I guess I have a musical mind, I always get music in my head when something comes up in conversation or otherwise. I was thinking of a couple famous 80’s songs, but did you know there are over 1000 songs with the title “Rumors”? Seems like a popular topic, and almost always very problematic. It implies something less reliable than information, or news, or data, or even story.

Since we’re talking about our health, and literally life-and-death choices, rumors become not just problematic, but dangerous. I haven’t done an episode on COVID lately, because you probably know most of what you need to know from the massive amount of media attention the vaccines are getting, and that’s where we are in this thing. But I have heard some rumors, and I think I can help clarify the facts about the vaccines.

First, the basics. In the United States, there are 2 vaccines approved or expected to be approved very soon for widespread use on an emergency basis by the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. This approval is called an Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA. Despite the massive effort to develop and test the vaccines, they have not been through enough review process to be called “FDA Approved”, but circumstances such as we face now, as well as some proof that the drugs will not harm the public, warrant the drugs’ use anyway.

So you can be assured, according to the FDA, that the vaccines “may be effective to prevent COVID-19” and that “the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product”. What are those risks?

The vaccines are the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, which was approved yesterday, December 11, 2020 (UK approval was 8 days earlier); and another vaccine from Moderna. The FDA has a meeting scheduled 5 days from now to discuss Moderna’s application for EUA.

The reported side effects of the Pfizer vaccine are:

injection site pain (the vaccine is administered via intramuscular injection)
tiredness
headache
muscle pain
chills
joint pain
fever
injection site swelling
injection site redness
nausea
feeling unwell
swollen lymph nodes
allergic reaction including difficulty breathing, swelling of face and throat, rapid heartbeat, a ‘bad rash’ all over the body, and dizziness and weakness. 1.6% have a food allergy.

There’s nothing in the above list, in my opinion, that outweighs the potential benefit of preventing COVID-19. In fact, I think I’ve had all of these in the last year or two. They will cause discomfort, but not serious, although the allergic reaction could be serious.

There was a rumor I personally heard about some study participants getting Bell’s Palsy. As far as that statement goes, it is true, according to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which is a committee of the FDA that does these reviews. 4 participants in a study which included 38,000 people, some of whom were given placebo, each had a case of Bell’s Palsy. These participants were given the real vaccine, and no cases occurred in the placebo group. However, this is no higher than the occurrence of Bell’s Palsy in the general population.

The Pfizer vaccine is the first approved messenger RNA or mRNA vaccine. Bill Gates was reported to have said the RNA vaccine will change our DNA forever. At least one YouTube video has made this claim. The claim that he said this is not exactly true, though it depends on your interpretation of his speech. The claim that a person’s DNA will be changed by the vaccine is false. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “mRNA from the vaccine never enters the nucleus of the cell and does not affect or interact with a person’s DNA.” Check the CDC website, where there is some good accessible information on how mRNA vaccines work. Just a note: Bill Gates is a professional philanthropist, and donates over a billion dollars a year for global health. However, he is neither a medical doctor or a scientist, and as far as I know, his organization may fund research, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it actually conducts research. So I stick with sources I trust, like the CDC, Mayo Clinic, and even the FDA.

Another rumor is that Pfizer’s vaccine causes infertility in both men and women. This is not true. The site that published this article has a bunch of claims like this. I have a link if you really want to get some bad information. The article is based on a request from a doctor who is a former Pfizer executive from about 9 years ago. He was much more careful in his speech, and did not say that the vaccine will cause infertility. The current Pfizer spokesperson said in an email to the Associated Press, “It has been incorrectly suggested that COVID-19 vaccines will cause infertility because of a shared amino acid sequence in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and a placental protein. The sequence, however, is too short to plausibly give rise to autoimmunity.” I was unable to find an independent statement on this, but I also don’t see any reputable source saying that it is true.

Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine candidate is in Phase 3, which means a larger number of participants and a longer list of things to test. This was actually developed in a partnership with the National Institutes of Health. Some results have come in, and the most common solicited adverse reactions included injection site pain, fatigue – 9.7%, myalgia (muscle aches and pain – 8.9%), arthralgia (joint pain – 5.2%), headache, and erythema or redness at the injection site. These numbers are significantly higher than in the Pfizer study. So far no serious safety concerns. Now a lot of these milder symptoms (in both of these vaccines) are similar to what you would get if you had a viral infection. Both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines prescribe two doses three weeks apart. Moderna study participants found more severe side effects after the second dose.

