Suspicious: Teenagers Worse Off With COVID Vaccines Than Other Vaccines

11th September 2021

Suspicious: Teenagers Worse Off With COVID Vaccines Than Other Vaccines

A causal relationship has not been determined (Getty Images).

The Claim

According to the CDC, teenagers who have been inoculated with a COVID-19 vaccine have a much higher chance of harmful side effects than any other type of vaccine.

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Emerging story

In the first week of September 2021, a plethora of anti-vax websites published articles making the same claim: COVID-19 vaccines have more reported adverse effects than other vaccines, particularly for teenagers. These articles were shared on social media.

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Misbar’s Analysis

Their source comes from Med Alerts, a website that takes data from the CDC-owned Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database and makes it more searchable.

However, VAERS isn’t a reliable source to determine causal relationships. The CDC even says so themselves.

Reports aren’t the same as occurrences. Anyone can make a VAERS report without any proof. Moreover, some of these reports may be describing correlation rather than causation. If someone gets sick after getting a vaccine, it may be due to other reasons than the vaccine. The VAERS doesn’t allow for that sort of nuance.

Med Alerts isn’t a reliable source either. For example, they include sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) as a vaccine side effect. SIDS is defined as a sudden and unexpected death with no clear cause. If there was a clear cause, it wouldn’t be SIDS.

Since VAERS and Med Alerts data are unreliable, we classify this claim as suspicious.