The Claim:
We were surprised that two anecdotes from 2023 continue to bring a large amount of traffic to our website in 2025. The first is about 8-year-old Yonatan Ehrlichman, son of a pediatrician who had a heart attack after receiving four vaccines.
The Facts:
The social media posts connecting this boy’s death to vaccination use a trick called appeal to emotion. It tries to link a very sad death to vaccines, even though there is no evidence that vaccines caused it.
News reports explain what really happened. The 8-year-old boy went into cardiac arrest at home and nearly drowned in a bathtub. He was taken to the hospital but died a few days later. Doctors and news sources did not say vaccines caused his collapse or death.
The only link to vaccines is that the child had been vaccinated at some point in the past. But millions of children are vaccinated every year. Millions upon millions of children under age 12 have received COVID vaccines. Being vaccinated does not mean a vaccine caused a medical emergency.
There is no medical evidence showing that a vaccine caused this child’s cardiac arrest or death. Claiming otherwise adds fear without facts.
Disclaimer: Science is always evolving and our understanding of these topics may have evolved too since this was originally posted. Be sure to check out our most recent posts and browse the latest Just the Facts Topics for the latest.
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