One man's truth is another's misinformation and propaganda
It's what happens when you thoroughly politicize a pandemic
Of course, we’ve heard story after story. I mean, all these athletes dropping dead on the field, but we’re supposed to ignore that.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)
I suppose you could call the 21st century the “Post-Truth” era, a time when truth is no longer absolute or even universally recognized. No, truth is now subject to specific agendas and can be molded and adapted to support any case an individual is trying to make. “Truth” is fungible.
“Truth” is no longer dependent on being empirical or verifiable but rather on how many people believe it to be factual. “Truth,” at least in the 21st century, is much like a beauty or popularity contest- the more people who believe it, the more “true” something is. This is how we get people paying to ingest livestock dewormer over a proven, safe, and free COVID-19 vaccine.
Except that there are times when we still have to call “bullshit” on claims, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Donald Trump succeeded in thoroughly politicizing. In the case of Sen. Johnson, his claim that “all these athletes dropping dead on the field” relate to COVID-19 vaccines. His claim is every sense complete and utter bullshit. There’s no polite way to describe something so monstrously over the top and just plain wrong.
Johnson made this comment after he asserted that there have been “over 22,000 deaths reported in association with the [coronavirus] vaccines” — and then quickly adding “that doesn’t prove causation.”
We have explored before how Johnson routinely raises concerns about vaccines by citing data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Anyone can submit a report to VAERS, and the reports are not verified. The numbers are basically meaningless.
In this instance, we are more interested in his comment about “athletes dropping dead on the field.” His staff says, as with his references to VAERS, that Johnson is just asking questions, not making factual claims.
Here are the facts: claims such as Sen. Johnson’s have been repeatedly debunked. There’s simply nothing to them. Besides, if athletes were dropping dead from COVID-19 vaccines, it would stand to reason that this would be BIG news- and yet we’ve heard virtually nothing about this in mainstream media.
The claims began in shadowy, mysterious Right-wing Austrian websites with ties to the country’s Freedom Party. Somehow they made their way to Right-wing anti-vaxxers in this country and eventually to the brain of a US Senator prone to broadcasting conspiracy theories. It sounded like it could be true, it dovetailed with his preconceived notions and prejudiced…and therefore he treated them as gospel. In fact, they’re woven out of whole cloth and there’s no solid, credible evidence behind the claims.
None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Bupkis.
It’s true that myocarditis- a swelling of the heart muscle- has been reported as one of the rare but possible side effects of mRNA vaccines. But anti-vaxxers have taken a kernel of truth and turned it into a full-blown conspiracy theory. The truth is that the risk of myocarditis is 100 times higher from COVID-19 than from any of the mRNA vaccines.
But, as often happens, a lie can circumnavigate the globe twice and be well into its third circuit before the truth drags its sorry ass out of bed.
On June 12, during the Euro 2020 match between Denmark and Finland, 29-year-old Christian Eriksen suffered cardiac arrest shortly before halftime. Almost immediately, there was speculation online that the midfielder, who had seemed healthy, had a reaction to a coronavirus vaccine — even though his club football team, Inter Milan, said he had not been vaccinated.
Lubos Motl, a blogger and physicist with a history of making false claims about coronavirus vaccines, tweeted that Eriksen had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine 12 days earlier. He claimed his source was a radio interview with Inter Milan’s chief medic and cardiologist, an interview that never happened and was quickly denied by Inter Milan and Radio Sportiva.
Motl soon deleted his tweet, but not before it was retweeted by others (many of whom later had their Twitter accounts suspended). The claim was picked up and reposted on Facebook in several different languages, where it took on a life of its own.
(Inter Milan didn’t schedule vaccinations until July, during preseason training.)
In September, Austrian websites began posting stories with inflated and provocative claims making it sound as if the vaccines MAY be responsible for many unexplained deaths. The disinformation they spread lacked evidence and was based on neither fact nor truth, just a lot of provocative questions intended to lead readers to a conclusion- vaccines are dangerous and possibly deadly.
After Wochenblick focused on dead athletes, Report24 picked up the ball. On Oct. 28, under Huber’s byline, the website published what it claimed was “a long list of ‘suddenly’ deceased or seriously ill athletes,” more than 75 in the previous five months. Buried in the story was this caveat: “We do not claim that all of these people became ill and died because of the vaccination, nor that there is a proven connection in the case of vaccination.”
Of course, the disclaimer sounds good, but the information was presented in a way intended to lead a reader to the inescapable conclusion that vaccines had to be the cause of the deaths of athletes.
But, despite efforts to rebut what was clearly misinformation, the claims about athletes dropping dead on the field didn’t let up. They migrated to other corners of the Internet.
