Anti-Vaccination activists - death by ignorance!

Of all the ways for somebody to die this one is one of the most ignorant. This thread doesn't seek to pour scorn on anybody's demise, but raises the spectre of what can happen to those who think they know better!

sorryantivaxxer.com | stories of anti-vaxxers who died from COVID.
Too many to list, read it and weep. Endless antivaxx sentiments and online tirades, resulting in death or brutal experiences of Covid-19. Many with long-covid.

Prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist dies from Covid after saying only ‘idiots’ get vaccinated | The Independent
"Cirsten Weldon, who had tens of thousands of followers on right-wing social media networks, used her influence to drive people away from vaccines. She was a vocal critic of coronavirus mitigation efforts and at one point said that Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, “needs to be hung from a rope”.

The Daily Beast reports that in one video, Ms Weldon harassed people waiting in line to get the coronavirus vaccine.
“The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” she yelled in the video. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!”

Ms Weldon began showing symptoms that she had been infected by Covid-19 in late December. Her final video shows her coughing and struggling to get through a rant about patriots overthrowing the US government. During the video she complained that she was exhausted.

She was admitted to the hospital three days after the video was posted. During her stay at the California hospital she posted photos of herself wearing an oxygen mask, claiming she had a “bacterial pneumonia”.

In one post to the social network Telegram, she said she had refused to take “Dr Fauci's Remdesivir”.

On Friday, it was revealed that she had died.

Ms Weldon is the latest right-wing media figure to die from the virus after becoming prominent for denying its danger."

"A group of conspiracy theorists who attended the ReAwaken America rally in Dallas – which included prominent right-wing figures like Alex Jones, Eric Trump, and Michael Flynn – began exhibiting Covid-19 symptoms and claimed that they had been the victims of an anthrax attack.

One of the attendees, conspiracy radio host Doug Kuzma, died after being found passed out in his home. It was ultimately determined he died from Covid-19."

Another QAnon adherent, Robert David Steele, died from the virus shortly after he posted a photo of himself wearing an oxygen mask and claiming he would never take the vaccine.

 

A trio of conservative radio hosts died of Covid. Will their deaths change vaccine resistance? (nbcnews.com)
"First it was Dick Farrel. Then Phil Valentine. Most recently, Marc Bernier. Just within the past month, those three conservative radio hosts — all unvaccinated critics of inoculation efforts — died after contracting Covid.

Will their deaths help sway any minds of unvaccinated listeners or the broader segment of conservatives resistant to the shots? Some fellow personalities think so — although the optimism is limited.

Each had publicly either mocked vaccination or derided broader vaccination efforts. Bernier, who called himself "Mr. Anti-Vax," said on Twitter that the Biden administration's push for vaccine intake was Nazi-esque. Farrel posted to Facebook in July: "why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks, where the virus came from and the death toll?" And Valentine questioned why he should get the shots and risk side effects when he was at low risk of death. Before they died, Farrel and Valentine changed their postures."

Read More HERE

 

Lots of candidates for the Darwin Award.

The conspiracy theory types are the ones I find most amusing.

 

The argument put forth about it being no worse than the flu and only affecting the elderly with comorbidity!
Anti-vaxxer mother and daughter die from Covid in Belfast hospital | Coronavirus | The Guardian
"An anti-vaxxer mother and her daughter died just days apart in a Belfast hospital after they contracted Covid-19, leaving their family “devastated”.

The BBC reported that Sammie-Jo Forde, 32, died in the Ulster hospital on Saturday, where she had been treated on the same ward as her mother, Heather Maddern, 55, who died on 31 August. Maddern had shared a number of Covid conspiracy theories before her death, MailOnline reported, as well as a post about nurses facing dismissal if they refused the jab. She also shared videos from Candace Owens, a conservative commentator and activist from the US, on how to respond if your employer forces you to be vaccinated, and another from a woman arguing against children being jabbed. Maddern’s funeral took place on 13 September, while Forde’s has been arranged for 20 September.

“I never, never thought in my life I would bury my daughter,” McAllister told the BBC. He said he believed his daughter had no underlying health conditions. “She’s a 32-year-old healthy girl and she took heart failure at the end because she just couldn’t cope.”"

 

Somehow, the newest evidence suggests that 70% of additional deaths were caused by the mRNA shots. These weren't vaccinations, they were science experiments.

 

More on Farrel:
Florida radio and Newsmax host who opposed Covid vaccine dies of Covid complications (nbcnews.com)
"Farrel was a vocal and staunch advocate against the coronavirus vaccines, which he posted about on social media, once calling them "bogus." He also railed against figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he called a "lying freak."

