Autopsy results on 6-year-old Anastasia Weaver could take several weeks. But it only took hours after his funeral this week for online anti-vaccine activists to baselessly blame the vaccine on COVID-19.
A prolific Twitter account posted Anastasia’s name and her smiling, dancing portrait in a tweet containing a syringe emoji. A Facebook user has sent a message to his mother, Jessica Day-Weaver, calling her a “murderer” for vaccinating her son.
In fact, the Ohio preschooler has had lifelong health problems since her premature birth, including epilepsy, asthma and frequent hospitalizations with respiratory viruses. “The doctors didn’t give us any information except because of all his chronic conditions. … It never occurred to her that it could be because of the vaccine,” Day-Weaver said of her daughter’s death.
But those facts didn’t count online, where Anastasia was quickly added to a growing list of hundreds of children, teens, athletes and celebrities whose unexpected deaths and injuries were wrongly attributed to COVID-19 vaccines. Using the hashtag #diedsuddenly, online conspiracy theorists have flooded social media with news stories, obituaries and GoFundMe pages in recent months, leaving grieving families struggling with lies.
He is the 37-year-old Brazilian TV presenter who collapsed in the air due to a congenital heart problem. The 18-year-old unvaccinated pilot died of a rare disease. The 32-year-old actress, who died of complications from a bacterial infection.
Use of the word “suddenly died” — or a misspelled version of it — has increased more than 740 percent in vaccine tweets in the past two months compared to the previous two months, according to media intelligence firm Zignal Labs in an analysis for The Associated. The press. The explosion of the phrase began with the debut of an online “documentary” of the same name in late November, giving strength to what experts define as a new and harmful shortcut.
“It’s kind of a group discussion, kind of a nudge,” said Renee DiResta, head of technical research at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “They’re taking something that’s a relatively routine way of describing something — people dying really unexpectedly — and then, by assigning it a hashtag, they’re bringing all these incidents together in one place.”
The campaign is causing damage beyond the Internet, said epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina.
“The real danger is that it eventually leads to real-world actions like not vaccinating,” said Jetelina, who tracks and analyzes COVID data for her blog, Your Local Epidemiologist.
Rigorous studies and real-world evidence from hundreds of millions of vaccines administered demonstrate that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Vaccination-related deaths are extremely rare, and the risks associated with not vaccinating are far greater than the risks of vaccination. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from making a series of false accusations against vaccines.
The film “Suddenly Dead” features a montage of headlines found on Google to falsely suggest that it proves that sudden deaths “never happened like this before.” The film has garnered more than 20 million views on an alternative video-sharing site, and its accompanying Twitter account posts more deaths and injuries daily.
An AP review of more than 100 tweets from the account in December and January found that claims about vaccine-related cases were largely unsubstantiated and, in some cases, contradicted by public information. Some of the people present died from genetic diseases, drug overdoses, complications from the flu or suicide. One died in a surfing accident.
The filmmakers did not respond to specific questions from the AP, instead issuing a statement referring to “an increase in sudden deaths” and a “PROVEN rate of excess deaths” without providing data.
The total number of deaths in the United States has been higher than expected since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in part from the virus, overdoses and other causes. COVID-19 vaccines have prevented nearly 2 million deaths in the United States in just the first year of use.
Some deaths exploited in the film predate the pandemic. Californian writer Dolores Cruz published an essay in 2022 about mourning her son, who died in a car accident in 2017. “Died Suddenly” used a screenshot of the film’s title, depicting his vaccine-related death.
“Without my permission, someone took his story to show a side, and I don’t appreciate that,” Cruz said in an interview. “His legacy and memory are tarnished.”
Others featured in the film survived but were forced to watch footage of their medical emergencies jumbled around the world. For Brazilian TV anchor Rafael Silva, who collapsed during an on-air report about a congenital heart defect, online misinformation sparked a wave of harassment even before the movie “Suddenly Dead” used the footage.
“I got messages saying I should die to serve as an example to other people who were still thinking about getting the vaccine,” Silva said.
Many of the online posts cite no evidence except that the deceased person had been vaccinated in the past, using a common disinformation strategy known as the post hoc fallacy, according to Jetelina.
“People assume that one thing caused another just because the first thing preceded the other,” he said.
There is also a grain of truth to some of the claims made by those who have suffered from heart disease – that the COVID-19 vaccines can cause rare problems with inflammation of the heart, myocarditis or pericarditis, especially in young men. Medical experts say these cases are usually mild and the benefits of immunization far outweigh the risks.
The narrative also used highlights such as Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin going into cardiac arrest during a game last month after taking a massive hit to the chest. But sudden cardiac arrest has long been one of the leading causes of death in the United States, and medical experts agree that the vaccine did not cause Hamlin’s injury.
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