Fact Checking the Arab Media

On February 4, 2022, Lebanon’s MTV News website carried a report indicating that India’s Bharat Biotech has unveiled “a vaccine that can be administered via a nasal spray instead of being injected in the body and that it works on stopping the virus in the airways.” The report further noted that “there are at least a dozen other nasal vaccines in development around the world, some of which are now in phase III trials. But Bharat Biotech may be the first to be made available.”

On February 15, the New York Times carried a detailed report on the matter in its health section under the title: “Nasal Vaccines Could Help Stop COVID-19 From Spreading—If Scientists Can Get Them Right.” The report read: “There is not yet a nasal COVID-19 vaccine available in the U.S.—and it’s not clear if or when there will be—but multiple research teams in the U.S., including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and abroad are working on them. Russian scientists are testing a nasal form of their Sputnik V vaccine in adult volunteers, and researchers in India have gotten approval for a Phase 3 trial.”

The New York Times report then adds: “Many researchers are excited about the prospect of nasal vaccines for COVID-19. ‘Yes with an exclamation point,’ says Troy Randall, an immunologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, when asked if they’re worth exploring.”

The same report then goes on to explain that “There’s a long road ahead” since the only nasal vaccine cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to fight a respiratory pathogen is FluMist, which is used to prevent influenza among people ages 2 to 49. FluMist was in development for decades but was briefly taken off the market due to efficacy issues, which “could foreshadow the challenges awaiting vaccine researchers working to create a nasal COVID-19 vaccine. Still, researchers hope that nasal vaccines may one day do what even the highly effective mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have not: slow transmission enough to bring the pandemic to an end.”

Fact Check Assessment: True But Misleading

The report published by Lebanon’s MTV website is true since there are indeed ongoing trials for a nasal vaccine around the world and the Indian Biotech firm has recently unveiled such a product. However, it is also misleading since there is no basis for the site’s claim that Bharat Biotech’s nasal vaccine “may be the first to be made available;” nor is there evidence presented that a rollout might be imminent anywhere in the world, as the report seems to strongly suggest.