hackers "crack" the servers of COVID-19 vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna and reveal vaccine death data from those companies? No, that's not true: The data used to make that claim is from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database that keeps a record of reported but often unconfirmed adverse effects. VAERS data does not prove a correlation…

Does this meme paint an accurate picture of the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines? No, that's not true: Although what we know about the virus and the vaccines has changed over time, scientists and public health experts continue to say that vaccines work, especially with respect to the risk of severe illness and death. Various factors, including age, the emergence of…

Did the CEO of Pfizer say that two doses of the vaccine offer very little protection against COVID-19? No, that's not true: He was speaking specifically about the omicron variant, not about other variants of the coronavirus. Clipping the quote in this way robs it of context that makes clear what he meant. The claim appeared in an Instagram post…

Are "all the soccer players getting heart attacks"? And can the recent cluster of cardiac events suffered by athletes be attributed to any one cause? No, that's not true: Several of the recent incidents are clearly unrelated to the COVID-19 vaccine, and others do not point to the vaccine as a cause, but this has not prevented anti-vaccine activists from…

Did scientists prove that 93% of the people who died after being vaccinated for COVID-19 were killed by the vaccine? No, that's not true: The non-peer-reviewed paper by two scientists, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and Dr. Arne Burkhardt, provides no proof for its claims and uses a tiny sample size of just 15 people to draw its conclusions. A professional peer…

Did Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "confess" that over 75% of COVID deaths occurred in people with at least four comorbidities? No, that's not true: The percentage is correct but extremely important context is missing. All of the 1.2 million people in the study from December 2020 to October 2021 were fully vaccinated.…

Are vaccine makers violating federal law when they point out there are duplicate reports, mistaken claims of causality and other flaws in the federal government's Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)? No, that's not true: The law cited by the person making the claim includes no such penalty provision. VAERS, set up by Congress to help improve vaccine safety by…