Since the United States began launching coronavirus vaccines, many Americans have been looking for information about when, where and how they and their loved ones could get a vaccine. The question of who is first in line and why is inevitable.
But a small vocal minority began frantically trying to find something darker and nonexistent: evidence that these vaccines against COVID-19 started killing people.
“Comprehensive list of COVID vaccine-related deaths?” a Reddit user posted on a conspiracy theory forum recently. “Is anyone already assembling one?”
“Choose a date and time when the first death record of someone who got the vaccine [sic], ”Another user posted. “To get a bonus, which news site will advertise this?”
Antivaxxer rhetoric has for many months prepared some Americans to mistakenly believe that the COVID-19 vaccines will kill people, that the powers that be will suppress them and that they should hunt and share evidence of this alleged outrage. Experts in antivaxxer rhetoric and conspiracy theories fear that this wild hunt for deaths and disasters could lead reasonable but concerned people to conspiratorial rabbit holes, ultimately hampering efforts to contain this nightmare pandemic.
The current search for deaths is so off track that even some of the old guard skeptics about vaccines are moving away from the frenzy.
“I heard reports that there were cases of anaphylaxis with two [resultant] deaths so far in England, ”a Reddit user, who declined to give his real name, told The Daily Beast, explaining why they posted a call for updates on alleged vaccine deaths.
The user, who posted denied talking points about how vaccines that require cold storage contain antifreeze, said he saw others on social media saying that the few cases of anaphylaxis linked to doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were treated quickly and effectively. , resulting in zero deaths.
That’s true. But “these are the rumors I’m trying to avoid” by posting a call for more death stories, added the ghost death hunter.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the only two currently authorized for emergency use in the United States, can have some side effects, such as pain at the injection site and mild fatigue and fever symptoms that can last for a day or two. They also produced, as Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist at Baylor College of Medicine told The Daily Beast, “a greater than expected number of allergic reactions”. The CDC recently reported that on December 18, six people had anaphylactic episodes shortly after receiving a dose, an allergic reaction that can be fatal if left untreated.
However, health officials are well aware of this minor risk and are prepared to address it. No official entity – or anyone removed from the world of radical antivaxxer misinformation – has registered a single case of death caused by the COVID-19 vaccine, or even linked, to date.
“Vaccines in general seem to have a good safety profile,” said Hotez.
Of course, it was virtually inevitable that antivaxxers, who have a long history of spurious vaccines connecting deaths, would go hunting for COVID-19 vaccine deaths. Some seem to have started researching and promoting sound tales as soon as vaccine testing began.
Already in April, posts appeared on social media claiming that one of the first participants in vaccine tests conducted by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford died after receiving a dose. She does not. It was also unclear whether, as a randomized trial participant, she received a dose of the vaccine or placebo. During the spring and summer, clearly false claims also emerged from COVID-19 vaccines killing people in Guinea, children in Senegal and four children in some unspecified part of the world.
Antivaxxers tend to focus on twisting hands that are based on established truth. Thus, the totally unfounded death allegations were left in the background this spring and summer, complaining and hesitating about the use of new mRNA vaccination techniques by Moderna and Pfizer, which were actually unproven technologies; some antivaxxers claimed that they could somehow transform humans. That changed last month to the fear advertisement about the risks of paralysis linked to the Pfizer vaccine, triggered when some people developed Bell’s palsy after the injection. (Bell’s palsy is usually a temporary condition, and these cases were not really linked to vaccinations.)
However, in the race for FDA clearance for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, stories about allergic reactions in test participants and about deaths during testing have combined to fuel a new wave of highly concentrated fear spread. The facts: Two people who received the Pfizer vaccine and six people who received Moderna died during their respective tests. However, they all seemed to die from totally unrelated causes.
In the past few days, antivaxxers have also adhered to the CDC report mentioned above, which noted that out of more than 110,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine they examined by December 18, more than 3,000 people had reactions that left them “unable to perform normal daily activities “Antivaxxers have suggested that this proves that the reaction risks associated with vaccines are incredibly dangerous – and will cause more deaths than COVID-19, which has already killed at least 330,000 Americans.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment on this report or its antivaxxer readings. However, Hotez noted that these more than 3,000 reactions likely consisted of symptoms of low fever and other mild and normal reactions to the vaccine.
Jonathan Berman, a physician at the New York Institute of Technology who studied antivaxxers communities, told The Daily Beast that as soon as antivaxxers cling to a theory, they start to get involved in what I call anomaly hunting. “Basically, like most other conspiracy theorists, instead of scrutinizing and testing a hypothesis, they just go in search of, and start promoting, facts and narratives that support your idea.
