Vaccine skeptics misrepresent Toronto SickKids' campaign
- Published on December 7, 2023 at 17:26
- 5 min read
- By Gwen ROLEY, AFP Canada
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"It's not a coincidence it's happening now," says the text accompanying a November 22, 2023 Instagram reel. "This is 1000000% because of these wackseens that have been administered."
The clip shows a user reacting to a short video from the SickKids Foundation -- which coordinates donations for The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto -- showing the story of a child who has a defibrillator implanted which later restarts his heart during a cardiac episode as a teenager.
The post claims the advertisement is showing children's increased susceptibility to heart conditions after receiving vaccines, implying others should not get vaccinated to avoid such scenarios. Similar posts appeared on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, receiving thousands of interactions.
"It's always sad to see how medicine normalizes the poisoning of society," says the caption of a November 18 post on X which received more than 2,900 likes.
While not every claim explicitly references vaccines, or specifically Covid-19 shots, a November 18 post on the Canadian video-sharing site Rumble tied the claim to coronavirus vaccination and included links to other misleading claims. Other posts included superimposed images of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates -- who is often claimed to be connected to vaccine conspiracies -- holding an injection needle.
However, the ad was never meant to show a connection with vaccines.
SickKids commercial
The SickKids Foundation told AFP in a November 28 email the advertisement tells the story of a child with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a genetic heart condition that is believed to be a leading cause of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in younger persons.
HCM is not linked to Covid-19 vaccines, according to the Canadian Adverse Events Following Immunization Surveillance System (CAEFISS) data (archived here). A study published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation found that patients with HCM were more likely to be hospitalized with serious cases of Covid-19 (archived here).
Tania Kwong, a spokeswoman for the SickKids Foundation, said the ad was meant to depict the benefits of a model of care at the hospital which uses a risk prediction calculator that could determine the probability of an HCM patient's sudden cardiac death. To illustrate this, the commercial describes how the life of a real HCM patient, Nathan, could have been saved by this system.
"Nathan's risk for sudden cardiac death hadn't yet been determined," Kwong said. "Despite all efforts to revive him, Nathan died just short of his 11th birthday in 2008."
The misleading posts about the ad use the terms "heart attack" and "cardiac arrest" interchangeably. But the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSFC) says a heart attack is when blood has stopped flowing to the heart, while cardiac arrest means the heart has stopped altogether (archived here).
Kwong said that the patient represented in the commercial died from sudden cardiac death, which is caused by cardiac arrest, according to Mayo Clinic.
Heart conditions, Covid-19 illness and vaccines
Between 2007 and 2022, deaths from heart disease fluctuated between 13 and 27 cases per year among Canadian children 1 to 14 years old (archived here) and 10 and 18 deaths per year among youth between 15 and 19 years of age (archived here), according to Statistics Canada.
The Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System indicates that heart failure in the general population over the age of 20 decreased slightly from 550 to 529 cases per 100,000 people between 2006 and 2021 (archived here). During this same period, incidences of heart attacks also fell from 235 to 202 cases per 100,000 (archived here).
Some of the noted adverse events following Covid-19 vaccination are myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, and pericarditis, inflammation of the tissue around the heart, with a higher prevalence among those aged 12 to 39 years old, particularly young males, according to CAEFISS.
According to the Mayo Clinic, myocarditis can cause unexpected cardiac events such as heart attacks and sudden cardiac death, while pericarditis can sometimes manifest after a heart attack (archived here and here).
The conditions are usually triggered by a viral infection, and have been observed following Covid-19 infection (archived here).
Of the more than 99 million vaccine doses administered, CAEFISS reported 56 cases of cardiac arrest, 86 cases of cardiac failure, 154 cases of heart attack and 1,207 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis following Covid-19 vaccination.
Physicians have previously told AFP that while post-vaccine cases of myocarditis and pericarditis can impede a young person's physical activity, symptoms mostly resolve within a year.
"Studies have also shown that the severity of disease and length of recovery are greater in myocarditis post-Covid, in contrast to this transient experience of inflammation after vaccination," Carrie Lucas, associate professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, is quoted as saying on the university's website (archived here).
Medical experts have repeatedly told AFP that the benefits of avoiding severe illness and death outweigh the risk of side effects from Covid-19 vaccination.
Read more of AFP's reporting on coronavirus misinformation here.
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