Religion is a Mental Illness

They died suddenly - then the anti-vax trolling started

A new "documentary" falsely blames Covid vaccines for deaths of young people.

www.bbc.com

"Seven days, 18 hours, 39 minutes ago my beloved... died suddenly of cardiac arrest". When Victoria Brownworth logged onto Twitter to post these words about her partner of 23 years, she didn't know that two of them in particular would provoke a storm of online harassment.

Because, as Victoria waited at her home in Philadelphia on Sunday night for her wife's ashes to be delivered, a video titled Died Suddenly was about to drop.

In an hour and eight minutes of dramatic music and out-of-context news reports, the film tells a fictitious story of a dangerous vaccine killing off swathes of young people - all part of an imagined plot to depopulate the earth.

It landed on niche video-sharing platform Rumble on Monday and began to spread. By Wednesday morning it had been viewed more than 4 million times on Rumble and at least 1.5 million times on Twitter.

The claims made in the video quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Vast amounts of evidence from different independent scientists all over the world, as well as the experiences of billions of people, have shown that serious Covid vaccine side effects are rare.

But its call for people to look at any reported deaths through a lens of suspicion had made Victoria fair game - and as the phrase "died suddenly" started to trend, people flocked to her memorial thread.

"How long's it been since she got the jab?", hundreds of people began to reply.

Victoria's wife, Madelaine Gold - a painter and design professor - had an advanced stage of cancer, though she had been doing better just before she died. There is no suggestion the vaccine had anything to do with her death.

When she began to hit back, Victoria was told she was lying.

"She did die suddenly... We didn't have time to say goodbye, I didn't have time to give her a last kiss. I will never get to talk to her again."

"They were trolling her obituary, literally."

So what was it about this film that led people online to deny Victoria's reality?

The film flashes through dozens of upsetting news reports and images of people collapsing.

One headline reads: "My kind, compassionate son died unexpectedly." Another clip shows a young athlete dramatically keeling over.

Together, this can easily be used to paint an alarming picture of something suspicious going on.

Yet just a couple more clicks would reveal the son in question died in a car crash. And the athlete, college basketball player Keyontae Johnson, collapsed in December 2020 before he could even have had a Covid vaccine. He didn't die suddenly as the title suggests - he returned to the court last week.

Other people featured are also still alive. And several of the genuine deaths are explained by an alternative cause within the very news reports used as evidence by the film makers.

Part of the film's power is that it takes scraps of truth but distorts them to tell a misleading story.

There have been a small number of deaths from the vaccines - I've spoken to people affected - but these cases are rare and their causes are established through extensive monitoring, complex medical testing and statistical analysis.

It's not possible to measure vaccine side effects by simply Googling news reports. As Dr Frank Han, a US cardiologist says, it can "give you pieces of the puzzle, but actual medical training is necessary to link all the pieces of how the body works together".

Long stretches of the film involve gruesome images of clots being pulled out of bodies, designed to suggest Covid vaccines are having alarming effects.

When people feel afraid or disgusted they might be more likely to leap to conclusions. But these images can't tell us anything on their own.

Firstly, they are mostly based on the testimony of one embalmer with no indication this is a wider concern.

And, Dr Han explains, it's "insufficient to establish why the clots are there".

Blood clots are commonly found in dead bodies and are caused by a range of things from smoking to being bed-bound to having Covid-19.

When unusual clotting was identified in rare cases after the AstraZeneca vaccine - not used in the US - it was quickly investigated and vaccine recommendations changed, after which the cases pretty much disappeared.

Emotional stories, backed up by official numbers make a powerful persuasive tool.

But it's important to understand where the numbers actually come from and whether they are being fairly represented - something many people won't have the time or resources to investigate.

A graph in the film showing stillbirths shooting up around 2021, making the unsupported suggestion Covid vaccines are causing miscarriages, looks shocking.

The film-makers don't provide a source, though.

Although the voiceover claims the data is from Waterloo, Canada, genuine data from Ontario, the province Waterloo is part of, has not seen any increase in stillbirths, according to Dr Victoria Male, a reproductive immunologist.

In fact, a large study found a "lower (not higher) rate of stillbirth among those vaccinated in pregnancy, compared to those who were not," she said.

This is supported by dozens of studies involving tens of thousands of people produced by different independent teams around the world.

The tactics used in this video have been seen before and this isn't the first time misleading health information has been spread by verified accounts.

What's new this time is the main account spreading the film on Twitter has bought verification - the blue tick which is supposed to be a mark of credibility, something experts have warned could help misinformation spread.

"Since Elon Musk took over he's just, you know, let it be the Wild West again," Victoria believes.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

The Anti-Vaccine Documentary Died Suddenly Wants You to Feel, Not Think

www.mcgill.ca

People want to feel like their concerns are heard. Being dismissed can lead to loss of trust, which can send people looking for empathy in the wrong places.

