Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Conspiracy Theories Are Supercharged Through Anti-Vaxxers
January 21, 2023
By Bill Berkowitz
Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories continue to course through the veins of anti-vaxxers, Republican Party activists, MAGA supporters, many conservative evangelicals, and an assortment of trolls, hustlers and grifters. By reinstating Covid misinformation accounts, Elon Musk’s Twitter has helped to “supercharge” the most dangerous Covid disinformation, a WIRED story recently noted. “It has opened the floodgates for conspiracy theorizing and misinformation,” Timothy Graham, a misinformation expert at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia, told WIRED’s Lydia Morrish.
Anti-vaxxers can be dangerous, often bombarding vaccine supporters with threats and vile messages, re-traumatizing families and labeling research scientists as “enemies of the state.”
As The Week’s Justin Klawins recently commented that anti-vax movements are nothing new, “hav[ing] a long history among conspiracy circles going back hundreds of years, with hesitancy evolving soon after Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in the 1790s.”
The deaths of sports reporter Grant Wahl while covering the World Cup tournament in Qatar, musician Lisa-Marie Presley, from a suspected heart attack, and the cardiac arrest suffered by Damar Hamlin, have inflamed the anti-vax movement. “The ‘sudden deaths’ trope is perhaps the most salient of the false Covid narratives circulating now, and the most dangerous from a public health perspective,” said Graham (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-sudden-death-vaccine-conspiracies).
When the Buffalo Bills’ defensive back Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a Monday Night Football game, anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists immediately went to work, filling their social media platforms with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
This rush to social media commentary fills a "data void," Kolina Koltai, a misinformation and social media researcher who until very recently, worked for Twitter, told NPR’s Lisa Hagen (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/10/1147969504/how-damar-hamlins-collapse-fueled-anti-vaccine-conspiracy-theories). Koltal “was watching the game and immediately braced herself for incoming anti-vaccine narratives. ‘We've seen this trope applied over and over again, not just to athletes, but any sort of celebrity malady.’”
For example, bodybuilder Louis Uridel tweeted that Hamlin's cardiac arrest was caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. "24 year old elite athletes in the NFL don't just have cardiac arrest in the middle of a prime time game," read Uridel’s tweet. "This is squarely on the back of every single person who pushed that poison, required it, and shamed people who didn't get it."
“Hamlin's agent told USA TODAY there is no known link between the COVID-19 vaccine and the athlete's injury, calling the baseless claim ‘ridiculous.’ Multiple medical experts also said it is unlikely the vaccine caused Hamlin's cardiac arrest, given the long history of cardiac issues in other athletes predating the COVID-19 vaccines,” to USA TODAY’s Sudiksha Kochi reported.
Justin Klawins of The Week reported (https://theweek.com/sports/1019977/how-the-sports-world-has-fueled-anti-vaccine-conspiracies) that Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, who has been a heavy promulgator of anti-vax conspiracies, tweeted after Hamlin was taken to the hospital, ‘This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.’”
As might be expected, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson got in on the action.
The Week’s Klawins reported that “A far-right podcaster named Stew Peters even created an entire documentary film called Died Suddenly, which purportedly presented evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine was inherently dangerous and caused people to, as the title suggests, die suddenly. However, an analysis of the film by Canada's McGill University was able to debunk the majority of its claims, saying the film ‘raids online obituaries ... and stitches a pseudoscientific horror story.’”
Klawins pointed out that Hamlin’s condition “can likely be attributed to a rare condition called common cordis, but that didn't stop unfounded speculation by some who attributed his heart stoppage to the COVID-19 vaccine.”
According to The Atlantic’s Benjamin Mazur, a physician specializing in pathology and laboratory medicine, “Factcheckers have repeatedly assessed these [die suddenly] claims and found them to be without merit. Jonathan Drezner, a sports-medicine physician who studies sudden deaths in athletes, told media outlets last year that he was ‘not aware of any COVID-19 vaccine-related athletic death.’”
As NPR’s Lisa Hagen comments, “The impacts of vaccine-related mis- and disinformation don't hit all at once, Koltai explains. They grow over time with repeated exposure. Hamlin's collapse happened to follow a recent period of heightened activity from anti-vaccine influencers.”
Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has seen America’s anti-vax conspiracy theories spread to other countries. "The U.S. is good at exporting its culture. We export music. We export our movies. We're now exporting this," Hotez told NPR’s Hagen. "You're starting to see the anti-vaccine lobby attack the introduction of new malaria vaccines on the African continent, using the same kind of phony baloney arguments."
Epidemiologist and infectious disease physician Celine Gounder, whose husband sports journalist Grant Wahl died suddenly while covering the World Cup tournament in Qatar has felt the the impact of disinformation mongers: "Disinformation is a business model. Make no mistake about it. And these are people who are trying to make money, who are trying to gain social media followers or subscribers on substack or some kind of social status or power. And that really is just retraumatizing, not just me and my family, but others who have been victims of this kind of behavior."