Video Makes Baseless Claim About Insurance Coverage of Vaccinated Frenchman

Quick Take

COVID-19 vaccines have been found to be safe and effective in trials and real-world conditions. Yet an online video baselessly claims a French life insurer refused to pay benefits for a man who died after receiving the vaccine because the insurer deemed it “a medical experiment.” It also falsely claims that the same has happened in the U.S. 

How do we know vaccines are safe?

How do we know vaccines are safe?

No vaccine or medical product is 100% safe, but the safety of vaccines is ensured via rigorous testing in clinical trials prior to authorization or approval, followed by continued safety monitoring once the vaccine is rolled out to the public to detect potential rare side effects. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration inspects vaccine production facilities and reviews manufacturing protocols to make sure vaccine doses are of high-quality and free of contaminants.

One key vaccine safety surveillance program is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which is an early warning system run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FDA. As its website explains, VAERS “is not designed to detect if a vaccine caused an adverse event, but it can identify unusual or unexpected patterns of reporting that might indicate possible safety problems requiring a closer look.”

Anyone can submit a report to VAERS for any health problem that occurs after an immunization. There is no screening or vetting of the report and no attempt to determine if the vaccine was responsible for the problem. The information is still valuable because it’s a way of being quickly alerted to a potential safety issue with a vaccine, which can then be followed-up by government scientists.

Another monitoring system is the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink, which uses electronic health data from nine health care organizations in the U.S. to identify adverse events related to vaccination in near real time.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, randomized controlled trials involving tens of thousands of people, which were reviewed by multiple groups of experts, revealed no serious safety issues and showed that the benefits outweigh the risks.

The CDC and FDA vaccine safety monitoring systems, which were expanded for the COVID-19 vaccines and also include a new smartphone-based reporting tool called v-safe, have subsequently identified only a few, very rare adverse events. 

For more, see “How safe are the vaccines?”

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How safe are the vaccines?

How safe are the vaccines?

More than half a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered in the U.S. and only a few, very rare, safety concerns have emerged. The vast majority of people experience only minor, temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, or muscle pain — or no side effects at all. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, these vaccines “have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.”

A small number of severe allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis, which are expected with any vaccine, have occurred with the authorized and approved COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately, these reactions are rare, typically occur within minutes of inoculation and can be treated. Approximately 5 per million people vaccinated have experienced anaphylaxis after a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CDC.

To make sure serious allergic reactions can be identified and treated, all people receiving a vaccine should be observed for 15 minutes after getting a shot, and anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis or had any kind of immediate allergic reaction to any vaccine or injection in the past should be monitored for a half hour. People who have had a serious allergic reaction to a previous dose or one of the vaccine ingredients should not be immunized. Also, those who shouldn’t receive one type of COVID-19 vaccine should be monitored for 30 minutes after receiving a different type of vaccine.

There is evidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines may rarely cause inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or of the surrounding lining (pericarditis), particularly in male adolescents and young adults.

Based on data collected through August 2021, the reporting rates of either condition in the U.S. are highest in males 16 to 17 years old after the second dose (105.9 cases per million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine), followed by 12- to 15-year-old males (70.7 cases per million). The rate for 18- to 24-year-old males was 52.4 cases and 56.3 cases per million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively.

Health officials have emphasized that vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis cases are rare and the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks. Early evidence suggests these myocarditis cases are less severe than typical ones. The CDC has also noted that most patients who were treated “responded well to medicine and rest and felt better quickly.”

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to an increased risk of rare blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets, especially in women ages 30 to 49. Early symptoms of the condition, which is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, can appear as late as three weeks after vaccination and include severe or persistent headaches or blurred vision, leg swelling, and easy bruising or tiny blood spots under the skin outside of the injection site.

According to the CDC, TTS has occurred in around 4 people per million doses administered. As of early April, the syndrome has been confirmed in 60 cases, including nine deaths, after more than 18.6 million doses of the J&J vaccine. Although TTS remains rare, because of the availability of mRNA vaccines, which are not associated with this serious side effect, the FDA on May 5 limited authorized use of the J&J vaccine to adults who either couldn’t get one of the other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines because of medical or access reasons, or only wanted a J&J vaccine for protection against the disease. Several months earlier, on Dec. 16, 2021, the CDC had recommended the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots over J&J’s.

The J&J vaccine has also been linked to an increased risk of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks nerve cells. Most people who develop GBS fully recover, although some have permanent nerve damage and the condition can be fatal.

