QAnon believers spread false claims about COVID-19 vaccine touted by Trump
Caitlin Dickson
·Reporter
Tue, December 15, 2020, 10:11 AM CST
Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory have helped fuel a variety of falsehoods about the coronavirus and the efforts to contain it. But over the past few weeks, amid rapid advancements in the race to inoculate the public against COVID-19, the misinformation has begun to coalesce around a new narrative: the supposed risks of the coronavirus vaccines.
The fact that President Trump, QAnon’s hero, claims credit for developing the vaccines hasn’t impeded the spread of rumors that they are unnecessary at best, and dangerous at worst.
The latest round of conspiracy theories are especially pernicious, experts say, because they come from sources who purport to be — or in some cases actually are — physicians or researchers, albeit with views far outside the mainstream. Ahead of the U.S. vaccine rollout on Monday, Melanie Smith, head of analysis at the social media research firm Graphika, told Yahoo News that much of current QAnon conversation around covid vaccines seemed to be driven by scientists and doctors, including former employees of the pharmaceutical companies involved in developing the vaccines.
“We're seeing a whole host of influencers emerge that have scientific backgrounds, claiming to be former epidemiologists and microbiologists, who seem to be consistently some of the most mentioned accounts by QAnon supporters over the past few weeks,” Smith said.
Vaccine protesters join a "Stop the Steal" rally in support of President Donald Trump in Lansing, Mich., in November. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)Smith pointed in particular to two former Pfizer employees who co-authored a petition earlier this month calling for the European Medicines Agency to stop clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine in the European Union. The petition, which raised concerns about the potential for COVID-19 vaccine to cause infertility in women, was cited in a since-deleted blog post under the dangerously misleading and inaccurate headline: "Head of Pfizer research: Covid vaccine is female sterilization."
Though the post has been removed and thoroughly debunked, the sterilization rumor has persisted, circulated by QAnon and anti-vaccine accounts on social media and promoted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, along with other baseless claims about the vaccine.
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