Since mRNA-1273 is also an mRNA drug, you can expect that the same rumors about DNA alteration apply. But honestly I didn’t find a lot of rumors about this vaccine specifically, possibly since so much light was thrown on the first-approved vaccine from Pfizer. There was one article on the site I mentioned above which claimed Moderna applied for a patent and warned of a deliberate coronavirus release.

Other vaccines are not as far along in the development and approval process. Here are a few general rumors that have appeared:

Could the vaccines increase the risk of HIV? This rumor is based on a Lancet article urging caution based on past HIV vaccine trials. The study data is not consistent, but it is a possibility for vaccines which use the Ad5 vector. There are candidate COVID-19 vaccines being developed by CanSino Biologics and ImmunityBio that use this vector.

In addition to the Bill Gates “altered DNA” video, some are claiming he wants to secretly implant microchips in everyone in the guise of giving a vaccine shot. There is evidence of a digital certificate contained in ink injected with a vaccine.

Do vaccines contain the lung tissue of aborted baby? This was claimed about the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. Some embryonic cells are used to produce lab-grown cells used in the development process, but the actual vaccine contains none of these cells.

Is the vaccine necessary if COVID-19 has a 99.97 recovery rate? This showed up in a meme on Facebook. First of all the recovery rate is wrong. The U.S. mortality rate for COVID-19, as of today, according to the CDC, is 1.8%. And August report had it at over 3%. That is very high. By contrast, the flu virus mortality rate, which varies from year to year, is about .1%. So COVID is 20-30 times as likely to kill you. I get a flu shot every year even though it may be only 40% effective. One reason is that even if I get the virus and it doesn’t affect me much, I may transmit it to someone else, for example someone over 65 years of age, a group that has a .83% mortality rate from the flu, more than 10 times the rate for my age group. My parents, who are in the 75-84 age group, have a 20.8% chance of dying if they get COVID.

So, there are a lot of unknowns because the virus, the disease, and the vaccines are all so new. I emphasize the word UNKNOWNS. Meaning beware of claims that the vaccine will definitely cause one bad thing or another. Anything like that is bound to be false. Even the published side effects will only occur in a fraction of people who are vaccinated.

A couple of months ago a survey of Americans found that more than half of those surveyed said they would not get the vaccine when it was available. The concern was that it was too soon, that there hasn’t been enough work to determine if it would be safe. That was September and it has been 3 months, and I think that is changing now.

I definitely will get a vaccine when it is available to me. I get a flu shot every year, I view the COVID vaccine in the same light. It’s not just for me. Even if only a fraction of people are prevented from getting the disease because they themselves were vaccinated, the community benefits the more people get the vaccine. In fact, I got my flu shot this year in a drive-through at the VA, and I’m hoping they make the COVID vaccine available in the same way.

The purpose here was not to debunk every rumor about vaccines. It was to emphasize that we need to be experts in our own health. Go read. Get the real info, don’t trust rumors. By the way, FDA actually has its own podcast called FDA Insight. I spent a lot of time on this episode, far more than I usually do. There is a big list of references in the show notes. And I’m releasing it early. I wanted to get it out today because next week people are going to start being able to get vaccinated, and you need to know the real deal.

References:
Fact Sheet for Pfizer-Biontech vaccine
https://www.fda.gov/media/144414/download
FDA Virtual Press Conference on the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine approval:

FDA Insight Podcast
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-insight/fda-insight-vaccines-covid-19-part-2
FDA VRBAC briefing on Pfizer-Biontech vaccine
https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/covid-vaccine-bells-alsy
Bill Gates DNA Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksEVaO806Oo&feature=youtu.be
FDA info about mRNA vaccine
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-basics.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/53525002
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/17/u-s-public-now-divided-over-whether-o-get-covid-19-vaccine/
https://www.wionews.com/world/can-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-lead-to-infertility-experts-have-this-to-say-349073
Head of Pfizer Research: Covid Vaccine is Female Sterilization
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/12/10/covid-vaccine-debunking-claims-causes-infertility-sterilization/6497018002/
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/myalgia#:~:text=What%20is%20myalgia%3F,can%20all%20bring%20about%20myalgia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthralgia#:~:text=Arthralgia%20(from%20Greek%20arthro%2D%2C,an%20allergic%20reaction%20to%20medication.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/fever-aches-pfizer-moderna-jabs-aren-t-dangerous-may-be-intense-some
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_deathsper100klast7days
https://www.goodrx.com/blog/flu-vs-coronavirus-mortality-and-death-rates-by-year/
https://www.ajmc.com/view/researchers-warn-of-heightened-risk-of-hiv-with-certain-covid-19-vaccines