It doesn’t protect you from COVID but it saves you from dying—the amusing claim about Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine comes out of South Africa from a scientist, who is not offering any science to support her claim.
Fake news factory Reuters saw its story featured on propaganda platform Yahoo News on Friday (August 06, 2021). Glenda Gray, a researcher that led a study about vaccine efficacy in health workers, told media that their study found Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine effective in preventing death. In her words:
Consistently after receiving the vaccine, there was very little death occurring in the vaccinated group as compared to the control group and showing a remarkable up-to 96.2% protection against death.
The first thing that such a claim means to someone with a little bit of intelligence will be, what a quack! How can she prove logically or demonstrate scientifically that those workers would have been dead had they not been vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine? Answer—she cannot, and it’s a laughable for someone who works as a lead researcher in South Africa to claim so. Logically it is impossible to prove anyone would be dead if they had not taken a certain drug or treatment.
What makes Gray’s claim even less credible is lack of proof, or the way media spread around her claim without any proof. No study link has been included in the Reuters story—and no surprises there since Reuters has been known to routinely spread false claims and vaccine advertisements masked as news. With no indication that this is a published peer-reviewed independent and verified study, virtually no details are shared about the study’s methodology, conflict of interest, limitations of research, and other features that would shed some light on how credible is this study.
Yet another interesting red flag about the Reuters story is that it comes with the note of correction of a paragraph.
It seems they first told people the Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine protected against COVID infection, but then changed it to say it protects against hospitalization—then the story goes on to claim the Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine protects from death. Those real scientists, long dead, are probably committing suicides inside their graves learning of what science has become in an age of pharmaceutical monarchy.
