Did Japanese politicians state that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate was a human experiment? No, that's not true: The claim circulating on social media misquotes and takes out of context a bill presented by the Democratic Party of Japan - an opposition party - acknowledging those who were harmed by COVID vaccine's side effects. The false allegations were first shared by Toshi, a blogger who has regularly posted conspiracy theories and deep state-related content.
The claim appeared in a video posted on TikTok (archived here) on August 31, 2023. The post shows a screenshot of what looks like a news article, with the caption:
Politicians and the press knew that it [the mRNA vaccine] was a human experiment and pushed it to the public.
The article's headline reads:
Opposition parties [Democratic Party of Japan] submitted a bill on COVID vaccine damage relief.
The post also highlights a key paragraph in the text:
As you all know, the COVID vaccine was publicly released without any 'therapeutic testing' under the third tier following a very unique approval process. We believe what is being done now is a form of human experimentation.
(Translations from Japanese to English by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 06 22:32:03 2023 UTC)
The text can be traced back to an article posted on August 29, 2023, on okagesamadesu, a blog run by Toshi.
A reverse image search performed by Lead Stories on September 7, 2023, did not yield any news articles from reputable media organizations with that headline and text. It showed, though, that the text shared in the TikTok had also been posted by websites with similar content, such as Ameblo, Hamazou, and Goo forums, popular among anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
While the bill referred to in the post actually exists, the post itself takes the purpose of the bill out of context and falsely claims that the opposition party called the vaccine rollout "a human experiment." In a Democratic Party of Japan's official statement describing the bill, which was presented on June 14, 2023, there is no trace of such a sentence: the text does not refer to the vaccine as a form of "human experiment." Rather, it explains that the bill focuses mainly on gaining better access to information and providing relief to the families of people who, in rare cases, have developed serious side effects related to the vaccine:
We proposed a bill based on the number of testimonies we received from bereaved families of patients whose death was directly caused by the vaccine's side effects. As a post-pandemic issue, we want to shed light on cases of death due to the vaccine's side effects. [...] We want to change the current situation because we are not receiving enough information on the potential damages that the vaccine's side effects might cause.
The Democratic Party has been highly critical of the goverment's handling of the COVID pandemic. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has responded to concerns about vaccine-related deaths in a document from 2021, stating, on page 8, that a causal relation between COVID-19 vaccines and individual deaths could not be established, based on the results of an investigation that they conducted.
According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, as well as international health organizations and state and federal authorities, severe side effects and cases of myocarditis and pericarditis after receiving COVID-vaccines have been extremely rare, and the vaccines themselves are completely safe and effective.
Lead Stories has fact checked several claims in relation to COVID-19 vaccines and alleged relations to severe side effects, which can be found here.
