There is information that vaccinated children and adolescents in Ireland have become more likely to suffer from cardiovascular diseases: heart attacks, heart attacks, and liver pathologies. We decided to check if this is actually true.

Original source information - online newspaper The Irish Light. Abstracts from the article published there were widely distributed on social networks: on Facebook* publications recruited up to 1300 reposts, on Twitter - up to 3155 sherov, on Telegram - 158,000 views in the channel "Skeptic», 77,000 - in the channel "Informant», 74,000 - in the channel MediaPost. In addition to Russian, publications on Telegram are available on German (103,000 views), English (more than 7000), French languages. Users from Finland, Kenya, South Africa, USA, Canada, Australia, India.

The Irish Light newspaper, which published an article about cardiovascular diseases in children and adolescents, heads Gemma O'Doherty. This information is on the main page of the publication. O'Doherty is an Irish activist and former journalist who has repeatedly been seen spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Previously, her statements were analyzed by fact checkers from Reuters, "Vox Ukraine" And Stopfake.kz. In 2020, she spread information that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was allegedly never isolated in a laboratory and, therefore, does not exist at all. O'Doherty has run for various elected positions several times: in 2018, she I couldn't receive the necessary support to participate in the Irish presidential elections in 2019 tried enter the European Parliament, and in the elections to the Dublin municipality in 2020 dialed only 1.97% of the votes. In 2019, Gemma blocked on YouTube for “inciting hatred”, and on July 31, 2020 it will be forever banned on Twitter (for six months earlierthan Donald Trump).

The Irish Light covers all the time criticize vaccination - “The number of “vaccine” deaths is growing”, “Catholics say no to lethal injections”, “Vaccines kill children”, “Pfizer knew that their vaccine could kill”, etc. The article itself states that the author takes information about dead children and teenagers from the website RIP.ie, supposedly “photos of athletic-looking teenagers and newborns” appear there almost every day.

Such a site really exists. Let's try to study the records (for convenience, we will consider only records for the last two days). There are nine pages of such records. Unfortunately, the site does not provide the ability to sort records by age of the deceased. However, for married women, their maiden name is indicated, so anyone who has née - “born” is indicated, can not even be opened, since child and teenage marriages are not practiced in Ireland. The page displays 40 records.

Let's study first page - 18 entries tell about the death of married women. Therefore, we are only interested in 22 names. Almost everywhere, a death notice is accompanied by a photograph of the deceased and a short biography, sometimes the age is indicated. Not a single photograph belongs to a child or teenager; these are all quite elderly people or at least middle-aged people. Only four records do not have photographs or information about the deceased. At the same time, in the description one The profiles suggest donating to an Alzheimer's research fund, which suggests that the deceased is unlikely to be a child or teenager.

Even if those three entries, which have no photograph or description, listed those who died as children or teenagers, journalists would have no way of knowing this from the site data.

A similar situation is on the second page - most of the entries contain a photograph that does not fall under the agreed age, and it is also said that the deceased will be missed by the husband or wife, children, and sometimes grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.

On page three there are seven deceased married women. All profiles, except one, have either a photograph of the deceased, or at least a description like “passed away surrounded by family: wife/husband, children and grandchildren.” There are also recording about the death, indicating that an aunt and uncle would be missed (one might assume that we were talking about a baby or a teenager, but the book of condolences states that the deceased “endured her illness with dignity for many years”).

Records indicating that the deceased was a newborn could not be found at all. Judging by the photographs and accompanying captions, there is only one recording about the death of a man who looks like a teenager in the photo - Dare Markey. He died suddenly at home, and relatives offer to donate to the Epilepsy Research Foundation in Ireland. There is no information on whether Dare was vaccinated on the memorial page.

The article also refers to the opinion of American cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough about the dangers of vaccines. Such a person really exists, however, during the coronavirus pandemic, he adhered to conspiracy theories. His statements that those who had been ill don't get sick again, number of deaths from vaccination hugeand also that vaccines useless against the “Delta” option, fact checkers also analyzed.

The next argument in the Irish article is that the MMR (measles-rubella-mumps) vaccine causes autism. However, scientists have long provedthat this is not so, having analyzed sample of 1,194,764 children. For comparison: Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s findings on the connection between this vaccine and autism put forward, analyzing a total of 12 clinical cases. We also sorted it out, what's wrong with Wakefield's study. Asya Kazantseva, journalist and popularizer of science, so responds about Wakefield's observations: “To find out whether circumstance X causes consequence Y, 12 carefully selected children are completely insufficient. Even if all of them really, without falsification, developed autism after the vaccine, you can just as easily find twelve children in whom it began after they first tried zucchini; stayed overnight with grandma; visited Disneyland. Studies on large samples are important - and in the case of vaccination, as you might guess, there is no shortage of them.” At the same time, Andrew Wakefield makes good money on the conspiracy theory about the connection between vaccination and autism: investigators from Factcheck.kz calculated, that from just one of the companies he founded, Wakefield received a profit of $484,000 in 2019.

The article goes on to claim that the US VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) system contains more than 1.2 million records of complications and deaths. There are indeed more than a million records in the system, however, how emphasize experts, they should be treated with caution. Any person who has been vaccinated can leave a record in the system (yes, this is not done by doctors); therefore, in this system you can even write that someone grew a third leg or tail after the vaccine was administered. Official website of the system warns: “An adverse event report to VAERS does not constitute documentation that the vaccine caused the event.” Johns Hopkins University Vaccine Safety Institute Director Daniel Salmon speaks on the system's flaws: “If I got the COVID vaccine and then my dog gets hit by a car, I can report that fact on the adverse event report and it will show up in the database. However, this will not mean that the car hit my dog because I was vaccinated.”

The article pays particular attention to athletes who were injured by vaccination - it is stated that 620 people died and 930 suffered heart attacks after vaccination. This information is also not confirmed; moreover, fact checkers more than once sorted it out allegations of increased mortality among athletes and not found to him evidence. If you check several cases in detail, it turns out that, for example, Barcelona striker Sergio Aguero received a heart attack not due to the vaccine, as stated in the Irish publication, but due to a scar on the myocardium that formed after a viral infection several years ago. And Newcastle United goalkeeper Martin Dubravka did not leave the sport due to complications after the vaccine at all - literally on November 10, 2022 he went out on the field.

Thus, the article was published in a publication that has been repeatedly noted for disseminating misinformation, quotes the positions of well-known conspiracy theorists, and contains a lot of false information. There was no spike in heart disease after coronavirus vaccinations. Moreover, in the case of children, the risk of getting myocarditis (that is, inflammation of the heart) is significantly higher, and the course of the disease is more severe in those who have suffered a coronavirus infection than in those who have received a vaccine against it.

Cover image: Standardchildren