Anti-vaxxers' 'desperate' conspiracy theory about the FDA gets pulled apart by Washington Post fact checker

The Food and Drug Administration this week granted full approval to Pfizer's vaccine against the novel coronavirus -- but anti-vaccination activists are still not convinced of its safety.

As Washington Post senior reporter Aaron Blake writes, anti-vaxxers are now latching on to what he describes as a "desperate" new conspiracy theory claiming that the FDA didn't really give full approval to the vaccine.

The conspiracy theorists are apparently seizing on a footnote in the approval stating that "although COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older, there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution to this population in its entirety at the time of reissuance of this EUA."

But, explains Blake, this footnote doesn't say anything about the vaccine not being fully approved.

"To some, this means the fully approved vaccine isn't or won't be available," he writes. "The language, though, strictly says that there merely isn't a 'sufficient' amount of it available to the approved groups to void the need for the EUAs. As for the idea that they simply wouldn't be allowed to continue the EUAs if they truly had a fully approved version? That comes out of thin air. The FDA is allowed to continue with EUAs even if a fully approved treatment is available, as long as there isn't an 'adequate' amount of the fully approved treatment available."

Patricia J. Zettler, a former FDA attorney and law professor at Ohio State University, tells Blake that this kind of language is still standard FDA speak and nothing out of the ordinary.

"There is nothing suspicious going on here; this is just regulatory language explaining why a legal standard is met," she said.

Read the whole analysis here.