Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines continues to spread more than two and a half years since the shots became available to the public in Canada. A video, originally posted in 2022 but reposted last month, shows a series of news headlines that appear to demonstrate how the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines has dropped from 100 per cent to 20 per cent. This is misleading. The headlines are presented in non-chronological order, refer to different vaccines and highlight studies that measured different things. The video also includes headlines for stories that are either unrelated to any COVID-19 vaccine or are from unreliable sources.
In a video in September to the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, screenshots of various news articles flash across the screen while "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg plays as background music. Percentages and certain words in the headlines are emphasized by the video-maker using red squares.
The highlighted numbers start at "100%" and gradually decrease to "20%" before switching to words, such as "booster," and other headlines about countries halting their vaccine programs. The video ends with headlines about vaccine-makers seeing record profits.
The video was by X owner Elon Musk in a post that has more than 77 million views.
Rating: Misleading
There are 110 articles highlighted in the video. Of the articles that can still be found online, the publication dates range between September 2020 and October 2021, with one outlier published in 2011.
The headlines refer to different vaccines, including those more commonly found in North America and the United Kingdom – such as vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson – as well as those found in India, Pakistan and China – such as vaccines produced by Bharat Biotech, Cadila Healthcare and CaSinoBIO. Despite the shots having different vaccine technologies, ingredients and trials, the reports on their effectiveness were lumped together in the video.
The headlines also mix clinical studies, which measure vaccine efficacy, with real-world figures, measuring effectiveness. This creates a misleading comparison between unrelated percentages.
"Effectiveness in the real world can differ from the efficacy measured in a trial, because we can’t predict exactly how effective vaccination will be for a much bigger and more variable population getting vaccinated in more real life conditions," The says on its website.
Some initial vaccine trials also excluded certain groups of people, such as or immunocompromised people, both groups with a higher risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. This likely led to higher efficacy rates for those trials than if those groups were included.
The headlines report studies measuring different things, with some focused on a vaccine's efficacy against severe illness and death, some measuring efficacy against infection or asymptomatic cases and some measuring real-world effectiveness of certain vaccines against specific variants. The figures would be different depending on what the studies were measuring and would change over time as new data was gathered.
This creates a false equivalence between unrelated figures – like comparing apples to oranges.
For example, the video shows an excerpt from a Feb. 24, 2021, post from the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, highlighting the figure "46%". The reads, "A large observational, real-world study from Israel estimates that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is 46% effective at preventing infection 14 to 20 days after the first dose and 92% 7 days after the second dose, backing the results of an earlier randomized, controlled trial, according to a study today in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)."
The video-maker cropped out the second half of the sentence that showed a second dose provided greater protection against infection. As explained in the story, also found one dose was 74 per cent effective against COVID-related hospitalization and 72 per cent effective at preventing death, as well as 57 per cent effective against symptomatic illness.
An excerpt that appears earlier in the video from a March 11, 2021, highlights a lower efficacy rate for the Novavax vaccine in South Africa against infection, showing that it was only "55% effective," but leaves in the rest of the sentence explaining it still "fully prevented severe illness and death."
The trial, which included 2,665 healthy adults a well as a smaller group of those living with HIV, found that most of the infections among the healthy adults were caused by the Beta variant, which was considered a more contagious variant at the time. "All five cases of severe disease observed in the trial occurred in the placebo group," in an updated report.
The Pfizer story was a large, real-world study from February 2021 that measured the vaccine's effectiveness against infection with the original strain of the novel coronavirus. The Novavax story, presented eight screenshots earlier, was about a smaller clinical trial, published after the Pfizer one, that measured the vaccine's efficacy against infection with the Beta variant.
Why vaccine effectiveness wanes
While vaccine effectiveness against severe illness and death remained high, the drop in effectiveness against infection from the Beta and Delta variants illustrates one of the major challenges with fighting viruses like the novel coronavirus.
SARS‑CoV‑2, the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, replicates quickly, meaning it has a higher chance to produce mutations, also known as variants.
Also, over time, the immune cells and antibodies generated through vaccines fade. and normal for all vaccines.
A November 2021 explains why some vaccines last a long time while others require boosters to stay effective.
"The more variants emerge, the harder it is to make a vaccine that will create lasting immunity, because the target keeps moving," says Hai Tran, associate director of Cedars-Sinai's Pharmacy Services.
The post goes on to say that measles, a highly contagious virus, is very stable with a low mutation rate, which is why two doses of vaccine provide a long-lasting immune response.
There are also many that require boosters to maintain a robust protection against infectious diseases, including tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough.
Biased and unrelated sources
While many of the screenshots crop out the publication date, some were kept in but are still easy to miss.
One headline, "Japan halts vaccines after deaths of 4 children," seems particularly alarming unless you notice the publication date – March 7, 2011, nine years before the COVID-19 pandemic was declared.
, from NBC News, says Japan's health ministry had temporarily stopped using vaccines from Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis as it investigated the deaths of four children who were inoculated against pneumonia, some types of meningitis and other infections.
Some headlines came from news sites and blogs that were heavily critical of vaccines and measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The headline "IT NEVER ENDS: Israel says FOURTH 'booster' vaccine will be required to keep covid 'green pass' active" comes from run by Eddy Bettermann, who claims to be a medical doctor based out of the Philippines, but whose medical licence could not be confirmed through the Philippine Professional Regulation Commission.
The story, written by Ethan Huff for and republished in the blog on Sept. 28, 2021, makes reference to a "plandemic," the that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned, and uses a racist term to describe the virus.
"Stunning Study Reveals How Ineffective Pfizer Vaccine Actually Is" reads another headline, with the subhead, "Biden official: 'If that's not a wakeup call, I don't know what is'." was posted on Aug. 11, 2021, by WND, also known as WorldNetDaily, which is a far-right fake news site that's known to promote conspiracy theories.
, conducted by nference and the Mayo Clinic, found the Pfizer vaccine's effectiveness against infection dropped to 42 per cent in July 2021 as the Delta variant was dominant in Minnesota, where the study took place. The effectiveness against infection of the Moderna vaccine fared better with 76 per cent. Both remained highly effective against hospitalization (81 per cent for Moderna and 75 per cent for Pfizer).
Sources
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