The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines have been a subject of intense debate since their rollout. A recent preprint study has ignited further controversy, with some claiming it provides evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). This article aims to debunk this myth, providing a clear, evidence-based analysis of the study’s limitations and reaffirming the overall safety and importance of vaccination. We will explore the study’s methodology, its findings, and why its conclusions are not only misleading but also potentially harmful to public health. By examining the scientific data and expert opinions, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of why COVID-19 vaccines are not causing AIDS.
The Study: A Critical Look
The new preprint is a cross-sectional case-control study. The authors looked at a group of 42 people who had voluntarily signed up to the LISTEN (Listen to Immune, Symptom and Treatment Experiences Now) study with Yale university, and had said that they were suffering from long-term effects of COVID-19 vaccination.
This study was originally started to recruit people who had self-reported symptoms of long COVID to try to better understand the physiological features of the condition to see if there are ways to predict who might be at highest risk and how to manage lingering symptoms after acute illness.
These 42 people were compared to a control group of 22 people who were not experiencing long-term health issues who signed up to the same LISTEN study. They assessed various immunological parameters based on blood sample analysis.
Akiko Iwasaki — well-known in the world of immunology and was the former President of the American Association for Immunology — shared some thoughts on this preprint in her Twitter feed, as she is listed as a senior author:
But did this study actually do this? The short answer? Not at all.
Anti-N Antibodies and Prior Infections
The study measured a type of antibody called anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. Anti-N antibodies allow us to distinguish between infections and vaccination, because the vaccinations that we’ve developed don’t mimic the nucleocapsid part of the virus and so don’t cause people to make antibodies to it.
But the study did something very strange. A traditional cut-off value to determine whether someone has a positive test on an anti-N antibody test is 30ng/ml. It’s the one used by, for example, the Office for National Statistics in the UK. In the UK dataset, any test showing >30ng/ml is considered positive, meaning that the individual has previously had COVID-19.
In the new study, they used two ways to look at these antibodies. Firstly, they used a test kit manufactured by Roche that gives a positive/negative result. On this test, about 50% of the participants did not show a positive result for anti-N antibodies. But the authors also used an in-house test which measured the specific level of antibodies. On this in-house test, 94% of the people in the study (62/66 based on Figure 3D in the paper) had antibody levels that would usually be considered evidence of a past infection. This means that most of the people in the study probably had already had a COVID-19 infection when they had these tests run.
So most of the sample had already had COVID-19. This means that any issues noticed by the authors could easily be due to Long COVID rather than vaccinations.
Symptomatic vs. Control: Meaningful Differences?
What about the symptomatic people vs the control? The authors found that there were a number of fairly minor differences between the groups in terms of their results on tests of their immune systems. For example, people with long-term symptoms had higher levels of antibodies against COVID-19, which might indicate that they had more recent infections than the people in the control group.
There were also a number of changes which have been wildly overstated by disingenuous charlatans online. The authors of the study tested a range of T-cell responses. These are a type of immune cell that help defend your body against infection. One useful measure of T-cell activity is how many cells are “exhausted”. This measure is used as an indicator in HIV treatment, because there’s some evidence that a higher number of exhausted T-cells means that the total count of T-cells will start falling soon as well.
Looking at the actual data here, there really doesn’t seem to be much difference between the groups. Yes, there’s a few statistically significant results, but they aren’t particularly meaningful. In addition, some of the stuff that’s gone the most viral about this study — such as the idea that the vaccines might be related to Epstein-Barr virus reactivation — weren’t even different between the groups!
Vaccines and Health Issues: A Flawed Premise
The study also fundamentally could not tell us anything about whether vaccines cause health issues. Why? Every single person in the study had been vaccinated. Including the controls. Most of the people in both groups had also had at least one SARS-CoV-2 infection according to their antibodies. Virtually the entire group had evidence of an Epstein-Barr infection, even the controls. So this paper cannot possibly give us any information about whether the vaccine or infection has caused any issues at all. There’s simply no way to make any inference about causality when everyone has the same exposure.
In addition, this was a tiny piece of research. Far too few people to help us understand anything interesting about health issues and where they come from. There is an entire scientific discipline dedicated to trying to identify causal relationships between health problems and exposures, and it’s far more difficult than a terrible online survey and some antibody tests. This was a one-arm study looking at 100% vaccinated people that somehow concluded that vaccines were causing problems for some of them.
Recall Bias and Study Weaknesses
There are many other weaknesses to this paper. There’s a huge issue with recall bias, for example. Most of the people in the symptomatic group had had their vaccines well over a year before they were interviewed for the research. This makes their statements about what might be causing their symptoms to be very unreliable — not because they are dishonest, but because people are terrible at remembering things.
But there’s no need to go through every major concern, because the study simply could not tell us anything about vaccines regardless.
Conclusion: Vaccines are Safe
It’s possible that COVID-19 vaccinations have some extraordinarily rare health impacts that we haven’t yet found, but frankly we doubt it. Yes, there are negatives to vaccination, but the idea that vaccines are causing an AIDS-like problem is a basic misreading of an already-weak piece of research.
If you’ve been vaccinated, there’s no need whatsoever to worry about your immune system. Vaccines are, in fact, the best way to make sure that your immunity against disease remains strong.