One of my long-term patients, a gentleman in his 80s, was recently admitted with Covid-19. He has a lot of illnesses, including cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He checks all the boxes for the worst of the worst outcomes for Covid-19: elderly, immunocompromised (cancer), and lung disease (COPD). Not only is he doing well, but his chest X-ray shows very few signs of Covid-19 pneumonia. The secret? Vaccination. This patient has received two primary Covid-19 shots and three boosters, and these are still very clearly protecting him.

Moreover, this is not the first time he contracted Covid-19. A few years ago, at the height of the Omicron variant, this same patient was admitted and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. He had gotten his two primary shots at that time and one booster. The reason I remember his case so vividly is that when we did a CT scan of his lungs, there was no trace of pneumonia. The pulmonologist and I could not believe our eyes. We had expected at least some viral pneumonia given his medical history, but we found none. I truly believe that without vaccination, this patient would have very quickly died.

A few days ago, one of my friends on social media tagged me in a video where a semi-famous celebrity with no medical background was attacking Covid-19 vaccines. He was saying that Covid-19 shots were completely bogus, and as proof, he cited a news report of a person who contracted Covid-19 a few days after getting vaccinated and subsequently died. He then proceeded to cite other instances from news reports where someone got the Covid-19 shot and then later died of Covid-19. He moved on to launching multiple strawman attacks on made-up facts about vaccines and continued his profanity-laced tirade for more than 30 minutes. It was hard to watch.

His first assertions are very easy to disprove. Covid-19 vaccines don’t fully protect a person until two weeks after the second shot. Therefore, the person who had only gotten his first shot was not protected because the vaccine had not even begun to generate antibodies. Moreover, since Covid-19 usually takes four to seven days to become symptomatic from the time of infection, it was likely that said person was already incubating the virus and there was not enough time for the vaccines to protect him. The other cases were hard to assess based on secondhand information, but the guy began to talk about them like he saw firsthand what had happened.

One clear misrepresentation in the video is that he said doctors claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines were 100 percent effective in preventing Covid-19. No reputable doctor or scientist would ever say that. In fact, the Pfizer vaccine, which was the best at preventing infection, was about 92 percent effective against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, if he cared to read the peer-reviewed publication. The old Covid-19 vaccine’s ability to block infection went down as variants emerged, since there was a mismatch between the spike protein and the generated antibody. Updated vaccines helped restore some of this infection protection, but it never approached 100 percent. The Covid-19 vaccines were never meant to generate broad sterilizing immunity. If they did with some recipients, then that was a bonus. The true value of the Covid-19 vaccines is in their high effectiveness in preventing hospitalization, severe disease, and death, just like with my patient. This was scientifically proven through numerous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and through millions of cases of real-world evidence. RCTs compare vaccines with a placebo (a harmless, inert substance injected instead of the vaccine) to remove any kind of bias, and study after study showed high efficacy in preventing severe infection and decreasing mortality.

He then attacked the statement that natural herd immunity is inferior to vaccine immunity. He did this not by presenting immunologic data to the contrary but by ridiculing the language used to present the non-equivalence. It is true that natural immunity can be quite robust, but the degree of exposure and timing of the exposure can be variable, which results in an inconsistent and unpredictable immune response. With vaccination, the amount of antigen used is fixed and well-studied. But the biggest thing that he did not mention was the number of people who would die if natural herd immunity were the only method to acquire resistance to the virus. This misguided proposition would have killed off 10 percent of all elderly people, not to mention the complications and long Covid-19 that would result among the survivors. About 15 to 20 million lives were saved by using vaccination to acquire immunity to Covid-19, as opposed to achieving herd immunity by natural infection.

Another fact that he misrepresented was that scientists supposedly said that vaccines have no significant side effects. This is not at all accurate since any medicine or vaccine will have side effects. For vaccines, almost everyone will end up with a sore arm and maybe a low-grade fever, and this happens because the vaccine is eliciting the desired immune response. The correct statement that is usually reported on any warning label is that there is no significant difference in severe adverse events compared to placebo. This means that there was not a higher number of deaths, hospitalizations, or any kind of severe side effects among those who received the vaccine compared to placebo.

In addition, scientists have been very quick to monitor any unusual side effects that cropped up during the mass administration of the vaccine. When a few people who got the Astra Covid-19 vaccine developed blood clots, the administration of the vaccine was suspended in the groups most likely at risk for blood clots. Natural Covid-19 infection itself is much more likely to cause blood clots than the Astra vaccine, and so the vaccine still reduces the overall risk of clotting among those who are vaccinated. Another side effect that was quickly addressed was the risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation) among young men with the mRNA vaccines. It was quickly determined that only this group was at higher risk, although the overall absolute risk was very low (three out of 100,000 cases) and most cases recovered quickly. In contrast, the risk of myocarditis in natural Covid-19 infection is six times higher and is much more severe.

It is unfortunate that there are many people who continue to tell lies about life-saving interventions about vaccines. Whether they are truly misguided or are attacking vaccines to increase their audience and clout, people who make videos like these inevitably harm people and cause preventable deaths. Even as governments and social media platforms try to clamp down on these agents of disinformation, it is important for the general public to educate themselves and only listen to reputable sources when it comes to their health.