MYTH: The mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 do not fit the CDC and FDA’s definitions of a vaccine, which state that vaccines have to both stimulate immunity and disrupt transmission of a virus.

THE FACTS: This claim was promoted by David Martin, a financial analyst and self-help entrepreneur who operates a YouTube channel pushing COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

As of January 2021, research is ongoing to determine whether COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the COVID-19 virus. However, contrary to Martin’s claim, neither U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stipulate that vaccines must both provide immunity and block transmission of a virus.

“There are many ways to define it, but CDC describes a vaccine as a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease,” CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund told NewsGuard in a January 2021 email. Similarly, a page on the FDA’s website explaining how vaccines work only mentions preventing disease, not transmission, stating, “Vaccination stimulates the body’s immune system to build up defenses against the infectious bacteria or virus (organism) without causing the disease.”

The two mRNA vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. as of January 2021 would fit those definitions, as clinical trials found that both vaccines are approximately 95 percent effective in preventing COVID-19.

MYTH: Hank Aaron’s death is linked to the COVID-19 vaccine.

THE FACTS: Baseball Hall of Famer and Major League Baseball’s one-time home run king Hank Aaron received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine on Jan. 5, 2021, at the Morehouse School of Medicine. He told The Associated Press at the time that he hoped his willingness to be vaccinated would reduce vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans.

The 86-year-old Aaron died on Jan. 22, 2021. Before his cause of death was disclosed, anti-vaccine activists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree, both of whom have repeatedly spread false claims about the safety of vaccines, suggested without evidence that Aaron’s death was caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.

Morehouse College of Medicine spokesperson Nicole Linton denied these claims in an email to NewsGuard, stating, “His passing was not related to the vaccine, nor did he experience any side effects from the immunization. He passed away peacefully in his sleep.”

Three days after his death, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office reported that Aaron died of natural causes. Additionally, Fox 5 Atlanta reported that officials at the medical examiner’s office do not believe the COVID-19 vaccine had any adverse effect on Aaron’s health and did not contribute to his death.

MYTH: A Tennessee nurse named Tiffany Dover died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine on live TV.

THE FACTS: Dover, a nurse at Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, received her COVID-19 vaccine during a live broadcast on WRCB-TV on Dec. 17, 2020. During a subsequent interview with the station, she fainted, which she later explained was a common occurrence. “I have a history of having an overactive vagal response and with that, if I have pain from anything, hangnail or if I stub my toe, I can just pass out,” she said.

CHI Memorial Hospital released a video on Dec. 21, 2020, showing Dover with other staff members and confirmed that she is alive and well in statements to WRCB, The Associated Press, and Reuters.

The Daily Beast reported in a January 2021 article that multiple relatives of Dover have confirmed on social media that she is alive, in response to online harassment from anti-vaccine activists. Elisa Myzal, a spokesperson for the Chattanooga Police Department, told the Daily Beast, “The police department isn’t involved in this at all because there’s no crime, no death, no nothing.”

MYTH: COVID-19 vaccines are not halal or kosher because they contain pork products.

THE FACTS: Halal food refers to food that adheres to Islamic law on how food is raised, slaughtered, and prepared. Similarly, kosher food refers to foods that meet Jewish dietary standards. Both religions consider pork products to be forbidden.

Pork gelatin is contained in some vaccines licensed in the U.S., including the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines. Gelatin is used to “protect vaccine viruses from adverse conditions such as freeze-drying or heat, particularly during transport and delivery,” according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

However, the four COVID-19 vaccines that have been authorized for widespread emergency use in the U.S. and Europe — those produced by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson — do not contain pork products, according to a February 2021 article in the Brussels Times.

In fact, Islamic and Jewish authorities, including the British Islamic Medical Association, Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, the Rabbinical Council of America, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, have encouraged their communities to get COVID-19 vaccines.

MYTH: The trials for COVID-19 vaccines were not designed to show the vaccines’ effectiveness in preventing severe cases of the disease.

