No, the vaccine does not make you more likely to get COVID
Despite a popular meme making the rounds yet again...
Have a look at this graphic being shared around on social media again, “the more vaccinated you are, the more likely you are to contract Covid-19”:
How terrifying! We should “ban the vaccinated from places of employment, from bars, movies, and restaurants.” (I was surprised they used the Oxford comma properly.)
Obviously, just about everything here is false. But how can that be, if it’s a real study from the respected Cleveland Clinic? Well, here are the first few red flags that should at least prompt you to seek out fact-checking articles about this:
It’s from the Cleveland Clinic, which has a very dodgy record. They do legit medicine there, but unfortunately they’re also one of the nation’s largest practitioners and promoters of SCAM (Supplemental, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine). Always triple-check anything coming from this woo-mill.
The article is a preprint and was never published, although you wouldn’t know that from reading this meme. Preprint servers used to be where articles awaiting peer review would reside while they’re awaiting review. But then, several years ago, publishers began opening these up to the public, which has been widely decried as a terrible move. It gave horrible articles full of crap which would never pass review the appearance of having been published by a respected journal, and made available to the press and to the public to get shared around like this.
The basic claims in this meme graphic are counter to everything everyone knows about vaccines. We use them because they work, because they protect people from disease. We develop them until they do. We test them exhaustively to make sure they do. The COVID vaccines underwent more testing than any other vaccines to ever hit the market, despite antivaxxers falsely claiming they were untested, which was always just a goofy and bizarre claim. Whenever you see a claim that’s obviously counter to everything we know, that’s a red flag that a triple-check is needed.
So those red flags gave us a rocky start. Our fact check gets an equally rocky start. What happened was this preprint was made available. It stated that among over 51,000 employees of the Cleveland Clinic, the bivalent vaccine reduced their chances of getting COVID by 30%, conferring what the article described as “modest protection”. The exact opposite of what the meme claims.
Next, opinion editor Allysia Finley at the Wall Street Journal, who writes pieces with a heavy far-right bend and who has no medical or public health background whatsoever, wrote this scare piece titled “Are vaccines fueling new COVID variants?” based in part on her own profound misunderstanding of the Cleveland Clinic preprint. She concludes:
But experts refuse to concede that boosters… may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.
They “refuse to concede” that because it’s false, and could really only come from an anti-vax editor looking to pander to the anti-vax base, and from the cesspool of shit that is social media meme sharing.
For a deeper dive into how this particular preprint has been misinterpreted and used to spread false anti-vaccine propaganda such as this social media meme, see this piece from Dr. Christopher Labos of the excellent Body of Evidence podcast for the Montreal Gazette.