How a Yale study got twisted into an anti-vaccine talking point

Last week, a blogger wrote about a Yale School of Medicine study that he alleged proved that millions of long COVID sufferers might, in fact been injured by the vaccine. The story blew up on social media among anti-vaxxers and was posted to X by Elon Musk.

The problem is that they were wrong. Shortly after Musk’s post went up, Akiko Iwasaki, the immunologist who headed the study, jumped into Musk’s comments to say, “No. This is not what our study shows.”

The study’s authors posted the paper before it was peer-reviewed, which is not uncommon in biomedical science. Outside immunologists who have examined the study say it doesn’t show any evidence of vaccine harm. However, the controversy shows how easily well-intentioned research can become politicized and misinterpreted, with serious unintended consequences, especially when vaccines are involved.

For the study, researchers recruited 42 people complaining of various health problems that started within a few days of receiving either their first, second, third or fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. They complained primarily of fatigue, exercise intolerance, numbness and tingling, tinnitus and brain fog — common symptoms that overlap with complaints of those with long COVID.

Researchers took blood samples from the subjects in late 2022 and compared them to those of 22 healthy control subjects. They looked at hundreds of markers, including COVID’s spike protein produced from vaccination. They detected minuscule amounts of the protein in people from both groups but more in those with symptoms.

They concluded that spike proteins left from the vaccine could sometimes circulate in the blood more than a year after vaccination and might cause what they call post-vaccine syndrome, or PVS.

Other experts don’t buy it.

Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and critical care doctor at Harvard Medical School, said the anti-vaccine community is ecstatic about this study because they think it validates their favorite pseudoscientific theory: “that vaccines are producing these spike proteins that are getting all around our body and are causing all these vaccine injuries.”

It’s a scary but implausible scenario, said John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Spike is a sort of word that makes you think, oh, it stabs things. It’s nasty,” he said.

Spike proteins can attach to the part of the cell called the ACE2 receptor. But when you get a vaccine, your body quickly produces hundreds of antibodies for every spike protein and permanently attaches to and disables them. Moore said that the spike proteins detected in the study would have been attached to antibodies and that they most likely couldn’t do anything.

Moore said the paper lacked detail on how the presence of the spike proteins was measured. The researchers said they used a commercial assay but didn’t explain how it worked. Did they test it against samples with known quantities of spike proteins and antibodies? Did they show that pre-pandemic samples didn’t give any false positives?

Duane Wesemann, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School, said the spike protein levels detected in the study were tiny and also showed up in some control subjects. He said he respects the team and their data gathering but disagrees with the interpretation that the spike protein is causing the patients’ health complaints. He wrote in an email that it’s unclear whether these would have any physiological significance.

Before the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, experts predicted much confusion about vaccine injury and fatality. With tens of millions of people getting vaccinated within a few weeks, a certain number of them would likely die from unrelated causes, and the timing would lead loved ones to suspect the deaths came from the vaccine.

During the same period, even more people would develop new health problems that they might assume came from the shots. The Yale researchers played into this by using the term PVS as if it were a known, well-defined illness.

The study didn’t show the patients had PVS. The syndrome’s role is an assumption embedded in the research, perhaps based on the researchers’ desire to show they were hearing the patients’ concerns.

“I don't think the evidence presented is substantial enough to validate the sort of enshrinement of this diagnosis of post-vaccination syndrome,” Gaffney said. He said that doctors should listen to patients about their feelings and suffering, but that doesn’t mean automatically buying into patients’ theories about what caused the symptoms.

The same confusion of correlation and causation can happen with long COVID. With a virus infecting millions of people over a couple of years, some fraction will develop chronic health problems during that period that were not caused by the virus.

There is medical consensus that long COVID is real. But debilitating symptoms haven’t disabled a significant fraction of the population, as some claim. Studies differ in how long COVID is defined. Those who define it loosely have found it in 48.5% of those infected with COVID, but the same symptoms also showed up in 47% of non-infected people in the control groups.

Though the outside researchers all doubted that spike proteins were causing vaccine injury, they agreed that it’s important to continue studying vaccine safety. Side effects sometimes don’t appear in clinical trials. If people report health problems, it’s essential to investigate them. However, it’s also crucial to report on the results with care.

The fearmongering over spike proteins could spill over from COVID shots, turning people away from other important vaccines. Childhood vaccination rates are down, and earlier this week, an unvaccinated child died from measles in an outbreak in Texas.

The Yale researchers should continue studying vaccine safety, but they should be aware that how they present their results can have serious unintended consequences.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.