At a glance

• Claim: Member countries of the European Union have reported 1.5 million injuries and 15,472 deaths related to COVID-19 vaccines.
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: The website containing this claim cites EudraVigilance, an EU-maintained database of self-reported adverse effects after COVID-19 vaccination. However, EudraVigilance says its database contains reports of events following COVID-19 vaccination that are not necessarily related to or caused by the vaccines.
• Why we fact-checked this: Facebook’s monitoring tool flagged a website containing this claim for verification. The link gained over 13,000 interactions on Facebook in the seven days before August 30.

Complete details

An article from website technocracy.news published on June 25 claims that member countries of the European Union had reported 1.5 million vaccine-related injuries and 15,472 deaths. 

At the top of the article, an editor’s note said: “The EU counterpart to the U.S. VAERS database reports deaths and injuries that are likely understated because not all cases are reported. Even still, the actually reported numbers are staggering. The Technocrats/Transhumans who are running this global human reset must be stopped.”

The entire article was reposted from globalresearch.ca, which published the original content on June 21. It cited as source EudraVigilance, an EU-maintained database of reported adverse effects after COVID-19 vaccination.

Claim Check, Facebook’s monitoring tool that identifies potentially dubious posts on the platform, flagged the link from technocracy.news. Data from social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle show that the link gained over 13,000 interactions on Facebook in the seven days before August 30.

This is false.

Reports submitted to EudraVigilance are not yet proven. On its official website, EudraVigilance stresses that the information provided on the database only relates to suspected side effects, such as medical events following vaccination of COVID-19 vaccines, but which are not proven to be necessarily related or due to the vaccines.

“These events may have been caused by another illness or be associated with another medicine taken by the patient at the same time,” EudraVigilance says.

It adds that the European Medicines Agency further assesses the reported data by considering many other factors, including the patient’s medical history, the frequency of the suspected adverse reaction in the vaccinated population compared to the general population, and the possibility of a vaccine causing the adverse reaction.

“Only a detailed assessment of all available data allows for robust conclusions to be drawn on the benefits and risks of the COVID-19 vaccines,” EudraVigilance says.

Rappler debunked a similar claim that said the United Kingdom and the United States are underreporting cases of COVID-19 vaccine’s adverse effects, citing their respective monitoring systems for COVID-19 vaccine’s adverse effects. This claim is also false.

BBC News has also flagged the website technocracy.news for sharing baseless information about COVID-19. Meanwhile, a US Department of State report in August 2020 said the website globalresearch.ca was “deeply enmeshed in Russia’s broader disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

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