Time to Kill Died Suddenly
In late 2022, a new COVID-19 conspiracy theory reared its ugly head, and it’s been labeled “Died Suddenly”. As with all lies, it’s time to kill Died Suddenly.
For those of you who don’t listen to conspiracy theories and those who push them, this ugly monstrosity of a conspiracy theory appeared on Twitter and other social media sometime back in 2022, and appears to be the brainchild of one Stew Peters, who’s well-known for being an extremely-far-far-far right wing conspiracy theorist and alleged white supremacist and racist.
Interestingly as a side note, inasmuch as Peters regularly makes comments and social media posts against non-whites, alleged pedophiles, and homosexuals, I’ve evolved the opinion that he’s likely a closeted homosexual and probably a pedophile himself… but of course that’s an “opinion”, not proven (yet).
But I digress…
What is “Died Suddenly”?
Died Suddenly, including social media accounts and a website, revolves around a documentary produced by Stew Peters Productions (thus the main connection to the conspiracy-theory world).
The main narrative of the film is that SARS-CoV-2 vaccines currently in production have caused otherwise healthy people to “die suddenly” en masse from blood clots, supposedly caused by the spike protein produced by the mRNA vaccines, as well as an increase in miscarriages and Bell’s Palsy [1]. Presented in a sort of “documentary” style, the film contains “testimony” from supposed embalmers and funeral directors claiming that the presence of blood clots in the bodies of the dead who have been vaccinated are “unusual” [2]. It delves into the tired old conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum and discusses a WEF pandemic-era concept called the “Great Reset” [3], which in reality never saw the light of day. The film makes a very strong suggestion that the pandemic preparedness exercises undertaken by the HHS and Johns Hopkins University in 2019 [4 and 5] were “proof” that the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t accidental but deliberately orchestrated by “nefarious global elites”[6]. Died Suddenly also promotes the false claim that Bill Gates was planning to kill up to 15% of the world’s population using vaccines, and offered as “proof” a misrepresented video clip of Gates at a TED Talk in 2010 where he stated that providing better healthcare to poor countries could slow population growth. They show a graph purporting to show stillbirths increasing in 2021, and relied on the “correlation is causation” fallacy that nearly all conspiracy theorists heavily lean on, as well as falsified data to claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused an increase in miscarriages. [7]. The film further falsely claims that adverse events reported from sources such as the US’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the UK’s “Yellow Card” system somehow “prove” that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are harmful to human health [8]. It also features interviews with individuals known for promoting misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, such as entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, himself a well-known very-far-right extremist, conspiracy theorist and misinformation promoter.
What Fueled The Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy Theory?
Back in the early days of the pandemic when not much was known about the virus or its effects, some people – most of them who appeared to be inclined to the less-educated among our population – started blaming the Chinese government and later the Chinese people generally for the viral outbreak, the latter leading to extremist backlash against Asian-heritage communities around the world, spurred on by completely ignorant, racist, and unnecessarily persistent remarks from the arch narcissistic dimwit and strangler of the Republican party Donald Trump.
Asian heritage had nothing to do with it
While it’s clear that the average Asian-heritage person had nothing to do with the viral outbreak or its aftermath, Trump whipped up anti-Asian sentiment among his MAGA cult followers and other far-right groups by publicly referring to SARS-CoV-2 as “Wuhan flu” and using other racist language, thus inciting far-right extremists into harassment of the Asian communities, and further cementing for the American people and the world how incredibly moronic those “MAGA” Trump followers were – and still are.
The initial medical response, as learned from previous viral outbreaks, was isolation of those infected. But since there wasn’t at that time an easy way to know was infected or were they were (testing initially took a day or more to result), the concept of lockdown became prevalent, since restricting everybody’s movements couple weeks was believed to be enough to stem the tide of infection. This is also when masking became recommended for those infected, to limit the spread of the virus to others. Physical distancing was a “best guess” since we were reasonably confident that primary transmission was airborne and we knew that the average distance that particulates from a person’s sneeze or cough would travel was about 2 to 4 feet, thus 6 feet (2 meters) was felt at the time to be sufficient.
The wrong messages
As the pandemic progressed however, many wrong messages were sent out by a number of actors.
The lockdowns were largely mishandled and heavy-handed in their implementation, and in retrospect, didn’t make much of a difference anyway. Many state and local governments saw masking and physical distancing as mandatory measures, not simply guidelines from public health officials. This deliberate misuse of the guidelines wasn’t helped by the bungling of top-level CDC officials at the time.
