Online trolls have reached a new level with their latest targeted cyberbullying campaign. In recent weeks, pregnant women have become a new target for the faceless crowd of antivaxxers, thanks to the increased popularity of posting “vaccine selfies” following the public availability of the new COVID-19 vaccine. But, as with anything on the internet, things quickly went sour.
Pregnant women have become the latest targets of online trolling, with many of them seeing their joyful vaccination posts cruelly turned into platforms for name calling and abuse. These attacks were even more difficult for women who shared their stories of pregnancy loss because the comments are falsely correlating the two unrelated events.
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Dr. Michelle Rockwell experienced the cruel attention of Internet trolls last week when she discovered that her history of pregnancy loss was being used as a warning against taking the vaccine during pregnancy, as the Daily Beast reported. Images taken from his popular Instagram account were used to spread cruel lies about how the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine that Rockwell received caused his miscarriage.
“Dec 21 she made it,” read the post. “January 24, she lost her baby. “
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Rockwell quickly accessed his Instagram account to resolve the misinformation. “First. This is bullshit. If someone really went to my IG and scrolled through my posts, they would see that I had an abortion three weeks before I got the vaccine,” she wrote next to an image that warned of the misinformation surrounding her loss. “I had my D&C 2 days after the vaccine, but my sweet baby was gone long before that.” We cannot imagine having to deal with the heartbreak of a pregnancy loss and then see that same loss manipulated to intimidate a pregnant woman. “Second, how soulless and predatory it is for someone to take someone’s heartbreak and change it to promote your own agenda. ”
Unfortunately, Rockwell was not the only one targeted in this way. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are full of topics spreading false information about the vaccine’s impacts on pregnancy, specifically targeting women who receive the vaccines and describing them as the reason behind their pregnancy losses. Instagram account cv19vaccinereactions (which somehow has over 100,000 followers) shared a screenshot of a Twitter post that seemed to link a recent vaccination and abortion, sharing the date of the injection, the date of the loss and a VAERS (Vaccine) Adverse Number of the Event Reporting System).
On Twitter, Dr. Candice Cody posted about having received the vaccination in the 35th week of pregnancy, saying how happy she was to be able to receive the first dose while she was pregnant and hoped that it would pass some of the antibodies to her baby. “Thank you for being part of the end of the pandemic,” she wrote.
The comment section of the post is full of baseless claims about the safety of the vaccine and what to receive during pregnancy said about Cody. @aspiringlockpic scolded Cody for receiving a “rushed” vaccine. “It must be magical. Good luck. You need this, ”they wrote. The user @ joelNicholas19 simply wrote, “fucking pycho”. These types of responses are exactly because so many medical professionals are using social media to share their stories, so that the public can see that those with medical training and education believe in both safety and effectiveness.
And, speaking of effectiveness. There are still doubts about the safety of receiving vaccination during pregnancy or breastfeeding, since none of the safety tests involved pregnant women. However, experts agree that the dangers of contracting COVID-19 during pregnancy pose a much greater risk, especially for those working on the front line, than any expected side effects. That is why so many mothers with medical training are lining up for the injection, and perhaps because most of the disagreement you hear comes from the bowels of social media.
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