Fact Check: NO EVIDENCE Quadruple-Boosted People Get Denied Life Insurance Based Solely On Vaccination Status
Do quadruple-boosted people get denied life insurance based solely on their vaccination status? No, that’s not true: The American Council of Life Insurers, which is one of the major industry groups, told Lead Stories that it is not aware of the data backing up the claim, pointing out that being up-to-date on vaccines is typically seen as a positive factor. No credible news reports supported online speculations.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on June 30, 2024. It began:
A man in the video continued:
You watch life insurance trends. What you’re going to find is if you are vaccinated, you can get preferred, not super preferred coverage. If you were vaccinated and double boosted, you may be able to get standard coverage, you will not get preferred. For vaccinated and triple boosted, you won’t be able to get standard coverage, you’ll be table rated. If you’re quadruple-boosted, you will not be able to get life insurance.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Jul 5 14:41:15 2024 UTC)
On June 9, 2024, Jan Graeber (archived here), a senior health actuary at the American Council of Life Insurers (archived here) told Lead Stories via email:
Generally, being up-to-date on medical provider-recommended preventive measures, including vaccines, is viewed positively. Whether four COVID-19 shots alone could be viewed as a negative factor depends on the existence of credible, actuarially sound data supporting this view. ACLI is not aware of such data.
The American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) is an industry group of 275 companies representing 93 percent of the U.S. market.
A search across 2024 news articles published by credible sources indexed by Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) did not produce any relevant results backing up the claim in question.
The same clip previously appeared on TikTok (archived here) where it was published by the garybreckashorts account in May 2023. A Google search across 2023 credible news reports on Google News (archived here) showed a single result: An article from that year published by Nerd Wallet (archived here). It read:
…the vaccine typically isn’t used to determine your eligibility for coverage. It may open up coverage for those with underlying health conditions, as the vaccine reduces the risk of dying from COVID-19.
Gary Brecka, whose name was referenced in the posts on social media that repeated the claim, is a self-described “human biologist” (archived here).
Using Amazon Rekognition, Lead Stories compared images of Brecka from his website (archived here) and his LinkedIn profile, confirming that both showed the person with the same facial features. Then, the tool confirmed that the appearance of a man in the video on Facebook which is the focus of this fact check was identical to that of Gary Brecka.
In the past, Brecka made other unsubstantiated health-related claims debunked by Lead Stories here, here and here.
Similar speculations about vaccination and insurance have been circulating on the internet at least since spring 2021, as Google Fact Check Explorer (archived here) shows.
On March 12, 2021, the ACLI issued a statement (archived here) specifically addressing the rumors about the claims-paying mechanism in response to what it described as “the spread of entirely false information”:
The fact is that life insurers do not consider whether or not a policyholder has received a COVID vaccine when deciding whether to pay a claim.
It additionally emphasized:
Life insurance policy contracts are very clear on how policies work, and what cause, if any, might lead to the denial of a benefit. A vaccine for COVID-19 is not one of them.
At the time, the New York Department of Financial Services, Louisiana Department of Insurance (archived here), and Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler in Washington state (archived here) were among those state authorities who refuted claims speculating about the purported negative impact of vaccination against COVID-19 as a sole factor on accessibility of life insurance policies.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about vaccines and COVID-19 can be found here.