The “experts in the trenches” at the CDC (some of whom Vince and I know personally) argued for clear and truthful explanations to the public for why/what/when/how of mitigation efforts so that people clearly knew what to do and why they were doing it. But their voices were drowned out by Trump-appointee and supremely-incompetent buffoon Robert Redfield (then-CDC Director) who completely mangled the narrative about mask use and other mitigation efforts. Because of his incompetence, no one single accurate set of guidelines came out from presumably the premier and comprehensive national source of public health guidance. The message from the top of the CDC was so screwed up that everyone from the Federal to local governments ended up interpreting guidelines however they wanted, often running foul of personal privacy and individual liberty.
Who’s Promoting This Conspiracy?
It is that not-so-humble and mostly draconian beginning that I believe fueled what’s become known as the modern “anti-vaccine” movement. Once vaccines were tested and approved for use in late 2021, the arguments started from the extreme right-wing conspiracy-theory group that the vaccines weren’t to be trusted. As the social-media flurry of everyone’s individual opinions became a blizzard, some of the previously lesser well-known extreme right-wing Q-Anon type conspiracy-theory promoters such as Peters, Kirsch and others, rose to more public attention, along with already well-known and maliciously infamous conspiracy-theory liar like Alex Jones (may he be burned alive in agony and publicly-videoed torment – that’s for you Vince, our resident 9/11 survivor).
These publicity-seeking morons started congealing the various unfounded beliefs about both the virus and the emerging vaccines, publicizing such fallacies as Bill Gates sponsoring the vaccine creation in order to put microchips in all of them in order to track people and ultimately control them, the vaccines supposedly being able to alter the recipient’s DNA, the vaccines using cells from aborted fetuses, and many other easily-disproved garbage. I won’t go in-depth with any of them here, because Vince has done a fantastic job of detailing and destroying each of them in our Vaccine Wars series that starts here and I strongly recommend people read the whole series.
The Died Suddenly film and affiliated social media presences that emerged in late 2022 only furthered the misinformation by merging unrelated old conspiracy theories held by the extremely far-right with new claims that blood clots caused by the COVID vaccines were the sole cause of death among those who have been reported as suddenly dying at an unusually early age, or for seemingly unknown reasons. Peters and the anti-vaccine leaders have pushed this envelope to claim that COVID vaccines were absolutely responsible, even after such a cause was proved incorrect, and in a great and growing number of cases, where the person named as dying “suddenly” from a COVID vaccine didn’t have a vaccine at all.
Why Is The Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy Wrong?
The anti-vaccine group completely disregards the mountain of evidence freely available via an Internet search in publications and research entities including JAMA, NEJM, American Family Physician, Stanford Medicine, Lancet, The BMJ, and Harvard Medical Review to name a few, not only proving that a number of various disorders and diseases can (and have) caused sudden death, but also publishing hundreds of studies into mRNA vaccines in general and the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines specifically, showing a very high level of effectiveness and overall adverse effect rates from the COVID19 mRNA vaccines ranging from 1% – 8%, which is generally consistent with a number of other non-mRNA vaccines for many other diseases, most of which have been around for many decades. (see this page in our blog for source links)
At the same time that the anti-vaccine cult simply ignores the relative Mount Everest of evidence disproving their claims, they offer no reliable and specific evidence to support their claims. All of their claims, spread across the social media presences of their leaders, rely on word-of-mouth subjective reporting, illogical assumptions, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook from YouTube videos of people claiming to be physicians or researchers but can’t objectively validate the data that they present, and deliberate misinterpretations and misreporting of legitimate medical research, statements, and data.
In other words, the anti-vaccine cult has no objective, legitimate way of proving any of their claims – but that doesn’t stop them from pushing their lies to anyone who will listen, and engaging in ad hominem attacks on social media against those who call them out.
Who Believes This Conspiracy Theory?
So, with all of this wealth of evidence conclusively disproving every single one of the anti-vaccine cult’s claims, it pays to ask: who is really believing all of their garbage? Who’s actually falling for the trash shoveled out by the liars like Kirsch, Peters, Jones, and their convenient pop-up list of so-called “doctors” and “experts” including the infamous liar Robert Malone, MD, whose claim to have “invented” the mRNA vaccines has been categorically disproved?