THE FACTS: In October 2020, the Food and Drug Administration announced that industry requests for emergency authorization of COVID-19 vaccines had to include data on “cases of severe COVID-19 disease among study subjects” in all phases of the vaccines’ clinical trials. This contradicts the claim that the vaccines were only designed for mild cases.

Moreover, clinical trial results for each of the three COVID-19 vaccines authorized in the U.S. — made by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — as well as the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been authorized in the U.K. and the European Union, included data showing that the vaccines were effective in preventing severe cases of COVID-19.

The claim that COVID-19 vaccine trials only demonstrated effectiveness against mild, symptomatic cases and not severe ones appears to be based on COVID-19 vaccine trials’ “primary endpoint,” which the U.S. National Cancer Institute defines as “The main result that is measured at the end of a study to see if a given treatment worked.” For the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine trials, the primary endpoint was based on preventing cases where a participant showed mild symptoms of COVID-19, such as fever, cough, and chills, and then tested positive for the disease.

However, as noted, the trials also measured the vaccines’ efficacy on what are called “secondary endpoints,” defined by the FDA as outcomes in clinical trials “selected to demonstrate additional effects after success on the primary endpoint.” These secondary endpoints include severe COVID-19 cases, the definition of which included respiratory failure, admission to an intensive care unit, or death.

At an October 2020 meeting on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, health experts on the committee said concerns that the trials’ primary endpoints meant they could only prove that the vaccines were effective against mild COVID-19 were unfounded. “There simply does not exist an example in vaccinology of vaccines that are effective against mild disease that are not more effective in severe disease,” said Dr. Phillip Krause, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.

MYTH: American boxer Marvin Hagler’s death is linked to the COVID-19 vaccine.

THE FACTS: This myth relies on an Instagram post made by boxer Thomas Hearns on March 13, 2021, in which Hearns stated that Hagler was “in ICU fighting the after effects of the vaccine.” Hagler died later that day, and vaccine misinformation sites have used Hearns’ statement to tie Hagler’s death to his COVID-19 vaccination.

There is no evidence that Hagler, who was 66 at the time of his death, died from anything related to a COVID-19 vaccine or vaccine side effects. A statement on the boxer’s official website said that he “died on March 13 of natural causes,” and Hagler’s wife Kay wrote in a post on his official Facebook fan page that Hagler had “passed away unexpectedly at his home here in New Hampshire.”

Kay Hagler wrote in another post on Hagler’s Facebook fan page that it “for sure wasn’t the vaccine that caused his death,” noting that “I was the only person close to him until the last minute, and I am the only person that know [sic] how things went … now is not the time to talk nonsense.” Hearns himself later wrote on Instagram that “this is not an anti vaccine campaign … It’s outrageous to have that in mind during the passing of a King, Legend, Father, Husband and so much more.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states on its website that COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in the U.S. “are safe and effective. Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history.” The CDC also says that to date, its vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) “has not detected patterns in cause of death that would indicate a safety problem with COVID-19 vaccines.”

MYTH: Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have discovered that mRNA inactivates tumor-suppressing proteins, meaning that mRNA vaccines used to protect against COVID-19 can cause cancer.

THE FACTS: This false claim was first promoted by NaturalNews.com, a network of health misinformation sites that NewsGuard has found to have repeatedly published false content. The March 2021 NaturalNews.com article was based on a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) study published in August 2018 in the journal Nature. Although that study did find that changes in mRNA can inactivate tumor-suppressing proteins, the research was not connected to mRNA vaccines like those used against COVID-19.

“This article circulating is categorically false, misrepresents the findings of our study and draws incorrect conclusions about vaccine risks,” Jeanne D’Agostino, spokesperson for Memorial Sloan Kettering, told Agence France-Presse in March 2021.

In fact, months before the NaturalNews.com story was published, the cancer center had updated its August 2018 press release about the study, to make it clear that the research did not involve mRNA vaccines. The updated text stated, “It’s important to note that mRNAs are a normal component of all cells and the specific ones discussed here are not involved in mRNA-based vaccines, like the one developed against SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes COVID-19.

