The Cloud of Misinformation Around COVID-19 Vaccines

What are the actual risks? How can vaccines help us personally and as a society?

Here we are, in December 2021, trudging through one of the longest surges of COVID-19 in West Michigan. Since August we have had high levels of transmission and illness due to the newest and most contagious SARS-CoV-2 variant of all: the Delta variant. Delta continues to cause high levels of infection and severe disease in areas with low COVID-19 vaccination rates, and is causing repeat infections and breakthrough infections in the vaccinated. And if you have young children, you are fully aware that most kids have been an open book to contract this virus and spread it to others. The FDA recently authorized the use of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine in children 5-11 years of age, which is a huge milestone. But what about kids 12 years of age and older? While the Pfizer mRNA has been available for those aged 12 years and older since the Spring of 2021, vaccination rates in children aged 12-17 years dragged significantly until recently, with only 32% of US kids in this age group being fully vaccinated as of July 2021 (thankfully this has picked up in a recent report). There are also wide variations in vaccinations in different parts of the country. Data shows marked hesitancy in 5-11 year old vaccination plans in parents. Why?

There are many reasons for why COVID-19 vaccination in 12-17 year olds lagged for several months, and why many parents don’t yet plan for COVID-19 vaccination in younger children. Simply put, having a vaccine authorized does not automatically mean that the full vaccine series will be received by all authorized age groups instantaneously. While it’s very important, we will not examine the lengthy process undertaken when a vaccine is developed and tested through authorization and approval. Let’s instead focus on the reasons why COVID-19 vaccine uptake has lagged so much in the US and other affluent countries, and how this is a deadly trap for our global community to fall into. 

Misinformation about COVID-19 and kids

As discussed at length in How COVID-19 is Bad for Kids, the pandemic has had a significant toll on the health and wellbeing of children. Yet, many believe that COVID is not a significant health concern for the young. However uncomfortable it may be for us to accept, children do need to be factored into our decisions about combatting the pandemic. Children can contract SARS-CoV-2, they can spread it to friends, teammates, classmates and family members, and in situations where vaccination rates are low in the young, kids can be the drivers of high COVID-19 positivity in a community. Making up a quarter of the US population, children are a substantial part of our herd, and their immunity (or lack thereof) to COVID-19 is undoubtedly crucial.

Worries about “long-term side effects” from the vaccines

Many have spread the myth that vaccinations can cause worrisome long-term side effects, but without really understanding if this is an actual concern. The fact is that vaccines do, rarely, cause important side effects, but these occur very soon after vaccination--within hours to days--not years down the road. Indeed, we monitor closely for vaccine adverse effects for a period of time after vaccination, but anything that occurs 60 days after a vaccine is received is not plausibly limited to the vaccine itself. 

So why are folks attached to the concern of “long-term side effects” at all? 

This is, I believe, rooted in some medical history. 

Many years ago, a physician published an article implicating a causative link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (“MMR”) to the development of autism. The science and claims of this study were completely untrue and not founded in the tried and true scientific method. However the damage of this now-refuted study resonates to the present day. The components of vaccines are specifically designed to produce an immune response, and be quickly degraded by the body as part of it’s natural cellular process. Vaccine components that generate an immune response have no ability to incorporate into the body’s DNA, brain tissue, or any other part of the body. I will discuss other vaccine ingredients below, but it’s worth noting here that thimerosal, which used to be part of the MMR vaccine, has since been removed from MMR, yet autism diagnoses continue to occur. The only thing that is enduring about the vaccine is the immune response made by the vaccine recipient’s body, and that is exactly what the vaccine is intended for!

Now, there are common and very normal side effects of being innoculated by any vaccine, and these are all due to the immune system doing exactly what we want it to do: generate an immune response to render the body ready and efficient in controlling the infection should you get exposed. These signs and symptoms can be experienced after receiving any vaccine, and include; pain or redness at the injection site, the vaccinated limb being sore, feeling achy or tired, and fever. These are all expected and are not serious, and tend to go away within a day or two or three. 

Very rarely, the immune response produced by the vaccine can be exaggerated, and cause more concerning signs or symptoms. In the case of pediatric COVID-19 infections, this is the development of post-vaccine myopericarditis, which occurs approximately 1-2 times in every 100,000 second doses of the mRNA vaccine. Myocarditis simply means inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis means inflammation of the outer lining of the heart. This adverse vaccine reaction occurs more commonly in males who are teens to young adults, and luckily is short-lived with excellent clinical resolution. But I do want to emphasize that post-vaccine myopericarditis occurs within hours to a few days after the vaccine, not months to years down the road. The extremely rare side effects from other vaccines also occur very quickly, no longer than 30-60 days after receiving a vaccine. So, in thinking about vaccine safety, you should be extremely confident focusing on the short-term, not the long-term, side effects. 

Affluent countries no longer grasp vaccine-preventable diseases

In many ways, the current misconceptions around the life-saving benefits of vaccines is a product of the successes of vaccines. Do most millennials know someone who was paralyzed by polio? Do young parents understand that tetanus is usually fatal? Do even middle aged folks recall how severely ill children would get from measles, and how 5% would die of this condition? Do you know anyone who has lost a child to whooping cough? The answers to most of these questions is: no. Because these infections, which plagued society for centuries, are so beautifully prevented by vaccines, modern affluent societies have lost touch with just how miraculous vaccines are. We need to remember this history, and also trust the decades to centuries of medical knowledge that got us to the present day, so that these pathogens don’t re-emerge and take the lives of our friends and loved ones.

