In a video, Tucker Carlson claims that COVID mRNA vaccines are deadly and harm people, that they use tissue from aborted babies, and that the companies behind them should lose their legal shield and be jailed.

Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites that need host cells to grow. Since human cells are sometimes best for growing human viruses, some vaccines use cell lines derived from two elective pregnancy terminations back in the 60s. Because these cell lines are practically immortal, manufacturers can continue using this cell line; there are no new sources of human fetal cells.

While the viral vector COVID vaccine does use fetal cells in vaccine production, the mRNA vaccines do not. Because we are only synthesizing the mRNA, and not growing the virus, plasmids are used instead of human or other animal cells. Human cell lines were used in the early stages of mRNA technology development only to research that they would theoretically work. However, these cells are not used in mRNA vaccine production.

The Vatican advised adherents in 2005  about the acceptability of receiving some live, attenuated vaccines. To further clarify that statement, the Vatican issued another statement in 2017, which reads: “The moral obligation to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others is no less urgent.”

Pope Francis, who was vaccinated in January 2021, is quoted as saying, “I believe that morally everyone must take the vaccine.” Given the moral obligation to protect one’s community and the unlikelihood that people will get to choose vaccines the way they choose toppings at Subway, people of all faiths should take the vaccine they are offered.

But do the vaccines harm people?

Careful reviews by CDC experts have found nine deaths in the United States linked to a rare blood-clotting condition after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. No other deaths have been confirmed as caused by any COVID shot, out of hundreds of millions of doses given. That works out to far less than one death per million doses, many times lower than the risk of dying from COVID itself.

Some teens and young adults can get mild myocarditis after an mRNA dose, but most cases clear with rest, and catching COVID is still more likely to hurt the heart than the vaccine. In most people, being vaccinated on shots actually reduced the risk of strokes, heart attacks, and clots.

The guidance cites a paper as evidence that vaccines cause autoimmune disease, but the authors say “we conclude that mRNA-based vaccinations are not associated with an increased risk of most AI-CTDs”

The idea that COVID vaccines cause “turbo cancer” has no scientific backing. Even the most potent carcinogens take years to cause cancer. It would be some time before we saw spikes in cancer. Epidemiological data show no increase in cancer linked to the vaccines. Reports of rising early-onset cancers started in the 1990s, long before the COVID vaccines existed.

With all this in mind, no. COVID vaccines do not appear to be evil.

An old myth that is recirculating claims that vaccines didn’t cut death rates, that they hurt your immune system, making unvaccinated kids healthier, and that the CDC is hiding studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

The graphs that these claims rely on are found here. They show that deaths had already drastically fallen before vaccines. Cases, on the other hand, didn’t fall until vaccines were introduced. Smallpox eradication is a good example of zero cases meaning zero deaths, too. Since the worldwide effort to get rid of smallpox, there hasn’t been a single case anywhere, which shows that vaccines stopped it.

Anti-vaxxers claim that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children in myriad ways. They often cite some studies to try to back up those claims. However, all these studies suffer from a lot of the same fallacies. Many are simple surveys.

Surveys are often victims of self-selection bias, or volunteer bias, in which participants can decide whether or not to participate in the study, along with recall bias and reporting bias.
Many large studies in the real world have looked into whether children who get vaccines do worse than children who do not. The answer is no. One Danish study followed more than 650,000 children for ten years and found that MMR vaccination did not cause autism, even in children who already had a sibling with autism.

Another meta-analysis combined data on 1.2 million children from five countries and came to the same conclusion for autism and every other long‑term health problem it examined. Studies from Germany, the Philippines, and several U.S. health systems show the same thing: the main difference is that vaccinated kids are protected from the diseases the vaccines are made to prevent.

In a series of videos and an article featuring HHS researcher David Geier and ACIP members Martin Kulldorf, Retsef Levi, and Robert Malone, the men claim even tiny amounts of mercury in vaccines add up to unsafe levels, so yearly flu shots and today’s big vaccine schedule may do more harm than good and should be rolled back.

We know a lot about thimerosal. Thimerosal, a mercury compound used in some flu vaccines today, has caused concern due to its name being confused with a harmful type of mercury. Thimerosal contains ethylmercury, which is safe and quickly leaves the body. It’s different from harmful methylmercury found in some fish. Thimerosal has been used safely in vaccines, drugs, and contact solutions since the 1930s. Nowadays, most vaccines use single-use vials, and thimerosal-free vaccines are available for those still concerned.

Studies on babies, including those preterm and low-weight babies, show that ethylmercury leaves the body quickly. About half of it is gone in three to seven days, and the rest is flushed out in the baby’s stool. Within a month after getting a vaccine, mercury levels in the blood return to normal, so it does not accumulate over time.

Studies also show that thimerosal does not increase the risk of autism. In addition, thimerosal has not even been used in childhood vaccines since 2001. Autism diagnoses continued to rise following the 2001 removal of thimerosal from all childhood vaccines. The continued rise of autism diagnoses is, in fact, mostly due to growing awareness and changing diagnostic criteria.

As to the childhood vaccine schedule, we are grateful that we can prevent more diseases now than before.

If you take a fair look, it’s obvious that the vaccination schedule has grown very, very slowly. One vaccine was dropped from the schedule in the 1970s, two were added in the 1980s, two were added in the 1990s, one was added in the 2000s, and two were added in the 2010s. And, of course, the 2020s brought us COVID and RSV vaccines. Over the decades, age recommendations have changed, and some vaccines have been replaced with newer counterparts.

Overall, the vaccine schedule has expanded by 1-2 vaccines per decade since the 1980s. This slow, methodical, scientific advance of immunization recommendations stands in stark contrast to concerns that vaccines are constantly being capriciously added to the schedule.

The vaccination schedule saves lives. Because of the routine vaccines given to kids born between 1994 and 2023, researchers estimate that about 508 million cases of disease were prevented, 32 million hospital stays were avoided, and roughly 1.1 million children’s lives were saved. All this prevention also saved a lot of money: around $540 billion in medical bills and, when you add in other costs like parents missing work, about $2.7 trillion for society overall.