Pfizer, COVID-19, vaccines, medical misinformation
Medical professionals across the country cautiously held their breath hoping COVID would soon become a distant memory and that the misinformation train had wandered off the track, never to return. But then we found ourselves in the middle of a surprising new resurgence on both fronts.
The seven-day average of new cases reached its nadir at around 24,000 in the United States in early April, and we have seen a slow but steady increase in this metric since that time. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID Data Tracker. https://bit.ly/3MB40D9.) This rise is mostly being fueled by the BA.2 subvariant.
And it seemed that Joe Rogan and his controversial guests had moved on to subjects more in vogue (and likely more profitable) than criticizing and fetishizing conspiracy for every aspect of the pandemic response.
But now we find ourselves back in the murky world of homegrown, antivax epidemiologists and biostatisticians loudly declaring they are finally vindicated and that the more than five billion people who received at least one “jab” are in big trouble. (New York Times. May 18, 2022; https://nyti.ms/3LtJqTT.)
What exactly is going on here?
Conspiracy Theory Strategy
The FDA gave full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Aug. 23, 2021. (FDA. https://bit.ly/3Nnpm76.) Four days later, the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain literally all data and information for the Pfizer vaccine. (https://phmpt.org; Aug. 27, 2021; https://bit.ly/3yWxSWu.) The FDA agreed to release 329,000 pages of data, and the PHMPT sued when the agency proved physically unable to do so within the requested timeframe.
Ultimately, a judge in Texas sided with the PHMPT, and ordered the FDA to release every document about the Pfizer vaccine to the public by this summer. The first 12,000 pages were ordered to be released immediately, with an additional 55,000 pages every month starting March 1. Several massive data dumps have been made, the most recent of more than 80,000 pages in early May.
Like sharks to chum, each release of the Pfizer vaccine data is immediately followed by a frenzy of misinformation and outrageous claims across social media platforms. The hashtag #PfizerDocuments has become a badge of moral courage for those who refused the vaccine.
Many of these tagged viral posts originate from some misinterpretation of the actual data, but some of these claims are built on completely false premises. Herein lies the rub with misinformation tactics. Like entropy in physics, the disorder created by conspiracy theory and misinformation often occurs almost spontaneously, yet debunking allegations requires considerable research and intentional mental energy.
Characters like the self-proclaimed inventor of the DNA and MRNA vaccine, Robert Malone, MD, and the many others who made their careers spreading COVID misinformation, cherry-pick platforms that allow them to release a barrage of uncontested claims to huge audiences. They start fires and sow seeds of doubt and fear among the public, and then leave the mess for more rational truth-seekers to clean up. It’s not an even playing field, and the damage is almost always irreparable.
The Attraction of Conspiracy
Some of the most alarming claims circulating since the Pfizer documents were released include that the FDA and Pfizer purposely lied about known risks to pregnant patients, that the real vaccine efficacy was only 12 percent rather than the originally reported 95 percent, and that the vaccine is directly responsible for more than 1200 deaths. The underlying foundational belief is that Pfizer and the FDA had malicious intent to hide these data from the public.
The first claim that the Pfizer vaccine is not safe during pregnancy or breastfeeding originated from a screenshot of a document purported to be found in the released Pfizer data, but, in fact, originated from a now-revised recommendation from a British public health organization. (Newswise. May 6, 2022; https://bit.ly/39GqaoT.)
The 12-percent-efficacy claim circulating on Twitter links back to a Substack post written by a single person that really only serves to demonstrate the author’s confusion about what the study category labeled “suspected but unconfirmed cases” actually means. She used numbers found from this studied group to mistakenly assign a vaccine efficacy of 12 percent.
The data used for that Substack post were actually taken from a previously released open-source document long before the PHMPT lawsuit, which further defuses claims that these documents are a smoking gun for the antivax community. (COVID Data Science. May 11, 2022; https://bit.ly/3aeFMjZ.)
The 1223 deaths being attributed to the Pfizer vaccine are, in fact, in the released papers, but were found in a dataset of all reported possible adverse effects collected across the globe. None of these adverse effects is verified or has been determined to be causal. It’s difficult to know what to do with these data, but claiming with certainty on your social media page that these are deaths caused by the Pfizer vaccine is clearly intellectually dishonest and does not reflect a genuine desire to understand the intent of these documents.
It stands that each of these claims is easily demonstrated not to be rooted in reality. This should persuade everyone to be highly skeptical of similar claims being made about the content of these documents.
Unfortunately, something is highly captivating and possibly even addictive about conspiracy theories to the human brain. People’s propensity to accept alternative explanations of world events increases considerably in times of tragedy or uncertainty. It is foundational to emergency medicine to care for patients experiencing tragedy during times of great uncertainty, and emergency physicians will need to continue to thwart these phenomena of magical thinking and conspiracy theories. The COVID pandemic only served to remind us of this.
Dr. Jedickis a board-certified emergency physician who works in EDs in Las Vegas and as clinical faculty at the University of Utah. He also practices aviation medicine, previously serving as an active-duty flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force with several fighter squadrons and now in the Utah Air National Guard. He is also an FAA aviation medical examiner and previously completed a space medicine clerkship with NASA. Follow him on Twitter@RockyJedickMD. Read his previous columns athttps://bit.ly/EMN-HumanFactors.
