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Data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a survey by the Cleveland Clinic do not reveal that immunizations against Covid-19 reduce life expectancy by up to 25 years, contrary to what articles and publications suggest. more than a thousand interactions on the networks. The content, which circulated in January 2023 alongside an alleged study by Josh Stirling published on a foreign portal, was shared again in April 2024. But the CDC data contradicts the allegations and experts told AFP that there are no statistics or research that supports them.
“A worrying study has found that people who have been ‘fully’ vaccinated against Covid with mRNA injections can expect to lose up to 25 years of their life expectancy. Researchers analyzed government data from the U.S. CDC, data from the Cleveland Clinic, and risk assessment data from insurance companies.”says one of the publications shared on Facebook, Instagram, X and Telegram.
Similar allegations circulate in English.
The content was also sent to AFP Checamos’ WhatsApp, where users can forward messages seen on social networks if they doubt their veracity.
Screenshot taken on April 24, 2024 from a post on X (.)
The publications share national and international articles that reference a publication from January 24, 2023 in The Epoch Times, a website that has already spread misinformation about vaccines against Covid-19.
In the article, the portal interviewed Josh Stirling, presented as a “insurance analyst and researcher” and author of the supposed study that led to the conclusion about a reduction of up to 24 years in the life expectancy of people vaccinated with messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.
Stirling’s claims about Covid-19 vaccines have already been verified by other fact-checking agencies (1, 2).
In the articles, it is mentioned that Stirling reached the viral conclusions by analyzing alleged data from the CDC and the results of a study published for the first time on February 23, 2023 by the Cleveland Clinic and entitled “Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccinate.”
The research concluded that the vaccine in question, which includes a component of the omicron variant, provided protection “modest” for the more than 50 thousand employees included in the observations.
But the Cleveland Clinic study does not analyze life expectancy — and the purported CDC data also cited in the article was not available at the time Stirling’s research was published.
Amesh Adalja, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said the allegations are “completely inaccurate and disconnected from reality”.
“Although there is some scientific debate about the immunological imprint that can influence susceptibility to infection, in reality, there has been nothing that has shown an increase in the number of deaths in vaccinated people”stated on March 9, 2023.
2022 data
The viral articles claim that CDC data indicates that the overall death rate in the United States increased by 7% between 2021 and 2022.
However, on March 21, 2024, the US agency published the official report on mortality in the United States in 2022 that goes against this claim.
According to the document, life expectancy rose to 77.5 years — an increase of 1.1 years compared to 2021 — while the mortality rate fell 9.2% — from 879.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021 to 798.8 in 2022.
Mortality rates increased only for the age groups 1 to 4 years and 5 to 14 years. However, the data showed a decrease in the mortality rate for all age groups over 15 years. The two leading causes of death in the United States in 2022 were heart disease and cancer.
Furthermore, at the time of publication of Josh Stirling’s study, on February 24, 2023, the CDC had not yet released information on mortality in the country, as confirmed at the time by John Grabenstein, director of scientific communication at the Coalition of Immunization Action, a non-profit organization that works to increase vaccination rates.
“Overall mortality data includes overdoses, traffic accidents, suicide, and many other things that are clearly unrelated to vaccination — so it is not a specific indicator even if it were available.”said on March 9, 2023.
Claims that vaccines against Covid-19 “caused large-scale deaths” are not supported, as the CDC confirmed to AFP on March 20, 2023. The agency also pointed to a study from January 16, 2023 that found no “no additional risk of death among individuals who received the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and J&J/Janssen covid-19 vaccines”.
“Mortality rates among people who received vaccines against Covid-19 were lower than those of people who did not receive the vaccine”the agency said. “The conclusions of this study should reassure potential recipients of the Covid-19 vaccine and healthcare professionals that these vaccines are safe”.
Decontextualized study
The Cleveland Clinic article cited in the viral content was, at the time, a preprint. The study has since been peer-reviewed and published on April 19, 2023 in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
However, Nabin Shrestha, an infectious disease specialist at the Cleveland Clinic and one of the study’s authors, said the research “does not examine hospitalization or deaths”.
“It is incorrect to state that our study found a greater risk of hospitalization or death with more doses of the vaccine”he told AFP in an email on March 15, 2023.
Researchers discovered a positive correlation between doses of Covid-19 vaccines and risk of infection, but Shrestha reinforced that this observation “does not necessarily prove that the vaccine is the cause of this greater risk”.
Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said other important factors include age and pre-existing health conditions.
“Probably, people who choose more doses are people at higher risk of disease, not just Covid-19”he told AFP on March 9, 2023. “They are more at risk because they are older, because they have comorbidities — they are more clinically fragile or more immunocompromised”.
Benjamin Neuman, a biology professor at Texas A&M University, said the allegations shared on social media were “distorted to fit an anti-vaccine narrative”.
“I see no evidence that anyone with competence in statistics, biology or physiology was involved in putting this together.”he told AFP on March 2, 2023.