According to a March 2021 article on Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s website, “It’s important to know that none of the COVID-19 vaccines interact with or alter your DNA in any way. They cannot cause cancer.”

MYTH: COVID-19 vaccines have been proven to increase the risk of having a miscarriage.

THE FACTS: A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Agence France-Presse in February 2021, “To date, no evidence has indicated an increase in miscarriages after Covid-19 vaccines, and no concerning patterns of reporting have been observed.” A February 2021 document from the British Fertility Society and the U.K. Association of Reproductive and Clinical Scientists stated that COVID-19 vaccines “will not affect your risk of having a miscarriage.”

Sources claiming that a link exists between miscarriages and COVID-19 vaccines have frequently cited data from CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and U.K. Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Yellow Card program. Both of these systems collect unverified reports of possible vaccine side effects that can be submitted by anyone, and do not prove that the vaccine caused the reported reaction.

A MHRA spokesperson told Reuters in March 2021, “There is no pattern to suggest an elevated risk of miscarriage related to exposure to the COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy… Sadly, miscarriage is estimated to occur in about 1 in 4 pregnancies (equal to 25 in 100) in the UK (outside of the pandemic) and most occur in the first 12 weeks (first trimester) of pregnancy, so some miscarriages would be expected to occur following vaccination purely by chance.”

MYTH: Vaccines are increasing the number of new variants of the COVID-19 virus and making vaccinated individuals more likely to infect others with new super-strains.

THE FACTS: None of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. and Europe contain a live COVID-19 virus, and thus cannot create a variant or allow vaccinated individuals to infect others.

Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told NewsGuard in a March 2021 email that the approved vaccines “are not complete viruses and so cannot replicate a new variant that can infect others. Some types of vaccine use attenuated whole viruses and these can generate variants that could theoretically pass on to others, but the COVID-19 vaccines are not of that type and so cannot do that.”

Hibberd also explained that variants that show some resistance to vaccine-acquired immunity could be more easily spread, but this does not mean that the vaccine created those variants. So far, there is no evidence of “resistant strains arising directly as a result of vaccines,” according to Hibberd.

Professor Luke O’Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin, told Euronews in April 2021 that, “Vaccines bring out the human immune system to kill the virus, that stops it replicating and therefore the chance of variants emerging is decreased.”

MYTH: PCR tests used to detect the virus that causes COVID-19 can also be used to secretly deliver the COVID-19 vaccine, according to research from Johns Hopkins University.

THE FACTS: This myth misrepresents an animal study by Johns Hopkins researchers and published in the journal Science Advances in October 2020. The study tested devices called theragrippers, which are as small as a speck of dust and can deliver medicine to the gastrointestinal tract, with the goal of improving the efficacy of extended-release drugs.

Unlike the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests used to detect the virus that causes COVID-19 — where a swab is inserted in the nose — the theragrippers in the Johns Hopkins study were administered via the rectum.

Johns Hopkins Medicine told NewsGuard in an April 2021 email, “This nanotechnology has shown promise in a laboratory setting. However, it is still in its infancy and has not been approved for use in humans. Theragrippers have been neither tested nor used for vaccine delivery.”

MYTH: Life insurance companies won’t pay out benefits to anyone who dies after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine because the vaccines are considered experimental.

THE FACTS: Paul Graham, senior vice president of policy development at the American Council of Life Insurers, addressed this claim in a March 2021 statement on the council’s website. “The fact is that life insurers do not consider whether or not a policyholder has received a COVID vaccine when deciding whether to pay a claim,” Graham said. “Life insurance policy contracts are very clear on how policies work, and what cause, if any, might lead to the denial of a benefit. A vaccine for COVID-19 is not one of them. Policyholders should rest assured that nothing has changed in the claims-paying process as a result of COVID-19 vaccinations.”

The Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association and the Association of British Insurers each released similar statements in March 2021 explaining that COVID-19 vaccinations will have no impact on an individual life insurance coverage or benefits.

Contrary to the claim that the COVID-19 vaccines are considered “experimental,” each of the vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. and Europe had to undergo multiple phases of clinical trials to test their safety and efficacy, although some phases overlapped to shorten development time. That data was then reviewed by health regulators before the vaccines were authorized for emergency use.

MYTH: MRNA COVID-19 vaccines can cause an increase in rare neurodegenerative disorders called prion diseases.

THE FACTS: This claim was based on a January 2021 research article published in the journal Microbiology & Infectious Diseases. The article was written by Dr. J. Bart Classen, an immunologist in Maryland who has previously promoted the false claim that vaccines are linked to diabetes, according to a February 2021 PolitiFact article.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prion diseases are “a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans and animals.” One such disease is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more widely known as mad cow disease. The disease is named for prions, which the CDC defines as “abnormal, pathogenic agents that are transmissible and are able to induce abnormal folding of specific normal cellular proteins called prion proteins that are found most abundantly in the brain.”

Classen’s article did assert that mRNA vaccines could cause prion diseases, as well as other neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, but only cited as evidence of the claim a three-sentence summary of an unspecified analysis of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Jacob Yount, an associate professor of microbial infection and immunity at Ohio State University, told The Dispatch in April 2021 that Classen’s study “seems to be based on gibberish presented in a seemingly scientific manner.” Yount said, “mRNA vaccines have a longer history of testing in humans that started several years before the COVID vaccines, and these past vaccines were found to be safe and have not resulted in prion disease. Further, the mRNAs themselves are degraded by our cells in a matter of days, so I do not find any reason to think that the mRNAs delivered to cells in our arm muscle would have a direct effect on proteins in the brain.”

MYTH: Being in close proximity to someone who has received a COVID-19 vaccine can cause unvaccinated women to have a miscarriage or experience menstrual cycle changes.

THE FACTS: According to an April 2021 article by The Associated Press, it is biologically impossible for unvaccinated women to experience reproductive problems just by being around individuals who have received a COVID-19 vaccine.

A spokesperson for the U.S. National Institutes of Health told Reuters in April 2021, “There is no evidence that individuals vaccinated for COVID-19 can transmit the vaccines to others or that vaccination of one person can have negative health effects on others.” Dr. Taraneh Shirazian, an NYU Langone gynecologist, told The Associated Press in April 2021: “You can’t pass it from one person to another if you stand next to someone.”

Centner Academy, a private school in Miami, Florida, announced in April 2021 that it would not employ vaccinated teachers, citing in a letter to parents anecdotal claims of women “reporting adverse reproductive issues from being in close proximity with those who have received any one of the COVID-19 injections.”

Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease specialist with Florida International University, told WFOR, a CBS-owned TV station in Miami, after reviewing the Centner Academy letter: “There are no scientific bases for any of the concerns that they raise and there’s no foundation whatsoever. It shows me that the author has a very primitive understanding of what a vaccine is and really no understanding of the scientific process.”

MYTH: People vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines can shed disease-causing particles to others.

THE FACTS: In an April 2021 statement to Reuters, an unnamed U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson said, “There is no way for a COVID-19 vaccinated person to ‘shed vaccine.’ COVID-19 vaccines give instructions to teach our cells how to make a protein—or even just a piece of a protein—that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. After the protein piece is made, the cell breaks down the instructions and gets rid of them. The immune response, which produces antibodies, is what protects us from getting infected if the real virus enters our bodies.”

Only vaccines that contain a live virus can shed enough to potentially infect other people. USA Today reported in a May 2017 article that this occurred with the oral polio vaccine, which was distributed beginning in 1961, because children who received the vaccine shed the virus through their feces, and in rare cases, could be spread to others who didn’t wash their hands after using the bathroom.

The oral polio vaccine stopped being used in the U.S. by 2000, and Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told USA Today that no other type of vaccine has ever been shown to shed in a manner that caused disease.