Worries about vaccine ingredients

Similar to concerns about long-term side effects, after the false claims about MMR and autism, there was much speculation about the other vaccine ingredients and components that could lead to ill effects and toxicities. It is true that some vaccines contain additional ingredients for three different reasons: 1) to heighten the immune response created by the vaccine; 2) to extend the shelf-life and sterility of the vaccine; 3) to actually manufacture the vaccine itself. If you’re concerned about a specific ingredient, this information is publicly available. It is worth noting that these ingredients have been studied for safety countless numbers of times. And, many of the ingredients are things that we ingest on a regular basis… often in significantly higher amounts than what is injected into your body with vaccination! So we should all rest assured, the ingredients in vaccines are only those necessary to the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, they are present in miniscule (and completely safe) and tried-and-tested levels to millions of vaccine recipients worldwide. This information also pertains to any and all ingredients in the COVID-19 vaccines! 

Worries about rare side effects

Serious safety events can occur very rarely with vaccination. These serious adverse events (SAEs) are taken very seriously and analyzed in great detail, with the goal of knowing exactly how often they occur, and which populations may be at higher risk for specific SAEs. This information is critical for when medical providers discuss the benefits, and the risks, of vaccines. Occasionally SAEs occur frequently enough that physicians exercise more caution in some people who may be at higher risk for the SAE. Fortunately, the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines has been more heavily scrutinized than any other vaccine introduced in the human population EVER. As of today, we have the experience of hundreds of millions of people being vaccinated against COVID-19, so we have excellent data on  even the rarest SAEs. So while some parents would rather “wait and see,” rather than jump into vaccination, I argue that the data we have are excellent to make sound decisions. In the setting of a global pandemic with hospitals at times being scarce resources, we must make decisions to affect the health and wellbeing of our communities before we have all the available data. 

Fortunately for parents of children, we currently the benefit of assessing the safety of hundreds of millions of vaccine recipients worldwide, giving plenty of opportunity to assess for the rarest of the rare SAEs (like myopericarditis, discussed above). Other good news is that SAEs from the COVID-19 vaccines are extremely rare, making the risk to individuals extremely low, while harboring all the benefits. 

So, how are SAE’s discovered for a given vaccine? 

After clinical trials are complete (where a wide array of parameters are assessed for every vaccine recipient), vaccines may be offered to the general public outside of a clinical trial. All vaccine recipients, their parents/caregivers/guardians, and/or medical providers are able to report symptoms and side effects of vaccines to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. The point of allowing anyone to report to VAERS is to have as broad of a reporting system available as possible so that even the rarest SAE can be detected. While reporting a symptoms or side effect is not mandatory of individuals, any and all possible SAE reporting is *mandatory* for medical providers, and we take this very seriously. Now, it is important to note that just because something is reported to VAERS, this does not necessarily mean that that vaccine definitely caused the symptom or SAE. All reports submitted to VAERS require review of medical information, which vaccine(s) were received and when, etc. It is only after careful review and analysis that SAEs can be attributed to a vaccine causing the SAE. 

Overstating vaccine-related adverse effects

With all the scrutiny focused on COVID-19 vaccines, it has been observed that reports to VAERS are high for vaccines to combat COVID-19, relative to other vaccines. A consistent, systematic approach continues to be applied to analyzing these potential SAE’s. The results of this analysis are publicly available on the CDC and VAERS websites, and are distilled into easy-to-understand statements about vaccine safety. 

You may wonder, how is there a common misconception that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous, and even fatal? 

In a word: misinformation that goes viral. There is no doubt that the media (and in particular social media) has allowed for the dissemination of sensationalistic stories in the COVID-19 era. Unfortunately this has made it just as easy (and maybe even easier) to find incorrect information rather than credible information from healthcare professionals. Because of this, at a given moment if you search “COVID-19 vaccine safety” you may get taken down a rabbit hole of misinformation on the topic that may end up giving you false notions that are hard to shake. An excellent example of this is detailed in this Reuters article about the mislabeled deaths after COVID-19 vaccination. The most important take-away from this is that for important medical information like curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic and making choices for the health of your family and community, credible medical information sources are critical. The misinformation spread about COVID-19 and vaccinations has unfortunately proven to be deadly. Please don’t fall into these traps. And if you feel confused, please discuss your concerns with your doctor. 

Again, the message for COVID-19 vaccines remains reassuring and exciting: the mRNA vaccines are extremely safe for children, much more so than natural COVID-19 infection.

Comparing the risks of COVID-19 vaccination to natural infection

It has become difficult for parents to weed through all of the information on the internet to make a very fundamental decision: to vaccinate their children, or not. A simple way to distill this information for personal health reasons is to compare the risk of something bad happening to your child from natural COVID (which in all likelihood will happen given that SARS-CoV-2 will likely circulate for years to come) compared to something bad happening from COVID-19 vaccination. 

To distill this down:
1) The risk of a negative health consequence for a child infected with COVID-19 is approximately 5-10% (average 7.5%). This percentage is the sum of the risk of hospitalization from acute respiratory COVID-19 (1-5%) + the risk of developing MIS-C (<1%) + the risk of developing Long COVID (5-10%).

2) The risk of myopericarditis after COVID-19 vaccination is 0.001-0.002% (average 0.0015%).

So, simple math tells us that the risk of something negative happening from natural COVID is 5,000 times higher than something negative happening from the vaccine. 

Then if you add in the benefits to the local, state, national and global community to adequate herd immunity, the benefits of vaccinating your children are astronomical.

Parents, get your children vaccinated. And your doctor is here to help you. 

Written by:
Rosey Olivero, MD

Co-founder and CSO of Inspired Biometrics

December 2, 2021