"Strange blood clots found in MOST bodies is very disturbing. They were not sure whether it is being caused by COVID, the Vaccine or something else but now they think its caused by the vaccine," says a September 11, 2022 tweet.
The post includes a video of an interview with an American embalmer named Richard Hirschman who says clots are found in "50 to 70 percent of bodies."
The clip, which shows glass jars purportedly containing removed clots, also circulated on Facebook and Instagram. Similar claims circulated in French and were debunked by AFP Factuel.
The video also references an article by The Epoch Times, a website that has previously published misinformation and was banned from advertising on Facebook following an NBC News investigation.
The article claims to show "the differences between the blood of the unvaccinated and the clot" Hirschman sent to a lab in the US state of Texas.
"I am not a doctor or scientist not even a phlebotomy expert," Hirschman, a licensed embalmer in Alabama, told AFP via Facebook Messenger. "But I am very familiar with embalming and I work with blood all the time."
Experts, however, said the presence of blood clots in dead bodies could have any number of causes, including obesity, smoking or infection with Covid-19.
"There's no data to prove any connection between the Covid vaccine and blood clots," said Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the US National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), in a September 17 email.
While Koth said embalmers have told the association about an uptick in clots, it would be unusual to know someone's vaccination status unless their family disclosed it. And she said such observations remain anecdotal.
"There is absolutely no scientific evidence to prove a correlation," she said.
The French Association of Thanatopraxy (AFT) emphasized to AFP the difference between samples taken during an autopsy and the care provided by thanatopractors or embalmers. The former is performed by a physician and can be used to determine the cause of death, while the latter is aimed at preserving bodies from natural decomposition.
Embalmers are required to perform acts of conservation, such as the sterilization of arteries. But they do not "take samples," AFT said September 14.
"Everything that is originally in the bodies goes back into the bodies," the organization said, adding that embalmers only remove "pockets of natural liquids from the person" that are then cremated.
The AFT also said embalmers often do not know the causes of death."This is part of the medical file and this section is hidden for us, it is accessible only to forensic scientists for example," the group said.
Marie-Antoinette Sevestre-Pietri, president of the French Society of Vascular Medicine, further questioned the tissue shown in the video.
"We cannot draw any conclusion from these images. It may be anything," she said.
Sevestre-Pietri said removing tissue of the size seen in the video would require opening the vessels widely -- a practice that would be unusual for embalming. A typical incision would be one centimeter, she said.
"You do not lacerate the bodies entrusted to you," Sevestre-Pietri said.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has listed blood clots as a "very rare" side effect of the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines.
Health Canada also lists "blood clots with low platelets" among the "rare reactions that have been reported" following administration of the two viral vector shots. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported four cases of "blood clots in large blood vessels and low platelets" per one million Johnson & Johnson doses administered.
But David Smadja, professor of hematology at the George Pompidou Hospital in Paris, said "there is currently no data showing a risk of thrombosis with messenger RNA vaccines" from companies such as Pfizer and Moderna -- the most widely administered Covid-19 shots in Canada and the US.
A study published in The Lancet in 2021 concluded that patients with a Covid-19 infection faced a significantly higher risk of developing blood clots than people who received mRNA vaccines.
AFP has fact-checked other inaccurate claims about vaccines here.
Copyright AFP 2017-2022. All rights reserved. Users can access and consult this website and use the share features available for personal, private, and non-commercial purposes. Any other use, in particular any reproduction, communication to the public or distribution of the content of this website, in whole or in part, for any other purpose and/or by any other means, without a specific licence agreement signed with AFP, is strictly prohibited. The subject matter depicted or included via links within the Fact Checking content is provided to the extent necessary for correct understanding of the verification of the information concerned. AFP has not obtained any rights from the authors or copyright owners of this third party content and shall incur no liability in this regard. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.