On Nov. 4, the HighWire tweeted a translation of the Austrian article to its more than 100,000 followers. The HighWire is associated with the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network, which is headed by Del Bigtree, a major voice in the anti-vaccination movement.
Two days later, Granite Grok — run by what it calls “fire-breathing, right-wing, hard-charging, gun-toting, opinionated, outspoken, rabble-rousing, letter-writing, radio microphone stomping, Conservatives and Rational Libertarians” — also posted about the Report24 article.
The report then spread across Facebook and on social media. On Nov. 10, it was fact-checked and labeled as false by PolitiFact as part of its partnership with Facebook. “The athletes listed in the German news story did not all die, nor did they all have heart attacks,” the fact check said, noting the caveat buried in the story.
The misinformation has spread so far that it’s impacted the English Premier League and its efforts to get players vaccinated.
It’s become a game of “Whack-a-Mole.” The truth is out there, to be certain, but the misinformation is insidious and so much easier to access. And who doesn’t want to believe what they read on Facebook?
That same month, the website Good Sciencing jumped on the bandwagon, posting a list of nearly 200 athletes and almost 100 deaths — which quickly grew. On Dec. 6, the popular right-wing website Gateway Pundit reported on an updated Good Sciencing list that now claimed nearly 300 athletes had collapsed or suffered cardiac arrests after getting a coronavirus vaccine in 2021, with many dying. That list, apparently assembled in part with help from a closed “sudden injuries and deaths” Telegram messenger group, was fact-checked by FactCheck.org and found riddled with errors.
Nevertheless, the list circulated “like wildfire” among players in Europe’s top soccer league, according to the New York Times, hampering vaccination efforts among players. Reports also spread that 108 FIFA soccer players had died in a six-month period in 2021. That was fact-checked as false by Reuters.
For fact checkers, it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. By late January, Good Sciencing claimed its list had grown to 577 players, with 352 dead. (Any close scrutiny finds links of deaths to a vaccine to be highly tenuous.) On Jan. 21, the HighWire posted a new video, titled “Healthy athletes are still inexplicably collapsing.”
Before long, Sen. Ron Johnson is spouting this misinformation as if it’s Gospel, embarrassing his staff and forcing them into damage control mode. Of course, Sen. Johnson is a repository of half-truths, lies, and conspiracy theories on the best of days. He either doesn’t know or care to distinguish between truth and lies, as long as what comes out of his mouth makes him look good.
Of course, Sen. Johnson is hardly the only prominent person in this country spouting this nonsense. John Stockton, a Hall of Fame former point guard for the NBA’s Utah Jazz, has falsely claimed that more than 100 professional athletes have dropped dead mid-competition from COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, he appeared in an anti-vax documentary in which he claimed that his “significant amount of research” has led him to believe that COVID-19 precautions are overdone.
Stockton, a Gonzaga alumnus who’s universally revered in Spokane, has seen his basketball season tickets revoked for refusing to comply with the school’s indoor mask mandate. Full credit to Gonzaga officials for standing up and doing the right thing, of course, but what is it that allows Stockton to believe that he should be above the rules? Is it his “significant amount of research?” Does his time on Facebook lead him to think that he knows more than the doctors and other scientists who’ve spent years studying infectious diseases?
There’s no reason and even less of an excuse for people like Sen. Johnson and John Stockton, people who really should know better, to be spreading misinformation and utter bullshit. I don’t say that lightly, but that misinformation and utter bullshit can result in people dying. Yet too many folks pass it along as if it’s a dictate from On High.
This isn’t about liberty or personal freedom. It’s about trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. It’s about trying to save lives. Even if you don’t care about your own, there are those around you who do care about theirs.
There are times when it can’t be all about “I.” Sometimes it has to be about “we.” Sometimes we have to face the fact that we need to look out for one another, that we have a much better chance together than we do going it alone.
It shouldn’t be about stupid, aggressively ignorant people passing along misinformation because they’re too arrogant and full of themselves to evaluate from where that information originates.
Not all “truth” is created the same. The sad thing about this pandemic is that it’s revealed that some folks have no problems spreading “truth” that can, will, and actually has resulted in needless death and suffering. They’ll never take any responsibility for it, of course, nor will they ever be held accountable for their lunacy and ludicrousness, but they have blood on their hands nonetheless.
If we’ve learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that 1) stupidity kills, and 2) Facebook is not a repository of medical knowledge.
Natural selection has, sadly, been a large part of the body count in a way that could’ve easily been prevented. Nearly a million victims later, COVID-19 has proven that it doesn’t care if you believe in it or not.
Remember: desperately wanting to believe something is true doesn’t make it so. Your life may depend on how you react to that statement.
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