Members of the anti-vaccination movement and of its media arm excel at portraying themselves as “those who care.” The rest of us—scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists—are represented as either apathetic or simply evil. The latest “documentary” to emerge from this movement, Died Suddenly, is an exercise in reframing compassion. It also represents the apogee of conspiritualist ideas, where grand conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines are painted on a canvas so large, they involve a Biblical war between the forces of absolute good and those of pure evil.

Who are portrayed as ringing the alarm for Armageddon in Died Suddenly? Embalmers.

A tale made out of whole clot

The documentary’s smoking gun is the alleged discovery of long, white, fibrous clots in the deceased bodies of people who, we are told, got vaccinated against COVID-19. Sometimes, their blood also looks dirty, like it contains coffee grounds. This claim seems to have originated from Richard Hirschman, an embalmer in Alabama, who spoke about it to The Epoch Times, a frequent vehicle for misinformation and grand conspiracy theories. Hirschman and a few other embalmers testify to their findings in Died Suddenly, with some being blurred out, their voices altered, like they are sharing secrets so damning they’re about to be shipped to their local witness protection program.

Every conspiracy demands its whistleblower, and Hirschman serves as one of many for this documentary. He can boldly speak out while his colleagues self-censor, he tells us, because he doesn’t work for a funeral home. The movie cozies up to the body horror genre by repeatedly showing us images and clips of these lengthy strings of organic matter being pulled out of post-mortem incisions. The power of these alien, rubbery artefacts grows in the telling: in the Epoch Times piece, a cardiologist says these clots have “nearly the strength of steel.” Given the shock that these visuals can give to the untrained eye, it’s no wonder these supposed “vaccine clots” are making the rounds on TikTok.

The problem is that embalmers and funeral directors are not medical professionals. Don’t take it from me, but from the National Funeral Directors Association in the United States, whose representative told me as much, and from Ben Schmidt, a funeral director and embalmer with a bachelor’s degree in natural science. Schmidt wrote a detailed explanation of what is happening here. Clots can easily form after death, as the liquid and solid parts of blood separate and as formaldehyde and calcium-containing water used in the embalming process catalyze clotting. Refrigeration can also be to blame, especially when a rapid influx of bodies due to COVID necessitates longer stays in the cooler as embalmers make their way through their backlog.

Then there are the clots that happen prior to death. Embalmers do not typically know that someone who died was “in normal health,” as is often claimed in the documentary, nor do they reliably know someone’s vaccination status. Blood clots do happen in life, for a variety of reasons. The COVID-19 vaccines made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were indeed associated with rare—and I must repeat, rare—cases of blood clots, but risk factors for blood clots in general include obesity, cancer, a sedentary lifestyle, pregnancy, family history, and smoking. Oh, and COVID-19 itself, which you won’t learn from Died Suddenly. This may surprise you, but an American dies of a blood clot every six minutes. Clots, either before or after death, are common.

As anatomical pathology specialist Irene Sansano told a fact-checking website, the clots shown by Hirschman do not look different from the ones pathologists regularly see in blood clot autopsies at the hospital. To know if there really was an uptick in clots seen during embalming, we can’t rely on a scattering of anecdotes. We would need a database to monitor trends, and as Schmidt points out, this database does not exist.

But if the sight of strings of clotted material isn’t scary enough, Died Suddenly is willing to make its title even more manifest by showing us rapid-fire montages of people fainting and seemingly dropping dead. Out of context, these videos are distressing. However, The Real Truther account on Twitter has demonstrated that many of them are not what they seem. The woman who passes out and falls into a moving train? Her name is Candela. She fainted because of low blood pressure and survived with a fractured skull. That young basketball player who collapses on the court? His name is Keyontae Johnson, and his fainting took place on December 12, 2020, before the COVID-19 vaccines were readily available. He has since been medically cleared to play and recently signed with Kansas State. These people are not dead. To borrow a phrase from the conspiracy playbook, we have been lied to.

Given that syncope, the medical term for a temporary loss of consciousness brought about by a drop in blood pressure, affects one in five over their lifetime, and given the ubiquity of cameras in our world, that’s a lot of fainting episodes captured on video that can be used to bolster a narrative that “something’s not right.”

