The end of the pandemic may be nigh as more than half of adults across 25 states are fully vaccinated, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But\u00a0the end of one health crisis\u00a0supposedly opens the door to another: autoimmune disease.<\/p>\n
The claim first appeared early in the pandemic and persisted thanks to Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician and anti-vaccine advocate based in Cleveland.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Some people are going to die from the vaccine directly,” Tenpenny said\u00a0in a February interview. “But a large number of people are going to start getting horribly sick and get all kinds of autoimmune diseases, 42 days to maybe a year out.”<\/p>\n
A month later in a different interview on the evangelical Daystar Television Network,\u00a0Tenpenny cites a January study as evidence supporting her linkage of the two. And\u00a0Facebook posts\u00a0echoing Tenpenny\u00a0have shared\u00a0excerpts\u00a0of this purported paper.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tenpenny did not return USA TODAY’s request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fact check: <\/strong>Nobel Prize winner did not say COVID-19 vaccine recipients have ‘no chance of survival’<\/span><\/p>\n There’s a problem with her citation, though. The study didn’t say COVID-19 vaccines cause autoimmunity. It didn’t even address vaccines.<\/p>\n Autoimmunity, or immunity against the self, is a\u00a0condition where the immune system gets too defensive, mistaking healthy tissue as the enemy and attacking it with antibodies and other immune molecules or cells.\u00a0<\/p>\n This self-attack can be directed against one organ \u2014\u00a0like the thyroid in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or multiple\u00a0organ systems simultaneously\u00a0\u2014\u00a0like systemic lupus erythematosus. Other common autoimmune diseases include type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It is estimated more than 24 million people in the U.S. have an autoimmune condition, and an additional eight million people carry a type of autoantibody \u2014\u00a0a self-attacking antibody \u2014\u00a0that may predispose them to develop\u00a0an autoimmune disease down the line, according to the National Institutes of Health.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fact check: <\/strong>No, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will not make your body Bluetooth connectable<\/span><\/p>\n Aside from the presence of autoantibodies, other contributing factors include genetics, environmental exposures (like certain drugs and viral infections), lifestyle choices (like smoking, which has been associated with inflammatory bowel diseases) and gender (women are more affected than men because of\u00a0estrogen’s influence on the immune system).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The claim that vaccines\u00a0can provoke\u00a0autoimmune diseases\u00a0predates the current pandemic\u00a0and is a tactic long used by opponents\u00a0to discredit vaccines.<\/p>\n Despite numerous studies looking for associations between the two, “no (vaccines)\u00a0have consistently been shown to cause autoimmune disease,”\u00a0the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia\u00a0said on its website.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fact check: <\/strong>Medical microchip developed by Columbia University has nothing to do with vaccines<\/span><\/p>\n Other studies investigating childhood vaccines\u00a0\u2014\u00a0like for the human papillomavirus, or HPV\u00a0\u2014\u00a0as risk factors for developing type 1 diabetes in children found no association. Other\u00a0studies found no cause-and-effect relationship between vaccines and celiac disease, an autoimmune condition triggered when eating gluten, or vaccines and\u00a0autoimmune neurological disorders.<\/p>\n In the study referenced by Tenpenny, researchers were investigating whether the virus that causes COVID-19 \u2014\u00a0not the vaccine \u2014 could cause autoimmunity, said Aristo Vojdani, one of the study’s co-authors.<\/p>\n The study predates\u00a0the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine.\u00a0<\/p>\n “There are at least ten different articles that were published in scientific journals with similar findings that the SARS-CoV-2 may cause autoimmunity,” Vojdani told USA TODAY via email. “When we did the study, (the COVID-19) vaccine did not exist.”<\/p>\n His group took commercially-manufactured\u00a0human and rabbit antibodies designed to fight COVID-19’s spike and other viral proteins and mixed them with proteins normally associated with human tissues.<\/p>\n “These antibodies had moderate to strong reactions with 20 or more of these tissue antigens. This means that antibodies made against SARS-CoV-2, NOT THE VACCINE, if they remain in the body, may initiate possible autoimmune reactivity,” he said in an email.\u00a0<\/p>\n Vojdani emphasized the results of his study should not be applied to the COVID-19 vaccine or its components since neither was\u00a0available to his lab when the study was conducted in August 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fact check: <\/strong>Disappearing needle in COVID-19 vaccination video is standard equipment<\/span><\/p>\n “Am I worried about a future increase in autoimmune disease? Yes, as a result of infection with COVID-19, and NOT due to a vaccine that can prevent the disease with 70-95% efficacy,” Vojdani said.<\/p>\n Based on our research,\u00a0we rate FALSE the\u00a0claim that\u00a0the COVID-19 vaccines will cause autoimmune disease. The study referenced as evidence against the COVID-19 vaccines was actually investigating whether the virus, not the vaccine, can cause autoimmune disease. The claim of autoimmunity predates the COVID-19 vaccine and is a tactic long used by anti-vaccination advocates to discredit vaccine\u00a0safety. To date, there has been\u00a0no conclusive data linking vaccines with autoimmune disease.<\/p>\nWhat is autoimmunity?<\/h2>\n
No proven link between vaccines and autoimmune diseases<\/h2>\n
Study not even related to vaccines<\/h2>\n
Our rating: False\u00a0<\/h2>\n
Our fact-check sources:<\/h2>\n
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