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As COVID-19 cases continue to rise across the globe, anti-vaccination activists try to undermine people\u2019s confidence by spreading misinformation around the safety, efficacy and value of the COVID-19 vaccines.<\/span><\/p>\n Baker, who describes himself as a healer who\u2019s <\/span>not anti-vaccine but anti-everything<\/span><\/a>, has created a business <\/span>selling misinformation <\/span><\/a>about vaccines. In April, <\/span>Facebook removed Baker\u2019s ad account and page<\/span><\/a> after he falsely claimed that a “silver spray” sold on his website protected people from COVID-19. In another video shared on TikTok and <\/span>fact-checked by PolitiFact, <\/span><\/a>he said people were dying because of the economic collapse caused by the pandemic, not from COVID-19.<\/span><\/p>\n In this video, Baker adds a disclaimer saying he\u2019s not giving medical advice. But he is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The first reason Baker gives to not get vaccinated is the ingredients in the vaccines. \u201cYou wouldn’t give your kid a shot of thimerosal, aluminum, aborted fetal tissue, chicken and eggs embryo \u2014 you wouldn\u2019t,\u201d he argues.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But the fact is you probably already have for most of those items, and research shows the ingredients in vaccines are not harmful. Also, the two U.S. authorized COVID-19 vaccines don’t contain any of those ingredients.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative used in multi-dose vaccines to <\/span>help prevent potentially deadly contamination<\/span><\/a> from harmful microbes. Although most vaccines for children don\u2019t use it anymore, some influenza vaccines still do. Thimerosal contains ethylmercury, a kind of mercury that\u2019s <\/span>safer than methylmercury<\/span><\/a>, which can be found in certain fish and animals. Ethylmercury is less toxic because it is broken down and excreted rapidly by the body. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the <\/span>amount of mercury contained in a vaccine<\/span><\/a> is roughly the same amount contained in a 3 ounce can of tuna fish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Aluminum salts are present in some vaccines. They are also found in some health products such as buffered aspirin and antacids, as well as in many foods and beverages, including fruit and vegetables, cereals, nuts, dairy products, flour, honey, and baby formula. The quantities of aluminum contained in vaccines are low and regulated. According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the<\/span> amount of aluminum infants receive<\/span><\/a> in their first six months of life from vaccines is about eight times lower than what they receive from formula, and about half of what they receive from breast milk in that same amount of time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some vaccines are made in eggs \u2014 the influenza and yellow fever vaccines \u2014 therefore they contain egg proteins. Eggs from chickens raised on a farm <\/span>are technically chicken embryos<\/span><\/a> if fertilized by a rooster.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, Baker names fetal tissue as a vaccine ingredient. That\u2019s not accurate. Fetal cells obtained from two aborted pregnancies in the early 1960s, one in Sweden and one in England, were made into cell lines that are used to grow virus to make some vaccines, such as varicella (chickenpox), rubella and hepatitis A. But those cells aren’t<\/a> present<\/a> in the vaccines themselves, since the virus is purified before it goes into a syringe.<\/p>\n As\u00a0we’ve<\/a>\u00a0explained<\/a>, the\u00a0Pfizer\/BioNTech<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Moderna<\/a>\u00a0COVID-19 vaccines\u00a0aren’t made from a virus. According to the CDC, neither <\/span>vaccine <\/span>contains eggs, preservatives or latex.<\/span><\/p>\n Vaccines do not<\/a> go directly into the bloodstream, as Baker says in the video. Instead, most vaccines are injected into muscle or skin.<\/span><\/p>\n Baker goes on to incorrectly say that vaccines \u201cdon\u2019t work\u201d because they don\u2019t \u201cprevent the virus or bacteria from getting in your body. What they do is that they reduce the amount of symptoms that you have from that bacteria or virus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Many vaccines are in fact helpful precisely because they reduce symptoms — less severe disease means less suffering and fewer deaths. This is a huge part of why vaccines have been so beneficial to society.<\/span><\/p>\n It is true that not all vaccines can prevent infection, or do so fully. But that\u2019s not a requirement for a vaccine to be effective. A <\/span>vaccine<\/span><\/a>, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a \u201cproduct that stimulates a person\u2019s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The <\/span>idea<\/span><\/a> is to train the immune system to recognize a particular pathogen so that if someone does encounter the germ, they will either not become infected or will not get sick — or if they do have symptoms, they will be less severe. This usually <\/span>involves<\/span><\/a> introducing a piece of or a small amount of weakened or killed virus or bacteria into the body.<\/span><\/p>\n Some vaccines produce what\u2019s called sterilizing immunity, which is when antibodies glom onto a pathogen and remove it before it has a chance to enter cells and set up an infection. This happens, <\/span>for example<\/span><\/a>, with the measles, hepatitis A and human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccines.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf you’re given the measles vaccine — two doses — you have a 97% chance of being protected against measles for the rest of your life. And not just disease — also asymptomatic infection,\u201d Dr. <\/span>Paul A. Offit,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us, referring to when someone is infected but doesn\u2019t have symptoms. \u201cYou’re done with that virus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Many other vaccines, Offit said, including seasonal influenza, rotavirus, whooping cough and pneumococcal vaccines, keep people from becoming seriously ill but aren\u2019t able to prevent infection. \u201cThat\u2019s okay,\u201d he said, because \u201cthe main goal you’re trying to do in these cases is prevent children or adults from being hospitalized or killed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Importantly, <\/span>many vaccines<\/span><\/a> can still reduce the spread of a disease even if they don\u2019t stop infection, contrary to Baker\u2019s other claim that vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, \u201cdon\u2019t prevent transmission.