MISLEADING CLAIMS
Are African-American children being over-dosed with current vaccine concentrations?
Background
On or about March 11, 2021, a documentary entitled, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, was released (Figure 1); a project of CHD Films, LLC, and co-produced by RFK, Jr. Statements from the one-hour documentary and its accompanying fact sheet were contested by FactCheck.org (210311; perma), an ‘independent third-party fact checker’ working with Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram, among other platforms).
The documentary’s accompanying fact sheet claims that in a 2014 analysis that found some Somali Americans developed twice the antibody response to rubella after getting the vaccine compared with whites, it “means that African-American children are being ‘overdosed’ with today’s current vaccine concentration” (CHD Films; Fact sheet).
FactCheck.org’s fact-check
“In another distortion of scientific research,” FactCheck.org (Figure 2) asserts, “the video twists the meaning of a preliminary 2014 study that found some Somali Americans developed twice the antibody response to rubella after getting the vaccine compared with Caucasians.”
“The Children’s Health Defense material, however, claims that the study, which was done by Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic, ‘means that African-American children are being ‘overdosed’ with today’s current vaccine concentration.’”
But that’s not at all what the study found, Poland told us in a phone interview.
He explained that this claim is based on a hypothesis generating study, which means that researchers look at a small sample, make observations and speculate about what those observations could mean. Then they do a larger study.
In this case, Poland said, “We haven’t done the larger study.”
— FactCheck.org, 2021
Poland and his colleagues looked at more than 1,000 healthy children and young adults in Rochester, Minnesota, and more than 1,000 participants from the U.S. Naval Health Research Center in San Diego as the replication cohort. They also analyzed a subset of subjects of African descent. On average, the Somali group from the Rochester cohort had more than twice the antibodies to rubella than the Caucasian group. Also, African Americans had significantly more antibodies in both Rochester and San Diego than their white counterparts.
Since they haven’t done the larger study, researchers don’t know why there is a difference or what it might mean. It could mean that white children are being underdosed, Poland said, explaining that without further study it’s unclear.
What is clear is that the claim from the Children’s Health Defense is wrong. “We do not have a study that shows African Americans need half the dose. We do not have a study that shows African American children are being overdosed,” Poland said.
He described the claim as being “like a good conspiracy theory — it contains a grain of truth with a lot of speculations around it.”
The grain of truth is that researchers found higher levels of antibodies in Somali immigrants, but the rest is conjecture. The higher levels may not have anything to do with the vaccine, Poland said. For example, the study subjects could have been exposed to rubella in refugee camps before arriving in the U.S., so the antibodies from the vaccine would have added to what was already in their systems.
— FactCheck.org, 2021
Our assessment
Misleading: The documentary’s accompanying fact sheet asserts that the 2014 Mayo Clinic study “showed that African-American children need only half the dose in order for the rubella vaccine to be effective” and that “This means that African-American children are being ‘overdosed’ with today’s current vaccine concentration,” is misleading because “showed” and “means” inappropriately imply causation.
Although the 2014 Mayo Clinic study’s findings suggest African American children may need half the current vaccine concentration, future — and more robust — studies are required to confirm this.
The findings are suggestive but not conclusive. The claim would be supported if the following edits (in brackets) are made in the fact sheet:
…African Americans have much higher antibody responses when given the vaccine for rubella virus as compared to any other race in the population. A study by Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic [suggests] that African-American children need only half the dose in order for the rubella vaccine to be effective. This [suggests] that African-American children are being “overdosed” with today’s current vaccine concentration.
The study’s author further supports this interpretation. “The interesting thought occurs to me maybe we only have to give African Americans half the size dose that we give to Caucasians,” Poland says in an interview with the Mayo Clinic (140226). “We may be able to reduce the amount of side effects. If you only need half as much vaccine to reach the same level of protection, we’re adding cost and potentially risk by giving you double what you actually need.”
FactCheck.org’s fact-check is misleading
FactCheck.org’s assertion that “the video twists the meaning” of the 2014 Mayo Clinic study relies on a claim made in an accompanying fact sheet and not the video itself and is therefore misleading.
Context: The title of FactCheck.org’s fact-check is “RFK Jr. Video Pushes Known Vaccine Misrepresentations,” and it asserts that “Several vaccine falsehoods and misrepresentations have been strung together in a video aimed at discouraging Black people from getting vaccinated against COVID-19.”
One of the misrepresentations identified by FactCheck.org: “In another distortion of scientific research, the video twists the meaning of a preliminary 2014 study that found some Somali Americans developed twice the antibody response to rubella after getting the vaccine compared with Caucasians.”
The Children’s Health Defense material, however, claims that the study, which was done by Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic, “means that African-American children are being ‘overdosed’ with today’s current vaccine concentration.”
But that’s not at all what the study found, Poland told us in a phone interview.
He explained that this claim is based on a hypothesis generating study, which means that researchers look at a small sample, make observations and speculate about what those observations could mean. Then they do a larger study.
In this case, Poland said, “We haven’t done the larger study.”
— FactCheck.org, 2021
“What is clear,” FactCheck.org asserts, “is that the claim from the Children’s Health Defense is wrong.”
“We do not have a study that shows African Americans need half the dose. We do not have a study that shows African American children are being overdosed,” Poland said.
He described the claim as being “like a good conspiracy theory — it contains a grain of truth with a lot of speculations around it.”
— FactCheck.org, 2021
The fact-check is misleading on two accounts:
- As discussed in the Claim Assessment section, while the claim in the accompanying fact sheet is misleading, FactCheck.org never explicitly addresses the video. Yet, they assert, “In another distortion of scientific research, the video twists the meaning of a preliminary 2014 study…”
- Poland describes the claim as being “like a good conspiracy theory,” yet Poland himself suggests the same thing.
“The interesting thought occurs to me maybe we only have to give African Americans half the size dose that we give to Caucasians,” Poland says in an interview with the Mayo Clinic (140226). “We may be able to reduce the amount of side effects. If you only need half as much vaccine to reach the same level of protection, we’re adding cost and potentially risk by giving you double what you actually need.”
Do we only have to give African Americans half the dose that we provide to Caucasians? Are we adding risk by giving double what they need? These are essential questions that Poland seeks to answer with his research. If confirmed, it demonstrates that “African-American children need only half the dose in order for the rubella vaccine to be effective. This means that African-American children are being ‘overdosed’ with today’s current vaccine concentration,” as the fact sheet claims.
It’s unclear what this has to do with a conspiracy theory.
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