"Pharmaceuticals are immune to vaccine lawsuits," wrote one person on Twitter. "All the risk and responsibility for severe side-effects or death is put on the individual person being vaccinated."
To find out the truth, the Verify team spoke with two leaders in the field. Peter Meyers, a professor of law emeritus at The George Washington University said that this claim is mostly true.
"If you just have an adverse effect or an illness that results from the vaccination," he said. "You can't sue them."
Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University, agreed.
"They would be immune if there were some safety issues that were unforeseeable," he said.
However, both experts emphasized that this is not complete immunity. A company can still be sued if there's willful misconduct.'
"They can't mislead," said Gostin. "Deceive, be fraudulent, or hide information."
The basis for this partial immunity is a law called the "Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness" Act, referred to as the PREP Act. This law was initially created in 2005 as liability protection for pharmaceutical companies.
In February, HHS Secretary Alex Azar invoked the PREP Act yet again in an effort to promote the production of the COVID-19 vaccines. The approved vaccines are protected from lawsuits until 2024 under the PREP Act.