Thanks Pfizer Tweet Shows Shaky Legs, Trying To Blame Covid-19 Vaccines

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This dubious claim has led to a tendency for people to use the words “Thank you Pfizer: while posting videos of… [+] random people shaking different parts of their body. (Photo: Getty)

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Talk about some really flimsy claims. Social media accounts, often anonymous, posted videos of people shaking different parts of their bodies and suggesting they were spasms induced by the Covid-19 vaccine. For example, a Twitter account named @AngeliaDesselle featured a video of two presumably human legs shaking quite vigorously, along with the words Thank You Pfizer. Presumably, the tweet was referring to the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 mRNA vaccine and not another Pfizer product like Viagra. So, could this video have shown someone actually suffering from a vaccine side effect? Or just someone shaking their legs because that’s what, you know, a lot of humans with legs are able to do?

Well, the bio for this Twitter account didn’t include any clear self-identifying information. So, it’s hard to tell if this Angelia Desselle is actually a real person or if it was actually her legs. And even though it was her legs, the tweet didn’t really provide any evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines were actually responsible for the jerks. But who needs real proof these days, right? The tweet has been retweeted over 5,400 times, quoted over 35.9,000 times and liked over 33.5,000 times. He also got the words Thank You Pfizer for trending on Twitter, but maybe not in the way the person running @AngeliaDesselle might have wanted.

This tweet and video had many people shaking their heads on Twitter. For example, someone used the Community Notes feature on Twitter to point out that spasms have not been shown to be a proven side effect of covid19 vaccines:

From Twitter

From Twitter

Also, this community note pointed out an undeniable fact about the @AngeliaDesselles video: the shaking is very strong, uncontrollable, but the camera stays still and level… Holy special effects, Batman, the @AngeliaDesselle video would have- could it actually have been staged? Was the intent of the video to suggest someone was having spasms after the Covid-19 vaccine when it didn’t actually happen?

Anyway, others on Twitter tried to get rid of such possible intent in another way. They’ve shared other videos of random people shaking in different ways with the words Thanks, Pfizer just to show how easy it is.

For example, Randi Mayem Singer, a well-known screenwriter for Mrs. Doubtfire, got dirty with this tweet:

Yes, that’s Jennifer Gray as Frances Baby Houseman in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing, which incidentally was more than 30 years before Covid-19 vaccines hit the market.

Another tweet danced around this topic along with a more recent video:

And here’s a quick reaction to the Merci Pfizer trend:

Meanwhile, Duolingo, not to be confused with Dua Lipa, tweeted, can’t…stop…twerking, in this two-part tweet thread:

There are few things worse than out of control twerking, except maybe out of control dabbing. Twerking, by the way, is not listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a common side effect of Covid-19 vaccines. No, common side effects include pain, swelling and redness around the injection site, fatigue, headache, muscle or joint pain, chills and swollen lymph nodes. On another webpage, the CDC lists more serious adverse events that can occur, although very rarely, such as anaphylaxis, myocarditis, and pericarditis. You may have heard of all kinds of things reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a system co-sponsored by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, the CDC’s webpage points out that reports of adverse events to VAERS after vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.

So don’t assume something is necessarily going on just because you see Thank You Pfizer attached to a video like this:

Yes, just because something happens after something doesn’t necessarily mean they’re related to each other. For example, let’s say you went on Tinder and a few days later fell headfirst into an omelette. It wouldn’t necessarily mean that Tinder was responsible for the accident or that you made the omelet.

If spasms were indeed a common side effect of Covid-19 vaccines, with over 12.7 billion doses administered in 184 countries in October 2022, don’t you think you would have seen a lot of shaking happening by now? Surely a medical researcher would have detected such a condition, conducted a study and published it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal at this point, right?

Moreover, what is the alleged mechanism of these spasms? It’s not like just spilling a vaccine on someone or something causes uncontrollable shaking:

Again, it’s very easy to film yourself shaking some part of your body, post the video and claim the vaccine caused it. It doesn’t require a lot of high-tech camera work or CGI. For example, some of the shaking videos in recent times have featured hands holding drinks and shaking, along with claims that the shaking was due to Covid-19 vaccines. Therefore, @redheadgemini94_3 showed on TikTok how easy it is to stage such a show without a big Hollywood budget:

Unsurprisingly, after Thanks Pfizer started trending on Twitter, an anonymous Twitter account posted the following: The #ThanksPfizer trend right now is despicable. Mocking, mocking, discrediting the injured CovVax really shines a light on who you are as a human. Such a tweet distracts from the real problem highlighted by the Thank You Pfizer. Why use very flimsy circumstantial evidence when you could see a doctor, have your problem documented, and then report it to public health authorities? There are clear mechanisms to show you have a problem with a vaccine, if you really do. This is, for example, how thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) turned out to be a rare possible side effect after the J&J/Janssen Covid-19 vaccination. This is also how myocarditis and pericarditis were detected as rare possible side effects after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.

Doctors, public health experts and other real scientists around the world have been monitoring Covid-19 vaccines since they became available. So it wouldn’t be so easy for authorities to just say, shake it, quickly any legitimate reports of possible vaccine side effects.

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