The Food and Drug Administration published an article in the journal Vaccine on Dec. 1 that described an early warning system for vaccine safety and noted that the system identified some potential safety signals for the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech that should be investigated further.
Among them were pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots in the lung.
A couple of weeks after the article was published, the Epoch Times — a conservative outlet with a history of spreading dubious claims about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines — posted a misleading headline referencing that now-entrenched narrative, saying: “Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine Linked to Blood Clotting: FDA.”
Then other outlets went even further. Conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, for example, posted a video that cited the Epoch Times story and claimed that “the FDA has finally admitted that Pfizer causes blood clots” and that this is “part of a mass genocide operation.”
One Facebook user shared the video with a message that said, “It’s why it’s called the ‘clot shot.’”
But all of these claims misrepresent the paper.
“The FDA has not found any new causal relationships between the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and potential adverse events of special interest identified in 2021,” FDA spokeswoman Abby Capobianco said in an email to FactCheck.org.