Safety surveillance data suggest that compared with the mRNA vaccines, which have not been linked to GBS, the J&J vaccine is associated with 15.5 additional GBS cases per million doses of vaccine in the three weeks following vaccination. Most reported cases following J&J vaccination have occurred in men 50 years old and older.

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Full Story

Four COVID-19 vaccines administered in the U.S. have been authorized or approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration following extensive testing, as we’ve previously written. (For more information, see SciCheck’s articles on the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax vaccines.) 

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were the first vaccines to receive the go-ahead in the U.S., receiving emergency use authorization in December 2020 and full FDA approval, respectively, in August 2021 and January 2022. Both vaccines use modified messenger RNA, or mRNA, which instruct cells to make spike proteins that will trigger an immune response.

Though the process from development to approval was faster than usual for a variety of reasons, including past investment and research in mRNA technology, scientists said safety was not compromised. The safety of the vaccines has been proven not only in clinical trials, but in real-world conditions. 

There have been more than 600 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the U.S., and serious adverse events have been very rare. Most people experience minor side effects, such as temporary pain at the injection site, fatigue or muscle pain, or no side effects at all. 

U.S. insurance companies do not consider the vaccines experimental, and have not refused payouts to beneficiaries of policyholders who died after receiving the vaccine, as we’ve written.

But a video shared on Instagram claims a French insurance company refused to pay life insurance benefits to the beneficiaries of an “elderly, wealthy” man who died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine because the insurer deemed the vaccine “a medical experiment.” 

The video was produced by America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that has spread misinformation about COVID-19 since 2020. It first appeared on March 14, 2022, as part of the group’s “Frontline Flash” video series, which carries the slogan, “The real story of fake news in 120 seconds or less.”

Dr. Peterson Pierre, a dermatologist and narrator of the video, says that a French judge ruled the man’s death a suicide because he knew the vaccine had risks and “willingly chose” to get it. While he speaks, a headline appears on the screen that says: “France: Court rules COVID vaccine-related death a suicide.”

The article about the French case featured in the video appeared in the Athens News on Jan. 14, citing the website Unser Mitteleuropa as the source of the report. Netzpolitik.org, a German website about “digital freedom rights,” describes Unser Mitteleuropa as a “right-hand portal” that promotes disinformation about COVID-19.

In the video, Pierre goes on to say: “Suicides, along with death from experimental drugs, are not covered by life insurance.” The “American Life Insurance Council,” Pierre claims, allows U.S. companies to deny payment if someone dies as the result of the COVID-19 vaccine.

But there is no basis for any of those claims. The video even gets the name of the American organization wrong; it’s the American Council of Life Insurers, or ACLI.

In France, as in the U.S., COVID-19 vaccines have been approved.

“The rumor that insurance companies would refuse to pay life insurance if the deceased had been vaccinated against Covid-19 continues to circulate on social networks. This is false information,” Jean-Baptiste Mounier, a spokesperson for the French Federation of Insurers, told us in a Sept. 26 email.  

The Spanish fact-checking organization Maldita, which also debunked the video, reported that in French media there’s no mention of the incident alleged in the video.

The French Ministry of Justice has no record of the case and the ACLI refuted the claim, according to Reuters. “The Ministry of Justice has no knowledge of this alleged claim concerning a French court supporting the decision of insurance companies’ refusal to pay out for life insurance due to death following COVID-19 vaccine,” a ministry representative told Reuters.

No U.S. insurer or court would consider a death linked to a prescribed medication such as a vaccine “tantamount to suicide,” Glenn Kantor, a partner at Kantor & Kantor LLP, a Los Angeles-based law firm specializing in health, life and disability insurance cases, told us in a phone interview. That’s because people who get vaccinated are “trying to save their life, not end it,” he said.

Basic life insurance policies in the U.S. generally pay for any death, regardless of cause, with suicides usually covered after the person has held the policy for two years, Kantor also said.

The video isn’t the first to make the claim that insurers refused to pay when someone has died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. ACLI last year debunked the claim that U.S. insurers don’t cover alleged vaccine-related deaths. 

“The fact is that life insurers do not consider whether or not a policyholder has received a COVID vaccine when deciding whether to pay a claim,” Paul Graham, senior vice president for policy development at the ACLI, said in a May 21, 2021, statement that he emailed to us at the time for a story on a claim about denied benefits in the U.S.

“Life insurance policy contracts are very clear on how policies work, and what cause, if any, might lead to the denial of a benefit. A vaccine for COVID-19 is not one of them,” Graham said.

And state insurance regulators in Louisiana, New York, and Texas have all issued statements refuting the claims, according to Reuters.

America’s Frontline Doctors couldn’t be reached for comment about the video’s baseless claims.