Beware, VAIDS is coming (actually, no it's not)

I can't say I have come across it myself, not being in the right social media bubble, but apparently there is an article doing the rounds of the right-wing fringe theory circuit claiming that "74% of triple-vaccinated now have VAIDS" (vaccine-induced immunodeficiency syndrome), and that the Canadian government has even "admitted" it.

If you happen to frequent sites like The People's Voice and The Exposé, you might have come across this claim which is being widely disseminated by the anti-vaccine conspiracy theory crowd. Unfortunately, it is complete bunk on a variety of different fronts.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, there is no such thing as "VAIDS": it is a spurious condition made up by the American pseudo-scientific ultra-right-wing group, America's Frontline Doctors.

Secondly, the claim rests on a deliberate misinterpretation of official statistics, and a conflation of "vaccine effectiveness", which does tend to reduce over time, and something the article calls "immune system performance". Yes, the effectiveness of a vaccine does wane over time (this is well-known, and it is why we get boosters), but that is nothing to do with the long-term effectiveness of a person's overall immune system, which is absolutely not compromised by receiving vaccines.

And finally, this is not even a new claim. These same purveyors of misinformation tried the same ploy back in March 2022, when it suggested that "the triple vaccinated have developed AIDS and are now 5.1x more likely to die of Covid-19 than the unvaccinated".

It was not true then, and it is equally untrue now.