The truth behind MTG’s claims that Covid boosters lead to hospitalizations

Claim

Seven to eight percent of recipients of the latest covid-19 boosters “get very sick and have to go to the hospital”.

The truth is that according to Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention0.03% of people over the age of 12 who got one of the new covid-19 boosters went to the hospital with serious side effects. CDCno children (ages 5-11) were hospitalized after receiving a booster.

When the CDC followed up with people who reported being hospitalized after being vaccinated, more than half said the hospitalization was unrelated to the COVID-19 vaccination they received.

how it started

On Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-Ga.) went viral on Twitter, quoting Texas cardiologist Peter McCullough saying that 7% to 8% of people lost weight after receiving a booster. I said I would be hospitalized. Greene added that her recent Rasmussen poll also found that 7% of her adult booster recipients had to go to the hospital for the vaccine.

“No healthy person or child should be vaccinated, and using boosters greatly increases risk,” she wrote.

The claim that 7-8% of booster recipients end up in the hospital is false.

Original source of the claim

Greene has two sources for the same false allegations. Polls from McCullough and Rasmussen Reports.

Frequent Providers of Misinformation

Let’s start with McCullough.

For context, McCullough says frequently provide covid-19 misinformationDuring a panel discussion on pandemic response last January hosted by Republican Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), McCullough falsely claimed that the CDC had confirmed 21,000 cases of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. bottom. In fact, after giving these groups more than 60 million doses of the mRNA covid vaccine, the CDC has found only about 700 cases in children and teens, the age at which they are most likely to develop side effects.

Bug in V-SAFE data

In this latest claim, McCullough cites CDC’s V-SAFE data, claiming that 7-8% of Americans “get sick enough to have to go to the hospital” after the second booster. increase.

V-SAFE is a COVID-vaccine safety surveillance system created by CDC in December 2020. Participants register for V-SAFE via smartphone after first vaccination Voluntarily report side effects to the CDC. CDC will send participants a text message containing a brief health survey to report post-vaccination symptoms and any new or worsening health conditions. Doctors are skeptical of her V-SAFE data. This is because self-reported side effects are not necessarily representative of all vaccinated people. Rather, V-SAFE is a tool that CDC uses to look for unexpected side effects or patterns of side effects in vaccinees. But the agency is using data from several other sources to paint a picture of the shot’s safety profile.

Still, V-SAFE data, including data from the time a COVID-19 vaccine became available, can be abused and misinterpreted.

The V-SAFE program asks participants about any changes in their health status — vaccine-related or not. As explained William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, anything that happens post-vaccination that participants think is vaccine-related can be reported. This means that symptoms unrelated to the vaccine or symptoms the participant had prior to the vaccine may be reported to the system.

“These are just anecdotal reports from the patients themselves,” Schaffner said. “Therefore, these have not been medically scrutinized.”

Another problem with relying on V-SAFE data is: This program does not necessarily represent everyone who has been vaccinated.

In fact, people who are more likely to have some reaction to the vaccine are more likely to be in the program, so they are not necessarily representative of the larger vaccinated population.

Analysis of CDC safety data also does not support this claim. According to a November 2022 report, 5-11 After receiving a bivalent booster, he received inpatient treatment. And according to the CDC, Based on V-SAFE and Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) datahospitalization was reported only in 0.03% of booster recipients aged 12 years or older.

It’s also important to note that the CDC examines what comes in through V-SAFE and VAERS and investigates potentially related reports or patterns of reports. CDC’s analysis is also based on data from V-SAFE and VAERS, which incorporates reports from physicians and the general public.

voting problem

The Rasmussen poll cited by Greene also comes to the same conclusion as McCullough and is problematic.

First, as David Mayhew, a clinical radiation oncologist at Tufts Medical Center, pointed out, the poll data “are vastly different from the medical facts.”

He added that the way questions are posed in polls is also important. For example, the Rasmussen poll asked participants whether they had experienced “significant side effects,” but as Mayhew points out, the poll asked what were serious and minor side effects. “They will be defined differently by different people,” he said.

irrational claims

according to it poll“7% of them reported serious side effects,” the poll said, meaning about 12 million people. I say no.

Here are some figures to contextualize these numbers.

As of October, 613 million An average of 30,000 daily doses of mRNA vaccines were deployed in the United States.

If the 7% figure is true, it means about 2,000 to 3,000 hospitalizations per day, given the sheer number of people in the US who have received the COVID-19 vaccine and booster dose, says Texas. Dean of the Center for Vaccine Development at Children’s Hospital and the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “This will obviously cause red flares here and there,” he said.

Hotez added that there is “no common sense associated” with the claim.

The Core of Truth: Side Effects and Reactogenicity

In addition to his claims about the V-SAFE data, McCullough also found that reactogenicity, or the propensity to cause side effects after vaccination, rose about 80-fold from shot 1 to shot 2 of the first covid vaccination, with shots Said to rise further.Three. Another false claim.

According to the CDC, the first and second doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines have similar side effects, and the third and subsequent doses have similar side effects. booster dose.

Hotez explained that mRNA vaccines are relatively reactogenic compared to other vaccines. That said, there are some side effects, but they are usually mild by medical standards. It’s a little worse than most people experience after a flu shot, but is consistent with the side effects of shingles vaccines given to older people. not.

Typical reactions to the mRNA covid vaccine include arm pain, arm redness, low-grade fever, pain, and fatigue. However, he stressed that these reactions were “far from typical adverse events.”

“Fever, injection site pain, fatigue, and headache are commonly reported in the days following vaccination,” a CDC spokesperson told Grid. Reactions reported after receiving boosters include: Most side effects after covid-19 boosters are mild to moderate and temporary, similar to those experienced after regular vaccination.

The most serious side effect of the mRNA covid vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer is myocarditis. However, this is a rare side effect. “That number puts him between 1 in 12,000 and 1 in 16,000,” he says, Hotez. “What anti-vaccination activists are trying to do is basically to make anyone who has another serious effect temporarily associated with vaccination, who is actually not, be the cause.” I would like to return the results.”

Hotez describes this kind of misinformation that exaggerates the side effects of vaccines, never mentions that side effects occur even with placebos, and never mentions the benefits of vaccines as “weaponized health communication.” .

This article has been updated. Thanks to Brett Zach for editing a copy of this article.