Some truth made COVID-19 vaccine lies easy to believe

An ounce of truth can make a lie very difficult to disprove. After the population of the world has received more than 11 billion vaccine shots against COVID-19, and death from the virus has plummeted accordingly, myths about the shot still exist all around us.

The hardest myths to shake, despite all the abundant evidence that they are not true, aren’t most improbable (“the vaccine has a microchip placed there by Bill Gates or George Soros to control you”), but the more sensible fears that people naturally have, for example, vaccine side effects.

There are several myths that have survived in people’s minds all throughout the pandemic. Some of them found a very fertile ground among a variety of Spanish-speaking and Latino communities in the U.S. and across the world.

According to research by First Draft, a history of medical trauma or racism, as well as health care neglect, can make Latino communities vulnerable to having some particular line of thinking about vaccines, doctors and the medical establishment.

Some of the most powerful disinformation spread by people – who often accuse others like doctors and pharma to have an economic interest but often have one as well – are the ones that are half-true or based on general truths, says Cameron Hickey, director of the Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI) which tracks disinformation.

“A myth built on a grain of truth is much more dangerous – than the outlandish one – because it opens the door to a much wider audience”, said Hickey.

The problem of myths and vaccine disinformation is that it keeps many people from a vaccine that is not only lifesaving for themselves but often they influence family and friends to avoid the shot.

This article will examine some of the most common myths and why and how they have been disproven by time and science.

Most side effects were mild, death was extremely rare

The side effect fear is one of the most common. When vaccination started, there was no conversation that did not include this question of someone who had just received the shot: “Did you have side effects?”

Many people did. That is true. Fever, pain on the injection site, fatigue, muscle pain, happened to many people. Many others felt nothing. The fear of side effects had some people deciding to delay taking the shot or refraining from taking it at all.

The most feared side effect is, of course, death. After more than one year of vaccinations, even the most hard-core anti-vax conspiracies can’t come up with any number of “deaths-by-vaccine” that approaches even 1% of the number of people that died of Covid-19 across the world.

More than 6 million people have died of COVID-19. In the United States, where Covid-19 has a higher death rate than other wealthy nations, the CDC run VAERS database received 12,989 reports of preliminary death, which accounts to 0.0023% of the vaccinated.

Disinformation channels often quote VAERS data as official, and it is managed by the Center for Disease Control as a place where people in the medical field can file a report about presumed vaccine side effects and deaths. But the actual data on it is not verified: it is posted as “suspect” but it does not require it to be proven in order to appear in the database.

“People who oppose the vaccine cherry pick pieces of data to prove that it is dangerous”, said Hickey, from ATI

Some serious side-effects were found for some vaccines and for some populations. They were immediately noted, studied, and reported by mainstream media.

The new vaccine technology was 30 years in the making

Vaccines traditionally take years to be produced, tested and ready, so when several Covid-19 vaccines were ready to go less than a year since the start of the pandemic, many people were suspicious.

It was a concern repeated by comments on social media and heard live from friends who feared that not all tests were made correctly or at all.

Also, Pfizer and Moderna were new types of vaccines. Not the traditional vaccine where a tiny part of a virus is injected so that antibodies can be produced to attack any later exposure. The new type was a messenger that taught the body how to produce the antibodies, without using the actual virus.

This new technology caused suspicion. However, it took 30 years since a Hungarian-born scientist working in the US had the idea to create a vaccine that would tell the body which proteins to make to protect itself from a virus.

It took all those years to test and improve the idea, and when Covid appeared and was identified by China, companies Pfizer and Moderna decided to use this new technology called mRNA.

There are several reasons why the development of the vaccines themselves took a shorter time, probably one of the biggest accomplishments of mankind, but the enormous private and public moneys invested in making it happen was certainly one of them.

Natural immunity is good but NOT without the vaccine

This was a huge trend on social media, and particularly popular in Spanish-language. Early on, we could see alternative doctors and even regular people passing for health advisors, recommending the use of water with lemon, vitamin C and, eventually, things like “colloidal silver” or “Chlorine dioxide”.

Many of them, such as Austrian scientist Andreas Kalcker or televangelist Jim Baker were selling these products or their image as “influencers”.

Of course, we all remember that a former president of the United States talked about injecting or bringing disinfectant “inside the body” to kill the virus.

But the most believable theories are the ones that make sense and that are somewhat true: taking care of your body with good food and vitamins is a good thing but plenty of people with good health were infected and suffered or died from Covid-19.

Vaccine production DOES NOT use fetal tissue

A huge part of the reason some religious leaders and believers opposed the vaccine was the belief that aborted fetuses were used in its manufacturing. Disinformation channels were even saying that babies were being killed for the material.

This isn’t true.

Using fetal cell lines to test the effectiveness and safety of medications is common practice in research. Fetal cell lines – cells grown in a laboratory based on aborted fetal cells collected generations ago – were used in testing during research and development of the mRNA vaccines, and during production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The vaccines themselves don’t contain any of the tissue. But if you have a problem using them, you should also not use acetaminophen, albuterol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, Preparation H, Claritin, Prilosec, and Zoloft, among many other drugs developed this way.