Outside of the documentary, its Twitter account and many more in the anti-vaccination space have used “died suddenly” as a rallying cry. One of the producers of the movie, Stew Peters, interviewed a woman who claimed that Canadian physicians were dropping like flies in the prime of their lives. Peters didn’t mince words: “We absolutely know 100% what is going on. They want to cover it up. The doctors are dying, and they’re dying from these stupid shots.” Their evidence comes from the Canadian Medical Association’s In Memoriam webpage. I had a look. Peters’ interview was released on August 22nd of this year. I looked at the last ten doctors who had been memorialized at this point. For most, the cause of death is not mentioned. For the others, it’s Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, COVID-19, and a two-year spell with brain cancer. The average age at which these ten physicians died? 82. The youngest was 64. Hardly in the prime of their lives. That same woman making the claim goes on to hypothesize that Alberta was sent the most toxic batch of the vaccines because its residents don’t typically vote for Justin Trudeau. How else to explain its high mortality during the pandemic?

The Died Suddenly Twitter account, which boasts an authoritative blue check mark it received after paying $8 a month, memorializes a long list of people who, we are led to believe, died of the vaccine, including the voice of Batman, Kevin Conroy, who very recently passed away from intestinal cancer. Except that scrolling through these names, it becomes apparent the list includes anyone who died suddenly, who died after a short illness, who died after a long illness, who died of cancer or of an immune condition or of a viral infection. Their vaccination status is often not even known. Basically, everybody dying after the vaccines were rolled out has now been killed by the jab

One of the funeral directors interviewed in Died Suddenly, who now identifies as an anti-vaxxer, tells us to go on Google and type in “died suddenly.” I listened to him and did the exercise.

Disturbingly, I found a 13-year-old boy who died suddenly after collapsing while playing in a schoolyard; a 38-year-old publisher who died suddenly at home, with no known health issues; even actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s brother who died suddenly at 36. What I didn’t tell you is that I did the search for the year 2010. Sudden deaths are not new. I even found a particularly distressing example. Her name was Kalina and she had shown no sign of illness before suddenly falling ill and dying that very evening. She was only 25 years old and was the third adult to die from her place of work in a four-month period.

Scary stuff, isn’t it? Except that Kalina was a killer whale who died at SeaWorld Orlando in 2010.

What Died Suddenly does is akin to grave-robbing. It raids online obituaries, with complete disregard for consent or basic journalistic integrity, and stitches a pseudoscientific horror story with the faces of the deceased.

The makers of Died Suddenly don’t want you to think; they want you to feel. For all of the anti-vaccination movement’s admonitions to “do your own research,” the thing that consistently sinks their arguments is doing your own research. It’s fact-checking if what they are telling you is correct.

None of this is new, though the conspiracy they are selling is growing to epic proportions.

Cut from the same clot

Died Suddenly can serve as a teachable moment for those of us who study the post-COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement, to help us recognize its traits and see its progression.

We witness motivated reasoning: starting from the conclusion that the vaccines cannot be safe and looking for evidence that matches the conclusion. We see a thick coating of “after the fact, therefore because of it,” as anybody dying from 2021 onwards is said to be the victim of a vaccine that can kill you instantly, with a delay, or simply worsen a pre-existing condition. The “VAERS scare” tactic is also briefly adopted, as the database of “bad things that happened after getting a vaccine” is easily trawled for hits.

Died Suddenly also features fake experts, a characteristic of science denial. The VAERS scare itself is brought up in the documentary by entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, who is seen stopped by police after repeated, uninvited visits to the private residence of Dr. Grace Lee, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He tells the cops he’s “a journalist for Substack,” a fancy term for “blogger” if there ever was one. In the documentary, he confidently asserts that no one wants to know what’s in the vaccines and that no journalist has ever asked, “What’s in the vials?” Funny how there was so much worry about what was in the COVID-19 vaccines, their manufacturers released a list of their ingredients at the beginning of the roll-out, which was covered by the mainstream press. But this is the kind of accuracy you can expect from a grown man who literally called me a chicken on his blog for refusing to debate him.

Meanwhile, a military whistleblower tells us that deaths are up 40% in the 18-to-64 age group, pointing the finger at the vaccines. Except that it’s not the vaccines; it’s the COVID-19 pandemic itself. From blood clots to excess mortality, everything caused by the virus is blamed on the vaccines.

Died Suddenly premiered on both Twitter and Rumble, the alternative video platform favoured by conservatives who loudly proclaim their right to free speech, to a combined 8 million views as of this writing. The text box below the documentary is filled with sponsor links that echo the concerns of the people living outside the mainstream: survival food, “manly” supplements, and precious metal investments. There’s also a link to Mike Lindell’s MyPillow company. The subtleties of the anti-vaccination movement have been shed: the box asks viewers to “support anti-vax activism.” The masks are off.

Meanwhile, the movie throws everything onto the conspiracy cork board, with Jeffrey Epstein, Anthony Fauci, Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg, and Bill Gates flashing before our eyes, next to mentions of MKUltra and a clip from that infamous Sasquatch hoax video.

