Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation senator from Queensland, has shared a dubious Twitter post, purportedly highlighting side effects associated with the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, currently being rolled out across Australia and the UK.
“BREAKING UK — Adverse Reactions to Covid Jabs now include 3787 blood disorders, 3426 heart disorders, 36,356 intestinal disorders and a shocking 68,797 nervous system disorders including brain damage and stroke according to OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT DATA”, the post reads.
But does the tweet accurately represent the UK Government’s official data?
The data is derived from a report published by Yellow Card, an initiative run by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which tracks and monitors potential safety concerns about medicines, vaccines, medical devices and e-cigarettes.
The Yellow Card scheme, as we reported recently in CoronaCheck, relies on “voluntary submissions” which can be made anyone — including members of the public — via its website.
The Vaccine Analysis Print, the relevant report cited by the Daily Expose article, carries a warning stating that “this information does not represent an overview of the potential side effects associated with the vaccines”.
Rather, it reflects all instances of suspected adverse reactions that are reported to the authority and as specified on their website “cannot be used to derive side effect rates or compare the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccinations”.
The report states: “The existence of an adverse reaction report in the print does not necessarily mean that the vaccine has caused the suspected reaction.”
It’s not the first time Senator Roberts has used Twitter to cast doubt over Australia’s COVID-19 vaccination program, regularly sharing the posts of independent MP Craig Kelly, who quit the Liberal Party over disagreements relating to his questioning of vaccines and promotion of unproven COVID-19 therapies.
Australia’s medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), has found both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines to “meet the high safety, efficacy and quality standards required for use in Australia”.
In an email, Senator Roberts told Fact Check:
“One Nation is pro-choice when it comes to the COVID vaccine and we know that many of our constituents in Australia are concerned about the vaccination becoming mandatory. Another concern from our constituents is the apparent rushed approvals process around the COVID vaccine and therefore we should always have the courage to ask questions when they need to be asked.”
As Fact Check has reported, COVID-19 vaccines have been provisionally approved by the TGA under a formal regulatory process.

“In making its decision to grant these provisional determinations, the TGA considered all eligibility criteria, including factors such as the evidence of a plan to submit comprehensive clinical data and the seriousness of the current COVID-19 pandemic,” a TGA spokeswoman previously told Fact Check.
Do COVID-19 vaccines contain tissue from aborted foetuses?
While vaccine hesitancy is proving a challenge to health officials around the world, some false and misleading claims have been more pernicious than others.

Just because a vaccine used a human cell line in its development doesn’t mean it is present in the final product.(
Reuters: Gareth Fuller)
Suggestions that COVID-19 jabs contain the tissue of aborted foetuses have been circulating for months, but those claims are not quite right.
According to Steven P. Millies, an associate professor of public theology at the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, no COVID-19 vaccine “directly uses foetal tissue”.
“All vaccines, whether Moderna, Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson, rely on stem cells, harvested decades ago from early-stage aborted foetuses, for the laboratory testing of vaccines,” Dr Millies wrote in The Conversation. “This research is extensively regulated.”
As explained by Dr Millies, embryonic stem cells are regularly used in medical research and are generally clones that are thousands of generations removed from the original cell.
“Researchers can turn these cloned cells into any type of cell,” Dr Millies wrote.
In the case of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, which is being used in Australia, kidney cell lines from a foetus aborted in 1973 were used in the development of the jab, according to fact checkers at Full Fact.
“While human-derived cells are used to manufacture the vaccine, they are filtered out of the final product,” the fact checkers said.
Pfizer, meanwhile, used the same cell line in the development of its vaccine, according to Alessondra T Speidel, a post-doctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.
“Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech used HEK 293 cells in their proof-of-concept tests to … effectively take up the genetic instructions contained in these vaccines and produce the required spike protein,” she wrote in an article for The Conversation.
“But human embryonic cell lines were not used to make either company’s final vaccine.”

The team found, for example, that the mRNA vaccine technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was not “experimental”, as suggested by the list, and had been developed over a number of years.
All three vaccines approved for use in the UK (Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca) had been tested on animals, despite claims to the contrary, and were effective in protecting recipients against COVID-19.
“Looking specifically at the mRNA vaccines, on clinical trials, participants who had received the Moderna vaccine were 94 per cent less likely to contract Covid-19 than participants who received the placebo, and none developed ‘severe Covid’,” Full Fact said.
“Recipients of the Pfizer vaccine were 95 per cent less likely to contract Covid-19 than participants who received the placebo.”
Further, there was emerging evidence that the vaccines could also stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in addition to preventing infections turning into symptomatic illnesses.
“For example, a recent Scottish study, which hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, found that the rate of infection among people who live with healthcare workers was at least 30 per cent lower when the worker had been vaccinated.”
As to whether doctors were concerned about the vaccines’ effect on long-term fertility, the fact checkers said there were some concerns about giving pregnant women the jab, and it was not currently recommended in the UK.
“The reason why there has been concern is because the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein bears a slight resemblance to proteins in the placenta,” Full Fact explained.
“The theory being that if the vaccine leads to the body producing antibodies which attack the virus, those antibodies might also attack the placenta. But, as we’ve said, the resemblance is only slight and realistically the body is not likely to confuse the two.”
Medium