Correcting this week’s misinformation: week of May 21 2026

On The Adam Corolla Show, RFK Jr. said that America gave COVID vaccines to too many people and that we should focus more on healthy food, exercise, and chronic disease, rather than relying so much on vaccines.

Before the COVID vaccine became available in December 2020, COVID had already caused more than 480,000 hospital stays and 350,000 deaths.

People with health problems had a higher risk of dying from COVID. But even people who were otherwise healthy still faced risk. About 3 out of every 100 healthy people who got COVID died. Many of those people may have survived if a vaccine had been available sooner.

Healthy food, exercise, and other good habits are important. But they probably would not have protected people quickly enough once the pandemic had already started. For people with health problems, changing habits also would not likely have happened fast enough to make a major difference during the early spread of COVID.

RFK Jr. has raised questions about vaccines and health. We believe it is also important to look at the number of lives that may have been saved by vaccination. Deaths went down a lot in every age group after the vaccine became available.

A social media post quotes the former doctor Paul Thomas and his claim that you are more likely to die from a vaccine than from the disease it prevents.

These numbers are not fair or accurate as written. They compare measles deaths and vaccine deaths in two very different ways. A fair comparison only works when both numbers are measured the same way.

For example, it would not be fair to compare your chance of dying from measles this year in a mostly vaccinated country TO any death reported, even if the vaccine did not cause the death. Those are different kinds of situations and numbers.

Let’s look at measles. The post says the chance of dying from measles is 1 in 106.5 million. That number comes from looking at recent measles deaths compared to the whole U.S. population. But that is misleading because most people in the U.S. are vaccinated, so measles is now rare.

A better question is: Out of the people who get measles, how many die?

Before the MMR vaccine, there were about 3 to 4 million measles cases in the United States each year. About 500 people died each year. That means about 1 in 6,000 people with measles died. Some estimates say the risk may have been even higher.

The number they use to talk about vaccine-related deaths is also not being used correctly.

Many vaccine death numbers come from VAERS. VAERS is a system where people can report health problems that happen after a vaccine. But a report does not prove the vaccine caused the problem.

For example, if someone dies in a car accident after getting a vaccine, that death can be reported to VAERS. But that does not mean the vaccine caused the car accident or the death. So it is not accurate to count every VAERS report as a vaccine death.

Even using the post’s own numbers, measles would still be more dangerous than the vaccine. A risk of 1 in 6,000 is much higher than a risk of 1 in 108,000.

But the most important point is this: the vaccine death number is not a confirmed number. In healthy children, there have been ZERO confirmed deaths caused by the measles vaccine.

A member of Peter McCullough’s anti-vaccine team claims they have written six peer-reviewed studies that prove COVID vaccines cause heart damage that can make a person die years later.

“Peer-reviewed” means other experts checked the article before it was published. But some journals check more carefully than others.

Some journals, called predatory journals, may publish weak studies without a strong review. So, if something is peer-reviewed, that does not always mean it is trustworthy. In this case, most of the six articles were published in journals with weaker review standards. That does not prove the articles are wrong, but it means they should not be treated as strong evidence.

Also, none of the articles prove the author’s claim that COVID vaccines can cause people to die suddenly years later. The condition they are talking about is usually called Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome, or SADS.

A Lancet study does show that mRNA COVID vaccines can slightly raise the risk of two rare heart problems: myocarditis and pericarditis. Myocarditis means the heart muscle has inflammation. This can cause chest pain, trouble breathing, or a fast heartbeat. Pericarditis means the thin sac around the heart has inflammation. This can cause sharp chest pain. The pain may feel worse when a person takes a deep breath or lies down. These heart problems are rare. Most cases linked to the vaccine are mild and get better quickly.

One study found that men under 40 had higher rates of myocarditis after vaccination than after COVID infection. Myocarditis from COVID illness is more dangerous. COVID illness had a higher risk of heart failure or death than myocarditis linked to vaccination.

So, a fair statement would be that COVID vaccine-related myocarditis is real, rare, and should continue to be studied carefully. But these studies do not prove the much stronger claim that COVID vaccines cause heart damage that can make people die years later.