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That can happen, Offit said, because a vaccinated person often sheds less virus, making them less contagious.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s <\/span>not known yet<\/span><\/a> whether the authorized COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but <\/span>it\u2019s<\/span><\/a> likely<\/span><\/a> the same dynamic will be at play and the vaccines will limit transmission to some degree.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Until more is known, it\u2019s important that people who receive a COVID-19 vaccine don\u2019t assume they can\u2019t pass the virus on to others — and <\/span>continue<\/span><\/a> to wear masks and physically distance — but it\u2019s also premature for Baker to declare the vaccines to be useless in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2.<\/span><\/p>\n As part of Baker\u2019s specious argument that vaccines \u201cdon\u2019t work,\u201d he brings up the example of polio and falsely says the disease subsided because of sanitation, not vaccination.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cObviously, polio went away because of sanitation because it’s a fecal-oral disease,\u201d Baker says. \u201cAnd if you start washing your hands and not drinking water in the streets, you\u2019re probably not going to get polio.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n While better sanitation helps reduce the spread of <\/span>poliovirus<\/span><\/a>, which is passed along primarily through feces but can also be spread through infectious droplets from sneezes or coughs, it is vaccination that is <\/span>credited<\/span><\/a> with eliminating the virus in the U.S.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After all, sanitation was quite good in 1950s America, but polio was still a major threat to families every summer.<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps counterintuitively, improved sanitation is thought to be why there was a surge in polio cases in the U.S. in the beginning of the early 20th century.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cBefore 1910, polio was silently circulating,\u201d explained <\/span>Micaela Martinez<\/span><\/a>, an infectious disease ecologist at Columbia University who has <\/span>studied<\/span><\/a> the history of the disease.<\/span><\/p>\n The virus was rampant, she said, but because virtually everyone would become infected as an infant when there is a low risk of getting severe disease and developing paralysis, it wasn\u2019t particularly noticed.<\/span><\/p>\n As sanitation improved, however, children wouldn\u2019t encounter the virus until they were older, when the risk of paralysis was greater. \u201cSo sanitation actually led to this first emergence of polio as being a widespread paralytic disease,\u201d Martinez told us.<\/span><\/p>\n Polio epidemics became even worse after World War II with the baby boom, as more children were around to further spread the disease, she added. It wasn\u2019t until vaccines arrived that cases began to fall — from more than 15,000 paralysis cases every year, <\/span>according<\/span><\/a> to the CDC, to fewer than 100 annually in the 1960s and fewer than 10 each year in the following decade.<\/span><\/p>\n The disease was eliminated in the U.S. in 1979, meaning there is no ongoing transmission of polio in the country, and no cases have originated in the U.S. since that time. Polio vaccination is still important, however, as the disease could be <\/span>introduced<\/span><\/a> at any time by travelers.<\/span><\/p>\n Baker proceeds to incorrectly say that there is “no such thing as a safe trial with vaccines,” because no vaccines are tested against what he considers true placebos. This is categorically false.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat they do is they actually compare the vaccine that they’re testing to a different vaccine, or they will compare the vaccine they’re testing to a syringe that is full of aluminum and everything in the vaccine, except for the antigen,\u201d he says, referring to the part of the vaccine that will trigger the specific immune response.<\/span><\/p>\n In fact, <\/span>many vaccines<\/span><\/a> have been tested against a saline, or saltwater, placebo in randomized controlled trials, <\/span>including<\/span><\/a> influenza and certain mumps, polio and measles vaccines. But there are also good reasons to use different placebo controls in trials — and it does not mean a vaccine has not been fully vetted for safety.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, as outlined by a World Health Organization <\/span>expert panel<\/span><\/a>, if a safe and effective vaccine against a specific disease already exists, then the real question becomes whether the new vaccine performs similarly or better, and in many cases it would be unethical to deprive a group of people of a protective vaccine.<\/span><\/p>\n It is also argued, Offit said, that it\u2019s not fair to enroll participants in a vaccine trial and not give them something of benefit, which sometimes means giving a different vaccine as a control.<\/span><\/p>\n Another<\/span> potential reason for deviating from a saline placebo is preserving the blinding<\/a> of a trial, making sure volunteers in trials don\u2019t know whether they have been randomly assigned to the control group, since many vaccines do have some minor, temporary side effects, such as arm soreness, that can clue participants into which shot they received.