A claim about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has been making the rounds on X, the microblogging app. According to the user who made the post, Pfizer recently listed some side effects of its vaccine, and some of these side effects, if true, prove very worrisome for those who might have taken the vaccine.
Pfizer is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The company was one of the entities involved in developing an earlier form of COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech) in partnership with German company BioNTech.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine emerged alongside a Moderna vaccine and an Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
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The side effects of using these vaccines have since become a talking point and a source of controversies. Friday’s post was the latest claim of revealed side effects.
The post listed blood thrombosis, positive antisperm antibodies, neonatal death, heart failure, sudden death, facial paralysis and others as Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine side effects.
The same claim also appeared on two other non-Nigerian X accounts.
While two of the accounts claimed that Pfizer listed these side effects, one of them referenced a United States House of Representatives Report.
CLAIM: Pfizer and a US House of Representatives Report recently listed some side effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
VERIFICATION: The first loophole apparent in the circulating side effects list is the mention of neonatal death. The occurrence of neonatal death cannot happen as a result of any vaccine because infants less than six months old are not allowed to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
Neonates are babies in the first 28 days of life.
Secondly, Pfizer’s website and its active social media accounts did not have any recent information about possible side effects of its COVID-19 vaccines.
The last time information concerning the COVID-19 vaccine side effects was published on the Pfizer website was in August. In the August press release, the company did not list any of the terrific illnesses the X posts wrote.
Some of the side effects Pfizer listed include tiredness, arm pain, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain and fever.
One of the posts on X referenced an HOR document. Apart from the side effects being absent in the report, the document only addressed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) which is a passive surveillance system managed by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
On page 349, the report stated that VAERS was established in 1990 but only gained more attention after 2020, especially as social media users used it actively to report cases of side effects, most of which were refuted with fact-checks.
CONCLUSION: Checks through the Pfizer website, the company’s social media pages and the US HOR 2024 report did not show any recent lists of side effects. The side effects that Pfizer declared in 2024 were milder compared to the ones claimed on X.
VERDICT: The claim that Pfizer listed recent side effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is false.
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