A mother has been targeted by anti-vaxxers after her six-year-old daughter passed away, making unfounded claims that she died because she had been vaccinated against Covid-19.
Anastasia Weaver was born in 2016 and died on 25 January in the emergency room of a local hospital in Ohio.
While the results of the autopsy may take weeks before it establishes a cause of death, online anti-vaxxers began claiming, without evidence, that Anastasia died because she had been vaccinated.
The attacks started only hours after her funeral after a Twitter account shared the six-year-old’s name and photo in a post with the emoji of a syringe.
The mother, Jessica Day-Weaver, from Boardman, Ohio, was told by a Facebook user over messenger that she was a “murderer” because her daughter had been vaccinated.
Anastasia had severe health issues since she was born prematurely, such as epilepsy and asthma, and she was often in the hospital struggling with respiratory viruses.
“The doctors haven’t given us any information other than it was due to all of her chronic conditions. ... There was never a thought that it could be from the vaccine,” Ms Day-Weaver told the Associated Press.
Conspiracy theorists have used the hashtag #diedsuddenly to share news stories, obituaries, and GoFundMe fundraisers to falsely argue that people died because of the vaccine.
The use of the phrase has spiked by more than 740 per cent in tweets about vaccines in the last two months compared to the preceding two months. It started after the phrase was used in an online “documentary” pushing the inaccurate narrative.
The technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Renee DiResta, told the AP that “it’s kind of in-group language, kind of a wink wink, nudge nudge”.
“They’re taking something that is a relatively routine way of describing something — people do, in fact, die unexpectedly — and then by assigning a hashtag to it, they aggregate all of these incidents in one place,” she added.
Dr Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist, told the news agency that “the real danger is that it ultimately leads to real world actions such as not vaccinating”.
After shots have been administered to the tune of hundreds of millions of doses and inoculated people, the vaccines have been found time and again to be safe and effective. The risks of not getting vaccinated far outnumber those of getting the shots.
The film Died Suddenly includes headlines found on Google to falsely indicate that sudden deaths “never happened like this until now”.
It has been seen more than 20 million times on an alternative video hosting platform. The Twitter account connected to it posts every day, making false assertions.
Without providing information to support their claims, the filmmakers issued a statement pointing to a “surge in sudden deaths” and a “PROVEN rate of excess deaths”.
During just the first year that the vaccine was being distributed, it prevented almost 2 million deaths in the US and 20 million globally, according to a study by Imperial College London.
The son of Dolores Cruz, a California-based writer, died in a car crash in 2017, but his death was still made out to be connected to the vaccine in the so-called documentary.
“Without my permission, someone has taken his story to show one side, and I don’t appreciate that,” Ms Cruz told the AP. “His legacy and memory are being tarnished.”
