Veria - Claim Fact Check

Claim: COVID‑19 vaccines increase the risk of psychosis by 440 times compared with flu shots.

The claim appears to originate from a June 2025 preprint/article by Thorp, McCullough, et al. analyzing VAERS data¹²³.
The paper actually reports a proportional reporting ratio (PRR) of 442 (not 440) for the specific VAERS term “psychotic symptom” when comparing COVID-19 vaccines to influenza vaccines, based on 25 COVID reports versus 0 flu reports¹.
A PRR measures reporting disproportionality in a passive surveillance database; it is not a measure of actual risk, incidence, or causality⁴⁵.
The CDC and FDA explicitly state that VAERS cannot be used to calculate risk rates or determine whether a vaccine caused an adverse event⁵⁴.
The comparison is methodologically flawed: COVID-19 vaccines were administered under unprecedented public scrutiny for 48 months, whereas influenza vaccines were tracked over 420 months, creating massive reporting bias and stimulated reporting³⁴.
With zero reports for influenza vaccines, the resulting ratio is mathematically unstable and the confidence interval is extremely wide (26.5–7380), making the figure unreliable¹.
One of the authors, Peter McCullough, has repeatedly made false and misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by independent fact-checkers⁶⁷.
There is no peer-reviewed epidemiological study showing that COVID-19 vaccines increase the actual risk of psychosis by 440-fold; the British Heart Foundation notes that any link between COVID-19 vaccination and psychosis is currently unknown and under investigation⁸.

Overall validity: 0%