However, after he contracted Covid-19, friends said, Farrel's attitude about the vaccines and the virus changed, WPTV reported.

"COVID took one of my best friends! RIP Dick Farrel. He is the reason I took the shot. He texted me and told me to 'Get it!' He told me this virus is no joke and he said, 'I wish I had gotten it!'" Amy Leigh Hair, a friend of Farrel's, wrote on Facebook."

 

A sad, stupid waste of lives.

 

LA man who mocked Covid-19 vaccines dies of virus - BBC News
"A California man who mocked Covid-19 vaccines on social media has died after a month-long battle with the virus. Stephen Harmon, a member of the Hillsong megachurch, had been a vocal opponent of vaccines, making a series of jokes about not having the vaccine.

"Got 99 problems but a vax ain't one," the 34-year-old tweeted to his 7,000 followers in June. He was treated for pneumonia and Covid-19 in a hospital outside Los Angeles, where he died on Wednesday. In the days leading up to his death, Mr Harmon documented his fight to stay alive, posting pictures of himself in his hospital bed.

"Please pray y'all, they really want to intubate me and put me on a ventilator," he said. In his final tweet on Wednesday, Mr Harmon said he had decided to go under intubation."

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/anti-vaxxer-covid-death-marc-bernier-phil-valentine-dick-farrel-b1911351.html

“What are my odds of getting Covid? They’re pretty low,” conservative talk radio host Phil Valentine wrote in December of last year. Putting his odds of dying should he contract the virus at “probably way less than one percent,” Valentine — a longtime fixture of Nashville airwaves — stressed that he was “not an anti-vaxxer. I’m just using common sense.”

Defying his own odds, last week Phil Valentine died of Covid-19. He was the first of three conservative talk radio hosts to pass away from the virus this month. “He regrets not being more adamant about getting the vaccine,” Valentine’s brother Mark told The Tennessean. “Look at the dadgum data.”

That data is stark. We are currently in a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Folks living in states with low vaccination rates are four times more likely to be hospitalized by Covid and five times more likely to die of it than those living in states with higher vaccination rates.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” the right is fond of saying, and that is certainly true here. So many anti-vaccine activists are falling ill and even dying from Covid that an entire subreddit, HermanCainAward, was created to document the growing number of fatalities. Named for the former Republican presidential candidate who contracted and died from Covid following a Trump rally last year, it is a stark indication of how the misinformation spread by right-wing media is costing not only its audience, but its stars, their lives.

Among those fatalities include two Florida rightwing shock jocks. Dick Farrel passed away on August 4, while the death of Daytona radio host Marc Bernier was announced on Saturday. Farrel and Bernier were stridently against vaccines, with Bernier comparing vaccination efforts to Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, in Texas 30-year-old anti-vaccine activist Caleb Wallace also died of Covid over the weekend, leaving behind his pregnant wife and three other children."

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/30/life-tragic-death-john-eyers-fitness-fanatic-who-refused-covid-vaccine
"In the age of social media, we don’t even need to have met the people we trust as much as established experts. “That’s why social media is so dangerous,” says Stafford. “Because people share that emotional connection with influencers they might never have met. But it’s an asymmetrical intimacy. I may think I know that vlogger and they are talking to me. But really they’re talking to millions of people – and the advertisers generating them their revenue.

“The best thing that people can do is realise that social media platforms are fundamentally unsafe environments to gain facts about a pandemic that might kill you,” says Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “Social media contains vast amounts of misinformation that mingles seamlessly with good information. The misinformation might kill you.”

"“John mentioned to me once that one of his beliefs was that we shouldn’t live in a climate of fear around Covid,” says Jenny. “If you were young and fit and well, you’d be fine.”

In this assumption, John wasn’t entirely wrong. He was extremely unlikely to die from Covid, as a physically fit 42-year-old with no underlying conditions. The Covid mortality rate for all 40-year-olds is about one in every 1,490 people infected, while for 40-year-olds with no underlying health conditions it is about one in every 28,500 people infected, although these figures vary between scientific papers."

 

Texas GOP official who mocked COVID-19 dies of virus | Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Republican official who mocked COVID in final Facebook post dies of virus in Texas BY MIKE STUNSON UPDATED AUGUST 06, 2021 8:38 AM H. Scott Apley, a member of the Republican party in Galveston, Texas, died of COVID-19 on Wednesday.

H. Scott Apley, who according to the Galveston News was a member of the Galveston County Republican Party and Dickinson City council, was 45 years old. In his last Facebook post July 30, Apley shared a Twitter post mocking COVID-19. “In 6 months, we’ve gone from the vax ending the pandemic, to you can still get Covid even if vaxxed, to you can pass Covid onto others even if vaxxed, to you can still die of Covid even if vaxxed, to the unvaxxed are killing the vaxxed,” the post read. Apley was admitted to a Galveston hospital two days after that post with pneumonia-like symptoms, according to a GoFundMe page. He tested positive for COVID-19 and was placed on a ventilator. He died around 3 a.m. Wednesday, according to the GoFundMe."

