Headlines misused to wrongly imply vaccines are killing white people | Fact check

Gabrielle Settles, USA TODAY
·3 min read
34

The claim: Post implies white people are being killed by COVID-19 vaccines

An Aug. 21 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows two headlines about the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on different racial groups.

The first headline reads, “White people are getting vaccinated at higher rates than Black and Latino Americans.” The second headline shows The Washington Post logo and reads, “Whites now more likely to die from covid than Blacks: Why the pandemic shifted.”

“Just posting two headlines from Wapo that I’m sure have nothing whatsoever to do with each other,” reads the post's caption

Some commenters took the post as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are killing people.

"So glad I opted out of the 'depopulation' plandemic," reads a comment from one user. "Not jabbed, never scared, didn't die."

The Instagram post amassed more than 45,000 likes in a week.

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

Our rating: Missing context

The implied claim here is wrong, as the two headlines do in fact have nothing to do with each other. The increased death rate in white people was due to a lack of vaccination, not an abundance. Vaccinated people of all races are far less likely to become seriously ill or die from COVID-19, according to medical professionals.

Washington Post reported unvaccinated white people were dying at high rates

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization state that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19. Fully vaccinated Americans are 14 times less likely to die of COVID-19 than their unvaccinated counterparts, as USA TODAY reported in 2022.

The first headline in the Instagram post comes from a CNN article published in January 2021, not The Washington Post.

The article reported on statistics from 14 states that showed vaccination rates among white people were more than twice as high as those of Black and Latino people at that time. It described this as a "‘warning flag’ about racial inequality."

Fact check: COVID-19 vaccine data from VAERS misrepresented (again) to overstate risks

The Washington Post article was written more than a year later. It describes how white people began to die at higher rates than Black people for the first time in October 2021.

But contrary to the post's implication that vaccines are driving the increasing death rate among white people, it's actually a lack of vaccines causing higher death rates. The article attributes the shift in mortality to decreased vaccine hesitancy in the Black community and steady levels of hesitancy in some rural, white communities.

Tasleem J. Padamsee, an associate professor in health services management and policy at Ohio State University, was part of a research group that studied the changes in vaccine hesitancy among Black and white people. She was interviewed by The Washington Post for its story.

“Our primary finding was that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy decreased more rapidly among Black individuals than among White individuals between December 2020 and June 2021,” Padamsee told USA TODAY. “A key factor associated with this pattern seemed to be the fact that Black individuals more rapidly came to believe that vaccines were necessary to protect themselves and their communities over this period.”

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Headlines didn't show COVID-19 vaccines kill white people | Fact check