Myths vs. Facts: Making Sense of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation
When so much wrong information is readily available, convincing people to get vaccinated has proven to be a huge challenge
Myth: pronounced mith; noun; definition: a widely held but false belief or idea; synonyms: misconception, fallacy, fantasy, fiction.
Among the many reasons COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States peaked earlier than experts hoped—then, rather than crescendoing into the summer months, began trending downward—are myths that took hold among the unvaccinated and solidified as their reasons not to get the shots. The vaccine will make women sterile; the vaccines are too new; the shots have a microchip in them; the vaccine itself will give me COVID; I’m immune because I had COVID; breakthrough cases prove vaccines are useless.
There are more. And none of them are true.
But no matter how convincing and irrefutable the science and the data about the COVID-19 vaccines are, misinformation spreads so easily and quickly—largely through social media networks—that it has become a major barrier stopping the United States from reaching higher levels of vaccination (190 million people, or 57 percent of Americans, have received at least one shot) that would bring us closer to herd immunity.
So let’s cut to the chase. Myth vs. Fact. The Brink took some of the most widespread myths to two leading infectious disease experts, Davidson Hamer, a faculty member of BU’s School of Public Health, School of Medicine, and National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, and Sabrina Assoumou, a BU School of Medicine assistant professor of medicine and of infectious diseases and a Boston Medical Center physician.
If these two experts encountered someone on the street who cited one of these myths as their reason not to get vaccinated, this is what they would say to them. To provide extra context, we include one more fact.
MYTH: The COVID vaccines were not rigorously tested, which is why they have only emergency authorization approval and not full Food and Drug Administration approval. (Update: Pfizer’s vaccine received full FDA approval on August 19)
FACT: “Vaccine developers didn’t skip any testing steps, but conducted some of the steps on an overlapping schedule to gather data faster.”—Johns Hopkins Medicine
Assoumou: This is the most common question I get asked. I think there is a perception that things moved very fast, but we want to underscore that the technology being used now was being studied for a decade. The main difference between emergency use versus full FDA approval is that you need two months of monitoring rather than six months. When you look at the history of vaccines, if patients were to develop side effects, these occurred within two months. We are now over six months into our experience with these vaccines. We have not seen anything that would make us believe that the risks outweigh the benefits. And vaccines have saved so many lives.
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MYTH: The technology used to create the COVID vaccines is too new to be safe.
FACT: The technology used, called messenger RNA, or mRNA, is not new. Research on it actually began in the early 1990s, and two diseases that are very close to COVID—SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome)—helped bring the mRNA vaccine development to present day use.—Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Understanding mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines
Assoumou: The reason this is called SARS-COV-2 is that there was a SARS-1, the original one, and scientists were working on this vaccine. So when this pandemic arrived they had already developed a lot of the science. A decade of work was actually going on. That’s one issue I like to emphasize when people think it was rushed.
The other point I like to remind people is that these vaccines went through all the regulatory steps like any other vaccines. None of this was rushed. The FDA reviewed all the data. When you say “Emergency use,” people think it was rushed, but the way to think about it is that the benefits outweigh the risks.
MYTH: Breakthrough cases prove that even if I get the vaccine, I might still get COVID. So why bother?
FACT: As of August 9, the CDC said there had been 8,054 vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died who had also tested positive for coronavirus—out of more than 166 million fully vaccinated Americans. That’s roughly .005 percent. Additionally, CDC director Rochelle Walensky has said that 99.5 percent of all deaths from COVID-19 are in the unvaccinated.—Politifact, Fact Checking Joe Biden’s Figure on Unvaccinated COVID-19 Deaths
Hamer: COVID vaccines have been shown to be very powerful in preventing more severe disease and the need for hospitalization. Breakthroughs occur at a much, much lower rate than in people who are unvaccinated. The breakthroughs have been occurring more frequently with the Delta variant because of the high level of infectiousness (or transmissibility) of the Delta variant and lower protection of current vaccines against this variant. But people having breakthroughs have much more mild infection, more like an upper respiratory infection. The vaccines prevent severe disease and complications and allow people to return to a more normal state.
Assoumou: I was just at the hospital taking care of patients. I can tell you all the cases of people getting hospitalized are unvaccinated. Breakthrough cases account for much less than 1 percent. There are so many zeros before the one—99 percent of people dying now of COVID are unvaccinated. And 97 percent of those hospitalized are unvaccinated. We are just not seeing large numbers of people vaccinated being hospitalized. And if you get it, for the most part it is like having a cold.