As a lifelong conservative and member of my state’s Republican party, I am saddened to come to the realization that the audience for the cesspool of lies from the anti-vaccine conspiracy crowd are mainly an very radical, extreme offshoot of traditional conservatism.
This extremism appeared to take more prominent hold in the Republican party during the Obama era. Prior to that, such radical views were seen as too radical for the mainstream of the party and were held by a few adherents on the fringe of the party. Unfortunately, the failed Republican party experiment of “Trumpism” moved this radical belief system to the forefront.
His early rhetoric gave people enough clues to what was coming – a extremely isolationist, exceptionalist, nationalistic approach to conservatism that traditional conservatives stood up against but were unsuccessful in defeating when it became clear that his rhetoric, despite the clear problems with it, appealed to disaffected workers, rural voters keen to keep government hands off of their weapons, white supremacist, outright racists, those with antisemitic beliefs, and those with poor intelligence who were prime fodder for conspiracy theorists, which at that time was primarily the old “new world order” conspiracy that Trump successfully morphed into the “Washington DC swamp”.
So it’s this extremist group – later termed “MAGA Republicans” – who are both the prime audience for and primary disseminators of the anti-vaccine rhetoric, based on their underlying misplaced distrust of anyone who doesn’t completely fall in line with their neo-fascist approach to life and politics.
It doesn’t help matters that this crowd of people patently refuse to believe facts and truth, even when placed before them. The leaders of the far-right conspiracy-theory cult have pushed illogical rationalizations to counter the fact that every thing they’re claiming has been proven as lies.
For instance, one of their claims is that vaccines have nanochips capable of receiving 5G signals to control people. This is easily disproven by the fact that nanochip technology on the scale required to place them in billions of doses of vaccines doesn’t even exist on Earth, they rationalize that by claiming that only certain doses contained nanochips.
Another “for instance” is the false claim that mRNA vaccines will alter human DNA; and when faced with categorical proof that such a cascade is impossible because of what is actually in the vaccines, they rationalize that as a “lie from Big Pharma”.
Their illogical rationalizations have attempted to counter every piece of evidence that disproves their claims. Their list of irrational blame-game subjects include “big pharma”, “big government”, President Biden, Bill Gates, medicine, medical providers, and even science itself. The only person who hasn’t seemed to be a target of their insanity is President Trump – who himself was vaccinated… they conveniently ignore that.
But with this group of menacing idiots taking too firm a hold on the Republican party for the time being, at least until more intelligent heads can prevail and kick such far-right extremism from the party and ultimately from society, the question pertaining to the anti-vaccine lies and disinformation remains:
How Do We Kill Died Suddenly?
How exactly do we kill Died Suddenly and flat-line its deliberately malicious disinformation pushers like Stew Peters and Steve Kirsch?
We kill their lies with the truth.
Beyond the tsunami of medical research information readily available on PubMed and other reputable research sites completely destroying the Died Suddenly narratives, we can also look at the film itself to pick out all of the deliberate deceptions that the producers threw into the video, and purposely place on social media posts in order to deceive the average, uninformed reader to believing their lies.
I note, for instance, that an Associated Press review of more than 100 tweets from the Died Suddenly account just from December 2022 to January 2023 alone found that claims about the cases being vaccine related were largely unsubstantiated and, in some cases, contradicted by public information. Some of the people featured died of genetic disorders, drug overdoses, flu complications or suicide. One died in a surfing accident (maybe a shark jabbed the victim with a COVID vaccine?) Many other sources have continued to monitor the social media presence and note a continuation of this pattern of lies and misinformation that the people behind the social media accounts refuse to provide adequate proof for.
If we were to put the claims and the evidence on the proverbial “scale of justice”, the point would be clear: the claims from the anti-vaccine cult would be as air on the one side of the scale, weighing nothing. Contrasting that would be the heavy weight of the mountain of evidence that disproves every single, solitary claim made by the Died Suddenly film and the affiliated social media presences, along with the entirety of the anti-vaccine cult. Thus, the scale is conclusively tipped against Peters and the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, and conclusively weighted for the facts and the truth.
If the difference were reflected as two patients, the facts and scientific evidence disproving the anti-vaccine cult’s claims would be a healthy patient living life well. The claims from the whole Died Suddenly movement would be a patient laying in a hospital bed with no breath, no circulation, no heartbeat, no brain activity.
Thus, as a medical provider, I pronounce Died Suddenly officially DEAD. May G-d NOT have mercy on its soul – because it doesn’t have one.