THIS sort of thing is being caused by all the noise generated online by antivax posters on social media.

 

'Crisis actor' conspiracy theory: How anti-vax activists targeted a Covid patient - BBC News
"A few days after Christmas, Henry Dyne nonchalantly checked his phone while ordering a couple of drinks at a bar. As he unlocked it, he was greeted by more than 600 notifications. He began to despair - it was something he'd experienced before - but, says the 29-year-old from Surrey, this time was "a hundred times worse". The messages were nasty, abusive, even threatening. "Next time you're in a hospital bed," one read, "it won't be with Corona."

Unlucky and in hospital
Dyne's misfortune began when he contracted the virus in summer 2021. He hadn't been vaccinated, he said, thinking that his relative youth would make any infection pretty mild. But the IT consultant - who also enjoys posting jokes on his Instagram account - was unlucky. "Every time I'd sleep, I'm not sleeping. I'm all over the place. And then one day, I just woke up at about six in the morning and said I'm calling an ambulance," he says. "The scariest part was the fever and the hallucinations."

In July, he ended up in hospital, hooked up to an oxygen tank, and spoke to BBC journalists who were visiting to report on a rise in Covid cases in young people for the News at Six. "I just thought it probably would be quite good to go on record and say 'this is my experience, it is a lot worse than I thought, so get the vaccine'," he says.
He didn't think he'd soon find himself the focus of a group of anti-vaccine activists. It was the start of allegations that he was a so-called "crisis actor".

"Not only death from COVID-19, we also get the abuse of all the crazies! Now this guy is not in the situation necessarily through ignorance, but during the pandemic the antivax noise routinely suggested all the young were safe and shouldn't get vaccinated! Many will remember the unspeakable scum who did something similar to the parents of the Sandy Hook victims!

 

This is an ongoing symptom with conspiracy-theorists! An utterly moronic claim (crisis actors) that involves disgusting personal abuse at the staff of hospitals and the victims lying in their beds struggling for their lives. It should be classified as a hate-crime and the perps brought to justice. These cowardly, nameless people hide behind internet anonymity, trolling people because they blundered into a belief system, brought to them by antivaxx activists.

 

More on the award given to those people who show ignorance in the face of science and believe questionable sources over academic ones:

https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2024/paper/79797
"Hosted on the Reddit website, the “Herman Cain Award” (HCA) subreddit is an online community that tracks COVID-19-related deaths among COVID-deniers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers who had publicly denied the reality of the virus and/or the effectiveness of public health measures against it. In the fall of 2021, the subreddit gained media exposure and public notoriety for celebrating the deaths of disproportionately conservative and Republican victims of the virus.

This notoriety led to the rapid growth of the community—today, with nearly 500,000 members—which is symptomatic of a society deeply divided by crisis. However, the HCA community also includes a sub-category, called the “Redemption Award,” that is conferred to nominees who publicly changed their minds about COVID-19, typically because of near-death encounters with the virus. This talk draws on a broader examination of 68 “Redemption Awards,” focusing on transformative learning experiences as narrated by former COVID-deniers in their encounters with the virus."

 

Borrowed the saying from Larry Niven but it is sooooo accurate!

 

Wellllll... only if they never reproduced. Considering 30s was on the young side, hard to say if it made a difference.

 

The absolute undeniable fact is that 96% of all that died were elderly and suffered from 4 co-morbid ailments...obesity being one of the main culprits. The 'victims' you are citing were not healthy young people...they were morbidly obese.


People like that die from complications from common colds every year.

meanwhile, young healthy athletes that were forced/coerced into taking the shots have been dropping dead all across the globe.

 

Bafflingly miles from the point!

Not so much if they get vaccinated!

And a total crock. Take your off-topic antivax nonsense to a relevant thread. There's about 50 of them for you to dump it in.

 

A ridiculous claim given the evidence.

 

Where's your proof for your absurd claims?

 

Trouble is they decided that all vaccines were suspect.


they have obviously never seen a case of tetanus

 

Evolution in action

 

And “Long Covid?”
https://aci.health.nsw.gov.au/statewide-programs/critical-intelligence-unit/post-acute-sequelae

 

Why don't you present evidence supporting your claims?

The individual is...? What did he or she say? Do you know to link sources?

Still nothing to support your claims.

 

I am 70 and a cancer survivor twice and COVID did not kill me. I did the Regeneron shots and they worked great for me