The Morrison Government’s decision to recommend the restricted use of the Astra-Zeneca vaccines was the right one. It was a good decision taken by the government based on expert advice.
It has caused problems, delays in the roll-out but it is easy to get caught up in the fear and anxiety of from a 24-hour news cycle. The success of the roll-out can only be measured a year from today, not in shrieking headlines on a daily basis.
Resist the urge to panic. Stay in touch with your general practitioner. Listen to the experts.
Most of all, we need to reject the misinformation that is spreading from the anti-vax industry who have found fertile ground for their conspiracy theories and outright lies in the wake of the government’s decision.
Last week, The Daily Telegraph caught out an anti-vaxxer “killing off” an intensive care doctor. The doctor was photographed having received her vaccine with an excited thumbs up. The photograph was posted on the doctor’s social media account.
The following day, an anti-vaxxer based in, guess where – Byron Bay posted, “Sadly, moments after her vaccination, this lady passed out and fell into a coma … she is still not conscious … doctors fear she will not recover.”
In reality, the doctor reported only a little fatigue in the 24-hour period after her shot of the vaccine. She didn’t miss any work. She continues to tend to the sick and injured in a hospital in the NSW’s northern rivers region.
This is more grist for the anti-vax mill. It is almost certainly true that anti-vaxxers have killed off more people than all of COVID-19 vaccinations combined.
Remember Margaret Keenan, the first woman to receive a COVID-19 vaccine? The anti-vaxxers initially claimed the now 91-year-old was a ‘crisis actor’. She had, the lies went, actually died in 2008 and obituaries were linked to the claims. It was an obvious con and anyone who bothered to read the obituaries in full would have realised the subject of the obit was another Margaret Keenan. Later, on social media they tried to kill her off again, but Margaret Keenan received her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on December 29, 2020 and she remains as fit as a fiddle.
In the distorted world of social media, it is easy to think of anti-vaxxers as almost insurmountable, millions of people, wringing their hands and swapping fictional horror stories online. Yes, it is a multi-billion dollar industry, surrounded as it is from the worst elements or the wellness industry who dismiss medical science, rational thought, and common sense all in one fell swoop.
But it would be a mistake to believe the numbers of anti-vax influencers are in the stratosphere.
In a report released last month, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate named the top twelve key entrepreneurs in the anti-vax industry, all of them US based, all of them generating anti-vaccine propaganda and exporting it to the world.
“Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 per cent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen,” the report said.
That’s 12 people flogging two thirds of the anti-vax lies. The trouble is that the anti-vax content of those twelve people hits millions of people, most of it indirectly through Facebook shares.
While it is true that social media companies have cracked down on anti-vax content and closed many accounts, it is a case of too little too late.
The so called “Disinformation Dozen” according to the CCDH are as follows: Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Ty and Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper and Kevin Jenkins.
Space does not permit a comprehensive analysis of each one, but they share many things in common. They are all grifters. They all have made repeated breaches of the terms of service of social media companies. They are often flogging products, sometimes supplements of little scientific value other than giving their addled consumers very expensive piss.
Ty Bollinger is a body builder. He flogs supplements. He and his wife made their bones, literally, in the wellness industry by peddling pseudoscience around cancer treatment. In 2015, he urged a teenage girl to reject chemotherapy for Hodgkins Lymphoma. His influence led to her going to Mexico for an alternative treatment. She’s dead now.
Joseph Mercola is or was a trained physician. He gave up on medical science, preferring the profits to be made from dietary supplements. He is constantly facing fines and warnings from the US Food and Drug Administration. In 2016, Mercola agreed to pay $USD5.3 million in restitution to patients after federal regulators pulled him up over false claims and suggestions of miracle cures he had made about tanning beds he sold. Always the dollars. Always the grift.
Robert F Kennedy Jnr, the son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of JFK is arguably the granddaddy of anti-vaxxers. Bearing the whiff of legitimacy from his days as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy has been caught out lying on multiple occasions when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic. Remember the nonsense about Bill Gates controlling us through a combination of vaccines and 5G technology? That laughable lie is directly attributable to Kennedy.
Christine Northrup is a qualified obstetrician who, like Mercola, prefers the riches to be made from direct sales of health supplements. She’s also dipped more than a toe into the QAnon rabbit hole - memo to QAnon influencers: You have been bilked by nerds, taken to the psychological cleaners by a couple of deeply disturbed human beings on a psychotic power trip.
The thing to remember about the anti-vaxxers is COVID-19 is their Alamo. An effective global roll out of COVID-19 vaccines and it is all over for them. Sure, they’ll keep hawking their own cons, but the recruitment drive will slow to a crawl and they’ll be left to shout their demented theories to the walls, flogging their worthless goods to shrinking markets.
Likewise, we have to see this as a war. A war against lies, a war against misinformation, a ferocious battle to safely get COVID-19 vaccines into enough arms so we can return to a form of pre-COVID-19 normal. The stakes are incredibly high and we cannot afford to give an inch.
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