Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of May 14 2026

A new rumor claims that hantavirus is listed as an adverse reaction in the package inserts for a COVID vaccine.

Hantavirus is listed in Pfizer’s “List of Adverse Events of Special Interest” for the COVID mRNA vaccine. But it is important to know what an “adverse event” means.

A side effect is something caused by a vaccine. An adverse event is something bad or unexpected that happens after someone gets a vaccine. But that does not always mean the vaccine caused it.

In this case, the COVID vaccine cannot cause hantavirus. Hantavirus is a separate virus. The COVID vaccine does not contain hantavirus or any part of it.

The insert also says that just because adverse events are reported, it does not mean the vaccine caused them. The event could be caused by another illness, a person’s health history, or other medicine they were taking.

We know COVID vaccines cannot cause hantavirus because hantavirus is its own virus, and it is not in any COVID vaccine.

A video from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing “Voices of the Vaccine Injured” from July of last year is going around again. In it, several people claim that doctors exaggerate how dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases are because they make so much money from vaccines.

Pediatrics is one of the lowest-paid specialties in medicine.

In the video, Brian Hooker claims that health insurance companies pay pediatricians $200 to $600 for each child who gets all their vaccines. But the claim is about HMOs, which are health insurance companies.

Health insurance companies try to save money. Most insurance plans do not charge families for childhood vaccines. Insurance companies also help pay for the vaccine supply and for doctors to give the shots.

So why would they do that? Vaccines help prevent serious illness and hospital visits. That saves insurance companies money.

Some doctors may get small rewards for meeting vaccine goals, but this does not mean vaccines are unsafe or unnecessary. It means insurance companies want to prevent costly illnesses.

In a new video, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny claims that before the vaccine, measles deaths were very rare and that the vaccine isn’t needed.

Sherri Tenpenny claims that “in 1962,” a year before the vaccine came out, “the death rate from measles was two in a million.”

This is not correct. It also does not show the full picture.

Before the measles vaccine, there were about 3 to 4 million measles cases in the U.S. each year. Each year, measles caused about:

• 400 to 500 deaths
• 48,000 hospital stays
• 1,000 cases of brain swelling, called encephalitis

So even if we only looked at deaths, the vaccine helped save hundreds of children every year. But deaths are not the only thing that matters. Measles also caused millions of illnesses and many serious health problems, leading to 1 in 5 people being hospitalized.

The MMR vaccine is a live vaccine, but the virus in it is weakened. This means it does not cause measles in people who can safely get the vaccine (without contraindications).  There is also no good reason to think the measles vaccine stops working in most adults. If that were true, we would see many older adults getting measles along with unvaccinated children. That is not what we see.

Most importantly, measles does not protect people from cancer. It also does not make the immune system stronger. In fact, measles can hurt the immune system. It can cause something called immune amnesia. This means the body may “forget” how to fight infections it already learned to fight before.