A new commentary has led to a number of claims that prominent scientists are admitting that no study of the safety of vaccines post-licensure exists and that vaccine injuries are less rare than people think,

The claim that Dr. Stanley Plotkin and his colleagues have admitted that vaccine safety is not properly studied is misleading and lacks context. The article doesn’t say vaccines aren’t studied for safety. Instead, it is a proposal to use surplus funds from the vaccine excise tax, which are not currently being used and as intended by the initial law to improve the detection, investigation, and prevention of vaccine adverse events after a vaccine is approved to enhance the current vaccine safety system.

Dr. Dan Salmon, the article’s primary author, says, “Mr. Siri is not portraying our NEJM article accurately. Available vaccines are highly safe and effective for the vast majority of people. Post-licensure studies exist abundantly to show vaccines are very safe and effective.”

Vaccines undergo extensive testing in preclinical and clinical trials before being approved by the FDA. This includes several phases of clinical trials with tens of thousands of participants to check for safety and effectiveness.

For example, the clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine included over 40,000 participants. But if a rare event happens once in a million cases, a trial of 40,000 might not catch it. That’s why post-approval monitoring systems like the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) are important. These systems help detect and study super rare events as millions of people get vaccinated.

The article acknowledges the need to keep improving vaccine safety monitoring to maintain public trust. It stresses the importance of strong safety monitoring to tackle new public health challenges. Their article aims to strengthen these systems and highlight the need for transparency and ongoing research to build confidence in vaccines.

When looking at the full context and evidence, it’s clear that the claim that vaccines are not properly studied is false. The scientific community always works to improve vaccine safety monitoring and transparency so that people can be confident in their decision to get vaccinated.

A video features a physician claiming that once she discovered her unvaccinated patients were more fertile, she discovered that tetanus vaccines contain agents of sterilization.

This rumor is based on a tiny bit of truth. Scientists did create a vaccine that contained a hormone (hCG) designed to temporarily prevent pregnancy in the early 1990s in India, using a protein similar to the tetanus toxin to carry the hCG. Only about 80% of women in the test made enough antibodies to prevent pregnancies. It didn’t cause infertility and wasn’t even effective enough as birth control to be released to the public.

Then, in Kenya, to combat neonatal tetanus, the WHO and UNICEF worked to improve vaccination rates among women of child-bearing age. Because of the persistence of the old rumors, testing was done on these vaccines. These tests detected a low level of “HCG-like activity,” thus launching the idea that the HCG was purposely placed in the vaccines to sterilize women.

The testing done was not to the standards that regulatory agencies such as the FDA would demand. If the HCG-positive results held, the amount of HCG that was detected would be far too low to affect fertility.

In the end, retesting was completed, and HCG was not detected in any vaccine, and Kenya attained neonatal tetanus elimination status.

A tweet from Dr. Pierre Kory claims that people who receive an HPV vaccine are more likely to get cervical cancer. 

Dr. Kory gets his ideas from clinical trials where small groups of people with active HPV infections had a higher rate of cancer events. He quickly highlights the negative results of Study 13 but doesn’t mention that other similar groups didn’t show negative results. The effectiveness of the HPV vaccine in preventing HPV-related cervical cell changes (CIN) in people who already tested positive for the HPV virus with a PCR test and had antibodies against the virus on the first day of the study.

The study points out that “while the subgroup from study 013 remains a concern of the clinical review team, there is some evidence that this represented an unbalanced subgroup where Gardasil™ recipients at baseline had more risk factors for development” of cancer events.

He also claims that women reported developing symptomatic HPV after receiving the vaccine. The HPV vaccine is not a live vaccine and not even a killed vaccine. It is a subunit vaccine, meaning that it contains pieces of the virus. There is no way for the vaccine, which doesn’t contain any live virus, let alone whole virus, to cause HPV infections. He then cites a study that claims to have found fragments of HPV DNA.

DNA fragments can no more cause an active infection than a car door handle can provide transportation.