Facebook posts claim that COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States were "never" subjected to clinical trials. The claim is false; all of the COVID-19 jabs that received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) underwent multiple stages of testing, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the results have been made available to the public.
"NO. I refuse to get vaccinated. Saying yes to COVID-19 vaccine is no different from becoming a rat in a lab and participate in an experiment that is uncertain and risky," reads a Korean-language Facebook post from July 8.
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"All COVID-19 vaccines [available in the US] are not approved by the FDA. They have been only granted with the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). What does getting EUA mean? It means these vaccines have never gone through clinical trials. They are testing these jabs on us. We are subjects for their trials".
Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post, taken on July 28, 2021.
Similar Facebook posts were shared here, here and here.
However, the claim is false. All COVID-19 jabs available in the United States under the EUA have gone through clinical trials.
There are currently three COVID-19 vaccines authorised for emergency use in the United States: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Janssen.
Under Emergency Use Authorizations, the FDA may allow "unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions...when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives".
"From a safety perspective, FDA expects an EUA submission will include all safety data accumulated from phase 1 and 2 studies conducted with the vaccine," the agency said on its website.
The FDA website also said that an EUA request should include a phase 3 study with more than 3,000 participants "who have been followed for serious adverse events and adverse events of special interest for at least one month after completion of the full vaccination regimen".
Clinical trial data for each jab is available to the public here and here for Pfizer, here and here for Moderna and here and here for Janssen.
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective, and pointed out that millions of people in the United States had received the jab "under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history".
The posts are correct that the vaccines have yet to receive formal FDA approval. President Joe Biden said on June 21 that he expected the jabs to be given full approval in the coming months.
"They're not promising me any specific date, but my expectation, talking to the group of scientists we put together... plus others in the field, is that sometime, maybe in the beginning of the school year, at the end of August, beginning September, October, they'll get a final approval," he told CNN.
AFP has previously debunked various false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, including that they contain a cancer-causing substance called graphene oxide or that a US court ruling meant that vaccinated people were legally "no longer human".