The Claim:
A well-shared tweet claims that this 8-year-old child of a pediatrician had a heart attack after receiving four vaccines.
The Facts:
This tweet is employing the fallacy appeal to emotion to try to tie tragic death of an 8-year old to vaccines without any evidence that vaccines had any relation to the death whatsoever.
According to news sources, the child nearly drowned in a bathtub after suffered cardiac arrest, and passed away a few days later. The only connection to vaccines was that the child had been vaccinated at some point in the past, but so have millions of other children around the globe, with 13.4 million children under the age of 12 in the US alone. There was nothing to indicate that vaccines had anything to do with his cardiac event nor his death.
Read more about the appeal to emotion fallacy and other “debate” tactics in our Advocacy on Social Media toolkit.
Disclaimer: Science is always evolving and our understanding of these topics may have evolved too since this was originally posted. Be sure to check out our most recent posts and browse the latest Just the Facts Topics for the latest.
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