Céline Gounder was reeling. Her husband of 21 years, Grant Wahl, had died suddenly while covering the World Cup in Qatar. Despite a disorienting and painful flurry of initial speculation and conspiracies, Gounder waited to learn from doctors and experts what had killed Grant.
But as she did, in the midst of her sadness and grief, messages started streaming in.
“Now you understand that you killed your poor husband. Karma is a bitch.”
Gounder received similar sentiments from countless strangers, social media trolls and conspiracy theorists, who all had one thing in common: They were anti-vaxxers who baselessly blamed Wahl’s untimely death on the COVID-19 vaccine.
Gounder, along with the world, would eventually learn from top pathologists at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner that Wahl died from a ruptured aorta — not his vaccination status. It wasn’t COVID-related. It was “nothing nefarious,” as she put it.
But nevertheless, the anti-vaxxers attacked, prompting a desperate and frustrated Gounder to appear on news shows and podcasts to set the record straight. Just this weekend she penned an essay in the New York Times. And she tweeted on Monday: “My husband @GrantWahl’s legacy was one of social justice through sports journalism. It is morally reprehensible for vaccine dis-informationists to exploit his death for their profit.”
See, Gounder wasn’t just a grieving widow trying to spare her late husband from the abuse of a rabid group of conspiracy trolls happy to use someone else’s tragedy to push their propaganda.
She is a physician and medical journalist. Her specialization, in fact, is infectious diseases and global health. Not only did she know a thing or two about vaccines, she was a member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board transition team of then-incoming President Joe Biden.
She’d already been the target of rape and death threats during the pandemic, as so many female public health officials were, but now it was her husband’s death that was driving the hate.
Wahl and Gounder have hardly been the only victims of this grotesque and deceitful exploitation. Immediately after Buffalo Bills’ safety Damar Hamlin suddenly suffered a cardiac arrest during a game, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ignorantly tweeted, “Before the covid vaccines we didn’t see athletes dropping dead on the playing field like we do now… Time to investigate the covid vaccines.”
Newsmax personality Emerald Robinson also weighed in: “Everybody knows what happened to Damar Hamlin because it’s happened to too many athletes around the world since COVID vaccination was required in sports.”
And Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on the air the day after Hamlin’s collapse to interview a noted anti-vaxxer about the “rise in young athletes with heart issues.”
There’s no science behind these claims that athletes have been dropping in record numbers since the COVID vaccine was introduced. But that doesn’t matter to the anti-vaccine quacks and grifters. When Danish footballer Christian Eriksen collapsed due to a cardiac episode during a soccer game in 2021, anti-vaxxers immediately blamed the COVID vaccine — except, as it turned out, Eriksen had not been vaccinated.
It’s not just athletes. A former colleague and friend of mine, ABC News producer Dax Tejera, died of a heart attack at 37 just before Christmas. As we mourned his shocking and tragic passing, anti-vaxxers jumped in with tweets like, “Was he one of those who are double triple vaccinated? They’re dropping like fly’s [sic].”
The depths to which these cretins will sink is seemingly limitless. When Amanda Makulec, a health data visualization designer, lost her three-month-old son, she wrote about her loss to avoid painful questions from colleagues and friends like, “How’s your baby?” But people she didn’t know on social media quickly pounced.
“Within a day, a stranger had gone through my old tweets and found confirmation that I had been vaccinated against COVID-19 during my pregnancy.” The stranger posted a side-by-side of her vaccine tweet and her baby’s death, writing “safe…and effective.”
Trolls called her a “murderer” and “dumbest mother ever.”
In addition to being soulless ghouls, anti-vaxxers are having a dangerous and significant impact by baselessly connecting certain high-profile deaths — and even those of ordinary people — to COVID vaccines.
Gounder writes that not only do these “disinformation profiteers” “re-traumatize families,” but that “they’re also at least in part responsible for the return of polio to the United States and the fact that so many children in Ohio are suffering from measles right now.”
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could cruelly taunt a grieving widow. Or how an actual lawmaker could use her platform to spread lies about a vaccine as a young athlete is rushed to a hospital. Or how a whole group of people could exploit a tragic death to push conspiracy theories that are endangering actual lives.
And yet, unimaginably, here we are.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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