Why do some people think that COVID shots increase your risk of getting COVID?
The usual suspects...
Do COVID Shots Increase Your Risk of Getting COVID?
Instead of his usual survey shenanigans, this time, Steve Kirsch demonstrates how anti-vaccine folks abuse FOIA requests...
Apparently, Steve Kirsch sent an FOIA request to the Santa Clara County Health Department and received information about folks diagnosed with COVID, including whether or not they were "vaccinated."
After looking at this data, Steve Kirsch concluded that "So the percentage of people who were diagnosed with COVID (98% or more) was higher than the percentage of people who got the vaccine (under 95%). In other words, the vaccine made you more likely to get COVID instead of 10X less likely that they claimed in the clinical trials."
What's the real explanation?
If you look through the extensive data available in the Santa Clara County Health Department COVID dashboards, you will see that while most folks got the primary series, far fewer got the booster doses or updated COVID vaccine.
So if more vaccinated people got COVID, it was simply because there were more vaccinated people than unvaccinated people to get COVID - "vaccinated people" who were not necessarily up-to-date with the latest COVID vaccines.
Looking even more closely at the data from Santa Clara County though, despite how Kirsch "analyzed" the data, you can easily see that unvaccinated people were more likely to get sick with COVID.
Not surprisingly, that COVID vaccines don't increase your risk of developing COVID has been fact checked plenty of times already:
- Cleveland Clinic Study Did Not Show Vaccines Increase COVID-19 Risk
- Vaccine study that has people worried is being misinterpreted
- The CDC didn’t say vaccinated people are more at risk of a new COVID variant than the unvaccinated
- Fact Check: CDC did not say COVID vaccines increase susceptibility to new variant
- Social media posts misrepresent CDC data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in teens
- Fact check: COVID-19 vaccination decreases chances of hospitalization, contrary to post's implication
- Vaccinated People Not More Susceptible to COVID-19 Than Unvaccinated
- Vaccination does not increase the likelihood of Covid-19 infection
- Widespread Claims Misrepresent Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines
- Fact Check - DeSantis said boosters make COVID-19 infection more likely
Whoops indeed!
And no, the exact same thing didn't happen in Australia, as Steve Kirsch claims. Something that has also been fact checked extensively.
- High numbers of vaccinated hospitalized in Australia not evidence of higher risk
- High COVID-19 vaccination rates in New South Wales mean that those admitted to hospital are likely to have been vaccinated
- Claims linking COVID vaccinations to ICU admissions are misleading
- Fact check: COVID-19 vaccination decreases chances of hospitalization, contrary to post's implication
- NSW COVID data details lost on former paramedic
Are these folks even trying anymore?
"A growing body of research indicates that these vaccines not only reduce the incidence of infection but also significantly decrease all-cause mortality among vaccinated individuals compared to those who are unvaccinated."
Vaccine Victory: How COVID-19 shots slash all-cause mortality and outshine misinformation
I mean, besides trying to keep folks from getting vaccinated and protected?
More on the Effectiveness of COVID Vaccines
- Did COVID Vaccines Cause More Deaths Than They Saved?
- How Misinformation About Vaccines is Created?
- Santa Clara County COVID Vaccinations Dashboard
- Santa Clara County COVID Cases and Deaths Dashboard
- Studies Show Boosted Immunity Against Omicron with Booster Doses
- COVID-19 Booster Enhances Protection, Contrary to ‘Immune Fatigue’ Claims
- Effectiveness of Bivalent Boosters against Severe Omicron Infection
- The Table 2 Fallacy: Presenting and Interpreting Confounder and Modifier Coefficients
- Hospitalization rates confirm COVID vaccines' benefits
- How We Know That the COVID-19 Vaccines Work
- More evidence vaccination reduces risk of long COVID
- Odds of Hospitalization for COVID-19 After 3 vs 2 Doses of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine by Time Since Booster Dose
- How vaccine safety data is constantly misused and what you can do
- Vaccine Victory: How COVID-19 shots slash all-cause mortality and outshine misinformation
- A Timeline of Events in the COVID-19 Pandemic
