COVID-19 vaccines went through clinical trials to determine their effectiveness and safety before they were authorized for use. The Nuremberg Code is a set of ten principles defining legitimate medical research. However, the Code doesn’t apply to medical interventions that were already tested in clinical trials and shown to be safe and effective, like the COVID-19 vaccines.
Childhood vaccination represents a great advancement in public health that has helped to eliminate or reduce the risk of diseases that in the past killed and disabled more than two million children worldwide per year. A robust body of evidence shows that the vaccines that are currently in use, including COVID-19 vaccines, are safe for children and not associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes.
Getting COVID-19 carries a greater risk of developing health complications compared to COVID-19 vaccination. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines contain messenger RNA (mRNA) that provides the blueprint for making spike protein. Modified mRNA isn’t intrinsically artificial. Modifications to mRNA also occur naturally in humans and are used to regulate gene expression. Scientists took their cue from nature when modifying COVID-19 vaccine mRNA to improve its stability and efficiency in protein synthesis.
COVID-19 vaccines were rigorously tested in clinical trials before they were permitted to be used in the general public. The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t contain graphene oxide nor is graphene listed on any credible ingredient lists of any COVID-19 vaccine provided by public health authorities and regulators. However, some have misrepresented a Pfizer document to claim otherwise. In fact, the document describes a microscopy study that was part of the structural characterization of the vaccine spike protein, in which scientists used graphene oxide as a support material for sample processing and visualization.
From the Black Plague to the 1918 flu pandemic to COVID-19, infectious disease outbreaks large and small have occurred throughout all of history and will continue to occur. Because of this, governments and public health agencies must continually monitor pathogens that could cause an outbreak. Tabletop simulation exercises are among public health emergency preparedness measures that aim to improve responses in case of a public health threat. The monitoring of viruses with the potential to cause a serious outbreak, such as the H5N1 avian flu virus, is also par for the course in infectious disease surveillance. Just as fire drills don’t mean a fire that occurs must have been planned, taking steps towards pandemic preparedness isn’t evidence that a pandemic is planned.
Studies show that COVID-19 vaccines don’t increase the risk of death. On the contrary, they reduce it by protecting people against severe illness and death, particularly among populations at a higher risk of severe COVID-19. While COVID-19 vaccines are associated with some serious side effects, this risk is very small and doesn’t outweigh the benefits of vaccination.
To date, more than 270 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Incidental cases of illnesses, including cancer, occurred even before COVID-19 vaccines existed. Therefore, in order to determine if vaccination raises the risk of illness, it isn’t enough to simply point to cases occurring after vaccination as evidence. One must compare the incidence of the illness following vaccination with the baseline incidence. There’s no evidence indicating that COVID-19 vaccines raise the risk of developing cancer or that they worsen cancer.
Even before COVID-19 vaccines existed, there was already a baseline rate of illness and death occurring in the general population. The occurrence of an adverse event after vaccination in itself doesn’t necessarily mean the vaccine caused the event. To determine whether vaccination alters the risk of such events, researchers need to compare the baseline rate and the rate in vaccinated people. Multiple scientific studies have shown that serious side effects following COVID-19 vaccination are rare and the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.
COVID-19 bivalent vaccines were developed to provide protection against the original form of SARS-CoV-2 as well as the Omicron variant. The U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention data showed that the bivalent booster had a limited and waning effectiveness against hospitalization due to infection by the dominant Omicron variant lineage called XBB. However, they are effective at protecting from severe forms of the disease in the case of infection by other Omicron lineages such as BQ.1 or BA.4/5.
To date, claims that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines can alter DNA in people lack a biologically plausible mechanism to explain how this would happen. A certain proportion of polio vaccine administered between the 1950s and 1960s were contaminated with the virus SV40, which can cause tumors in animals. However, epidemiological studies since then haven’t detected a higher risk of cancer in people who received the polio vaccine at that time period.
