The claim
Apparently the German government admitted that an alarming number of vaccinated people were developing AIDS-like symptoms.
Our conclusion
The claim is based on an incorrect calculation of the vaccine's effectiveness using incorrect values and the false claim that the immune response to coronavirus vaccines influences the immune system's response to other diseases.
Since the first COVID-19 vaccines were administered, it has been claimed that they extremely weaken the immune system and therefore trigger AIDS-like symptoms. The statement is often shortened to such an extent that AIDS is directly spoken of as a result of vaccinations. However, the latest circulating justification for the claim relies on incorrect numbers from January 2022 that have been corrected and an even more incorrect calculation.
The claim
In German-language tweets you can often read that the COVID-19 vaccines could trigger an immune deficiency, but this is not explained further there. However, in English-language tweets, based on two articles, it is even claimed that the German federal government has even admitted AIDS as a result of vaccinations.

Both sides write directly in the headline that vaccinated people would develop AIDS or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which the German government would even confirm - with the small problem that somehow no one in this country knows about it (and no, that's not because of one major cover-up).
In principle it is just an article, because the article on “News Punch”, a notorious fake news “factory” whose fakes we have often reported , is based on the article on “The Exposé”, a British site for created in November 2020 by mechanic Jonny Allen-Walker . She is known for using official data for the articles, but completely misinterpreting and distorting them - as in the current case.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The reasoning
In fact, “The Exposé” uses official data, and in this case data that caused some uproar in this country in January 2022, because a weekly report from the RKI is said to have provided evidence that unvaccinated people were far better protected against the Omicron variant than vaccinated people .
In that weekly report from December 30, 2021 (archived HERE ), it actually briefly said on page 14:
“186 patients were unvaccinated, 4,020 were fully vaccinated, of which 1,137 were given a booster vaccination. Based on the data transmitted, 148 reinfections were identified among all transmitted omicron infections; no previous illnesses were reported for any of the persons affected by reinfection.”
Source: RKI, archived file
However, the numbers were not consistent, which the RKI also noticed: On January 3, 2022, the number of unvaccinated people was corrected, and on January 5, a table in the document was also corrected, which is also pointed out in the corrected version (see HERE ):

“Correction: On page 14, the number of unvaccinated people among the reported omicron cases was corrected on January 3, 2022 (before: 186; after: 1,097). On January 5, 2022, the number and proportion of delta and omicron were corrected in Table 3.”
The numbers were corrected within a few days and match all the information in the corresponding weekly report, as well as in the weekly reports before and after - but the wrong numbers were still used as the basis for calculation for the current articles!
This then results in completely different percentage values, as we in an article and illustrated with examples that it is hardly possible to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the vaccination from the available figures and that all claims about it were very speculative.
Even with the correct data, the articles would be wrong!
To compare the proportion of unvaccinated and vaccinated people among COVID-19 cases, one must take into account . If there are many more vaccinated people in the population, it is expected that there will be more vaccinated people among the COVID-19 cases, because vaccines are not 100% effective. And at the time the report was published, more than 70% of the population in Germany fully vaccinated.
Example of one of the calculation errors:
To calculate the frequency of COVID-19 in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, the articles use the ratio between the number of cases in vaccinated (or unvaccinated) people and the percentage of people in Germany with the respective vaccination status .
“The unvaccinated had 186 cases in 26.5% of the population […] the fully vaccinated had 4020 cases in 70.53% of the population. So the frequency of vaccinated omicron cases was 57 per 1 percent of the population […] the frequency of unvaccinated omicron cases was only 7.02 per 1 percent of the population.”
However, this calculation is based on the assumption that the characteristics of the 6,788 cases for which symptom information was available broadly reflect the characteristics of the general population, although there is not enough information to assume this reliably.
to calculate the risk of infection , in addition to the vaccination status, we need additional information about these 6,788 COVID-19 cases, such as: B. the age of these people. This information is important because the proportion of vaccinated and unvaccinated people can vary greatly depending on the age group. , at this point in time, 90.1% of those over 60 have been vaccinated, while the vaccination rate among 12 to 17 year olds is 74.5% .
Therefore, the risk changes depending on whether we are dealing with a predominantly youth population with a lower vaccination rate (a smaller vaccinated group) or older people with a higher vaccination rate (a larger vaccinated group).
Failure to account for inherent differences in population size leads to the base rate fallacy . The additional information required for the calculation is not available, so the mathematical proof in the articles can only be incorrect.
The subsequent error: The effectiveness of the vaccine does not measure the strength of the immune system!
Due to the incorrect calculation in the articles, it is claimed that vaccinated people get AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) or at least develop AIDS-like symptoms. However, this is fundamentally wrong.
AIDS is an infectious disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and is unrelated to COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccines. This claim is based on the false idea that vaccine effectiveness is a measure of immune system strength, with low or negative vaccine effectiveness indicating immune system failure.
Vaccine effectiveness affects the immune system's ability to fight the pathogen targeted by the vaccine, but does not otherwise reflect the immune system's ability to fight other threats . The effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine says nothing about how well vaccinated people fight other infectious diseases.
In other words: Even if the calculations prove that the vaccine has failed (which they do not), it cannot be concluded that the entire immune system would now also fail against other diseases. That claim is completely out of thin air.
For example, the articles claim that “ the average German only has 12.3% of their immune system available to fight certain classes of viruses and certain types of cancer .” Why? Is the rest of the immune system busy dealing with the COVID-19 spikes? Because if that were the case, everyone suffering from COVID-19 would also have this immune deficiency!
Excess mortality in Germany does not prove an immune deficiency
The articles present excess mortality in Germany in 2022 as evidence that “ something is wrong and that the true impact of Covid-19 vaccinations needs to be fully understood .”
Excess mortality is determined by comparing how many people were expected to have died based on the previous year's mortality rate and how many people actually died. Many countries experienced some excess mortality in 2022. Germany in particular recorded 102,500 excess deaths in 2022, according to previous data
However, the articles do not provide evidence that COVID-19 vaccination has a causal relationship with all-cause mortality. The claim is made again and again without any real evidence, while excess mortality from COVID-19 is quite clearly proven .
Many other factors also contributed to the excess mortality in Germany in 2022, e.g. B. the heat waves in the summer, indirect consequences of the COVID-19 infection or the strain on the health systems during the pandemic - to attribute all cases to an alleged immune deficiency of those vaccinated is a very strong oversimplification and a wrong conclusion of the articles.
A study from November 2022 even shows the opposite of what is claimed in the articles: According to this, between June 2021 and March 2022 in the USA there was higher excess mortality in the ten least vaccinated states than in the ten most vaccinated states.
Of course, this is not the only study of this kind:
- A CDC study that examined the period between December 2020 and July 2021 found that vaccinated people had a lower risk of death from diseases other than COVID-19 than unvaccinated people.
- Another study of more than 520,000 people came to a similar result: All-cause mortality was 37% lower in the vaccinated group.
Conclusion

This claim is based on a flawed calculation of vaccine effectiveness that uses inaccurate information and does not take into account the caveats associated with the data, such as: B. the lack of information about the vaccination status of the COVID-19 cases in the report.
Furthermore, this claim ignored the fact that an immune response elicited by a vaccine is specific to the infectious agent targeted by the vaccine and has no impact on the immune response to other threats.
Article image: Pixabay
Additional source:
Health feedback
Note: This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication
.
The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic.