<\/span><\/p>\n Baker gets his facts wrong once again when says the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was tested against a meningitis vaccine. Both the <\/span>Moderna<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Pfizer\/BioNTech<\/span><\/a> vaccines, which are the only two COVID-19 vaccines currently authorized for use in the U.S., were tested against a saline placebo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some arms of the Oxford\/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial <\/span>did include<\/span><\/a> a meningococcal vaccine as a control to reduce the chance that control volunteers would know they didn\u2019t get the COVID-19 vaccine. That\u2019s true of the U.K. portion of the trial and part of the Brazilian trial, which used the <\/span>meningococcal group A, C, W and Y conjugate vaccine<\/span><\/a> as a control for the first dose, but not the second.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Saline, however, was used for the South African arm of the trial and the 30,000-person trial in the <\/span>U.S.<\/span><\/a>, which is still ongoing.<\/span><\/p>\n Baker also argues people should not get vaccinated because vaccines are not safe and companies are not liable.<\/p>\n “You cannot sue them, but yet they have a special court. And that special court to date has paid out over $4 billion in damages,” he says.<\/p>\n Baker is referring to the National Vaccines Injury Compensation Program, created by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.<\/p>\n Vaccines are extensively tested<\/a> to ensure they’re effective and safe. But just like any other medication, they’re not risk-free and can cause adverse events or side effects. <\/a>Most vaccines can cause pain, redness or tenderness<\/a> where they were injected, and some can cause more severe events.<\/p>\n Beginning in the mid-1970s<\/a>, several lawsuits were filed against vaccine-makers and health care providers, which led manufacturers to stop their production. They were forced to pay for damages despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting injury claims. The threats of a vaccine shortage moved Congress to pass the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which creates a compensation fund. <\/a>According to the\u00a0<\/span>latest data<\/span><\/a>, the government has paid out nearly $4.2 billion in compensation since 1988.<\/span><\/p>\n But as we have previously explained<\/a>, the fact that there have been payouts doesn’t mean that vaccines caused an injury. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, approximately 70% of all compensation awarded by the fund is a result of a negotiated settlement between the parties, previous to any review of the evidence, to save time and money.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, the number of complaints and compensations<\/a> is very low. Over 3.7 billion doses of covered vaccines were distributed in the U.S. from 2006 to 2018, according to the CDC. In that same period of time, only 7,589 petitions were adjudicated and of those 5,317 were compensated.<\/p>\n The World Health Organization estimates that<\/span>\u00a0immunizations prevent<\/span> 2 to 3 million deaths every year<\/span><\/a> globally.\u00a0<\/span>In the U.S., the CDC estimates flu vaccines averted 105,000 hospitalizations and 6,300 deaths in the 2019-2020 season,<\/span> according to preliminary data<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act also requires health care providers to report side effects occurring after immunization to the Vaccines Adverse Event Reporting System<\/a>, a program created in 1990 and co-administrated by the CDC and the FDA.<\/p>\n The act also allows individuals to pursue legal action<\/a> against a vaccine manufacturer under certain conditions, including negligence on the part of the vaccine-maker.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the video, Baker falsely claims that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children and cites a study<\/a> published in November 2020 in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health<\/em>, an open-access journal. The journal says it is peer-reviewed but its lack of rigor has been cause for concern.<\/a> The quality of its publisher, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, has also been questioned<\/a> — in 2018, 10 senior editors resigned<\/a>, saying they were being pressured to receive mediocre studies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The study is\u00a0co-authored by James Lyons-Weiler<\/a> and Paul Thomas<\/a>, and funded<\/a> by The Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, a nonprofit directed by Lyons-Weiler, a scientist who has been spreading misleading information on COVID-19 <\/a>and vaccines<\/a> for years.<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Thomas, a pediatrician in Portland, Oregon, had his license revoked in December<\/a> for failing to adequately vaccinate patients. According to the Oregon Medical Board, <\/a>his conduct \u201chas breached the standard of care and has placed the health and safety of many of his patients at serious risk of harm.\u201d One of his unvaccinated patients<\/span> developed a severe case of tetanus that required a two-month stay in an intensive care unit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the video, Baker baselessly accuses the CDC of profiting off vaccines and falsely states that Dr. Thomas\u2019 license was removed because of the \u201ctruth\u201d revealed in his study. \u201cThe CDC is not in the business to make you safe or help you and your kids, the CDC is in the business of marketing vaccines and profiting off of you and your family getting vaccinated, period,\u201d he argues.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.factcheck.org\/UploadedFiles\/SciCHECKsquare_4-e1430162915812.png\")
<\/a>A <\/span>14-minute long video<\/span><\/a> posted on January 13 by Steven Baker, a <\/span>licensed chiropractor<\/span><\/a> from Idaho, on Facebook and Instagram<\/a> gives people five reasons why they \u201cshould definitely never vaccinate.\u201d The video has been liked since by 1,600 viewers on Facebook and viewed by over 50,000 on Instagram.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMisleading Claim About Vaccine Ingredients<\/h2>\n
Inaccurate Claims About Vaccine Efficacy<\/span><\/h2>\n
False Polio Claim<\/span><\/h2>\n
Vaccine Trial Misinformation<\/h2>\n
Vaccine Liability<\/h2>\n
Unvaccinated Children Not Healthier<\/h2>\n