Pfizer didn’t release a list of COVID-19 vaccine side effects in 2025, contrary to allegations on social media

Key takeaway

Adverse events reported after COVID-19 vaccination aren’t the same as proven side effects. These events may occur coincidentally and require rigorous clinical and epidemiological studies to determine causality. COVID-19 vaccines authorized by regulatory agencies continue to demonstrate a favorable safety profile, with their benefits outweighing their risks.

Reviewed content

Verdict:

Inaccurate

Claim:

“Pfizer just released a few days ago the side effects of the jab” ; this lists contains more than forty medical conditions that are side effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine

Verdict detail

Factually inaccurate: The list of medical conditions cited in the claim wasn’t released by Pfizer in 2025. It originates from a document submitted to the FDA in 2021 and has been publicly accessible online since 2022.
Misleading: The medical conditions listed are adverse events reported following vaccination, not confirmed side effects. Adverse events are occurrences that follow vaccination but lack evidence of a causal link to the vaccine. By conflating these terms, the claim misleads readers into assuming causation where none has been established.

See our method of evaluation

Full Claim

“Pfizer just released a few days ago the side effects of the jab” ; this lists contains more than forty medical conditions that are side effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine

Facebook posts circulating in early 2025 claimed that Pfizer had “just released” a list of side effects associated with its COVID-19 vaccine. These posts shared a list of approximately 40 to 50 medical conditions purportedly linked to the vaccine, including positive antisperm antibodies, epileptic psychosis, and stillbirth (see examples here and here). However, this claim is both inaccurate and misleading.

Firstly, the list isn’t new, nor did Pfizer “just release” it, as the posts claimed. A similar list appeared in a 2023 article by the Argentinian outlet El Cronista, which cited a 2022 article from The South African. These articles claimed that Pfizer provided a list of over 1,200 potential vaccine-related side effects to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, investigations by Reuters in 2022 and AFP in 2023 debunked this allegation. Science Feedback also reviewed that claim in 2022 and found it misleading. Thus, the 2025 posts merely recycled a previously refuted claim without providing any new information.

Second, the list submitted to the FDA described medical conditions reported in the first three months following vaccine authorization among vaccinated individuals, but this doesn’t mean the vaccine caused these events. The use of the term “side effects” in these claims is misleading, as it implies a causal relationship that hasn’t been established.

The list originates from a Pfizer document submitted to the FDA in early 2021 as part of the company’s Biologics License Application for COVID-19 vaccine approval. This document includes Adverse Events of Special Interest (AESI) gathered from health agencies across 63 countries, including the United States.

The Reuters review highlighted that these adverse events were collected from national reporting systems, such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the U.S. and the Yellow Card system in the U.K. While these systems are critical for monitoring vaccine safety, they can’t be used alone to establish a causal link between vaccination and reported medical conditions. As Science Feedback has explained on multiple occasions, such databases are useful for identifying patterns but require further investigation to determine causality (see here, here, and here for details).

Furthermore, the Pfizer document lists these medical conditions as “adverse events” and not “side effects”. It’s important to distinguish these terms. According to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), an adverse event is defined as:

“Any untoward medical occurrence in a patient or clinical investigation subject administered a pharmaceutical product and which does not necessarily have to have a causal relationship with this treatment.” [our emphasis]

This means that adverse events like those cited in the Pfizer document may occur by coincidence and aren’t automatically linked to the vaccination itself. The Pfizer document echoed this, clarifying that:

“An accumulation of adverse events reports does not necessarily indicate that a particular AE was caused by the drug; rather, the event may be due to an underlying disease or some other factors such as past medical history or concomitant reaction.”

The idea that any medical event occurring after vaccination is caused by the vaccine is an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—the mistaken assumption that because one event follows another, the first must have caused the second. But establishing causality requires detailed clinical investigations and statistical analyses. Science Feedback previously explained the concept of determining causality here.

An EMA spokesperson cited in the Reuters article concurred:

“Spontaneous case reports of suspected adverse reactions alone are rarely sufficient to prove that a certain suspected reaction has indeed been caused by a specific medicine. This could be a symptom of another illness, or it could be associated with another medicinal product taken by the patient at the same time. Hence, a case report should be seen as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.”

For example, some medical conditions, such as myocarditis with mRNA vaccines or thrombosis with thrombocytopenia in adenoviral vector vaccines, were identified only after large-scale vaccine distribution. These associations were confirmed through case reviews and epidemiological studies. By contrast, most conditions listed in the Pfizer document haven’t been causally linked to vaccination.

In conclusion, the claim that Pfizer recently released a list of vaccine side effects is inaccurate. The document referenced in these posts was submitted to the FDA in 2021 and made public in 2022. Moreover, the conditions listed in the document are adverse events reported following vaccination, not proven side effects, and thus lack evidence of a causal relationship with the vaccine.