The efforts of antivaxxers to portray COVID-19 vaccines as harmful or even deadly continue apace (VAERS edition)
With the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines continuing apace, so are the efforts of antivaxxers to portray the vaccines as dangerous. This time around, they’ve resurrected the old antivaccine trick of deceptively misusing the VAERS database to imply causation from VAERS reports. That’s not how VAERS works, however.
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With the rollout of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 finally starting to result in tens of millions of people receiving the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, with newer vaccines likely to be introduced in the coming months, the predictions that I (and many others) made months ago are coming to pass. I’m referring, of course, to antivaxxers resurrecting old antivaccine tropes, dusting them off, and updating them for the age of COVID. Examples abound, including antivaxxers claiming that COVID-19 vaccines cause female infertility, “reprogram your DNA“, are unnecessary because COVID-19 is not deadly, and even kill, particularly the elderly. Similarly, as expected, antivaxxers point to anecdotes of bad things happening to people after receiving the vaccine that are almost certainly coincidences and not related to the vaccine and are weaponizing them to spread fear. Certainly, it doesn’t help that there is at least one person who proclaims himself so very, very, very pro-vaccine is out there pointing to anecdotes to support his pet hypothesis that it’s dangerous to vaccinate people who have pre-existing COVID-19 antibodies. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that antivaxxers are now weaponizing the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (