Scientific evidence from clinical trials and safety monitoring indicate that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. While severe reactions to the vaccine can occur, they are rare, and the most common side effects of vaccination are mild and go away within a few days. All available evidence indicates that being vaccinated is safer than not being vaccinated.
The antimalarial hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was one of the drugs investigated as a potential COVID-19 treatment in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Large clinical trials with thousands of study participants eventually showed it provided no benefit to hospitalized COVID-19 patients. There are no similarly large trials evaluating the effect of early treatment with HCQ, although published results from smaller clinical trials show that HCQ didn’t provide significant benefits for outpatients compared with placebo.
COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be highly effective at protecting people from severe disease and death, and they can also reduce one’s chances of developing long COVID. While previous infection confers some degree of protective immunity, infection-induced immunity is unpredictable due to many variables that aren’t within our control, such as disease severity. Vaccination remains the safer and more reliable means of inducing protection against COVID-19.
Scientific evidence from clinical trials and safety monitoring indicate that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. In the first year of the COVID-19 vaccine campaign, these vaccines were estimated to have prevented 19.8 million deaths due to COVID-19. There is no evidence that these vaccines have caused a rise in mortality or sudden deaths, and studies have shown that the vaccines don’t increase the risk of negative pregnancy outcomes. The claim that the COVID-19 vaccines have caused an international medical crisis is baseless.
COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at reducing a person’s risk of developing severe COVID-19 and death. More than 80% of Denmark’s population were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by April 2022. Booster doses are now being offered to groups with a high risk of developing severe COVID-19. This will enhance protection against severe disease and death in the most vulnerable, as a large wave of infections are expected in the autumn and winter.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca and the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with very rare cases of blood clots with low platelets, a condition known as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia. However, COVID-19 itself is much more likely to increase the risk of blood clots, particularly in patients with moderate and severe COVID-19. Furthermore, recent research indicates that this risk might remain elevated for up to six months following infection. COVID-19 vaccines are currently the best tool to prevent COVID-19-associated blood clots, as well as other cardiovascular complications.
Before receiving marketing authorization, COVID-19 vaccines demonstrated their safety and effectiveness through several stages of clinical trials. However, regulatory agencies and health authorities continue to monitor possible safety issues among vaccinated people to identify any potential rare effect. There is an overwhelming body of evidence indicating that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination continue to outweigh the known and potential risks, and serious reactions after vaccination are rare.
Scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that COVID-19 vaccines are very safe and highly effective at reducing the risk of severe illness and death. No evidence suggests an association between COVID-19 vaccines and sudden death in young people. On the contrary, analyses comparing the proportion of deaths among vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals indicate that COVID-19 vaccines actually reduce the risk of all-cause death.
Clinical trials showed that COVID-19 vaccines effectively reduce the risk of developing severe forms or dying from the disease. In San Diego county, statistics show that the COVID-19 mortality rate of unvaccinated people is twice as high as for vaccinated ones. All COVID-19 vaccines authorized in the U.S. only contain a fragment of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, either the genetic information to produce the spike protein, or the protein itself. Therefore they cannot cause COVID-19, which would require a whole, functional virus.
Pregnant women are at a higher risk of severe COVID-19 than non-pregnant women and are also at a higher risk of pregnancy complications if they get COVID-19. All available evidence, including data from clinical trials, safety monitoring, and research studies, show that COVID-19 vaccines aren’t associated with any safety issues during pregnancy. On the contrary, vaccination reduces the risk of pregnancy complications, improving the outcomes for both the mother and the baby.