As soon as people began to raise concerns about vaccine reaction deaths, the search for cases began.
In the third week of December, antivaxxers found and frantically began sharing images from a Facebook chat of someone claiming that their aunt, a nurse in Alabama, had died a day after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. These posts did not contain verifiable details.
Still, on December 16, the Alabama Department of Public Health called all hospitals in the state and found that the story was not true. But that just made the story turn into hungry circles for evidence of their doubts and beliefs, with new narratives arguing that the nurse in question was just in Alabama and was actually working in South Carolina when she died. Or that the story was actually about a nurse in Arizona and someone made a typo in a message. They insisted that their hunts yielded rich red meat.
Health officials in Arizona and South Carolina told The Daily Beast that they did not report anyone’s death after receiving the COVID-19 vaccination.
“When you don’t have much to go on, you try to hold on to any small piece of support for your narrative that you can,” Hotez explained about the persistence of that rumor. “You explode.”
In the past few days, antivaxxers looking for evidence of their hunches have brought up several other rumors along the same lines. Most notably, on December 17, nurse Tiffany Dover of CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, received a dose of the vaccine and passed out 17 minutes later – all while on camera. She explained that she sometimes passes out in reaction to pain, a vasovagal syncope answer that is not unusual or dangerous.
“But it was a dramatic video,” noted Berman, who antivaxxers hungry for evidence of danger could point out, claiming that she was lying and that in fact she had some kind of dangerous reaction.
“People tend to believe what they see, and seeing someone pass out is scary. This causes a visceral reaction in the intestine, ”said Berman. For antivaxxers who sell a point, “this is a powerful tool”.
So the antivaxxers started following Dover online, looking for any trace of possible evidence that something bad actually happened to her. They claimed that nobody who passes out on receiving an injection can become a nurse, which is absurd. They claimed that the fact that she did not post on social media in the days following the shooting was suspect – all the while chasing her accounts for some kind of statement. And finally they found the death certificate of someone with his name and age who lived in Higdon, Alabama, 28 miles from Chattanooga, on a records search site.
Dover is not dead. On Saturday, your employer Tweeted that she was home and well, but wanted to keep her privacy. On Monday, they noticed that she was working in shifts and showed a video of her and other employees. A public health officer from Tennessee also told The Daily Beast that they had no records of anyone who received a COVID-19 vaccine in the state dying for any reason related to the vaccine.
Radical anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists looking for evidence of their beliefs, however, “don’t want this tool to be taken away,” Berman noted. So, instead of retreating in Dover, the first named death that they persistently tried to claim, they said they would not believe she was alive until she made a statement with proof of date and time. They also said they would not believe her if she said she was fine, suspecting that she was paid. And many of them firmly believe that her video at work is a fake deep supplement or a body double.
“Tiffany Dover’s hair has a different tone and thickness, folded differently on her head, covered mouth, and you can’t see her ice-blue eyes,” argued a post on Telegram, criticizing Monday’s video. “They pushed the crisis actor forward [of the group of nurses in the video,] too.”
“This is further evidence of the cover-up of Tiffany Dover’s death … Vaccinations kill.”
None of the experts surveyed by The Daily Beast have been able to trace the origins of these claims, and groups skeptical about vaccination also say they don’t know where they come from. Some of these groups, according to a recent report, are apparently actively plotting social media campaigns to exaggerate the side effects of vaccines and alienate people from them. But not even they registered or promoted any allegations of death from vaccine, although they are open to the idea that these jabs could prove lethal.
Rita Shreffler of Children’s Health Defense, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told the Daily Beast that they “believe the Tiffany death hoax is misinformation. We don’t know where it comes from. We repress it whenever we see it. “
Gorski believes that the search and proliferation of stories of deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine are just beginning and will heat up as the vaccine reaches the general population.
This is deeply worrying, because even people who generally rely on vaccines are scared now, thanks to the rapid and highly politicized development of Moderna and Pfizer products. This fear and instability, Berman argued, leaves millions of Americans susceptible to conspiracy theories that they might otherwise have ignored.
That is why, Berman said, we need to do more to recognize this growing type of misinformation and address it with compelling messages that reflect and reinforce real reality and “that reaches people before they fall into the rabbit hole of the conspiracy.”
Convincing them of the safety of the vaccine, once they have done so, is much more difficult.