Misleading: Nurse Contracts COVID After Vaccination

Christopher Frawley

Health

1st January 2021

Misleading: Nurse Contracts COVID After Vaccination

The vaccine takes several weeks to be fully absorbed by the body (Getty Images).

The Claim

A nurse in California tested positive for COVID-19 one week after receiving the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

News posted on

Emerging story

Confusion was sparked on December 30th as multiple outlets published headlines in regard to a nurse in southern California who had contracted the virus. The titles of several of these articles (whether done deliberately or unintentionally) were written so that they could easily have been misinterpreted as proclaiming that the vaccine did not work. Social media users responded with concern, and then later outrage at the dangerous use of “clickbait.” Reuters in particular was heavily criticized and changed the title of their article after being called out.

Misbar’s Analysis

The key element to this story which several outlets failed to make adequately transparent is that the Pfizer vaccine is not immediately effective. It takes several weeks to be fully absorbed by the body and is meant to be administered twice to be completely functional. Therefore, the aforementioned nurse did not demonstrate that the vaccine failed.

By leaving out this crucial information in the title of an article, several platforms were creating the potential for spreading misinformation. Not all people will fully read an article or even click on it; some might even take the title at face value. With many people already skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine, this is a potentially dangerous practice.