As pharmaceutical companies test vaccine effectiveness in adolescents and young children, a post has surfaced on social media claiming a 2-year-old girl in Virginia died after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech\u00a0COVID-19 vaccine.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to\u00a0authorize the Pfizer vaccine for adolescents ages 12-15 by mid-May, however, studies for children ages 6 months to 11 years are still underway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The claim originated in an April 30 article from Natural News\u00a0shared as a screen grab to Facebook on May 1 and headlined, \u201cTwo-year-old baby DIES during Pfizer\u2019s Covid-19 vaccine experiments on children.\u201d<\/p>\n
The article claims the child received her second dose of Pfizer\u2019s vaccine on Feb. 25,\u00a0suffered \u201csome kind of serious adverse reaction\u201d on March 1 and passed away on March 3. The report also said she had\u00a0been hospitalized since Feb. 14, suggesting “she may have gotten sick from the first shot.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
The\u00a0claim relies entirely on an entry from\u00a0the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA\u2019s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which allows anyone to submit an unverified report.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fact check: <\/strong>No, the COVID-19 vaccines won’t give you genital herpes<\/span><\/p>\n In a message to USA TODAY, the user cited\u00a0Natural News, which\u00a0is\u00a0rated by Media Bias\/ Fact Check as a \u201cquestionable source based on the promotion of quackery level pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, as well as extreme right-wing bias.\u201d Natural News did not return a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n The original\u00a0VAERS\u00a0report of a 2-year-old dying after receiving the Pfizer vaccine no longer exists.\u00a0CDC spokesperson\u00a0Kristen Nordlund said\u00a0via email it was removed from the system for being “completely made up.”\u00a0<\/p>\n VAERS is an “early warning system” that was established in\u00a01990\u00a0in response to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act\u00a0to detect possible vaccine safety problems in U.S. licensed vaccines, according to the CDC.<\/p>\n However, there are limitations to the data and it is not possible to use the system to determine whether the vaccine caused or contributed to a reported death.\u00a0<\/p>\n “A report to VAERS does not mean that the vaccine caused the adverse event, only that the adverse event occurred some time after vaccination,”\u00a0a CDC disclaimer\u00a0states.\u00a0<\/p>\n “The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable,” the CDC’s site reads.<\/p>\n The agency\u00a0adds that because a majority of VAERS reports are voluntary, “they are subject to biases”\u00a0that result in\u00a0“specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Fact check: <\/strong>CDC data on adverse effects of vaccine cannot determine cause<\/span><\/p>\n There have been instances of people abusing\u00a0the VAERS database\u00a0and filing false reports. For example,\u00a0anesthesiologist James Laidler submitted a report claiming a flu shot turned him into the Incredible Hulk,\u00a0Vice\u00a0reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n Aside from the\u00a0VAERS entry about the 2-year-old being discredited, the original report contained\u00a0inaccuracies.\u00a0<\/p>\n The article claims the child received the second dose on Feb. 25, but Pfizer did not start vaccine trials with children 6 months to 11 years until March, according to the company’s site.<\/p>\n Results from those trials are expected in the second half of 2021. Pfizer says it hopes “to receive authorization for vaccination of these younger kids by early 2022.”<\/p>\n Similarly, Moderna did not give the first doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to children under 12 years old until mid-March.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fact check: <\/strong>COVID-19 vaccinated people don\u2019t \u2018shed\u2019 virus, infect others<\/span><\/p>\n From Dec. 14, 2020, through May 3,\u00a0VAERS received 4,178 reports of deaths among those who received a COVID-19 vaccine. However, the CDC states a\u00a0review of medical records, autopsies and death certificates related to\u00a0reports “has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.”<\/p>\n The claim that a 2-year-old girl died after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is FALSE, based on our research. The CDC said the report was removed from the VAERS database for being “completely made up.” VAERS allows anyone to submit an unverified\u00a0report and the data can contain inaccurate information. Clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine in that age group\u00a0had not started at the time the report claimed the vaccine was administered to the child. Further, the CDC says it has not identified a correlation between reported patient deaths and COVID-19 vaccines.\u00a0<\/p>\nVAERS report is not authentic<\/h2>\n
Inaccuracies in the report<\/h2>\n
Our rating: False<\/h2>\n
Our fact-check sources:\u00a0<\/h2>\n