A clip of Tom Hanks explaining Malthusian theory during a press tour is borrowed, which introduces us to the ultimate thesis of the documentary: the COVID-19 pandemic was apparently an excuse to roll out a deadly vaccine engineered to decimate our military forces, affect pregnant women, and kill as many people as possible. As Thomas Malthus once wrote, our population will someday exceed in numbers our ability to provide for everyone. The Powers That Be thus had to come up with a solution: an injectable bioweapon.

And this is where conspirituality comes in. As Died Suddenly ramps up to its climax, religious beliefs are made clear and the full scope of the conspiracy is laid out. This is spiritual war, we are told. The depopulation agenda was written by the forces of Evil and it is our God-given role to fight back.

The anti-vaccination movement no longer sees itself as merely opposing an industry; its vociferations are a clarion call for divine salvation.

Those who care

I have already read superficial denunciations of the movie by media outlets that do not address the core claims the movie makes. I get it. The escalation of the anti-vaccine rhetoric into a mad fever pitch is so pronounced, it can leave us speechless. We resort to dismissal, anger, and accusations of widespread idiocy.

I worry that this sort of drive-by skepticism—quick, often smug—, excusable though it may be, plays right into the hand of a movie like Died Suddenly. Its brave “truthtellers” are shown as people who care. They want to prevent deaths. They are tearing through the wall of passivity and the thicket of wickedness they see in order to save human lives. Propped up by the shallow depth of field of the camera, the professional lighting, the unnerving music, and the storytelling power of a good edit, it makes for convincing fodder.

Our casual dismissal of these propaganda pieces doesn’t help, in my opinion. If we want to persuade the people caught in their wake—not the die-hard believers, who can hardly be swayed, but those who are scared yet still willing to listen to reason—we must fact-check with empathy. We must show how easy it is to topple the scarecrows of anti-vaccine propaganda.

We need patience, as hard as it can be to find these days.

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Take-home message: - The anti-vaccine “documentary” Died Suddenly alleges that the COVID-19 vaccines are bioweapons meant to depopulate the world by creating clots that kill people suddenly - The clots shown by the embalmers in the movie seem to medical experts to be no different than the clots that commonly occur in life and also after death - Many of the people the movie wants us to believe suddenly died are not actually dead

"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."

-- Paracelsus

Back to the Vax

We are Heather Simpson and Lydia Greene. Two former antivax moms on a journey back to evidence based medicine.

backtothevax.com|Back to the Vax

Heather Simpson is a mom who was popular in the antivax community as the mom who dressed as measles for Halloween, the least scary thing she could think of. She also made multiple viral antivax polls on facebook.

Lydia Greene was an antivaxxer for 12 years and wrote a story on her journey to changing her mind, and bringing her 3 children up to date. She is now in nursing school to get into public health, to deal with vaccine hesitancy on the front lines.

Together we share our story with anyone that will hear us. To our surprise we have been welcomed back with open arms. We now give other people like us support and a platform to share their experience if they choose to.  

“Hey folks, how you doin’?

I just got a quick question about this whole COVID not-getting-vaccinated-and-running-to-the-fucking-hospital-once-you-get-the-virus fucking deal. Cause this shit is out of fucking control. Alright?

And I’m gonna give you a quick story on why I think it’s out of fucking control.

Last week I had to bring my wife into the hospital. She has stage 4 breast cancer, she was dealing with some symptoms and I had to bring her in to get some fluid drained, she was having some pain, blah, blah, blah.

She was in there for two days. On the third day -  she honestly should have stayed one more day, maybe two more days, okay - but on the third day, instead of draining her fluid and what they wanted to do, they had to - they told us that she had to be discharged. Because they had no room left in the hospital, because of COVID.

Here is my question. Why - 99% of everybody that's in the hospital with COVID right now is unvaccinated, okay. If you really fucking believe that COVID's not real, and you really believe that it's not a big deal, and you really believe that you don't need to get the vaccine, that is your fucking right, okay. I'm not gonna argue with you about that.

What I am gonna argue with you about is you running to the fucking hospital once you get the virus. If you don't trust the medical field to prevent you from getting it, why do you trust them to cure you from it? Why do you run to the fucking hospital?

If you really believe that COVID's not a big deal and it's not this, that, the other, and you don't get the vaccine because of... stick to your fucking guns, and keep your motherfucking ass at home.

Stop running to the hospital, putting everybody else at fucking risk and, in turn, the collateral damage is people like my wife who actually need medical fucking help for a chronic fucking disease get kicked out of the hospital because your dumb ass is too stupid to go get a fucking vaccine shot.

Keep your ass at home. If you really believe COVID's not a big deal, prove it. Stick to your fucking guns, keep your ass at home and fucking deal with it.”

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